Early Checks on Use of Jail Informants Were Rejected

Nearly two years ago, top officials of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office rejected a subordinate’s suggestion to create a system that would allow prosecutors to quickly check the reliability of jailhouse informants, The Times learned Tuesday.

The proposal was discussed and dismissed in early 1987 at a meeting attended by virtually all the top aides to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner.

Reiner did not attend the gathering and was not available for comment Tuesday.

Nearly a year later, a prosecutor made a similar proposal after she became frustrated by her colleagues’ continued use of notorious jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White, whom the prosecutor knew to be a liar.

But her suggestion went nowhere.

“Looking back,” said Richard Hecht, director of the district attorney’s branch offices, “I think the conclusion is inescapable that internal controls insofar as jailhouse informants were concerned have not been what they should have been. And that’s true for at least the past decade.”

Several senior officials said they rejected the clearinghouse idea first proposed by Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter S. Berman because of concern that courts would give defense attorneys access to the informant files.

“That means that Defendant X is going to get the names of all informants and you’re going to get them all killed,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, the third-ranking executive in the 800-prosecutor office.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson said he shared Livesay’s concern that a court could order prosecutors to disclose the entire list of informants.

However, he said, the district attorney’s office is still considering the clearinghouse idea because it has certain advantages.

He said that, with a clearinghouse, the district attorney’s office would be better able to discharge its ethical obligation to provide defense attorneys with information about individual informants who may be witnesses.

“The law requires us to disclose anything that reflects on (an informant’s) credibility that’s in our possession,” Thompson noted.

He said that prosecutors would also be better able to evaluate their own informants’ credibility. “There is at least one view that had we kept book on Leslie White, the book would have shown he was manipulative, dishonest and scamming everyone and that therefore we wouldn’t have used him.”

Advantage of Clearinghouse

The advantage of a clearinghouse was underscored by the experiences of Deputy Dist. Attys. Berman and Katherine Mader, each of whom independently suggested that their office keep better records on informants.

Berman, who was in charge of gang prosecutions, said in an interview that he made the suggestion because he was frequently consulted by other prosecutors or police officers seeking information about informants who claimed they had served as witnesses in gang cases.

“It was impossible for me to remember in most cases,” he said.

In a memorandum to his superiors in October, 1986, Berman wrote, “Every D.A. who uses an informant on a case should be required to log some basic information on a standardized card.” Such a system would enable other prosecutors to easily check on an informant’s reliability, he suggested.

Berman’s proposal was rejected at a senior staff meeting on Jan. 27, 1987, said Gilbert I. Garcetti, who was then chief deputy district attorney and who presided over the session.

Participants at Session

One participant recalled that, in addition to Garcetti, those who attended included Hecht, Livesay, Dennis K. Petty, then head of branch operations, Jack White, head of the bureau of investigation, and Gordon Jacobson, head of family support services.

Instead of establishing a clearinghouse, Garcetti said, “We decided that we should have a seminar on the use of informants.”

Mader, a trial prosecutor in Van Nuys, made her suggestion for a clearinghouse a year later after she heard that other prosecutors were using White, although for years he had been on a Los Angeles Police Department list of undesirable informants. Mader had trouble discovering who the prosecutors were.

Under case law, prosecutors have a responsibility to put on the stand only witnesses whose testimony they believe.

In October of this year, White caused a public furor when it was disclosed that he had demonstrated that he could gather enough information to fabricate the confession of a defendant he had never met.

A convicted kidnaper, robber and car thief, White assembled the data using a jail telephone to contact law enforcement agencies, posing as a bail bondsman, prosecutor and police officer.

White’s demonstration to sheriff’s deputies triggered concerns that some criminal defendants may have been convicted on the basis of confessions fabricated by informants seeking leniency in their own cases.

The district attorney’s office subsequently began a review of all cases in the last decade in which jailhouse informants testified and adopted strict controls on the use of informants in criminal cases.

‘Concrete Evidence’

Prosecutors are now required to have “concrete evidence” such as a tape recording to corroborate the account of a jailhouse informant, and they must obtain the unanimous consent of the office’s senior management to use such an informant in court.

In proposing her clearinghouse idea last January, Mader wrote: “I have been struck by the number of instances in which professional jailhouse informants are utilized as prosecution witnesses by deputy district attorneys without full access being available as to background information on them.

“The fact that an informant may be on the Los Angeles Police Department’s unreliable informant list may be known to a deputy in one jurisdiction, but not in another.”

Mader suggested that the office require prosecutors to consult “a central repository for information as to the credibility of the informant” before using the informant as a witness. In addition, she said, high-level managers in the office should grant permission before informants testify.

Reached by The Times, Mader declined to discuss her experiences.

However, she described them in detail in a memorandum written in October and obtained by The Times. The memo was among more than 100 submitted by prosecutors as part of the district attorney’s current review of informant cases.

Mader wrote that she learned that White had lied to investigators when she was a defense attorney representing then-accused Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono.

White had told investigators from the state attorney general’s office, which was prosecuting the Hillside Strangler case, that Buono had made incriminating statements to him in Los Angeles County Jail. But later, White told the investigators that he had made up the incriminating statements in the hope that authorities would be grateful for the information about Buono and somehow help White with his own criminal cases.

Mader said in the memo that she also knew of other cases in which White had lied.

“As I was new in the office, I was somewhat wary of being perceived as a former defense attorney with an ‘ax to grind,’ and unclear as to exactly where to go with this information,” Mader wrote.

She said she confided in Deputy Dist. Atty. Karen Rizzo, a veteran prosecutor then working in the Van Nuys office, and that the two women used a law enforcement computer system to try to identify the criminal cases in which White was listed as a potential prosecution witness.

‘Admitted’ Lying

Rizzo explained her involvement by saying that White “admitted fabricating a confession. I certainly thought that showed he was not reliable and that anybody who dealt with him should for sure know that.”

As the effort to warn prosecutors began, Mader was told by a Los Angeles homicide detective that White’s name was on a list of undesirable informants maintained by the Police Department.

White was put on the list sometime in 1982 by Detective Chris Biller of the LAPD’s West Valley Division, after Biller arrested White in connection with a series of convenience store robberies, Biller told The Times on Tuesday.

White had “snitched-off his cohort” in the robbery case, Biller said. However, when police refused to provide favors that White requested, White filed what proved to be a fraudulent complaint in which he accused Biller of fabricating evidence against him. Biller was cleared.

Placing an informant’s name on the list “doesn’t mean the man’s information (always) isn’t correct,” Biller said. “It means he’s a jerk and you should proceed with caution. And that’s exactly what Leslie White is. He’s a jerk.”

About the time that Mader learned of the Police Department’s doubts about White, she discovered that White was scheduled to testify in a triple murder case in Norwalk.

Because neither she nor Rizzo knew the prosecutor in the Norwalk case, they sent a message to him through an intermediary.

Angry and Surprised

In the memo Mader later wrote, she said they were surprised and angered to learn that the prosecutor planned to use White as a witness despite their warning.

After using another intermediary to warn a second prosecutor who had planned to call White as a witness, Mader and Rizzo went to the head deputy district attorney in Van Nuys, Ronald H. Carroll.

At the prosecutors’ behest, Carroll told The Times, he raised the issue of White’s credibility at a middle-management meeting attended by the heads of the branch offices.

During this period, White was providing information to the district attorney’s office in eight cases and had testified in four of them.

In January, 1987, Mader recalled in her October memo, she ran into a “very upset” Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Diamond, who said he had been ordered by his superiors to secure White’s release from jail.

“I told Larry that it looks terrible for our office to assist White in this way,” Mader wrote. However, she wrote, Diamond replied that “he had no choice.”

Reached Tuesday, Diamond declined to discuss Mader’s memo.

The same day she encountered Larry Diamond, another prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew Diamond “came into my office, saying he was sick also of Leslie White,” Mader wrote.

Andrew Diamond said “that he had been asked by downtown to be ‘social secretary’ to White,” Mader recalled.

“Andy (Diamond) told me that he explained to downtown that there were serious problems with White’s credibility, that other district attorneys (Karen and I) knew his history and thought we shouldn’t be dealing with him.

Told to Go Ahead

“Andy told me that downtown said to go ahead anyway and continue to deal with (White). I told Andy that I thought the situation was very foolish and it was unethical for our office to continue to use and humor White, but Andy said he had no choice.”

Andrew Diamond was not available for comment Tuesday.

Later, Mader prevailed upon a fellow prosecutor who was being transferred to the downtown office to take up the matter of White with officials there. She sought, she wrote, to persuade the office to undertake “a coordinated effort . . . to identify all cases in which White was scheduled to appear as a witness.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ed Feldman said he raised the issue of White’s credibility with Livesay, the assistant district attorney, and was told that Livesay was aware of his subordinates concerns.

“He acknowledged that he was on top of those concerns,” Feldman said.

Issue of Credibility

“Several months later,” Mader wrote, she read in a newspaper that White was to be used as a witness in yet another case. She asked Feldman to raise the issue of White’s credibility with the case prosecutor.

Feldman said he was told that White was to be called in that case only for the purpose of identifying a voice on an audiotape.

“At that point, Karen and I couldn’t think of anything more we could ethically do,” Mader wrote.

“I felt, however, that this situation could be avoided in the future with respect to other snitches if a uniform office policy was followed. As such, I wrote a memo to Dennis Petty on Jan. 19, 1988, suggesting new procedures relating to informants. To this date, I have not received a response.”