Informant Switches to the Defense : Jail-Wise ‘Expert’ Knows Whole Truth About Lying

Jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White, an admitted drug abuser and small-time criminal who for years bought his freedom by testifying for prosecutors, has now become an expert witness for the defense.

Unlike an ordinary witness who has to stick to what he has seen or heard, an expert is allowed to give opinions in his field. Usually, the field is a lofty one, such as science or medicine.

But White’s area of expertise is the behavior of jailhouse informants. And his expert opinion is that most of them lie.

“I base that on 12 years experience of watching them lie,” he explained.

Tall, lean, with bad teeth and a half-dozen prison tattoos, including a swastika, White is far from the typical suited expert with a professorial air.

Because he is in custody on a purse-snatching conviction, he testifies in jail clothes. And, because law enforcement officials are no longer among his friends, he is sometimes forced to wear chains--something he said never happened while he was testifying for prosecutors.

Why White switched sides is a mystery. Some who know him theorize that he had exhausted his usefulness to the prosecution. Others suggest he just got fed up with lying. White says he quit for love. He wanted to show his ex-wife that he could be a better person.

Since March, judges at three murder trials in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Solano counties have allowed him to testify as an expert. White has been paid for each appearance--as is customary for an expert--once by the court and twice by the defense. He received an average of $500 a case.

In each instance, White testified that the prosecution’s informants could have made up their stories. Although his performance earned good reviews from defense attorneys, its effect on juries was unclear. One case ended in a conviction, another in an acquittal and a third in a hung jury.

White’s most impressive claim to expertise remains the convincing demonstration he gave last fall showing that confessions can be faked. Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies supplied him with the name of an inmate who was a suspect in a murder case. White then posed as a law enforcement official and, using a jail telephone, got other officials to divulge details of the case. Continuing his pose, White created a record that he and the suspect had shared a cell.

Decade of Experience

White’s credentials as an expert include a decade of experience. In that time, he claims he provided information to police in an estimated 150 cases and lied in three-quarters of them.

He says he testified as an informant in 16 cases and lied under oath in three of them. This is a dangerous admission, because White could be prosecuted for perjury. But he believes he is safe in the three cases because the statute of limitations or other developments bar prosecution.

He won’t say whether he lied under oath in the other 13 cases, unless authorities formally grant him immunity. White says he wants to tell the truth, but without immunity prosecutors would “bury me.”

“Hypothetically,” he said in an interview, “I think I’ve told the truth in two cases.”

White says he feels no remorse for framing other inmates. That, he says, is because he has no conscience.

“Does it bother you . . . about having committed perjury and having sent people to jail?” he once was asked in court.

“Not a bit,” White replied.

A Source of Concern

Still, White claims to be troubled by the behavior of some prosecutors and police. He says they knew for more than 10 years that he was a liar, but relied on him anyway to testify that other inmates had confessed. White’s allegations of law enforcement misconduct are part of an ongoing probe by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury.

In his expert testimony, the veteran informant said law enforcement officials knew for certain in two instances that he intended to lie under oath, but did not try to stop him. In other cases, he said, police fed him details of crimes, then sat back and waited for him to come forward and claim a suspect had confessed those details to him.

“I’ve had . . . law enforcement officers come down to the jail, put their foot up on the desk and tell me the complete details of a homicide from A to Z, including what the suspect drove and the fact of what color his car phone was, without stating a reason,” White testified.

In such instances, White said, the police did not have to tell him to fake confessions. They simply knew he would.

Giving him inside information, White once told the court, was “like taking a car and putting the car on the hill and taking the emergency brake off. It’s going to go down. There’s no stopping it.”

Serving a Sentence

White, 31, is serving a nearly six-year prison sentence for purse snatching and failure to appear in court--an extraordinarily severe penalty imposed after his demonstration triggered an ongoing review of Los Angeles County murder cases involving informants.

His expert testimony includes some of the strategies he says he used so successfully over the years.

White testified, for instance, how he would try to figure out what information detectives wanted and then would supply it.

“You just simply sell them what they want and they buy all the time,” he explained. In most cases where informants are used, he said, detectives “are desperate for testimony or information to corroborate their theory of the case.”

Even in some cases where police already had an informant, White said there are ways to become involved. One sure way, he has testified, is to claim to have information that a defendant was trying to arrange to have a prosecutor or detective killed.

Even when he had nothing to offer, White said, he would still try to call homicide detectives whenever he landed in jail.

“When you’re coming down (from drugs after an arrest), you’re extremely hungry and they don’t like you to smoke in the cell,” he testified, “so I make a call to homicide and get candy and cigarettes.”

Never Fails to Work

“They always good for that?” asked a defense attorney.

“Always,” White replied.

While White portrayed some law enforcement officials as cynical and manipulative, he said others are honest and on the lookout for phony confessions. Accordingly, he said, a confession shouldn’t be perfect.

Even if all sorts of details are available from the coroner’s office--an easy place to obtain information such as where and how many times a victim was shot, White says--it is best to leave out some of them.

In his expert testimony and in a series of interviews, White also provided information to support his claim that Los Angeles authorities had known for years that he lied.

A generally nonviolent drug abuser, White first was committed to the California Youth Authority at the age of 8 for being “incorrigible.” He said he began his career as an informant as a 19-year-old in 1977. He said Los Angeles police detectives quickly discovered how resourceful and unreliable he was.

In jail for a series of robberies, White said he became a suspect in a murder. Although White said he knew nothing about the murder, he decided to string police along because they offered him a trip to the California Youth Authority, instead of adult prison, if he informed on other suspects in the case.

White said he persuaded police that he was at the house where the murder took place by describing it in detail. An investigator he had hired to help prepare his defense in the robbery case provided him with the description by taking photographs of the house. White said he eventually ended his ruse by showing police the photographs.

Proves Unreliable

Los Angeles sheriff’s homicide detectives apparently learned of his unreliability the following year. In that instance, White said he involved himself in an outrageous plot with one of his foster fathers, who was also a criminal.

White falsely accused the foster father of kidnaping and killing a 2-year-old Ventura girl. He told authorities his foster father confessed to him over the phone. But White said he needed to be released from jail so that he could speak with his foster father in person to obtain more details. The foster father, who was to be paid for his role, instead alerted Los Angeles sheriff’s homicide detectives, White said.

Ventura Sheriff’s Lt. Ernie Rogers, who was assigned to investigate the killing, recalled that he found White to be “a complete liar . . . I’m sure I told L.A. detectives about it and went on my merry way.”

Two years later, in 1980, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office was formally told that White was unreliable. White, who then was in state prison for kidnaping, wrote the district attorney’s office, saying he was paid by prosecutors and police to lie on the witness stand. “I can prove this and I will take polygraph tests and supply names of officials who are involved,” White wrote.

Referred to State

Because its own staff was being accused of wrongdoing, the district attorney’s office referred the case to the state attorney general’s office. That agency investigated, then notified the district attorney’s office that “our final appraisal was that White . . . lacked credibility.”

But, the very next year, the district attorney’s office employed White as an informant-witness. The district attorney’s office had him transferred from state prison where he was serving a sentence for kidnaping to the more comfortable Long Beach jail. Then a prosecutor helped him obtain a series of eight court rulings from the county’s chief criminal court judge, each ordering that White be freed for as long as a week at a time.

White claims that he ended his relationship with the district attorney’s office last year because he wanted to change his life. He hoped to win back his ex-wife, he said, by proving to her he could go straight.

Knowing that he could no longer deal with prosecutors, he reasoned, might give him the willpower to stop using drugs and stop committing crimes.

It didn’t work.

Before his latest jailing earlier this year, White said he spent his last few days of freedom getting high.

“I didn’t accomplish nothing for myself,” he said in an interview. “Nothing.”