Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Alleged B.C. drug kingpin marked for death

Occasionally the media gives us a glimpse of how high level drug investigations are conducted.

According to this story, Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were dispatched to warn an alleged B.C. drug kingpin that a hit team was en route to murder him. The reason? He had offered to become a confidential informant:
He claimed to have the “ability to control 70 percent of the work that comes out of B.C. and what comes into B.C.,” explaining that he “had a long history of credibility” in the drug business, which he had been in “for most of my adult life,” the Grand Jury indictment against allged drug smugglers state.

Martin offered to identify other B.C. drug lords and direct law enforcement agencies to drug loads as long as they “only arrested other people.”

What Martin did not anticipate was that his offer to help in the war on drugs would be made public in the court documents filed in Seattle three days before Christmas.
His identity was revealed in a grand jury indictment. It appears some of his business associates may not have appreciated his alleged offer to become a confidential source.

The grand jury indictment is an interesting read, as it details a lengthy and expensive investigation into the use of helicopters for transporting illegal drugs across the US - Canada border.

By the way, if you're interested in learning more about the use of informants to prosecute the War on Drugs, check out The Snitching Blog by Alexandra Natapoff.

2 comments:

  1. Amazingly stupid all the way around. I don't wish death on anyone by a long shot but this fool Martin wrote his own story. What a cop out on his part. No sympathy coming from me if he does meet an "untimely death".
    Sorry, don't mean to offend anyone but stuff like this gets my goat.

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  2. The problem here isn't really that Martin "ratted" out his associates. The problem is a system that encourages police to solicit this sort of cooperation. There are a seemingly infinite number of tragic cases is which people get arrested on drug charges, are convinced to become informants in exchange for reduced or removed sentences, and then are somehow harmed or killed by criminals who are upset at their actions.

    Not only do practices like this put citizens directly in danger, but they create incentives for people to spread misinformation and flat-out lies. The awful raids in Tulia, TX a few years ago were based largely on CI information that is now known to be demonstrably false -- information that was solicited and then used by police.

    And, of course, police officers are almost never held accountable when their use of CI's leads to violence, illegal raids, etc etc. Apparently for drug warriors, such death and destruction of the rule of law is an acceptable sacrifice in the name of their own personal moral outlooks.

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