Confidential Informants: Career Makers N Breakers

Confidential Informants.  CIs.

Sources of Information.  SOIs.

Rats.  Police.  Snitches.  12.

On today's episode I will discuss how to utilize CIs to make your career and not break it.  Google "Whitey Bulger" for a great example of how to ruin a career and an agency's reputation through CI mismanagement.

I've had many lessons learned, and today I will turn them all over!  

Run your CI, don't let your CI run you.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Good morning. Welcome back. Let's get into the basics of confidential informant management. Some places call them sources, confidential sources. On the street, they're referred to as snitches, rats, police, 12, whatever you want to call it. Running confidential informants, the military would call this humant or human intelligence collection. It is gaining intelligence from people. Very, very simple stuff. Also very complicated if you want to do it right and legally and safely. CIs, confidential informants, hereafter CIs, can make or break your career. Do not ever forget that. Do not get nonchalant when you're handling your CIs. There are some simple things you can do that will get you fired or indicted.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Sleeping with them. You may be a man with a female CI. Or vice versa.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Texting in the wee hours of the morning because you're lonely. Or during the day, just being overly friendly with your CIs.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

These are not your friends. Do not get it confused. They work for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

So the moment it doesn't mean you have to be a jerk to them, talk crazy to them, nothing like that. But it does mean you need to remember that they are criminals. And every CI you ever have is likely to be a criminal. Somebody that regularly engages in crime. And once you realize that, you realize they don't really live like me. Like they they're people, so they may be charismatic, they may be fun, you may have a similar sense of humor. I always found that oftentimes I like undercover work. I've I found that I get along better with CIs than with the cops I work with. We tend to have more common conversational ground. Could we hang out? No. But I'm more comfortable talking to them over a card game, you know, while I'm undercover or just cutting up with them before a deal than I am with the cops that I work with. And that's okay. But I still don't cross boundaries with them. And that's the key factor is having those clear boundaries. They're criminals. They're criminals that are working for you. What do we do as investigators? We collect facts and they assist with fact collection. So don't get fired because of your CI management. I'll tell you a quick story to illustrate this. I had a jury trial in the not too distant past where there was this guy who came in as a cell phone record or cell phone data professional. And he tried to juke the juke the system a little bit. We were using tower, tower direction, you know, tower records, stuff like that to put the suspect that was on trial on the scene. And he came in. I'll I'll do a quick rundown of how tower data works. You know, it shows on the map, it'll show a tower, and it'll have a little arc like a triangle pointing in a direction, and there'll it'll be slightly shaded. That arc will have part of it will be shaded. It's like an acute angle, if you remember seventh grade math or whatever, ninth grade math. So picture all these little dots on maps with which are towers, cell phone towers, with an acute angle pointing a direction, and part of it is shaded in. He had changed the amount of shading, which the shading is irrelevant. It doesn't, it only signifies direction, not distance. So he came in and he was telling the jury, like, here's my map. You can clearly see that this suspect was not within the tower range. And I'm like, my elbow is like all the way deep in the A USA's ribs. Like, you got to put me back on the stand. He's full of crap. So I get back on the stand and I'm able to refute it. Well, I found out later, I knew a guy who's also a cop, and I found out that this guy, the cell phone expert, who looked like a big biker guy, he had tattoos, he had a big beard, like he looked like what you would think of as like an undercover cop. He had been fired and almost indicted because he had been sleeping with his female informants. They're buying crack by day and he'd be messing around with them and hanging out with them at night. Uh, he didn't get indicted, but he did get fired. So people do it. So don't throw away your career, your life, everything else that you've worked for because you have a connection with somebody. CIs need three things if you want to be able to run them. Let's go ahead and get out of the here's how you get in trouble, don't do that crap. And let's get into how to actually run them a little bit and what you need to have a good one. Because when I was new to working in formants, I went through a bunch that were just kind of trash. They couldn't really do much, very barebone stuff. And then I started figuring out like, okay, this is what I need them to have to not waste all my time. Placement, access, and motivation. Those are the three main things. Placement is geography. It's where they are, what street they're on, where they hang out, where they sell drugs, where.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Access is how involved are they?

SPEAKER_01 5:46

What do they have access to? So let's say the hundred block of Main Street is full of crime. You can live on that block and still have no access. You may be worth something as an informant just from what you can see, but largely you would want somebody that's involved in the criminal activity. That's the access. They're going to the gang meetings. They're walking behind the vacant house to pick up the drugs from the guy before they go out and sell them on the block. You know, they're in the fold, they're on the group text. Whatever it may be, they have access to this group's information. And then motivation. This is a tough one because most everybody will work for money. And it's easy to put that, you know, when you formalize it and do the form, to put that as their motivation, monetary gain. You, however, need to know their real motivation, because that's what's going to get you screwed over, is if you don't understand that their real motivation is, let's say, revenge. They're mad at somebody who shot at them recently. They want to get them put in jail. Kind of similar to that, eliminating the competition. If you're, you know, you catch somebody with some crack on Main Street and he says, Oh, I can do all them boys on Main Street, his real motivation may be eliminating his competition. So that doesn't mean you don't work him, but it does mean you need to understand why he's doing that, because could that possibly motivate him to set somebody up? If you've worked CIs for a while, you've had somebody try to do something wily. And you understanding their motivation, yeah, maybe it may be just monetary gain. They may need money. But most of the ones I've worked at some point on my time, my time spending with them and working them, I've discovered some other motivation. It's usually not just cleaning up the community. It's not just they're a good person who wants some money. There's something else going on. And if there's a personal vendetta, you need to know that. You need to figure that out. You can maybe figure that out in the way they talk or the way they talk about the person, and you can ask them questions about it. Brings me on to kind of my next point, which is don't let informants run your career. I saw this quite a bit at narcotics. CI would come in, you know, one of these agents that loves working confidential informants. There's nothing wrong with that. CI would come in, you'd sit in the meeting with the agent would say, Detective, whoever would say, All right, who can you buy from? Tell me about him. And they just start taking notes. All right, you can buy from Johnny Jones. He looks like this. Here's the car he drives. Here's where he lives, here's where he sells dope. What can you buy from him? What's normal? And they're like, I can buy like a couple crack rocks. Okay, you can buy some crack, we're gonna buy some crack rocks today. Let's get this going. What's his phone number? Boom. And they get a deal started or they plan one for the next week or whatever the case may be. You don't have to let informants run your career. If you do that, you're often going to end up with the lowest hanging fruit. The mid to higher level drug dealers are gonna elude you. So if you have a good informant that you've developed and you trust to some degree, you can go ahead and start putting them on targets, on areas. You can have a guy that's not from Main Street and go, hey, do you think you could hang out over on Main Street? They're out there doing it big over there. Can you get to know some of those guys and get the ball rolling that way? They may say, like, nah, that's all blood. Like they know I'm crypt. That's gonna break wild. You're just like, okay, cool, that's unsafe. Say no more. But don't let them make the decisions. Don't let them pressure you into something that you don't really want to do, or you know, your unit is stat driven. So you're like, I really need this stat this week. Like, if it kind of sucks or it feels wrong, just skip it. So let's go into kind of the different types of informants that you'll deal with. There's the informal informant. That might be that's early stages. That might be you're on patrol and there's a store owner where guys hang out in there and they open carry guns and sell drugs all day. Or it may not be that extreme. That's more of a big city problem. If you're in a smaller town or in the country, you probably don't have a store where 10 guys hang out in there with, you know, Dracos and AR pistols in their hands. But it can be whatever. It can be a store owner who can tell you when they're prostituting and, you know, whatever the case may be, whatever they, whatever goes on at that store. And I'm just using that as an example. It can be anybody, can be your source on patrol. You're not gonna sign them, you're not gonna do paperwork, you're not gonna be taking stuff to court based on information they give you. You're using that information to find a direction, to look. It's completely informal. During this time, you're gonna be learning how to run them, how to not get run, how to learn what their motivation is. It's a slow process. Learning to build rapport. You need the early stage rapport where we'll stick with the gas station clerk. You go in and y'all kind of get along. It doesn't mean you're best friends, but it needs to be genuine rapport where they feel that they can trust you and you're not going to get them killed. You're not gonna put their name in a rapport. Clerk Johnny Jones told me this, so I went and grabbed the guy. Like they need to understand that they're safe with you to talk to you. It may even be exchanging phone numbers. I did this several times on patrol. Check your policy. Don't do something that's out of policy. But I did this quite a few times where people would say, you know, I'm walking a neighborhood, I'm walking some apartments, and some lady would say, Oh, yeah, you know, them boys are always out. I'd be like, hey, how's it how's it looking in here? Used to be wild in here. I don't really hear. We don't get as many calls in here. Like, how's it been? Are things cooling off? And she'd be like, Yeah. But them young dudes are always up here in the stolen cars, man. They got stolos almost nightly. I go, all right, you wanna, you wanna call me when they park one and I'll come recover it? Because if I start recovering them all the time, they'll stop bringing them around. They won't know it's you. I'm not putting you in a report. I'm just gonna pull up. You're gonna say, hey, there's a red Camry over here parked at the end. And once they see I grabbed two stolen cars and the stolen cars stop materializing there and the young guys are no longer hanging out there, we start to develop a trust. I did this multiple, multiple times on patrol. It's very, very easy. Just make sure you're not gonna get in trouble and make sure you're not crossing any kind of boundaries with that informant. That's the biggest thing. Once you have that flash rapport, that early stage, low level rapport, which is what that is. Like, hey, you can call me shit, you can call me off blocked if you want. Here's my number. Call me off blocked and tell me when there's a stolen car here. We don't even need to be talking. That's a very early stage rapport. They don't really trust you. Then you start developing further and further. That's the goal. You know, when you're in this informal stage, if they give you something really good, a lot of agencies have a one-time payment program where they don't have to sign up. But let's say we'll stick with some apartments and you have a, you know, a little rapport with this old lady who doesn't like the stolen cars and, you know, the kids that shoot out of them in the evenings. And then, you know, one of the kids, well, we'll call him a kid, but he's 19, gets warrants for shooting somebody. He lands some shots, he gets caught, and I know he's hanging out there. And Betty Lou, Pearl, Geraldine, old lady, is able to call me one night and say, Hey, that kid, Johnny's out here. Johnny's out here by a car right now. He's got a gun in his hand. And she knows he's got a warrant for shooting somebody. So I let her know. And we're able to swarm in and grab Johnny and get his gun and make a good case. And it's the gun used in the shooting. There's a good chance that you can get her a one-time payment for that if she wants that. So consider that I would at least offer it. Like, hey, we have a one-time payment program. I'm not sure exactly what I can get you, probably like 200 bucks or something, 400 bucks, whatever it may be, 50 bucks. I don't know. To some people, 50 bucks is a big deal. So if you can get her 50 bucks, she may love that. Maybe the phone bill. But that is an option. If you're gonna be dealing with informants, read your confidential informant or your source policy. That's another one you're gonna want to look over and talk to your people that have been doing it for a while. Now, when you formalize a confidential informant, you're probably not gonna formalize Geraldine, the old lady who's telling you about these kids. But let's say one of the kids from this group, one of the 18-year-olds that steals cars, you get this guy. It's not the guy that shot somebody. I don't want somebody that's out there shooting every night as my CI, really. But one of the other guys in this group that just kind of likes to run fast and steal cars, he agrees to be a source. I catch him in a stolen car somewhere else, and he's like, oh man, yeah, we boost every night. Like, this is all we do. It's a it's so much fun. You'd love it. If he's saying that, we may need to do paperwork on that guy. If we're gonna do things like have him taking recordings, this is not stuff you're gonna do on patrol. This is gonna be into investigations. But if he's gonna be recording that group, if he's gonna be providing you with that group text, man, I'll tell you a great method that most people don't do is they can let you log into their social media. If they have an Instagram chat, if they have Snapchat, uh, you know, I don't even know if Snapchat has groups, but Facebook, any of these things where you can do a group message, they can allow you to log in. Don't add you, but uh you can log into their account is the point. And then you will see everything real time. But if you're doing that, I would want that formalized. They can get more money for that. You can do longer term stuff. And most importantly, there's a formal agreement. It'll go through a whole bunch of stuff. Yours should have something like by signing this, I am not a police officer. I am not authorized to carry a gun at work, I will not be making arrests, I will not receive proceeds from any seizures. I'm required to file a 1099 for taxes for any monies received, all this stuff. It'll have a very formal, normal sheet. Formal normal. So there comes a point you should formalize it. Uh, very likely that the first one you try to put on paper is just not gonna play out. Don't let that make you quit. My first one that I put on paper, I mean, dude was in like, he showed up the first day to narcotics in like this all gold, shiny jumpsuit, just looking crazy, just smoking crack every day. Like he was not, he was a good source on patrol. He was telling me who was stealing stuff because he was out there homeless in the streets. But as far as buying from decent level drug targets, he had no accent, access. He had placement, he was hanging out where they were, or at least mid-level guys. He had motivation. He wanted to make money to support his crack habit. He had no access. Nobody's selling this dude two ounces of crack, two ounces of heroin. They're selling him rocks. They would look at him crazy. He had no access to that stuff. Meeting with sources alone. I don't care if they're opposite sex or same sex. You don't know their real motivation. And they could have had a bad day. Their cousin could have just caught a murder case. They could be on some killer cop shit that day. They could be recording you. I've seen confidential informants get caught during searches recording meetings with narcotics agents. So don't be alone. It just opens up room for accusations, for mistakes, any of that. Just always bring somebody with you. Always. I don't care if you've been working with this guy 10 years, bring a friend. You generally want to search your, again, know your policy. It may say you search them every meeting. Am I gonna, I don't believe that was our policy. I did not search every meeting. If we were at the police station, I would. If I'm out there meeting them in the world, in the streets, they may just hop in with me. I may pat them down and just make sure they don't have a gun. But if you're doing any kind of activity, like a buy or sending them into a meeting, you need to search them. Let's say you're buying some crack. Your informant is buying crack. You're sending them to go buy crack from a drug dealer and bring it back to you. You're not arresting anybody. This is totally normal. You do a few buys, you get a search warrant, you get arrest warrants, you get phone records, you climb the chain. It's normal day. We call that Tuesday. So you need to search them for multiple reasons. You're gonna provide the money that they spend. You don't want them spending their money. You want them spending the marked known serial number bills so that you can try to recover those on a search warrant and strengthen your case. So you don't want them walking in spending their bread. You don't want them carrying a gun. You don't want them bringing drugs to the meeting and framing somebody. It's not our job. Our job is to collect facts. And you don't want them pinching off. A lot of people out there that are in the drug game that can do buys for you have a drug habit. They do drugs. And man, I had one, it wasn't my buy, but my buddy sent this guy in on a righteous, good target, bought some crack from his CI bought some crack from the guy, came back, and I did the search on the tail end. And I wasn't trying to be extra, but the CI had a wallet on him, and I opened his wallet and he had some crack down in it. I hate to say this, when you've been in the game for a little bit, you can tell the difference between different crack rocks. This crack was a little bit wet, like it had just been cooked. It hadn't even really dried fully yet. And it had like some weird specks of color in it. It had like red and green tiny specks. I don't know why, but it was distinct. And the crack this guy had just bought was like that. And then he had a little crack rock just shoved down in one of those back pockets of his wallet that had that crack. And I went to the case agent. I was like, dude, he pinched crack. Like he pinched part of that rock off and shoved it in his wallet. And the case agent was like, oh man. So we went and talked to him. I was like, that's the same crack, dude. Like, you pinched. And he was like, Yeah, well, y'all didn't search my wallet before the deal. So I didn't think you were going to search it afterwards. And I was like, see, that's crazy. Like, that's why you should have done a good search because that dude was about to go home and smoke our crack. And on the other side of the coin, like that case became unprosecutable immediately. Because what if he had brought some crack with him? And now an innocent man is going to prison for selling drugs. So you got to do a good, thorough search on your confidential informant. Be aware of the technology you're using. We always had some tech that we didn't let the confidential informants know about. Certain things, I'm not going to go way down the rabbit hole. You should know your technology. The R O C O R O C I C episode has already aired. They provide technology if you need it. So talk to them. I'm not going to air out what we use in case someone nefarious is listening. I appreciate your listenership, despite you being a criminal. But beware. I'll tell you another quick story. I was in a hotel, I was probably buying some crack rocks, I don't remember. But there was this lady in there that was, she wasn't part of the deal, but she was there. You know, she was hanging out. And she was prattling on and on about that technology. Our drug unit was called CNT, Counter Narcotics Team. She was talking about everything they use. She was like, I know you're not an informant because you're not wearing a hat. And they put cameras in their hats, and there's this thing here, and here's how they do it. She's like, Yeah, I used to work for them, but I don't do that no more. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So informants come and go. So don't they don't need to know everything, and you need to be very cautious about what they do know because they're criminals. As we mentioned, there's going to be times that your CI is tough to get a hold of. There are plenty of people that give up on running informants when they can't reach their CIs. They're like, this is stupid. I can't reach them. You can buy them a phone a lot of times. Research, find somebody that's done it. If they're always saying, I don't have no minutes, I'm on Wi-Fi calling only, blah, blah, blah. I'm unreachable. And you want to get some deals done. You're, you know, you're on a time hack. You're like, man, I'm trying to do some work. This CI wants to work, but he's broke as a joke. Get him a phone with a hundred minutes on it and say, hey, only use this for talking to me. There's plenty of time. We're not even going to use all these minutes. So it's an option if they're a decent CI. You're not going to do that for some guy you just met on the street. You're not going to be out there buying them a freaking phone. But you can get a cheap little track phone and throw a couple minutes on it. And, you know, your sit, your agency should buy that if that's the biggest problem. I've already gently touched on this, but a lot of the people you deal with are druggies. So just beware of what they're up to. I've deactivated an informant before because I had him do a buy and I was right before the end of shift. So I went, I logged to evidence, whatever, did my thing. He left. And then when I drove by, I paid him like a hundred bucks. And when I drove by, he was right back. The drug hotel was right on my way home. And I drove by and his freaking car was outside. And I was like, man, I'm just not comfortable with this guy's a crackhead. I just paid him money to buy crack for me. And he immediately went back and bought some more. Like, I'm supporting his drug. This feels stupid. What am I doing? From the same person he just bought from. Like, there's too much risk and overlap here. I don't know. It made me squirm. I deactivated the guy. Whitey Bulger. If you don't know who that is, read a book. Uh, it's an old school FBI informant, mob boss, that he was an informant, but he was also like a sociopathic murdering gang leader up in the north. Don't keep your informants out of trouble. Make it very clear. If you get caught up, don't fucking call me, dude. Don't call me saying, oh, I got a gun and some drugs, and I'm pulled over in Atlanta and tell them I'm working for you. Because your paperwork should clearly state you are not authorized to do crime when you're not working for me. You're authorized to do what I authorize to you to do. Like go buy crack from this person and come back. But if you run, if you run CIs for a while, you will get the calls where they are in handcuffs and their dumbass is telling some patrol officer, hey, I work for the feds. You need to call this dude, call Leo. And the phone rings. And I would always tell my CIs, do not call me. I'm not bailing you out. If you're out doing crime on your own, there's a slew of problems with that. One, it's illegal. I'm not doing it. I'm not getting whitey bulgered where you go out and do whatever you want. You have a get out of jail free card. And on top of that, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are dirty cops and there are stupid cops that will blab. And imagine if I, you know, I'm a DEA agent in Atlanta, and APD pulls a guy over and catches him dirty, and I say, Oh yeah, they call me, oh yeah, let him go. And that APD officer knows somebody that knows somebody, gets off shift, says, Man, I pulled somebody over and you know the Fed said let him go because he works for them. And their little friend goes, Oh, who was it? You know, it's it's Boogie Woogie. Okay. And this person knows Boogie Woogie. Now Boogie Woogie's dead because he was running his freaking mouth to patrol. So that's why I would always tell him, like, you don't know who you're dealing with. Trust me, I'm not gonna out you. Do not trust strangers, which a cop at the end of the day is a stranger to you. So you put your life in others' hands. As soon as you tell your wife, your friends, your family that you're telling for the police, you're putting your life in immediate danger. That's not my fault. I'm telling you to shut up. Thank you. That's what I tell my informants. Just don't become their friends. I I touched on this briefly, but it's very easy. We had a girl that I was buying from when I was pretty young in narcotics. She was around my age, I think a couple years younger, very cute, very flirty. Every deal I did, I was buying from her. We ended up busting all her dealers. But every deal she'd want to hang out, she'd be like, hey, I got some blow. You want to like go to this bar later? And I'd have to just make excuses. But just don't get too close with these people. I actually told my boss once she flipped, because she didn't, she was called like an unwitting. She didn't know that she was bringing us to her dealers and that we were watching all this. It's a grimy world, dude. But she was unwitting and then she flipped and became a CI. Once we busted all these six people or whatever, you know, her and all her dealers, she was like, Oh yeah, I'll be a CI. And I can only talk about her because she's dead now. So whatever. I'm not exactly burning anybody. But she I told my boss, I was like, hey man, I can't, I'm not gonna be a handler for her, and I'm not gonna go undercover with her. Like, not to sound weird, but like we kind of have a connection, like we get along, and there's some kind of weird spark there. I don't need those fucking problems. Be, you know, she's gonna be texting me. She's already asked to hang out, like, I'm gonna pass on this. So I went ahead and set that boundary. Like, Sarge, yeah. I know I'd be good you see with her. It'd be good for the organization. I ain't fucking doing it. Don't put me with her. Just keep in mind that you run them. They don't run you. Some of them will try to run you. They will try to whitey boulder you where they can kill people and you protect them. And there was one where I was on the Marshall Task Force. We were going out on this guy that had done several murders, not a mass shooting. He'd done several different murders. And the short version is this officer pulled up and was like, the dude ended up getting fired and indicted later. But he pulled up to me and was like, hey, y'all going after this guy? Because he was the hot topic in the area. I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, cool. He leaves not two, three minutes later. We're just briefing up to go get this dude. My phone rings. It's the homicide detective over the case, and she's like, Hey, are you going after this guy? And I was like, Yeah, we're about to go out. And she was like, Oh, well, he knows. I said, What do you mean? And she was like, I don't know. But his sister just called me and said that he called her and said, Hey, the marshals are about to come after me. So to break it down, what had happened is this patrol officer, who I think at the time was more dumb than dirty, had called somebody that he saw as a confidential source who was actually working him for information and said, Hey, the marshals are looking for this dude. You know where he's at? And the dude said, No, I don't know. I don't know. I'll keep an ear out. And the dude that the officer had called actually knew my target and called him. He then called his sister, who called the homicide detective. So there was this whole game of telephone in like a five-minute pyramid. Period, not pyramid. Everybody started calling each other and he knew we were coming. We ended up lucking out and getting him. He didn't flee. He just kind of buckled down and tried to like lock his doors and stay put, hoping we wouldn't find him. We did, but that officer got worked. That informant was working officer and probably getting money on top of that. And the lastly, to go with the ending of an episode appropriately, deactivation. It's okay if you activate a CI and they're crossing boundaries, they're pushing you, they're always unavailable, they're not giving you what they say, they're doing something unethical. Whatever it is that they're doing that you're not okay with, it's okay to deactivate them. It can be frustrating when they've done some work for you and, you know, they've made you 10 good drug drug cases and, you know, you've spun up on wiretaps based on this person. But if they're doing something that's going to get you fired or indicted, or they're just pushing boundaries, or, you know, they're probing you for information too much, or they're always calling you at night, trying to get you out of trouble or get their friends out of trouble, or whatever it is that's not working for you. I'm all for a conversation first. If you can avoid deactivation, like, hey, listen, Johnny, don't be calling me. Slide the form over. Here's the form where it says, I'm not going to get you out of trouble. Why did you call me last night and put a cop on the phone and say, hey, tell them I work for you. And let him explain. And they either need to be fired on the spot or have a real heart to heart of like, hey, let's get clear. I'm not your fucking friend. I'm a guy that you talk to about what's going on, and I use your information to collect facts and make cases. So don't call me to get you out of trouble. It's not going to fly. You do this again, you're fired. Okay. Um, so I lied about ending the episode because I did think of something else that I didn't have in my notes. A couple different ways to use CIs. If you charge the evidence that they buy, you they may face exposure in court, meaning when the discovery is turned over, I know there's just a number on it. This is where you need to know your policy. Communicate with your prosecutors about if they're going to be called to testify in court. Because if you're targeting certain gangs and groups, that may be a death sentence, especially if they live in the area. So, one way that I would do it often, you know, where I was, if we charge what we buy. So let's say we buy a Draco and kilo of heroin from this guy, and we want to charge those, right? Yeah, this dude's a four-time felon. He's going to be, he's armed career criminal, he's going to be facing like 25 to life for this one sale because of how much stuff he's done in the past and his crazy criminal history. So I want to charge that. You need to be aware that if you're charging that stuff you bought, that confidential informant is likely going to have to testify at trial. And if they're an informant, I mean, I've had plenty of non-testifying informants. And what that means is I can use what they buy as probable cause for search warrants. So would I buy a kilo and a Draco if I'm not charging that? No, that's like a lot of money. But would I buy a half ounce of heroin and a pistol from this guy? Yes. Establish probable cause for not for arrest, but for search warrants. And then you do your job on your own where you get search warrants on their house, their car, their business, their storage unit. You get all the call detail records you need because now you have probable cause that they're doing crime and you essentially use it as a lead. So if you have an informant, they may have done 10 buys before where they're fine with testifying, and then they're like, oh, you want me to buy from Troy? Troy's gonna kill me. Troy kills informants. And they're freaking out. Like, all right, what if we do it this way? Bring the prosecutor in the room. Go ahead and tell him that you're not gonna subpoena him for this case. He's not gonna be needed to testify. Because I want you to buy from Troy, but I'm not seeking charges on that. I'm seeking a search warrant. You might be seeking a wiretap on Troy because he's a big time big dog. But understand when you're gonna have to put them on the stand and when you're not. Because if you're not speaking knowledgeably, for one, it's just unethical to put them on the stand if they said, like, I'm not testifying, and now you're turning over, turning them over in discovery and subpoenaeing them. But on top of that, it just kills rapport if you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And you're like, yeah, I don't think you'll have to testify, but you know, we'll figure it out when it comes to that point. Well, that's their life. So you need to kind of know that as the investigator and the handler, that's that's on you. So, two ways you can do it. I loved PC buys. You can get into really good, violent targets with probable cause-only buys and never expose your informant. You're kind of throwing money away because you can't charge that stuff you bought, but you are getting PC to hit the house where the dirt is happening. I hope this helps some of y'all seriously. Take it very seriously that they can mess up your career. Don't be fast and loose with these people. Doesn't mean you have to be a robot, but it does mean you have to know the policy. You have to talk to prosecutors so that you know what they'll accept. Another side note, they're not please don't make child molesters your informants. You know, if they testify at the jury, it comes out, aside from the obvious moral issue, it comes out and putting a child molester on the stand or a sex predator, you know, I'll I'll make a shooter an informant way before some kind of sex crime person. Because when the jury hears that criminal history, when that informant's on the stand and the defense attorney is going, so I'm I'm seeing a 2007 conviction for aggravated rape of a child. Can you tell us about that to your informant? I mean, you should be bright red and wondering what the hell you're doing. So most prosecutors can tell you like, just show them the criminal history first. Like, hey, can I even make this person? Will you prosecute cases that this person helps me collect facts on? And if they say no, you might need to move along. All right, reach out if you have questions. Hit me up on any of the social media pages for that Leo guy, that L E O guy, and have a wonderful day.