Confidential informants — people who pose as criminals so they can provide information to the police or some government agency — have helped crack some major U.S. cases.
They are part of the shadowy side of law enforcement and operate in a secret and largely unregulated world.
And sometimes, things go terribly wrong.
'I Was Doing Something Good'
A decade ago, at 2 a.m., a Mexican drug runner walked over the international bridge that links El Paso, Texas, with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and asked to speak with a U.S. agent.
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Raul Bencomo, then an agent with U.S. Customs, assigned code No. 913 to the runner, Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez Peyro, who went by the nickname Lalo.
Bencomo says Lalo was different from other informants. He was well dressed and always respectful — and anxious to talk about the Mexican drug lords he worked for.
"He had a lot of information, and the type of information that he started providing was at a high level," Bencomo says.
Lalo's information was on the mark. He tipped Bencomo to a corrupt U.S. immigration agent who was taking bribes from drug gangs. He also helped crack a major international cigarette smuggling ring.
"He kept us so busy — we were so behind on reports that we told him to go take a vacation just to let us catch up on reports," Bencomo says.
Lalo wasn't looking to make a deal. And he didn't need the money — he was already making plenty in Juarez's drug trade. But he had his reasons for informing on the drug gang.
"I was doing something good, something positive," Lalo said to an attorney during an interview that was videotaped four years ago.
During several phone conversations with NPR last fall, Lalo insisted on speaking only Spanish. But in either language, his story is the same.
"I believe in some kind of justice, and I think I was doing something good," he said.
On the tape, Lalo looks more like a victim than a drug thug. He's clean-cut and clearly educated.
"I really was doing something good," he said.
The ICE Target: Heriberto Santillan
The feds paid Lalo well: nearly $250,000 over four years. His handlers did well, too.
The El Paso Customs office (Customs later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) had never gotten much recognition. Now, with Lalo on board, agents set their sights on a Juarez kingpin known as the Engineer: Heriberto Santillan Tabares.
Bencomo says the agents were told that Santillan was the No. 3 man in the Juarez cartel.
But as that investigation started, ICE's prized snitch came under suspicion. At a Border Patrol checkpoint, Lalo got caught smuggling more than 100 pounds of marijuana stuffed into the wheels of his pickup. The Drug Enforcement Administration blacklisted him. ICE kept Lalo on its payroll, and even worked with a federal prosecutor to get his drug charges dropped. In hindsight, Bencomo says, the pot in the pickup should have been a warning sign.
"It just made me sick. I had to go to the restroom and throw up. I took the recording and I told my supervisor that I didn't wish to be part of the case." - Former ICE Agent Raul Bencomo, recalling listening to a tape recording that Lalo made of a murder
"That was the first incident that I ever came across that he was working both sides," Bencomo says.
Drug smuggling turned out to be the least of Lalo's exploits. He was climbing the ranks of the drug cartel and was becoming a trusted ally to Juarez's third in command.
Killings Caught On Tape
In the fall of 2003, Santillan and a band of crooked Mexican police officers went on an eight-month crime spree — killing, kidnapping and torturing drug rivals in Juarez. And Lalo was with them.
According to documents obtained by NPR, Lalo kept his ICE handlers informed of the murders piling up in Juarez. In fact, Lalo secretly recorded the first murder — and admitted that he held the victim's legs while the man was being brutally strangled, suffocated and beaten with a shovel. Former agent Bencomo remembers listening to the tape.
"It just made me sick," he says. "I had to go to the restroom and throw up. I took the recording and I told my supervisor that I didn't wish to be part of the case."
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