By A.C. Thompson

God has turned his back on Judas and me.

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

Book 'em: The SFPD's Informant Management Manual offers insights into the department's covert practices. Guardian photo by Lori Spears

I slip into a seat next to him and can't help but think those teeth look somehow menacing, like the flesh-rending incisors of some feral beast. But it's not the teeth that matter when you're a snitch. It's the tongue. The tongue of this man has put at least 50 people, most of them small cogs in the illegal drug industry, in jail cells.

His eyes glance in my direction as he stabs his fork into a pile of meatballs. Mostly though, he surveils the room, scanning the place for unfriendly faces. Eternal vigilance keeps rats alive.

He's agreed to rendezvous with me at 10 p.m. on this blustery March night because there might be something in it for him. He's got a handwritten memoir he'd like to sell. He figures the narrative, scratched out in pencil on a thick sheaf of yellow paper, could be transformed into an HBO miniseries, or a big-budget feature like Blow, the Johnny Depp film about a drug kingpin who winds up doing an interminable sentence in the pen. But instead of spending eternity in a cage with a guy named Bubba, this coke dealer gives up his partners, his customers, his friends, his lovers. And the snitch, whom I'll call Jeff, strides away, scarred but free.

Jeff thinks letting a journalist survey the rubble of his life is a first step toward getting Hollywood interested. For me, the snitch is an entry point into the dark subbasement of the war on drugs. He becomes the first of several people I meet in this murky realm, a place where the cops break their own rules, deception is king, and self-preservation is the only virtue. Snitching is as old as crime, but in the past two decades the drug war has created a whole new stratum of bottom-feeders, an army of long-term informants who are part criminal, part law enforcer, part mercenary.

To move through this shadow world, I must agree to a condition. I must shroud the identities of the informants I meet (because to do otherwise could get them killed) and those of their law enforcement handlers (because they could lose their jobs for speaking frankly about what they do).

My effectiveness, I found, was directly proportional to my ruthlessness.

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

In April 2004, Jeff was locked in a glass-walled holding pen in the Santa Clara County Jail with about 10 other guys when the guards opened the door. In walked Roy.

Some 10 years earlier Jeff had set up a bogus drug deal with Roy, a blues musician who'd gigged with the late John Lee Hooker. As Jeff recounts it, "I called him and said, 'Hey, Roy, can you come down to my house and bring me some meth and two pounds of weed?' " Before Roy could deliver the goods, 10 San Jose narcotics cops pounced on him. They'd been tipped off by Jeff.

Now the two men were intently staring at each other. Jeff knew this was fucked. Real fucked. He wasn't worried about Roy beating him down. The guy was skinny, not much of a hard-ass, and Jeff figured he could take him. The real problem was all the other guys in the cell.

All Roy had to do was open his mouth and tell the other inmates, "Hey, that guy's a snitch," and Jeff could count on a severe, possibly fatal, pummeling or shanking. In jail the one thing everyone can agree on – regardless of age, race, or gang affiliation – is their hatred for informants.

But Jeff is nothing if not gifted at the art of bullshitting. He conned his way out of it. "He didn't realize it was me. He thought I was two inches taller because I'd been wearing cowboy boots," Jeff says. "I convinced this moron that I'm a different guy. Unbelievable."

At the time Jeff was staring down indictment number 11 – or was it 12? His five-page rap sheet already included busts on drug charges, lots of 'em, both federal and state. Identity theft charges (that particular indictment included seven aliases). Statutory rape charges. Now he'd caught a new case, a felony indictment for allegedly stalking an ex-girlfriend.

Santa Clara County prosecutors, Jeff says, had put a deal on the table: seven years in the pen. As usual, however, Jeff was able to trim time off his sentence by ratting on other cons, in this case a thoroughly tattooed Norteño gangbanger allegedly responsible for a string of liquor store robberies. "The Norteños will be after me," he says. "It's probably even worse than the coke dealers I set up. They're crazy. Even in fucking prison they're like warriors. They'll kill you."

For his effort, Jeff returned to the streets after 10 months; the Norteño's case is still unfolding.

Too many people wanted to kill me, the dirty yellow stinking rat bastard I'd become.

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

I'm in a dimly lit Chinese restaurant in San Francisco with an experienced plainclothes cop who's schooling me on informants. "A good informant will run the cop, not the other way around," he says. They'll manipulate the badge wearer, enriching themselves, truncating their pending prison sentences, taking down underworld rivals and enemies.

I ask about truthfulness. How often do snitches lie – either to extricate themselves from legal trouble or to build a case for a cop? The cop drops his spoon, pauses for a moment, and says, "When it comes down to money, they'll say whatever you want to hear."

He continues, "If someone gives you bad information, you're supposed to deactivate them. But that doesn't always happen."

Jeff told me he continuously dealt drugs while working as an informant, committing felonies at the same time he helped law enforcers collar other felons. The cop says this is standard operating procedure. "You have to be in the game. You have to be in that element." If you're a drug trafficker and you stop moving product, your underworld associates are gonna start wondering if you've been turned, he explains.

The San Francisco Police Department's Informant Management Manual, a confidential 30-page handbook I've obtained, says snitches "shall not violate criminal law in furtherance of gathering information." In practice, the cop says, the rule is a joke.

The typical informant is somebody who's been busted and starts blabbing in exchange for a lighter sentence. Jeff says snitches have a saying: do three and go free – meaning rat out three dealers and you walk. I ask the cop if he's heard of it. "Yeah," he replies. "But it doesn't always apply. Say I catch you with an ounce of dope. I might ask you to bring a case worth 10 times as much. To give me a guy with 10 ounces of dope." When the mission's accomplished, the charges against the informant disappear.

According to the manual, S.F. cops can't unilaterally hammer out such deals. "The Office of the District Attorney and the Court are the only parties who may enter into agreements that affect the outcome of the defendant's case," it states.

However, the manual also details the methods officers should use when asking prosecutors to go easy on a snitch and reveals the steps a cop can take to spring an informant from jail. Cops can generally get an informant out of jail if the person wasn't arrested for a "crime of violence" or a "sexual crime," isn't a flight risk, and has a "residence in the Bay Area."

One other intriguing fact appears in the manual: "A person under the age of 18" can be used as an informant so long as the department gets "written permission from a parent or guardian."

Of course, snitching is a risky occupation for a kid. "Snitches die all the time," the cop tells me.

There is, however, a significant upside to cultivating a pool of informants. Acting on tips from informants, the cop's pulled hundreds of illegal guns – everything from .22 handguns to AKs – off the streets, disarming some of the city's more notorious street gangs, and, in all probability, saving lives.

I love my job!

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

Before Jeff was an informant, he was just a lower-middle-class kid from San Jose, a generic '60s-era longhair with love for the Stones, disdain for the establishment, and no inclination to join the straight world. He started smuggling in the late 1960s, first hauling bundles of weed north from Mexico at the age of 22. Early trips were logistically simple: buy the shit and drag it through the desert, cloaked by the night.

"You could only put maybe 30 kilos on your back," Jeff says. "That's 70 to 75 pounds. You're walking 20 miles across. You dehydrate." On one trek a diarrhea-inducing bug snaked its way into Jeff's guts, unleashing his bowels as he hiked.

Despite the colonic mishap, "it was exhilarating. I was an adrenaline junkie. Later on, when I became a rat, it was the same thing."

On a subsequent run, he employed an old Chevy van, a bookmobile formerly owned by a public library, to move marijuana from Oaxaca to northern California, stashing the dope under a false floor. He claims the run netted several hundred kilos.

Ensconcing himself in the role of the dealer, Jeff proceeded to act like an asshole. Got spun out on the stimulant Dexedrine. Toted around a revolver. Called himself a "psychedelic gangster." When he got stiffed for $5,000 by some Venice Beach hippie, he kidnapped the guy at gunpoint and tortured him, snapping the dude's arm with a blackjack.

Fast-forward to the 1980s. Jeff was still deep in the game, peddling cocaine as well as sticking gobs of it up his nose, for a time using a converted San Francisco firehouse as a base of operations. "I was moving about a pound every week, no problem." Along the way, he'd burned through two serious relationships that had spawned three children.

"He was a big dealer, he was well-connected, and he always had excellent product," says one former customer, who claims Jeff once supplied comedian John Belushi. Jeff dropped big money on a car, a Porsche 914, which he drove to pick up coke from a half dozen stash houses scattered around the South Bay.

Things finally went sour in 1988, when he jetted into New York City from Lima, Peru, with two kilos of high-grade Andean coke. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration were waiting for him. Jeff thinks they were alerted to his arrival by one of his associates.

His parents posted his $250,000 bail, using their San Jose home as collateral. Given the draconian nature of federal drug laws, Jeff was looking at a very lengthy stay in prison.

Back home in San Jose, he continued to deal. "I had lawyers to pay – they cost $50,000. I had a wife, kids, expenses." Predictably, he was popped again, busted by local cops in the Porsche with a couple of grams stuffed down his pants.

He was sitting in an interview room at San Jose Police Department headquarters when an undercover detective in jeans and a white T-shirt strode in. The cop, a San Jose police officer assigned to a DEA task force, had a dossier on Jeff and was quite aware of his pending federal case.

The officer said federal prosecutors planned to seize his parents' two-bedroom home. Though the feds are notorious for snapping up property they claim is drug-connected, it's not totally clear the government could actually have tossed the parental units out on the sidewalk. Regardless, Jeff says he thought they were about to become homeless thanks to his chosen vocation.

He folded and began feeding the task force incriminating information on his partners in the smuggling ring, starting with a "fat, greasy Deadhead."

This, anyway, is the yarn Jeff spins. Should I believe it? Should you? I mean, Jeff is, by his own admission, a thoroughly untrustworthy narrator, "a great fucking liar."

Looking to verify Jeff's many claims, I make contact with one of his old friends. "I've known Jeff since sixth grade," says the friend, a professional computer geek. "His wild claims are true."

I also talk to Jeff's handler, a midlevel San Jose law enforcement figure, who confirms the broad outline of his tale, describing Jeff as something of a Super Rat. "Ninety percent of the informants only do a few cases," he says. Jeff's "been doing this for 15 years. He is very reliable."

The handler says Jeff's put easily 50 people in cells.

When Jeff turned on his cronies, the handler recounts, "We went all the way through the chain and got the lab in Peru. That lab had 150 pounds of coke. Ten indictments came down from that."

I ask the handler what, in his opinion, propels Jeff's perpetual informing. "I've never paid him. He does it to work off cases, to get revenge, and, maybe, to get rid of competition."

The handler has no illusions about Jeff – or any other informant – leading a square, squeaky-clean life. "Most all of them will stay in the mix. Very few of them will quit the criminal life altogether. We're not naive." For the handler and his cohorts, the focus is always on hooking the bigger fish.

As for Jeff, he'll readily acknowledge that he hasn't the slightest shred of honor or loyalty. He's ratted on "customers, friends, and competition." He's turned in a girlfriend. Later, when another woman dumped him, he turned in her new beau.

At times, Jeff says, he "digs" getting people busted, loves the power, savors the action, smiles as he sends people down. "I'm twisted, man. Maybe I do this 'cause I'm mean." But at other moments, Jeff is gripped by "guilt, compassion, and remorse for the lives I've ruined and the families I've torn apart."

I feel slightly bad for being this unscrupulous, pretending to help him when I'm really setting him up for the big fall.

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

Family man: Jeff and baby before the bust.

We are talking in a tiny, thick-walled concrete room in the San Francisco county lockup. Donny (not his real name) is witty, cerebral, likable. I have no doubt that in another life he could've been anything – a successful entrepreneur, a Broadway actor, a biochemist, a cop, anything. In this world, though, he's the Betrayer.

Donny and Jeff share the same basic M.O. When Donny's doing time, he convinces his cellies to spill the grisly details of their crimes to him and then passes the salient nuggets on to the cops. On the streets, he leads the SFPD to drug peddlers, purchasing crank or heroin with marked bills and shuffling off when the narc squad swoops in to cuff the dealer.

He says he participated in his first covert operation when he was 15, buying acid from a small-time southern California dealer. The cops "paid me $50, which was a lot of money at the time," Donny recalls. "I was nervous. I was wearing a wire, and I couldn't carry a gun."

For Donny, snitching is a by-product of his penchant for ingesting verboten substances – he's been fucked-up on speed and heroin since 1969 and has worked straight jobs "only on rare occasions."

Junkiedom has kept him rotating in and out of jail and prison. He snitches to put a little money in his pocket, and, of course, to reduce the amount of time he's got to spend caged. "I've worked with SFPD, state Department of Justice, DEA, San Mateo Narcotics Task Force, San Jose P.D.," Donny tells me, before reeling off the names of a half-dozen SFPD detectives who've employed him.

I ask how many people he's ratted on. He pauses. "You know, I've never really thought about that." After some reflection, he says, "probably 20."

Donny says he was paid $1,200 by the DEA for his role last year in a two-pound meth bust in Antioch. S.F. cops, he claims, generally pay $60 for the average drug buy. "I've had cops pay me $20, $40, $60, depending on the situation. I know it's not official because they didn't have me sign anything."

(Later I mention this to the S.F. cop. "Oh yeah, a lot of times the department doesn't give us the money we need," he says. "Sometimes I'll just go to the ATM, take out money, and give it to the informant." He slips me a confidential memo sent by several undercover officers to an assistant police chief; they're asking to be reimbursed for more than $3,000 they've paid out to informants.)

I ask Donny if he's ever been pressured to give bogus testimony. He answers by way of anecdote: "I've had cops shove a case file in front of me and say, 'I'm going to get a Coke. Do you want anything? I'll be back in five minutes.' "

How much should I trust Donny? I don't know. All I can say for sure is I was introduced to Donny by a credible source with an extensive knowledge of the criminal justice arena. This person says Donny's for real. He also says I shouldn't write anything that'll get Donny whacked.

The old adage about the truth setting you free is not necessarily true.

Jeff, from an unpublished memoir

As ruthless and unsavory as they can be, Jeff and Donny are, in many respects, tragic figures, captives of the drug war just like the people they put away. They'll never truly be free. They'll always be looking over their shoulders for men palming guns or knives. Outside of the shadows, this society has no place for them.

Donny is doing time. He is providing information in several felony cases. When his term ends, he'll likely take up residence in a cheap hotel.

These days Jeff is living in the East Bay, pulling down a paycheck as a barber, attending regular sessions with a shrink as part of his probation in the stalking case. Aside from an array of business suits and dress shoes, he owns very little. He lives in fear of encountering figures from his past.

When it comes to the war on drugs, he's ambivalent. "It's a war we can never win. It's like Vietnam. Weed should be legal. But you can't legalize methamphetamine or cocaine. It would only make it worse."

Despite his misgivings, he's still informing.

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