Problem - It's legal for prosecutors and members of law enforcement to lie to suspects about evidence during interrogations. This is unlawful in most western countries. Police do not have the right to lie to an attorney, because because an attorney is considered “an officer of the court”. Nonetheless, corrupt "officers of the court" lie frequently with very rare accountability ... . They can even bribe inmates to become snitches, often making up lies to help prosecutors win their case.
Witnesses are another group of people that may be targets of police and prosecutorial deception.
Here is an Excerpt about lying to coerce witnesses to testify, taken from
"Perfect villains, imperfect heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's war against organized crime" by Ronald L. Goldfarb (see photo) who was a former DOJ prosecutor.
[note: Edwyn Silberling also worked in the DOJ heading up their Organized Crime and Racketeering unit]
page 144: "So, Mullaney spent months talking to every merchant in town trying to persuade them to open up to him. He let each of them think we had proved our case and they'd better join in and cooperate with us now.
"You want to cooperate or lie to us?"
John had asked each of the frightened businessmen he interviewed. "If you lie, we'll be free to prove you lied. If you cooperate, you'll be one of many helping us."
Eventually, and it took a long time and a lot of talk, John got over fifteen of them to corroborate the ex-con and admit how the system worked.
Here is more of the story to provide context of the above paragraphs:
Page 142
...Silberling looked around the room. "Bob, you'll recall Bill Kehoe's earlier reports of our long investigation into the Mannarino brothers." Sam and Kelly Mannarino ran a multimillion-dollar gambling operation in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Gabriel "Kelly" Mannarino had attended the notorious 1957 Apalachin meeting, and had taken the Fifth before the McClellan Committee in 1958. The brothers owned the town for years and operated the biggest gambling joint in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, with links to the national mob. They had much of the city on their payroll for years. Police gambled there, delivered messages in and out, and cruised the area to protect it.
Bill Kehoe had led the IRS undercover investigation and the raid on the Mannarinos' building. Kehoe's team found a lay-off betting operation, along with dice, horses, barbotte, and blackjack, that ran day and night for gamblers from all over the state and from other states. All this went on with the knowledge of everyone in town. Ed reported now about our investigation. "Two IRS undercover agents from the Pittsburgh office staked out for observation and eventually penetrated the operation for about four months before one of them was spotted and the raid had to be set up immediately. A truckload of IRS agents, deputized as marshals so they could make arrests — sixty-five of them to be specific — entered through a series of bolted doors and one-way-glassed screening stages. They used cameras, sledgehammers, axes, and crowbars to expedite their sudden arrival. The agents arrested a houseful of about a hundred people including some policemen. Naturally, nobody talked. Our tax experts analyzed the paper and money we rounded up and estimated we could prove a $175,000 wagering excise tax evasion. We indicted seventeen members of the Mannarino mob in Pittsburgh for tax evasion and conspiracy. But no one — neither the gamblers, the employees, nor the businessmen they had to deal with — would talk and connect the operation to the Mannarinos.
"When Bill Kehoe left the department, his younger sidekick, John Mullaney, took over the investigation and moved to Pittsburgh to work on it full-time. He became the Department of Justice pest of the year pushing his thing," Silberling joked.
"We've been pushing for a year to try a case we've had in the Tax Division for a long time to get at the Mannarinos. Tax felt we needed more evidence. We knew the Mannarinos and another guy we had just indicted, Willie Sams, owned a citywide pinball machine company. An ace IRS investigator on our team uncovered a scam they used all over town. When the company rep came to the numerous stores, clubs, restaurants, and taverns where the machines were, they'd empty the machines of all the money but only record half. They'd tell the owners to report half of their take on their tax returns, using year-end forms the company would provide them. Everyone went along. They weren't about to expose the Mannarinos or argue with them. And everyone likes to pay less taxes anyway. But, John couldn't corroborate the fact that the collectors turned the money over to the Mannarinos, though we knew they must have.
"We got one break. Our lead IRS agent spotted one ex-newsstand and luncheonette owner who had dealt with the pinball. company. He was a former ally of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, and he was serving a sentence in Lewisburg penitentiary. The agent visited the prisoner there, discovered he had a personal grudge against Sam Mannarino, and brought him here to Washington the day he was released from prison. Sure enough, he put Sam Mannarino into the whole payoff operation. John wanted to go ahead and prosecute, but the Tax Division wanted more witnesses than our one ex-convict to bolster this case.
"So, Mullaney spent months talking to every merchant in town trying to persuade them to open up to him. He let each of them think we had proved our case and they'd better join in and cooperate with us now.
"You want to cooperate or lie to us?" John had asked each of the frightened businessmen he interviewed. "If you lie, we'll be free to prove you lied. If you cooperate, you'll be one of many helping us." Eventually, and it took a long time and a lot of talk, John got over fifteen of them to corroborate the ex-con and admit how the system worked.
"After our being a pest," Ed smiled in the direction of the representative from the Tax Division, who had given him a hard time with his conspiracy case, "we got folks here to agree to add a conspiracy-to-defraud count to the sixteen filing-false-returns counts the Tax Division had approved. The U.S. attorney got a conviction on the conspiracy count," he concluded, subtly rubbing it in to the Tax Division, whose added charges did not result in guilty verdicts.
---end of excerpt
Glossary -
Appalachin Meeting - The Apalachin meeting was a historic summit of the American Mafia held at the home of mobster Joseph "Joe the Barber"
Barbara, at 625 McFall Road in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957. Wikipedia
barbotte - a dice game similar to craps
Witnesses are another group of people that may be targets of police and prosecutorial deception.
Here is an Excerpt about lying to coerce witnesses to testify, taken from
"Perfect villains, imperfect heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's war against organized crime" by Ronald L. Goldfarb (see photo) who was a former DOJ prosecutor.
[note: Edwyn Silberling also worked in the DOJ heading up their Organized Crime and Racketeering unit]
page 144: "So, Mullaney spent months talking to every merchant in town trying to persuade them to open up to him. He let each of them think we had proved our case and they'd better join in and cooperate with us now.
"You want to cooperate or lie to us?"
John had asked each of the frightened businessmen he interviewed. "If you lie, we'll be free to prove you lied. If you cooperate, you'll be one of many helping us."
Eventually, and it took a long time and a lot of talk, John got over fifteen of them to corroborate the ex-con and admit how the system worked.
Here is more of the story to provide context of the above paragraphs:
Page 142
...Silberling looked around the room. "Bob, you'll recall Bill Kehoe's earlier reports of our long investigation into the Mannarino brothers." Sam and Kelly Mannarino ran a multimillion-dollar gambling operation in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Gabriel "Kelly" Mannarino had attended the notorious 1957 Apalachin meeting, and had taken the Fifth before the McClellan Committee in 1958. The brothers owned the town for years and operated the biggest gambling joint in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, with links to the national mob. They had much of the city on their payroll for years. Police gambled there, delivered messages in and out, and cruised the area to protect it.
Bill Kehoe had led the IRS undercover investigation and the raid on the Mannarinos' building. Kehoe's team found a lay-off betting operation, along with dice, horses, barbotte, and blackjack, that ran day and night for gamblers from all over the state and from other states. All this went on with the knowledge of everyone in town. Ed reported now about our investigation. "Two IRS undercover agents from the Pittsburgh office staked out for observation and eventually penetrated the operation for about four months before one of them was spotted and the raid had to be set up immediately. A truckload of IRS agents, deputized as marshals so they could make arrests — sixty-five of them to be specific — entered through a series of bolted doors and one-way-glassed screening stages. They used cameras, sledgehammers, axes, and crowbars to expedite their sudden arrival. The agents arrested a houseful of about a hundred people including some policemen. Naturally, nobody talked. Our tax experts analyzed the paper and money we rounded up and estimated we could prove a $175,000 wagering excise tax evasion. We indicted seventeen members of the Mannarino mob in Pittsburgh for tax evasion and conspiracy. But no one — neither the gamblers, the employees, nor the businessmen they had to deal with — would talk and connect the operation to the Mannarinos.
"When Bill Kehoe left the department, his younger sidekick, John Mullaney, took over the investigation and moved to Pittsburgh to work on it full-time. He became the Department of Justice pest of the year pushing his thing," Silberling joked.
"We've been pushing for a year to try a case we've had in the Tax Division for a long time to get at the Mannarinos. Tax felt we needed more evidence. We knew the Mannarinos and another guy we had just indicted, Willie Sams, owned a citywide pinball machine company. An ace IRS investigator on our team uncovered a scam they used all over town. When the company rep came to the numerous stores, clubs, restaurants, and taverns where the machines were, they'd empty the machines of all the money but only record half. They'd tell the owners to report half of their take on their tax returns, using year-end forms the company would provide them. Everyone went along. They weren't about to expose the Mannarinos or argue with them. And everyone likes to pay less taxes anyway. But, John couldn't corroborate the fact that the collectors turned the money over to the Mannarinos, though we knew they must have.
"We got one break. Our lead IRS agent spotted one ex-newsstand and luncheonette owner who had dealt with the pinball. company. He was a former ally of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, and he was serving a sentence in Lewisburg penitentiary. The agent visited the prisoner there, discovered he had a personal grudge against Sam Mannarino, and brought him here to Washington the day he was released from prison. Sure enough, he put Sam Mannarino into the whole payoff operation. John wanted to go ahead and prosecute, but the Tax Division wanted more witnesses than our one ex-convict to bolster this case.
"So, Mullaney spent months talking to every merchant in town trying to persuade them to open up to him. He let each of them think we had proved our case and they'd better join in and cooperate with us now.
"You want to cooperate or lie to us?" John had asked each of the frightened businessmen he interviewed. "If you lie, we'll be free to prove you lied. If you cooperate, you'll be one of many helping us." Eventually, and it took a long time and a lot of talk, John got over fifteen of them to corroborate the ex-con and admit how the system worked.
"After our being a pest," Ed smiled in the direction of the representative from the Tax Division, who had given him a hard time with his conspiracy case, "we got folks here to agree to add a conspiracy-to-defraud count to the sixteen filing-false-returns counts the Tax Division had approved. The U.S. attorney got a conviction on the conspiracy count," he concluded, subtly rubbing it in to the Tax Division, whose added charges did not result in guilty verdicts.
---end of excerpt
Glossary -
Appalachin Meeting - The Apalachin meeting was a historic summit of the American Mafia held at the home of mobster Joseph "Joe the Barber"
Barbara, at 625 McFall Road in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957. Wikipedia
barbotte - a dice game similar to craps