Snitch power, Part I

Those readers with long enough memories perhaps can recall the sordid case of one Arthur L. “Art” Feckner, a lying, drug-dealing scumbag who, in the mid-1980s, was running a wholesale drug operation out of a house on Woodland Avenue. It later came out in court testimony that he was doing so with the permission of (actually in cahoots with) members of the Cleveland Police Department. Feckner, a White guy who had the disheveled and unkempt look of a derelict, had been running a junkyard on the Eastside of Cleveland for years. He got into selling drugs as a sideline, and when he got busted he cut a deal to set up his supplier. But the catch was, he would need a large sum of money to close the deal with his “Cuban Connection,” in Miami, so he and his police handlers came up with this madcap scheme for Feckner to literally flood the Eastside of Cleveland with drugs so they, in turn, could come up with the necessary money for the “big buy.”

Now any drug dealer that’s been around the block a few times knows that all he has to say to a narcotics officer upon arrest is “Cuban (or Columbian) Connection” and that officer is instantly salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Tired of just busting people for having a roach in the ashtray, or a couple of rocks in the pocket of their sagging jeans, these cops daydream of that “big bust” involving dozens of kilos of narcotics that will catapult them to “super-cop” status among their peers. In the drug game, bigger is always better. To them, concepts like “rehab” and “demand reduction” are for wusses, sissies.

Playing on this knowledge, Feckner talked the police into allowing him to push kilo after kilo of drugs onto Cleveland streets with what amounted to a license to do so. It really wasn’t a hard trick for him to pull off. The logic (which is still operational today) is that by allowing this flooding of neighborhoods with drugs, police will be able to eventually set up and catch the bigger fish that bring the drugs into the country. This strategy is analogous to the Army’s Viet Nam era policy of burning down villages in order to save them, and actually both policies were first initiated around the same time. It’s noteworthy that neither strategy enjoyed much — if any — success.

Retired narcotics squad Sgt. James R. Bistricky and four other members of the Cleveland Police Department were eventually indicted for their roles in the fiasco, but a sympathetic judge threw the charges out, saying the cops believed they were working toward a good end. The half-million dollars Feckner was allowed to accumulate via drug sales were never accounted for nor was the supply of cocaine flowing into Cleveland interrupted in any way by the operation.

Now let us fast-forward to a few weeks ago and the tragic killing of 12-year-old Asteve’e “Cookie” Thomas. One of the gunmen involved in the shootout, Eric “Big Willie” Wilson, should not have been on the street to participate in this wanton murder. He had numerous felony cases pending that he was allowed to virtually laugh at due to the fact that he was a confidential informant (CI) for the police, and had earned his right to remain free by snitching. He even called a TV station after the killing, trying to explain to a news anchor that he was (or should have been) untouchable due to his snitch status.

When the police “flip” someone and turn them into a snitch, rarely is there money in the budget to pay them. So, what do the police think the snitch is going to do to survive when back on the street? Snitches get “paid” by being given a virtual license to sell drugs — to literally poison Black neighborhoods. If they are not buying and selling drugs (in addition to committing other crimes), how are they going to maintain their “street credibility” and be of any use to the cops?

While everyone at the Justice Center is now publicly scratching their head and wondering how Wilson “slipped through” the cracks, they are all being disingenuous; it’s all probably a show for the unsuspecting and gullible citizenry. They should know how and why Wilson managed to dodge legal bullet after legal bullet … his police handler probably pulled strings to allow his CI to stay on the street and continue to “work.” It’s done all the time, and they all know it.

Now there are a lot of people in town (Judges and prosecutors) who are as nervous as a bunch of “ladies of the evening” in church because they signed off on similar deals to allow known dangerous people to walk out of the courtroom scot-free. A few officials do not go along with the practice, but they are indeed few and far between.

The police justify these kinds of dirty deals as necessary to curtailing drug activity; a strategy which has not worked; if it was working the price of a kilo would go up, but instead has gone down, there is more supply on the streets than ever. Cops convince court officials to go along with the CI farce by telling those officials that they can’t find their own butts with both hands if some snitch doesn’t tell him where it is, but the whole system of police C Is? is rotten to the core and poses a danger to society. The “cure” in this case is far worse than the “disease.”

Each detective has his own stable of snitches so there are possibly hundreds — who knows, maybe even thousands (no one knows the actual number out there because of the secrecy surrounding the process) — of confidential informants roaming the streets of Cleveland, armed, dangerous, and thinking they are above the law because of “snitch power.” If these thugs were going anywhere but back to minority communities I guarantee you there would be more oversight, if such a dangerous program were allowed to operate at all.

Many of the vicious street killings in Cleveland are drug-related, but not because of unpaid drug debts (drugs are largely cash & carry business); these thugs are settling old scores created by snitching on each other. Narcotics detectives, in their zeal to make the “big buy,” (believe me, the cops buy into the thug culture just as assuredly as the wannabe gangsters) have unleashed a small army of potential “Big Willie” killers onto inner-city streets. Will an investigation into this practice be launched? Not likely. By whom? Against whom? That sound you hear emanating from the Justice Center is the circling of the wagons, as criminal justice practitioners there prepare to ride out another storm of controversy.

Next week: Part II of an ongoing series on “Snitch power.”

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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