Corrupt Military Contractor Threatened Witnesses

The United States likes to start wars and hire people to fight them, whether they're civilian "volunteers" or "military contractors" (aka: Mercs). Like all crumbling empires, the wars are getting worse and worse as the country advances through the process of decomposition. Everyone knows Mercs are brutes.

A military contractor under investigation on allegations he overbilled and did faulty repair work on Navy and Army aircraft has been charged with threatening to kill witnesses in the case, according to a complaint unsealed Thursday.

Keith E. Shaw, owner of Shaw Aero Instruments in Louisville, traveled to Tennessee to buy explosives as part of a plot to blow up his former business partner's plane, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Even the contractor's son was worried about what this guy could do. Mr. Shaw REALLY didn't want his profits fucked with, apparently. Sounds familiar.

A fourth informant, Shaw's 21-year-old son Nathan, told Camper that in December 2008 Shaw offered him $100,000 to kill Dickinson and Brown and delivered him a .308 sniper rifle, sophisticated scope and tripod, Camper said.

"It was his father's intention to have him use the rifle to kill Dean Dickinson and Andrew Brown," Camper said.

This guy was real old school, even contemplating poisoning his enemy's wine collection or kidnapping an enemy and his daughter, forcing them to fornicate on film and using it for blackmail. I guess no-bid contracts make people do crazy things.

EnCana Put Out $1 Million Reward for Pipeline Bomber

EnCana has doubled it's original offer of $500,000 to $1 million in an effort to capture the likely environmentally motivated "Pipeline Bomber." The bomber has struck six targets in nine months and has only invoked a loss of profits; none of lives or limbs. If you watched this week's episode of "It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine" from the stimulator, you'd already know all about this shit, and why the Pipeline Bomber should be a world-renowned hero instead of a hunted "terrorist."



Did you watch it? Well, now you know about how evil the "motherfucking tar sands" are, you may have been introduced to your new favorite program, AND you learned about SnitchWire's new favorite anonymous, autonomous superhero! But anyway, SnitchWire encourages all readers to try and get that cool million by framing a Nazi instead!

Arizona Woman Tortures and Kills Wheelchair-Bound Alleged Snitch

In a chilling interview, posted below, an Arizona woman admits to murdering a 46 year old man in a wheelchair once finding out he was a snitch in prison. She claims to not feel any remorse and wishes she could kill more informants. The victim, Terry Neely, was beaten with a tire iron, subjected to amateur dentistry and strangled over three days of torturing. He was lured to the apartment of Angela Simpson with promises of sex and drugs. Simpson, not fond of rats, decided to dispose of him.

Neely's remains were found burning in a trash can outside of a church earlier this month. He had a three inch nail driven through his skull. Cold blooded!

Woman Looking at 20 Years for Threatening Rat Brandon Darby

Katyanne Marie Kibby could be going to trial after being indicted in June for threatening the life of RNC snitch Brandon Darby. She is facing 20 years after allegedly sending a threatening email shortly after David Crowder took a plea deal last January. Kibby has until August 31st to reach a plea deal with federal prosecutors or else it goes to trial.

This whole case makes SnitchWire feel ill and the only solace is in that the stupid corporate media mentioned Darby still lives just outside Austin, Texas. Don't talk to Brandon Darby.

BAD INFORMANT WEEK

• A disgusting portrait of right-wing blogger, white supremacist and FBI informant Hal Turner is being featured in Wired Magazine's Threat Level this week; detailing how federal agencies trained him to straddle the line of the law while still inciting hateful violence. Turner was paid tens of thousands of dollars to "disseminate right-wing rhetoric" as an "agent provocateur."An interesting component to this case is that Turner was outed as working with the FBI by the Scientology-hating, /b/-dwelling Anonymous, who as very well many of you may know are Internet Superheroes.
• Albert Gonzalez helped the Secret Service hunt down hackers as an informant, now he is being charged with the largest data breach in United States history. Prosecutors also believe he held the record before that as well, making this 28 year old rat one hell of a computer hacker. Albert came away with loot amounting to 130 million credit and debit card accounts.
• Officials in St. Louis want to hold informants more accountable for the information they may or may not be giving to the police. The police, in return, could be fabricating evidence and violating civil rights. Naturally, the Pigs are trying to block legislation.
  

All of My Heroes Are Weirdos

A self-described liberal blog called Irregular Times recently wrote SnitchWire up, bringing up some discussion points regarding the law, violence and ethics. Evidently, the author found SnitchWire through searching for information on John Towery, the snitch outed in Olympia a few weeks ago. The author, J. Clifford, endorses this publication up to this point. "Watching the watchers" and whatnot, practices of infiltration and warrantless surveillance never ended when President Figurehead took office, etc. It appears that on one side of the coin, Clifford views SnitchWire as a resource for activists; something that private citizens started in an effort to counter the Big Brother Police State more and more of the world is becoming blanketed under.

Right on.

The author goes on with a critique, claiming we would discourage citizens from informing to the police about possible assassination attempts against the president or other "violent criminal conspiracies." This probably stems from our blurb about habitual dumbass white supremacist Hal Turner, who attempted to use his status as an FBI informant as leverage while defending himself against charges of threatening federal judges in Chicago. While we did say "fuck Hal Turner for working with the FBI," that didn't necessarily mean we were endorsing some racist skinhead piece of shit to off the man your Mama calls Obama. Turner was exhibiting classic snitch tactics, using his status as a rat to weasel his way out of his own legal situation. For that (and plenty of other reasons), he should be condemned. Do you really think a white supremacist podcaster from North Bergen has access to credible, dangerous threats against anybody? No, man. Not even the paranoid FBI believed him. Fuck that guy. Hal Turner is an attention whore attempting to grab headlines.

This goes a little deeper. Further questioning of our ethics as to whether "violent criminal conspiracies" should be investigated "through constitutional procedures" can again be rebutted through commentary on Turner. SnitchWire admitted that even with our anti-snitch ethos, we wouldn't exactly be in the throws of self-loathing failure and depression should Turner's activities as an informant lead to the imprisonment and/or extermination of neo-Nazi scum. By all means, we are happy to endorse a five-point plan that eventually leads to fascists being flung en mass into major active volcanoes or used as fertilizer at communes. SnitchWire functions on principals of non-aggression, self-defense, and direct action; principals which should not be confused with the mayhem, violence and pointless, petty hatred people like Hal Turner revel in.

Clifford goes on to criticize our aesthetic further as well as our sense of humor:

Then there’s SnitchWire’s wink-and-nod encouragement of violence against government informants. The subtitle of the site is so you get what’s coming to you – with an obvious double meaning.

The site also advises, “Individuals pursuing a ’snitches get stitches’ policy do so on their own accord and are in no way affiliated directly with this publication.” That’s not a discouragement of violent retribution against government spies. It’s just a legal disclaimer.

If we want the government to follow the Constitution and stop spying against us, then we need to follow the Constitution as well – and the laws established under it. Nobody should be above the law – including activists who criticize illegal government activities.

"Violent retribution against government spies."

...

Yeah. We certainly wouldn't frown on it. You caught us! When mother of two Marie Mason gets 22 years in prison from the State for acts of righteous property destruction that didn't hurt anyone, excuse us for hoping her snitch ex-husband Frank Ambrose gets recognized in a dark part of town by a sleeping ELF cell. While the "terrorists" of the RNC8 are nervously awaiting trial for organizing the fucking logistical elements of a counter-summit, the snitch Andrew Darst is saved from possible felony charges after kicking a door down and beating two people in the middle of the night because the State wanted to make sure his testimony would still be credible. Or how about when Brandon Darby set up a couple of kids with Molotov cocktails that weren't ever even used? Should we go on? Does anyone need anymore examples of these disgusting vermin (because we got quite a list)? Is it so wrong to wish the pain they've inflicted upon entire communities could be directed at them? Is it so wrong to fight back?

But that's where we differ, liberals. Keep on dreaming that the government will "follow the constitution and stop spying on us" and we'll keep wiping our asses with it. Your government is a "violent criminal conspiracy." The laws are unjust, the punishments obscene, the State illegitimate. So you can have your Cindy Sheehans, Pelosis, Obamas and Reids, and we'll happily root on the Tarnac 9, the Greek insurrection, and the anti-globalization movement. Endorsing the capitalist class and throwing effort behind it only betrays everyone under the thumb of the ruling elite. Simply acting within the boundaries of the law is futile, because the State doesn't listen and it's only a matter of time before total co-option. They set the boundaries of the law for a reason: because they can control everything operating inside of it.

In many circumstances (and in our opinion), the stakes are far too high to allow informant activity and infiltration to go unchecked. Don't honestly think that for a second, if you're in even the most peaceful, hands-off kind of activism, you aren't watched. They figured you out. They can counter peace marches and petitions and lobbying. The 60s scared them all to death and Nixon had to figure it all out. If you don't think Dick Nixon figured out that whole protest thing, let's schedule a luncheon and we'll do some schooling.


So for those engaging in a diversity of tactics to become a puss-spewing, irritating thorn in the side, we salute you. Empires are brought down through many means, and the smartest thing to do is never put your foot in your mouth when your fists might have to fight. We'll support those communities and individuals, and provide them the information they need to avoid spies. That's what we're committed to. We write with a humorous bent on occasion, and that's that. Enjoy your world of endless compromise, Clifford, but there are still people with some fight left in them.

Denver Private Investigator Shot Four Times

A workers compensation investigator in Denver was saved by his backpack when his surveillance target, claiming he was unloading "at a bear," plugged him four times after allegedly yelling at the PI. Eh... However...

The operative – whose name is withheld here for his safety - told officers he was conducting an investigation regarding possible insurance fraud. Court records indicate he was working for Pinnacol Assurance, Colorado’s largest worker’s compensation insurance provider. It regularly retains private investigators to watch employees who have submitted worker’s compensation claims, to try to obtain video documenting that the employee is not injured, not injured as severely as they claim, or not hampered by the injury in the way they claim.

What an asshole! After Marshall Lawson fired his .22 at "a bear," he was subsequently arrested after the PI (unnamed) drove back into town, realized he had nearly been killed, and called the police. Lawson is being held on first degree attempted murder charges with bond set at $150,000. Fucking bears.

US Soldier Allegedly Capped Cartel Snitch

Following up on a Stompings story we posted the other day, an 18 year old US Soldier Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca was arrested along with two other men in connection with the slaying of a Juarez cartel member found dead in El Paso after reportedly being outed as a confidential informant. All three men are facing a charge of capital murder and are being held on $1 million bond. The three men were tracked using those lovely little pocket telescreens most consumers refer to as a cell phone, which revealed that the three men tracked Gonzalez back to the scene of the crime.

That's some dumb shit. Cell phones.

Ex-Undercover Pig Dishes on UK Informant Scene

This is a massive article detailing some grit in Britain's rat rosters. It is an interesting read, and gives enough insight to be worthwhile for readers internationally. From the Sunday Mercury:

WEST Midlands Police spent £20,000 on a single tip from an informant – and would regularly turn a blind eye to serious crime to protect their sources.

These are just some of the shocking revelations from a former undercover cop who has spilled the beans on the murky world of the snitch.

Ronnie Howard spent 23 years as an undercover detective working for West Midlands Police and the National Crime Squad.

A tough, no-nonsense, old school copper like Gene Hunt from TV’s Life On Mars, he took on pushers, pimps and fraudsters and, at the peak of his career in Birmingham, would run between 15 and 20 informants at a time.

For the first time the Sunday Mercury can reveal how the police worked with the criminal underworld in order to get the job done.

“All the top criminals will have a cop they are talking to all the time,” says Ronnie. “It’s an insurance policy for them in case anything goes wrong.

“I admit there were plenty of times we turned a blind eye to crimes because they were being carried out by informants – that was common practice.”

He reveals that, although top cops in the command chain regarded informants simply as “flies on the wall” privy to the gossip of the underworld, they were almost always shadier characters than that.

“The management at the top used to have the wrong idea,” he says. “They thought of them just as flies on the wall but the truth is that they couldn’t have known the things they did if they weren’t criminals themselves.

“The top brass used to kid themselves that this wasn’t the case. They were too afraid to admit that the police allowed certain crimes to go ahead in order to solve others.

“There was one top informant, for example, who blew the lid on a cannabis importation gang, even though he was a top drug dealer himself.

“We allowed him to carry on dealing because he helped us smash the scam and we recovered a ton of cannabis.

“Without him we would never have been able to pull that off. It just proved how important informants are to the police – they are crucial.”

Last week, it was revealed that West Midlands Police paid out nearly £300,000 to informants in one year alone.

Charged

And for the first time ever the amount of money that the cops spent on snitches was revealed to top £6 million across every police force in Britain.

The Metropolitan Police spent most – more than £1.8 million – Greater Manchester Police spent £329,497 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland £299,000, while West Midlands police spent a total of £291,780.

It doesn’t surprise Ronnie, who reveals how the process worked before he retired just a few years ago.

“First of all you wait until you’ve locked them up and charged them,” he says. “It’s only then that you approach them and ask them if they would consider being an informer.

“If they proved to be reliable, and gave good quality information on a consistent basis, I could help them get a third off any sentence they may have received for other offences.

“And depending on how good the information was they could get anything from £100 a tip to thousands of pounds.

“In my time it was customary to give informants in drug busts up to 10 per cent of the value of the drugs seized.

“In one case I paid a drug dealer £20,000.

“Often I would be simply handing out £100 or £500 at a time for good info. If an informant delivers the goods on a regular basis he can make a living out of it – and many of them do.”

Ronnie points out, however, that he didn’t tolerate any nonsense from his underworld snitches.

“It takes time to establish a good informant,” he says. “You’ve got to build a relationship with them based on trust – and you can’t do that overnight.

“At first I wouldn’t trust them one bit, and lots of them would try to take advantage of the system. That was a big mistake on their part.

“I had to arrest a top source who had led us to a huge haul of ecstasy. He was at the scene and, when he was searched, he had a load on him.

“He knew the risks, he knew the law – and I made sure he went down for that.

“I had one paedophile who was nothing but a wind-up merchant and never came up with anything concrete.

“He never got paid so it was pointless.

“Sources could often be slippery, difficult characters, who would build you up and then disappear, but it was all worth it.

“They knew that if they overstepped the mark they were going to get busted – and I’ve done that many times.”

Flawed

Even though Ronnie admits the system was sometimes flawed, he argues that the network of informants was the most effective way to crack crime. Now, he fears detectives have become bogged down in bureaucracy.

“The process of running informants changed about eight years ago in a bid by senior management to sanitize the process,” he explains.

“In my opinion this is one of the worst things that has ever happened to policing in Britain.

“Yes, the old system was open to abuse, and some cops did skim the top off some of their informants’ payments, but at least it was effective.

“You meet so-called detectives these days who don’t have any informants, and have no relationships with their sources.”

Ronnie reveals that a good relationship can help bring about good results.

“I once took down one of Britain’s most dangerous and wanted men – a guy called John McPhee – based completely on a tip-off from a trusted source,” he recalls.

“No-one in Britain had any idea where this guy was but I had built up such a good relationship with an informant that the source wasn’t scared to let me know where he was.

“That’s how much they trusted me."

“This guy was a cold-blooded killer, but they trusted me enough to let me know where he was.

“It turned out he was dealing cocaine from a Birmingham hotel.

“We got down there and I arrested him on the spot. We found cocaine worth more than £100,000 in his room.

“That was all from one phone call.

“But that happens less and less nowadays. I doubt whether I could be half as successful as a cop these days as I was back then because of the way they use informants now.

“At least 40 per cent of my arrests came from my informants throughout my career.

“And when I was a drugs squad officers that rose to 100 per cent because there was no other way to do it short of going undercover yourself.

“These days detectives spend most of their time behind their desks counting their crime beans.

“It’s all about the figures – and that really is criminal.”

adam.aspinall@sundaymercury.net

Juarez Cartel Lieutenant-turned-CI Slain in El Paso, TX

In a Friday afternoon stompings double-feature, SnitchWire is reporting that Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana was found dead outside his home in El Paso (just a few doors down from where the police chief lives) after being shot eight times last week. Galeana was a Lieutenant in the weakening Juarez cartel, which exports weed, coke, and smack into the United States. Sources told the Associated Press he was working as a confidential informant with US officials, feeding information about the cartel to authorities.

Galeana was a legal immigrant to the US, likely fleeing into the country in an effort to escape persecution from enemies as well as the Mexican authorities. Residency in the US by cartel members is becoming a more common practice, which may lead to more violence spilling across the border. Galeana's eight gunshot wounds were probably inflicted at close range, indictating that he may have been found out to be working as a CI and that the cartel sent assassains to dispatch him. This is perhaps the first time a ranking cartel member has been capped on US soil.

Teenager Murdered by IRA Vindicated

Bernard Teggert was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by Irish Republican Army forces when he was 15 in 1973. Now, decades later, the IRA is clearing up the whole mess and apologizing to the boy's family. From the Belfast Telegraph:

News reports from the time said that Bernard had seen IRA members hijacking a beer lorry and after witnessing them hold a gun to the driver's head he shouted at them to leave the man alone. A relative interviewed in 2004 said the boy had shouted: “I am going to tell on youse.”

When soldiers coincidentally arrived on the scene and captured the IRA members, it appeared that Bernard was later blamed.

Family members also contend that although Teggert was 15 years old, he had "the mental age of a child." Although in this instance it is easy to cast the IRA as monsters, consider that aside from their nationalistic struggle, the IRA took great care in prisoner support. Screaming "I am going to tell on youse" to guerrilla combatants in an occupied country generally means death; mind of a child or not. The misunderstanding that followed is unfortunate, but not hard to see the logic in. Perhaps more detective work on behalf of the IRA could've benefitted all parties involved.

Arcata Eye Reporter Kevin Hoover a Snitch

Kevin Hoover, a so-called investigative reporter at tabloid rag the Arcata Eye in Humboldt County, California, is using propagandist, fear-mongering tactics in an effort to either boost the circulation of his garbage paper, draw attention to himself, or be a jackbooted thug. Either way, this guy sounds like an asshole:

This morning while looking at the board at the Arcata Coop I notice a flier that had Hoover’s picture and said: “WARNING TO THE PUBLIC! This man, Kevin Hoover, has been caught twice in Arcata in the past two weeks trespassing on private property and going through peoples personal things. Both times he was seen by separate witnesses, and the last time he was caught by the owner of the property. A police report has been filed. This was not investigative reporting. This was a crime. If you see this man trespassing on your property, call 911 immediately.”

Most of you remember how Hoover started his vigilante campaign against marijuana. How he trespassed onto peoples property, and declared they were “large scale commercial grow houses,” because he decided the electricity meter was spinning too fast. And how he wrote letters to the cops and the tenets land-”lords” in an attempt to get them busted and evicted. And how he went on national TV and told the world that the killer marijuana was ruining “his” town. And how he used his tabloid to rally the cry to put an end to the pot culture that has so long been, even his, economic provider.

Hoover is not a reporter! He is a tabloidist! He tries to create a problem so he can then report on it. Everyone who has dealt with the steaming pile knows this is his MO. It is widely believed it was Hoover who spray painted “grow house” on the side of peoples residences to alert the pigs. I personally have little trouble believing that he would paint the house, put a picture of it in his Arcata Leye tabloid with a story saying “see how pissed off the people of Arcata are.”

Kevin "amateur Glenn Beck" Hoover alerting pigs to grow houses? In Humboldt County? What the hell? I wouldn't want that guy digging through my stuff and looking at camping pictures. I'd kick his ass for spraypainting anything on my house that could alert the pigs at all.

Fuck you, Kevin Hoover, and fuck your paper too!