Spare a Thought for the Snitch

The Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team has been reporting on wrongdoing for decades—before and after its stunning exposure, in 2003, of the vast Catholic Church child-sexual-abuse crisis, dramatized in Tom McCarthy’s movie “Spotlight,” in 2015. Its latest exposé is “Spotlight: Snitch City,” a print and podcast series about how police have abused the confidential-informant system in the historic port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford is a former whaling stronghold with a bustling commercial-fishing industry and several cobblestoned streets; in “Moby-Dick,” it’s where Ishmael met Queequeg. Like many American cities, it also has a drug problem, and police officers trying to bust dealers. In order to do so, the police enlist confidential informants, generally poor people connected with the illegal-drug trade, to get information about who’s selling and how. In New Bedford, long a hotbed of drug trafficking, officers have been given great leeway with informants, with little oversight. Some have run amok. In “Snitch City,” narrated by the reporter Dugan Arnett, we hear about a whole spectrum of amok: police officers having sex with informants, inventing informants, lying, stealing, manipulating, colluding, breaking laws to inflate crime-solving statistics. Informants rarely want to snitch; some feel trapped, and some feel that they can’t stop without experiencing police retribution. “It’s a game to a lot of these police officers, and, to win, they have to think like the criminal,” a lawyer pushing for reform tells Arnett. “And they start acting like the criminal.”

“Snitch City” begins cinematically. On a warm summer night in 2018, a 911 dispatcher gets a call from a crew member on a scalloping boat called the Little Tootie, docked for the night on the New Bedford waterfront. The sailors are sleeping or preparing for the morning’s voyage, but a frenzied man has pushed his way aboard, looking for drugs. He has bloodshot eyes, is dressed in black, and is armed with a pistol; he also has a badge. We hear clips of the 911 call (“He says he’s a cop, but he doesn’t have no warrants,” a fisherman says) and of a police radio sending an officer to the scene. In a voice-over, the responding officer, Mark Raposo, recalls his suspicions en route. “I think at that point I’m probably already putting two and two together,” he says. He thinks that the intruder is Jorge Santos, a young officer who’s rumored to conduct excessive searches, especially of Spanish-speaking fishermen. On the boat, Raposo finds Santos, who is off duty, in sweatpants, armed. The agitated fishermen think that he’s trying to rob them. Raposo says, “Jorge, what the—what the fuck are you doing? What is this?” Santos says that he’s acting on a tip from a confidential informant. “These two words—‘confidential informant’—are like magic,” Arnett tells us. “As soon as they are uttered, a cloak of secrecy takes over.” Uttering them gives Santos plausible deniability, but Raposo still doesn’t buy it. “It looked like a drug rip,” he tells Arnett. “Like something out of a fucking movie.” (Or out of “The Wire,” à la Omar Little.) In the community, one fisherman says, Santos was known as Officer Pastillas—“Officer Pills.” The kicker: he wasn’t even a drug cop. He and Raposo worked the marine unit.

Without oversight, institutional secrecy can foster abuse. That was one of the major lessons of Spotlight’s reporting on the Church’s sexual-assault saga, and it’s a theme here, too. Arnett became interested in the New Bedford situation two years ago, when a woman there who felt trapped in a police-informant quagmire sent him an e-mail with the subject line “I NEED HELP.” Arnett and his fellow-reporters began investigating her case and others; after two years, they’d found credible evidence of twelve New Bedford police officers abusing the confidential-informant system and using it to break the law. The Spotlight reporters also found that some ninety per cent of Massachusetts drug raids have cited a confidential informant—in New Bedford, that figure was ninety-nine per cent, and usually involved a single source—and that dozens of Massachusetts law-enforcement agencies had no policy, transparency, or accountability regarding informants. The system’s fairness hinges on the integrity of individual police officers.

In the series’ six episodes, a range of memorable interviewees put a human face on the team’s stunning findings. Raposo comes across as a decent guy who sees being a marine-unit officer—riding around on boats, diving, dealing with fishermen—as a joy, a “prize.” He’s horrified not only by Santos’s thuggish behavior but by his lack of marine qualifications, such as diving. Bobby Richard, a former detective who now works in private security (he was fired from the police force for smoking a cigar on duty), matter-of-factly describes how Paul Oliveira, who would become the police chief, colluded with dealers to make busts and impound huge amounts of drugs, and how his statistics, consequently, were like “hitting a home run every time you’re at the plate”—impressive and impossible. (Oliveira, who has been investigated by the F.B.I. several times, declined to speak with the Globe but has denied its allegations.) Carly Medeiros, of the “I NEED HELP” e-mail, has the gravelly voice of hard living, and recounts being used as an inadvertent C.I. by a cop she had an affair with. Frank (Rizzo) Simmons, who chuckles while saying he used to be described as a drug “kingpin,” recalls being robbed by the police during a raid. “Paul was passing out thousand-dollar stacks to everybody,” he says of Oliveira and his fellow-detectives. “And then he turns to me and he says, ‘That’s what we call the fucking green fund. Thanks, buddy.’ ” Talking with Arnett, Simmons wears an old T-shirt he’d made: “Ten Questions to Ask a New Bedford Narcotics Detective.” (One is “How much money did you pocket in from last night’s raid?”) “We sold about a hundred of them,” he says. Freddy Loya, the captain of the Little Tootie, describes Santos searching his car and stealing his wife’s legally prescribed Adderall. When Loya demands that Santos return it (“She’s going to be pissed at me if I don’t got those pills when I get back”), Santos tries to get him to become an informant in exchange—with the old “I need you to do me a favor, though.”

“Snitch City,” like some of the better high-quality crime-centered podcasts, employs a tastefully artful documentary aesthetic. The noirish cover-art illustrations, by J. D. Paulsen, suggest a non-lurid pulp-paperback style. Arnett’s narration is conversational but authoritative, proud but not self-aggrandizing. Profanity is handled in a refreshingly un-prudish manner—after a quick note up top, interviewees let it fly. Sound effects are mostly unobtrusive. (A bit too much ringing phone, perhaps.) The music is an odd blend of classic podcast atmospherics—pensive follow-along vibes, a little jazz, guitar-rock blasts to rev up the narrative awe—that somehow hangs together fine. To my ears, the series makes only one jarring creative choice, in a realm that’s nearly impossible to do well: reënactments. In the second episode, we hear re-created phone calls between Arnett and an incarcerated former gang member, “Daniel,” who’s terrified for his safety when his C.I. status is revealed to others in the gang. In the fifth episode, a Globe staffer plays a former drug dealer, “Russ,” who has been a C.I. for Oliveira, beginning when he was a teen-ager. Russ helped Oliveira with some twenty setups; he also felt some affection for him. “Oliveira was charming, and took a personal interest in him, seemed to care for him in a big-brother kind of way,” Arnett says. Russ also felt betrayed by Oliveira—though, when Arnett first reaches out, his initial instinct is to warn the police chief. “We were close, you know?” the staffer playing Russ says. “On the surface, he’s a nice guy. We had a good relationship. I don’t know if it was bullshit or it was the truth, but as I look back now, it’s kind of fucking sad, isn’t it?” (This tortured wistfulness, too, has chilling echoes of themes in “Spotlight.”) Both Daniel and Russ offer agonizing testimony—awful life-or-death stuff—and both deserve anonymity. But the actors’ earnest performances, enhanced by phone-call audio effects, land us in a kind of aural uncanny valley—they’re close to the real thing but distractingly ersatz. They make for a slight off note in a series that mostly fulfills our expectations of authoritative credibility.

“Snitch City” focusses on Massachusetts, but, like other outstanding podcasts that home in on local injustices, it raises our awareness of a wider systemic problem. (See what In the Dark showed us via Minnesota sheriffs and Mississippi D.A.s.) Snitching is famously considered dishonorable—given the opportunity by the F.B.I., Frank (Rizzo) Simmons, who has a strict personal anti-snitching policy, declined to snitch even on his nemesis Officer Oliveira—but wanting the truth to be known is not, and ideally, the truth is what good journalism can provide. In the nineties, Simmons made the “10 Questions to Ask a New Bedford Narcotics Detective” T-shirts because he and his crew resented that the officers “were so crooked and could just get away with it,” he tells Arnett. “So we were, like, How can we let people know?” “Snitch City” lets people know. New Bedford officials have pushed back on its most damning revelations—but after the series came out, Oliveira announced his early retirement, and the case against Carly (“I NEED HELP”) Medeiros was dismissed. ♦