The snitch list

BACK STORY • Ex-con gets revenge on informants by posting their names online

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Apr 15, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (68 Reader comments)

Ann Lambert (inset), who went to prison for three years after a meth bust, posts online the names of people she believes are police informants.

Stockdisc / Getty ImAGES

Whether you call them informants, snitches or rats, it’s hard to categorize the tipsters that police say are a pillar of public safety and the source of most major busts.

They are crooks’ bitter ex-lovers, and they are down-on-their-luck junkies needing money for a fix. They are well-meaning people protecting their neighborhoods, and they are drug dealers intent on taking out the competition. Many are defendants hoping to stay out of a cramped cell of concrete and steel by helping put others in it.

Now, however, Portland-area snitches are themselves being snitched on. Their foe is a local ex-con who goes by the name “Sixpack.”

Ann Lambert spent three years behind bars on drug charges following anonymous tips to police. Ever since she walked out of Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville in 2003, she’s been going after the type of people who she says victimized her.

While police typically use a narrow definition of informant, meaning secret and undercover, Lambert’s definition is broader. On her Web site she names people who simply cooperate with police as “informants.”

Lambert says she has dozens of allies helping her with this mission, pulling police and court records to confirm the identities of informants and witnesses used by local and federal law enforcement in the Portland area.

Lambert calls her group Women’s Anarchist Black Cross Collective and has a Web site at www.wabc.mahost.org, where she posts the identities of alleged police informants.

“I’m doing it because I think it’s important for people to know, (and also to) restore a little bit of fairness to our justice system,” Lambert says.

Lawrence Taylor, an attorney who has represented Lambert in the past, shares many of her concerns, that informants represent “real deep rot” in the criminal justice system and their use can amount to “police-state tactics.”

He says that when informants are defendants trading information for their freedom, it is “akin to witness tampering. If I were to offer witnesses the kind of inducements that the prosecution is able to offer them then I’d be prosecuted.”

Others see it differently.

Sgt. Doug Justus, whose bust of Lambert sent her to prison in 2001, and who was tipped off to her site by fellow officers, says informants and tipsters are “crucial” to solving crimes, and contends that she is operating from a personal vendetta.

“She’s a frustrated woman who got busted a couple of times,” he says. “She lost all of her drugs, she lost all her money and she lost all her stuff that she had collected.”

Others are worried that people named on the site will be harmed, whether they really are informants or not.

“There have been instances where bad things have happened” to informants whose identities became public, says Senior Deputy District Attorney Norm Frink.

Retired police Capt. C.W. Jensen says the Web site shows that “in this age where anyone can have a Web page and anyone can say anything about anybody, it just makes it that much more important to protect (informants).”

He says that she could face legal retribution.

“I hope that if she incorrectly names somebody they sue her,” he says.

Cop defends the practice

Police say informants are a vital part of law enforcement, especially when it comes to pursuing drugs, prostitution and gangs, and solving murders.

“We can’t get in houses,” Justus says. “We’re the straight guys, you know, so we rely on people who have been there to do that.”

But a backlash against them has been growing both nationally and locally.

On a national level, a nonprofit organization called the Innocence Project says that of all the convictions it’s seen reversed due to DNA evidence, 15 percent were due to inaccurate or dishonest information provided by informants.

Locally, cops have problems finding people to provide evidence on gang-related murders, and some merchants in Northeast Portland even sell hats and T-shirts encouraging others not to “snitch.”

Lambert, however, is taking it another step, by actually naming those she says have snitched. She said she got the idea from her fellow inmates at the state’s Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, where she spent nearly three years, starting in 2001.

She says her group documents everything it can. “Our credibility is very important to us.” she says.

She says that her criminal record should not detract from her message.

“Just because I am an ex-felon does not make me a liar,” she says.

Lambert says the very fact that informants usually operate through deception is reason enough not to use them.

“You can’t get justice out of lies, it doesn’t work that way,” she says. But she added that she does not disapprove of all snitches, and would herself help police with information concerning someone who had committed murder or rape.

On the other hand, “I have a problem with invasion of our privacies,” she says. “A person smoking a joint in the privacy of their own home is not hurting anybody.”

Court panel agreed

Lambert says she’s picked up her computer skills in the years since she left prison. Before then, she had worked as a carpenter and machinist, only to be waylaid by the effects of cerebral palsy, she says.

The opening page of the Web site Lambert founded, which is dedicated to Coffee Creek, proclaims that “Informants Barter Our Freedom For Their Own,” adding that “A life is not a bargaining tool.”

Head to the “Not-so-confidential informants” pages and you’ll find the names of 45 alleged informants, many accompanied by photographs. Two entries were added as recently as Friday.

You’ll also find entries describing court cases, such as a federal case, U.S. vs. Singleton, in which a three-judge panel of federal appeals judges in 1998 ruled that trading time off for informants’ testimony amounted to bribery.

“The judicial process is tainted and justice cheapened when factual testimony is purchased, whether with leniency or money,” said the panel’s decision.

The panel soon was overruled by the entire 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the earlier ruling would “make a criminal out of nearly every federal prosecutor.”

Lambert says her motive is not personal, but the first few alleged informants she describes were, according to her, the tipsters that put her in prison seven years ago for manufacturing methamphetamine.

According to police reports obtained by the Portland Tribune under Oregon Public Records Law, in June 2000 Justus arrested a burglar who pointed the finger at “Sixpack” to avoid being arrested himself. That led to a search of Lambert’s apartment at Southeast 79th Avenue and Prescott Street.

There, Justus found an apartment full of apparently stolen computers and power tools –as well as the makings of a meth lab.

Before the earlier case was resolved, Justus again arrested her in March 2001 based on an anonymous tip, leading to trial and conviction. Lambert was sentenced to three years behind bars, of which she had already spent a portion in Multnomah County jails.

On her Web site, Lambert claims her ex-boyfriend, Harold Hayes, was the one who turned her in. While she was in jail, she claims, Hayes then looted her apartment of all her money and valuables.

Police concluded that her possessions had been largely stolen goods. Her landlord – whom Lambert also names on the site as an “informant” – told police that she had a constant stream of people bringing her goods, which police felt were brought to her by car prowlers and burglars, then traded for meth, records show.

The police reports do not accuse her landlord or ex-boyfriend of informing on Lambert.

Hayes could not be located to comment on this article. However, his brother, Marvin, says Hayes certainly was an informant.

“I mean when you’re caught with a whole lot of drugs and you get out two days later, and then everybody else goes to jail for 10, 20 years. … It was pretty obvious,” he says.

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