Arbitrary DEA Policy Takes Fatal Toll : Informant: Don Shantos was the victim of a corrupt system administered at the whim of the DEA.

The end came in dramatic fashion.

As the jury’s guilty verdict was being read in open court, Don Shantos quickly swallowed capsules of cyanide. He collapsed in convulsions and was dead a few hours later.

In a note written before taking his own life, Don said he could not bear to be locked up for the rest of his life. Don’s crime was not rape, murder or another violent crime. It was dealing drugs while he was an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Don became an informant a little less than four years before he took his own life. Don had delivered four drums of ephedrine to a methamphetamine manufacturer in exchange for $66,000. Rather than arrest Don for his transgression, the DEA signed him on as an informant.

The DEA reasoned it was more important to apprehend the drug manufacturers who tend to be violent, ruthless people. Don was allowed to keep the $66,000 in exchange for his cooperation.

While the pay was lucrative, Don did not realize that the DEA would use him when it suited their purposes and then abandon and abuse him when he no longer fulfilled their expectations.

Don was a successful informant. His cooperation caused the arrest and conviction of five people, the seizure of three potentially explosive methamphetamine laboratories and the seizure of more than $200,000 in drug-related assets.

Don’s experience as an informant conditioned him to believe he could resume his drug dealing ways provided he eventually turned in the drug manufacturers to the DEA. Little did Don know that the informant system is governed by ill-defined rules. Don never knew whether he was going to be rewarded or punished for violating the rules.

About two years before his death, Don resumed his ephedrine deliveries, this time to a methamphetamine manufacturer named Bud Wharton. After a few profitable transactions, Don decided to report Wharton to the DEA, this time voluntarily.

The DEA accepted Don like a long-lost brother. They signed him up as an informant again. They used Don’s cooperation to arrest Wharton, seize 6 1/2 pounds of methamphetamine, cash, firearms and a methamphetamine laboratory in Wharton’s home.

But the DEA got offended when they learned from Wharton that Don was attempting to deal drugs behind their back. The DEA could have taken Don into the woodshed and confronted him with their suspicions. The DEA could have removed Don from the information dole and refused to pay him for his work in apprehending Wharton.

But in a bizarre twist, the DEA signed Wharton on as an informant to ensnare Don.

Never mind that Wharton was a potentially violent person who had threatened Don in the past. Never mind that Wharton was the type of individual Congress probably had in mind when they imposed tough mandatory penalties as part of the war on drugs. Common sense was not to prevail. In DEA’s view, Don had betrayed them. He deserved no consideration. He was no longer the hunter, he was now the hunted.

An elaborate sting was designed by the DEA. Eventually, Don was arrested after accepting delivery of four pounds of methamphetamine from Wharton.

After an eight-hour interrogation, Don signed a five-page written confession. He later claimed the confession was coerced.

Before Don’s trial, Wharton was sentenced to 68 months in custody, far less than what the federal sentencing guidelines normally require. The government decided his cooperation against Don justified “departing” from the sentencing guidelines.

Meanwhile, Don recanted his confession before trial. He claimed he believed he was an informant for the DEA when he accepted drugs from Wharton on the day of his arrest and he intended to turn the drugs over to his supervising agent.

Don took and passed lie detector tests on these issues. He was frustrated by the judge’s ruling that the lie detector tests were unreliable and could not be received by the jury as evidence at trial.

Had Don not taken his own life, the federal sentencing guidelines would have required the judge to sentence him to 25 to 30 years in prison. At age 53, Don saw this as a death sentence. He feared retaliation in prison if fellow inmates learned of his informant status. He chose to expedite the sentence.

Ironically, the day after Don’s death, the government requested that Wharton’s 68-month sentence be reduced to three years because he testified at trial against Don. The judge reduced the sentence to four years.

The DEA relies far too heavily on paid informants, persons of questionable moral fiber to begin with. But when true to character, an informant who has risked life and limb resumes criminal activity, the DEA should consider alternative ways to sanctioning the informant short of rewarding the Bud Whartons of the world.

While Don Shantos was no hero, he was the victim of a corrupt and callous informant system administered by the DEA. If his death causes us to scrutinize this system and examine how it perverts the judicial process, then he did not die in vain.