Free Republic

Ex-Agents: FBI Recruits Violent Informants By JEFF DONN The Associated Press For decades, in cities from coast to coast, FBI agents recruited killers and crime bosses as informants and then looked the other way as they continued to commit violent crimes. When the practice first came to light in Boston - unleashing an ongoing investigation that has already sent one agent to prison for obstruction of justice - FBI officials in Washington portrayed it as an aberration. But Associated Press interviews with nine former FBI agents - men with a combined 190 years of experience in more than 25 bureau...

In 1987, McDonald’s launched an ingenious sweepstakes based on the game of Monopoly. Customers would purchase sandwiches, fries, drinks, etc., that included peel-off game pieces on the packaging — potentially rewarding them with anything from a Filet-O-Fish to a new car to $1 million. People went wild for it and business spiked by 40 percent for the fast-food giant, which kept it up for years. But it wasn’t all happy meals. “It seemed like an opportunity for ordinary people to get ahead, but there were consequences,” said Brian Lazarte, co-director of the HBO docu-series “McMillion$,” premiering Monday, about the contest. In fact,...

<p>STRANGE CELL-FELLOW: Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the '93 WTC bombing, in 1996, when he began spilling to a jail "friend."</p> <p>April 11, 2004 -- The 9/11 commission has been given an FBI report detailing mobster-turned-spy Gregory Scarpa Jr.'s 1996 prison exchanges with terrorist Ramzi Yousef. The Post's Al Guart reports how a Brooklyn hood became America's unlikely agent in the war on terror.</p>

Former FBI Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio fed a mobster-turned-informant confidential information that was used "to devastating effect,'' a prosecutor said Monday at his murder trial.Former Colombo crime family capo Gregory Scarpa brutally killed four people, prosecutor Joseph Alexis said, "and the defendant helped him do it.''But defense attorney Douglas Grover said prosecutors "are quick to provide broad strokes -- broad strokes that provide cover for witnesses who are telling lies.''DeVecchio went on trial Monday in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn in what prosecutors have billed as "one of the worst cases of law enforcement corruption in the history of this...