fbi informant killed in gangster disciples case

Troubling new details arise over informant’s murder
BY KIM JANSSEN AND FRANK MAIN | STAFF REPORTERS June 8, 2013 9:40AM

Informant killed in Dolton

Updated: June 8, 2013 1:42PM

The feds called him a “cooperating source.”

But the drug dealers, gun runners and murderers he was cooperating against have a harsher word for folks like Keith Daniels.

“Snitch.”

And on April 14, snitching likely cost the 27-year-old his life.

Gunned down outside his Dolton home, allegedly by a parolee in front of his terrified girlfriend and child, Daniels was killed for his role in the front line of Chicago’s war against gangs, authorities said.

Now — just days after U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) called for a federal crackdown on 18,000 members of the Gangster Disciples — troubling new details have been uncovered by the Sun-Times about the events leading up to Daniels’ murder.

They appear to raise serious questions about the FBI’s ability to protect the informants it will rely upon in any fresh assault on Chicago’s decades-old gang culture, and about the state’s ability to keep tabs on the thousands of violent parolees walking the city’s streets.

That’s because the gang leader suspected of killing Daniels — and of at least three other recent unsolved murders — was supposed to be more than 25 miles away, under house arrest, wearing an Illinois Department of Corrections electronic monitoring ankle bracelet when he allegedly shot Daniels multiple times.

Instead, the suspect in the slaying — Paris Poe — had gone on the run four days earlier, likely cutting off his ankle bracelet within hours of learning that Daniels was working with the FBI in a major undercover investigation.

There was compelling evidence that Daniels’ cover had been blown, according to court records and sources.

And the feds knew that Poe, who had both a history of allegedly threatening witnesses and reason to hurt Daniels, was on the lam.

But they could neither catch Poe in time, nor, authorities believe, keep him from Daniels,

Poe was only finally caught on May 2 near Madison, Wis., following a wild manhunt that saw several schools locked down.

He has yet to be charged with the murder of Daniels or anyone else.

It’s a case the FBI is reluctant to discuss. Asked detailed questions this week about the murder and its fallout, including whether the FBI can protect its informants in the light of Daniels’ death, or whether Daniels critically compromised himself, FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.

But a review of court, prison and police records and information from multiple law enforcement sources paints a disturbing picture.

A small-time crook charged 16 times for everything from assault and battery to drug offenses, Daniels was never convicted of a felony.

He started work as a Chicago Police and FBI informant after a May 2011 arrest, and proved himself a reliable informant in numerous cases, including murders, a special agent wrote in a recent court filing. The FBI paid him a total of $28,000 and helped him relocate 15 miles south to Dolton.

Soon, he was wearing a wire against the “Hobos,” a so-called “supergang” composed of members of the Gangster Disciples and other gangs.

The Hobos were in the heroin, gun and murder business. Over the last decade, the crew also specialized in robbing NBA players, police sources said. Investigators, for example, believe the crew was responsible for robbing then-NBA star Antoine Walker of a $55,000 watch outside a near West Side restaurant in 2000.

It was a lucrative racket that allowed one high-ranking Hobo to bet more than $1 million in Las Vegas and Dominican Republic casinos, according to court papers.

With a tattoo that reads “Hobo Chief” on his right arm reflecting his position as one of the gang’s leaders, Poe was especially dangerous.

His convictions for aggravated assault, robbery, drug dealing and owning an illegal machine gun, along with a 2006 witness intimidation charge that he beat, hinted at just how fraught a situation Daniels was in.

On three occasions in 2011, Daniels secretly recorded Poe’s reputed associates and fellow Hobos, Lance “Double” Dillard and Gregory “Bowlegs” Chester, allegedly making large heroin deals.

But things started going badly wrong on April 9 this year, when Dillard and Chester were arrested — and agents found Poe’s paycheck in Dillard’s car.

Though the federal complaints unsealed that day didn’t identify Daniels by name, they detailed multiple private conversations he had with both men, including during a Sept. 1, 2011, heroin deal in a parked minivan in which a wary Chester asked Daniels, “This ain’t the police?”

Both Dillard and Chester would have known from the court documents that Daniels was the informant who secretly recorded them, though Dillard’s attorney recently told a judge that Dillard had nothing to do with unmasking Daniels.

Even so, within a day of Dillard and Chester’s arrests, on April 10, Poe had violated his parole. IDOC records show his electronic monitoring ankle bracelet went “out of range” of his Humboldt Park home at 10:35 p.m. and that the feds were alerted immediately, according to IDOC spokesman Tom Shaer.

When Poe could not be found April 11, an arrest warrant was issued.

Two days later, on April 13, William Ford — a Hobo leader incarcerated at Stateville Prison — was secretly recorded on the phone discussing the fact that Daniels was wearing a wire and that Poe was on the run, according to a law enforcement source.

And on April 14, Daniels was killed.

He isn’t the only informant to be murdered in the Chicago area in recent years.

FBI informant Timothy Forrest was shot dead in 2006 while wearing a wire. And murder witness Kimberly Harris was gunned down last year after identifying a killer to a Cook County grand jury.

A recent cellphone ban in Cook County’s criminal courts — designed to prevent gangs from witness intimidation — also illustrated the danger.

David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of New York, said that informants typically “know what the risks are” when they wear a wire, and that informant murders have little impact on the so-called “no-snitching” culture, which he said is driven by “extreme alienation” from and longstanding “distrust of the police” in poor communities.

But Art Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminology at Loyola University, said that though informant murders are relatively rare, they weigh heavily on potential witnesses in gang-controlled neighborhoods whenever Mayor Rahm Emanuel or Police Supt. Garry McCarthy calls for greater community assistance in criminal investigations.

“It’s meant to have a chilling and deterring effect on the general population — that’s one of the main reasons its done,” Lurigio said.

“Any undercover informant knows with utter certainty that they’ll be executed if they’re discovered.

“It’s the responsibility of law enforcement to do everything it can to provide as much security as it can.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/crime/20580...nts-murder.html

"The feds called him a “cooperating source.”

But the drug dealers, gun runners and murderers he was cooperating against have a harsher word for folks like Keith Daniels.

“Snitch.”

Really man?

hey, i didnt write it, to be honest the only other words they could have used were rat or stool pigeon.

Informant feared for life after helping Chicago police
BY KIM JANSSEN AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters June 14, 2013 7:42PM

Updated: June 16, 2013 2:36AM

In his final months, Keith Daniels seemed to be carrying an invisible weight.

The 27-year-old drug dealer had always had a taste for Hennessy cognac, but now he regularly reeked of booze.

He’d once been a loving, if all-too-often absent parent, friends say. Now he openly disowned his young son, telling folks on the street somebody else was the father.

When he visited the high-rise building on the South Side where part of his extended family lived, he lingered in the lobby and refused to come upstairs.

“We thought he was being an ass****,” a friend said. “Now we know — he was protecting them from what he was doing.”

That’s because, unknown to his family, Daniels had taken on a job even more dangerous than his previous gig hustling heroin: working as a paid snitch for the FBI and the Chicago Police Department.

It earned him $28,000 but cost him his life, authorities believe.

Though nobody has been charged with Daniels’ murder, the Sun-Times last Sunday revealed how he was allegedly gunned down April 14 by an escaped parolee just days after a federal complaint was unsealed, identifying Daniels as an FBI informant in a major investigation of the “Hobos,” a so-called “supergang” that specialized in robbing NBA players.

Now, interviews with some of the people closest to Daniels show the toll his undercover work took.

And freshly uncovered court documents lay out how he previously risked his life to help police and Cook County prosecutors solve one of Chicago’s highest-profile murders of 2011 — the botched drive-by shooting of an innocent bystander, 13-year-old Darius “Bay Bay” Brown.

Despite Daniels’ death, Cook County prosecutors say they plan to go to trial against the three men charged in Brown’s murder.

But Daniels’ supporters say the case raises further questions about state and federal law enforcement’s ability to protect the informants it relies upon in its battle against gang violence.

Citing fears for their safety — and the extreme stigma in their South Side community of any association with snitches — they spoke on the condition they not be named.

Their account of Daniels’ last two years jibes with official records, while illustrating the difficulties police and the feds face protecting informants.

Daniels started cooperating following a May 2011 gun arrest, according to court records.

Just a month earlier, his younger brother, Khristopher Daniels, had been murdered in a gangland hit. The murder haunted the elder Daniels, who told pals, “I wish it had been me,” sources said.

The brothers grew up at 37th and Indiana, two blocks from Chicago Police headquarters, in the stronghold of a Gangster Disciple faction called the 37th Avenue Boys.

According to court records, the gang blamed a rival Gangster Disciple faction called Welch World/So-Icey for the murders of Khristopher Daniels and Princess Streeter, a 24-year-old woman killed in February 2011.

Three members of the 37th Avenue boys — Princess Streeter’s brother, Jamal Streeter, 20; Princess Streeter’s boyfriend, Aramis Beachem, 23; and Vito Richmond, 19 — were allegedly gunning for revenge for those murders on Aug. 3, 2011, when police say they opened fire from passing cars at a crowd playing basketball at Metcalfe Park, near 42nd and State.

The intended target was Steven Barron, a rival who displayed his reputed membership of Welch World/So Icey with a Washington Nationals ball cap with a “W” insignia.

But the bullet meant for Barron hit and killed Brown, who was standing next to him.

Brown wasn’t a gang member — just a kid playing ball, police said.

Even in a community numbed to violence, the murder of the young basketball phenom provoked widespread revulsion. It also attracted significant media attention and offers of rewards for anyone willing to break the no-snitch code.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel even called Brown’s mother to inform her of the charges that Daniels helped bring.

Within days of the killing, Daniels had told police that he heard members of the 37th Avenue Boys talking about it.

He’d seen them passing around a .45-caliber pistol used in the shooting, he told the cops.

Detectives gave him $500 to attempt to buy the gun. A week after Brown’s murder, he purchased the pistol from 37th Avenue Boys’ member Clarence Whitelow, according to court records. Tests showed the gun fired the same .45-caliber bullets whose casings were found at the scene of Brown’s murder, police said.

Using a hidden recording device, Daniels also captured the suspects admitting roles in the killing, and helped police recover one of the two cars used in the shooting, prosecutors said.

Despite the media attention, Daniels’ friends say they had no clue that Daniels was cooperating until the summer of 2012, when a jealous girlfriend lashed out in a wild Facebook posting, sharing what appeared to be loose pillow talk about his role as a snitch.

A court filing by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office at around the same time — May 2012 — also identified Daniels as an informant in Brown’s murder.

Daniels was mortified, friends say. But “he had that swagger — he didn’t want the streets to think it was true
. . . people were saying he was a snitch, so he came back to the neighborhood to show that it wasn’t,” said a source who learned the full story only after Daniels was killed.

The brazen act apparently worked, for a while.

But Daniels seemed to sense he was at increased danger in the final weeks before his work with the FBI was revealed April 9 this year.

In addition to his increased drinking, friends say he made a “goodbye” visit to confused relatives, telling them, “People are trying to kill me.”

A day after Daniels’ cover was definitively blown in a federal court filing against two reputed members of the Hobos, “Hobo Chief” Paris Poe, 30, allegedly cut off an electronic monitoring bracelet and went on the run from house arrest.

And on April 14, Poe allegedly gunned down Daniels outside the home in South suburban Dolton that the FBI had helped Daniels move to, authorities said.

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde again this week declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing investigation.

Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, said Daniels never asked the office to relocate him.

“We understand the concerns people have coming forward and we do the very best with the resources we have to make them safe,” she said.

But a friend of Daniels who asked not to be named said whatever happens in the cases Daniels helped build, “He’s not coming back . . . it’s hard for his family.”

The family wants to know why law enforcement couldn’t save Daniels, the friend said.

“They were supposed to protect him.”

http://www.suntimes.com/news/20738067-418/snitch-feared-he-would-be-murdered.html