The Paid Informer of Seattle
Seattle Police Chief Sullivan faces scrutiny after admitting to employing a convicted career burglar as a paid police informant.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
As a stool pigeon in the personal employ of Chief of Police Sullivan, and paid by the chief out of his allowance for private purposes, as a convicted burglar operating in two great coast cities, as a would-be reformed criminal, and as a man considered by the police to have been one of the most dangerous ever allowed to run at large in Seattle, burglar Frank Comyns, now awaiting trial for breaking into a store, has had a career of crime lasting many years. Chief Sullivan has admitted that he employed Comyns to work for him. 'Comyns worked for me a short time,' said the chief, 'and was not paid regularly, but by results. None of his pay came from the city funds.' With a person made extremely easy to identify by anyone who has once seen him, owing to his brilliantly red hair and degenerate face, Comyns has alternated back and forth between his own thieving pals and the police until between the two he has long imprisonment now to fear from one side and death from the hands of the comrades he betrayed on the other.
“Comyns has alternated back and forth between his own thieving pals and the police until between the two he has long imprisonment now to fear from one side and death from the hands of the comrades he betrayed on the other.”
The relationship between law enforcement and 'confidential informants' remains a fraught issue in criminal justice, especially when such arrangements incentivize law-breaking or rely on compromised figures. This story highlights the long, dark history of police departments outsourcing surveillance to the criminal underworld.
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