To take down secretive drug dealing operations in the Lehigh Valley, police usually get help from someone on the inside.
Confidential informants — who trade information about others in exchange for a lesser sentence or other consideration from police and prosecutors in their own criminal cases — frequently help build narcotics cases. Though law enforcement does not keep statistics on use of confidential informants, the American Civil Liberties Union estimates they play a part in as much as 80% of drug investigations nationwide.
CIs, as they are referred to in court documents, or snitches, as they’re called in movies and on the streets, have taken the witness stand in numerous high profile valley drug trials, including the grand jury investigation of an alleged multi-state operation that led to the arrest of more than three dozen people this year, including Lehigh County Commissioner Zachary Cole-Borghi.
Cole-Borghi, who is charged with more than 100 counts related to the trafficking of marijuana, cocaine and other substances, is due in court Thursday for a preliminary hearing.
Speaking generally and not about any particular case, Lehigh County District Attorney Gavin Holihan said police use informants to build drug cases because they’re effective.
“The drug world is a closed world, so relying on people within that world to give us information and evidence to prosecute people in that world is a necessary part of the investigative process,” he said.
Most Lehigh County police departments have a protocol for working with informants, and usually don’t need permission from the district attorney’s office, Holihan said. While many informants are people who have been arrested and may work with police hoping to get a break at sentencing, some have no charges pending.
“Sometimes, the CI will be identified as someone who is subject to arrest, and is approached by law enforcement,” he said.
When informants take the witness stand, the first question they’re often asked is whether they’ve been promised anything in exchange for their testimony. Almost always, they answer “no.”
While that might technically be true, because the defendant’s sentence is ultimately up to a judge, not police or prosecutors, informants usually expect something for their testimony, said Chief Lehigh County Public Defender Kimberly Makoul, who also spoke generally, not about any particular case, while being interviewed for this story.
“With the understanding that every case is different, in my opinion most, if not all, CIs believe that they will receive a benefit for cooperating with authorities. Such benefits included avoidance of or dropping of charges, or the reduction of sentences,” she said.
Holihan, who spent most of his career as a defense lawyer, agreed that informants generally expect better treatment for spilling a drug organization’s secrets.
“On cross examination, a good defense attorney will ask ‘if you haven’t been promised anything, do you still expect to get something in exchange for your testimony?’ It’s the difference between a promise and an expectation,” he said.
The use of informants by police has been upheld by courts since the 1960s, when judges decided challenges on several high-profile cases, including the jury tampering trial of labor union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and found that that reliance on informant testimony didn’t violate a defendant’s Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, nor their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Critics of the practice say people who are desperate to avoid incarceration might lie to police or embellish their testimony to get a better deal. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit focused on helping people who have been wrongly convicted, says informant testimony is one of the leading contributing factors of wrongful convictions and has played a role in nearly 1 in 5 of the 367 DNA-based exoneration cases they’ve worked on.
Holihan said informants are warned about making up stories in court. Judges don’t like liars.
“If you choose to cooperate, you have to cooperate truthfully,” Holihan told clients when he was a defense lawyer.
“Because if you testify falsely and you get caught in a lie, the judge is not going to give you credit for cooperating. In fact, he might give you a worse sentence for lying under oath in court. If a judge thinks a prosecutor brought a witness in to court to lie, the judge is going to punish that witness, and very likely punish that prosecutor,” Holihan said.
If they take the stand and testify, a confidential informant’s checkered past becomes fair game for the defense. The jury can hear about their convictions and learn the informant’s name and other identifying information. Cases investigated by grand juries, as Cole-Borghi’s was, are an exception. The informant who testified against him at a hearing in March was given the pseudonym Randy.
Randy told jurors that he delivered drugs for Joseph Rosario, an Allentown man who went by the name “Swav” and had a stash house at Sixth and Washington streets. Randy said he worked for Rosario since 2023 and moved approximately 3,000 pounds of marijuana for the organization. He described the way the drugs were packaged and said Rosario branded his product with the words “Death Before Dirt.”
Randy testified that he delivered a pound of marijuana to Cole-Borghi on May 29, 2024, in an alley behind Cole-Borghi’s Sixth Avenue home in Bethlehem. Cole-Borghi denies the charges and remains free on bail.
Do juries believe informants? A good defense attorney will repeatedly remind a jury that the information they’re hearing about their client came from the lips of a criminal. For that reason, relying on informants can be risky, Makoul said.
“If the only witness to an offense is an individual who is involved in criminal activity and has an interest in the outcome of a case, it makes them a less reliable and believable witness. For that reason, I believe it’s important that law enforcement build their case in other ways as well,” she said.
Makoul said some people who become informants believe that cooperation is their only path to avoiding a long jail sentence or other consequences of a conviction. Ideally, people who are approached by police about being an informant should talk to a lawyer, she said.
“I would want to ensure that my client understood all ramifications of cooperation and make sure that they understand all legal options available to them before agreeing to cooperate.”
Confidential informants usually aren’t off the hook once they step down from the witness stand. They have to wait until they get their own day in court to learn what their work for the prosecution earned them.
For Mike Fleck, the political consultant for former Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, cooperating with prosecutors meant cutting his federal prison term in half.
Fleck’s decision to wear a wire and record Pawlowski, then one of his closest friends, was a turning point in the FBI’s investigation of City Hall corruption that eventually led to Pawlowski’s conviction, prosecutors said in 2019.
Pawlowski was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2018 for rigging municipal contracts in a scheme to raise money for his failed political campaigns for U.S. Senate and governor. A jury convicted Pawlowski on dozens of federal charges, including conspiracy, bribery, fraud and attempted extortion.
Fleck pleaded guilty in 2016 to tax evasion and conspiring to commit bribery and extortion. As part of a plea deal with the U.S. attorney’s office, prosecutors agreed to recommend a lenient sentence if they were satisfied with his cooperation.
Instead of a potential 10-year prison sentence, Fleck got five years and was allowed to participate in a reentry program to shave another 18-months off his term. He was set free in October 2022.
Although he said that he expects to be released to a halfway house this summer, Pawlowski remains in a federal prison in Otisville, New York, with a release date of Aug. 3, 2030, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Even if a judge finds that an informant’s cooperation was helpful, there are other, better ways to earn a lighter sentence, especially in drug-related cases, Holihan said.
“The most beneficial argument is what they’re doing with their own life. That they’ve stopped engaging in drug sales, that they’ve gotten themselves clean, that they’ve gotten a job or returned to school,” he said. “Being involved in the drug world, it’s very easy to start selling to support your own habit or to make money. It becomes very easy to be pressured into selling drugs when you’re addicted. People who are in recovery, who get themselves on the right track, who get out of the drug world, those arguments are even better mitigation than being a confidential informant.”