'Departed' takes snitch abuses to big screen

One of Grits' favorite topics, the toleration by law enforcement of crimes by confidential informants, has found a venue on the silver screen with one of Hollywood's biggest directors.

Martin Scorcese's new movie, The Departed, fictionalizes a real-life scenario Grits has written about in the past: The case of Whitey Bulger, the FBI's supersnitch who built up the Irish mob in Boston while ratting out his competition among the Italians. Anyone from Boston would recognize Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello character as a paean to Bulger, though the bloody incidents in the movie were fictionalized.

Kathy and I saw the movie last night. (Spoiler alert.) The Departed ups the ante on the crime-boss-as-snitch scenario by telling the story of an undercover police officer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and one of Costello's plants in the police department (Matt Damon), as each side, the police and the crooks, tries to discover the informants in their midst, each using their own various means of pressure and deceit.

Much of the rest of the country hasn't heard of Bulger, but many of the highest profile cases against Italian mafia figures on the East Coast from the '70s through the '90s were made with Bulger's help. In the end, though, it turned out the FBI was protecting their prized informant, even in the face of evidence he'd ordered many murders himself and used his position as a snitch to accuse his competitors while building up his own criminal organization.

This movie had a great cast, though I wish the screenwriter had taken a bit less artistic license and focused more on a plot from the real-life Bulger case. (There will be plenty of fodder for future films, one imagines, in Bulger's story). In the movie, Nicholson's character dies at the hand of his own snitch, who by then is a high-up detective in the Boston Police Department. In real life, Bulger's FBI handler told the mob boss he was about to be arrested, and he fled before authorities could capture him. He is still at large.

Still, the fictionalized layering of snitching and counter-snitching emphasized the thick moral dilemmas faced as both law enforcement and criminal cartels have come to rely so heavily on informants. For most of us, trust and loyalty are positive values that facilitate all communications, both at home and at work. Snitches create loyalty only to violate the trust that forms between people.

Even for a good cause, we tend to feel uncomfortable with that, and as seen in Scorcese's film exploration, even a worthy cause can end up in a bad place because loyalty doesn't form overnight. DiCaprio's character must commit increasingly violent crimes to solidify that loyalty, while Damon's corrupt cop must send officers into increasingly dangerous situations to keep the spotlight off his activites.

Bulger's case reminds us that informants choose to snitch for their own purposes, not always for the good of law and order. That's why, as long as police rely on criminal informants, the web of corruption and deceit they weave will continue to haunt our consciences - and make for pretty good drama.

Perhaps the next Whitey Bulger-inspired movie will end with a scene of the supersnitch sipping a Guiness on a Caribbean beach with all his money piled around him. That's a less morally satisfying ending, but in this case probably closer to reality.