ON A SUNNY TUESDAY AFTERNOON at the end of June 1994, a little more than seven months after Walter’s mistrial, John Hall was stretched out, head tipped back, eyes closed, in the driver’s seat of a new Nissan sports car idling in a mall parking lot outside Philadelphia. He was in his early forties, with a long, oval face and double chin, high forehead, stringy brown hair, and glasses; his white button-down shirt made him look like an accountant. On the passenger seat were a few blank prescription pads and a prescription for Percocet.
A police officer knocked on the window. Hall opened his eyes and buzzed it down.
“What’s wrong?” the officer asked, leaning in. “What are you doing?”
Hall didn’t answer, his bland face hiding a mind sparking but not turning over: how to talk his way out of this one. His painkiller fog was thick, the car was stolen, the prescription pads and script on the passenger seat were forged, and he was wanted on parole violations and various new charges in several counties.1
“What’re you doing with those pads?” the officer asked, nodding.
“I’m a printer,” Hall said.
“Oh,” the officer said. “You got a business card?”
Hall could only think to drive away fast. The officer had the same thought and grabbed for the keys, but Hall yanked the car into drive, catching the officer’s arm in the door and forcing him to run alongside for twenty feet before getting free. Hall sped away down crowded, mall-lined streets and through family neighborhoods, passing into the next town, police cruisers pulling in behind him.
Pursued, he felt heroic, and when he felt heroic he usually wrote about himself in the third person. In a letter to his wife, Phyllis, written a few days later, he referred to himself as an American soldier, the police and DAs as Nazis:
He had become overwhelmed by Nazi armored-personnel carriers. They were coming from everywhere. The poor guy knew he could not escape. . . . Soon, he knew, he was going to be a P.O.W. . . . He had to formulate a plan. If he were captured in the out-lying areas he wouldn’t be able to effectively put his plan into action. A dilemma—stay in the more rural areas where he had no more than a slim chance to get away, or head for the city of Berlin, where he could begin Plan B. He decided to go down fighting, but nearer to the Nazi High Command. He knew the Nazis had radioed the city and warned of his approach.
“Berlin” was Philadelphia and the “Nazi High Command” was the Philadelphia DA’s office, where he had a better chance to snitch his way out from under the charges he knew were coming.
He saw before him so many Nazis . . . but he dodged and missed all of them. . . . But he knew they would defeat him. . . . He knew he would be tortured. Maybe killed. But he had made it to Berlin. He opened his storage pack and ate pain-killers to ease his anticipated torture.
Hall described his capture to Phyllis vividly: accepting defeat, he slowed down, let a cruiser ram him, and stopped. Police of all kinds fixed their rifles on him, pulled him out, cuffed him, and beat him. As he wondered if he would die that day, he thought of her. A Philadelphia officer who knew he was supposed to be treated with respect stepped in and saved his life.
As usual with Hall’s stories, the truth was more mundane: a cruiser forced him to the curb and another blocked him in. Panicking, grinding the stick shift into gear, he rocked his car back and forth, trying to batter his way free, striking the police car in front. More police arrived but Hall wouldn’t stop, so they broke the driver’s side window, turned the car off, and subdued him.2 Bleeding from a cut above his right eye, he was arrested and, news photographers snapping, put in the back of a cruiser.3
In jail, Hall assessed his situation. The stolen car, fake prescriptions, and even resisting arrest were relatively minor charges. But dragging the first cop and ramming the cruiser at the end were not.
“I had aggravated assault on police which is a felony of the first degree,” he explained later. “Because it would have been my third or fourth [felony] conviction I could’ve been sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years mandatory minimum. I had to get it off me . . .”4
That he could do: Hall was a master snitch, so well known for getting confessions from other inmates and turning them over to prosecutors in exchange for leniency in his own cases that local authorities called him “the Monsignor,” because he’d heard more confessions than a priest.5 He was an intelligent fraud, a craftsman who liked to show off his legal mind and insisted on being the smartest in the room, even in cell blocks full of people who didn’t care; a bland everyman with thirteen aliases, four Social Security numbers, and seven birthdays,6 all of them, he swore, obtained not to commit crimes but to stay safe ahead of all the snitching—crime fighting, in his eyes—he’d done over the years.7
Prosecutors in Walter’s case had just gotten their big break.
John Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1952, and his father left the family in 1958. A few years later his mother, a sometime nightclub singer, married William Martino, a low-level mobster involved in gambling and loan-sharking. In the late ’60s, Martino was paying protection money to a police captain named Hearn, who’d come by the house to collect his payments and who fixed Hall’s first criminal charge, a 1971 marijuana bust.
Hall was a runner for his stepfather and then joined Martino’s crew in 1978. He worked out a system for stealing cars and forging VIN numbers and another for filling forged prescriptions. Hall’s regular pharmacy didn’t hassle him about his forgeries, and when passing fake scripts at other pharmacies, he put down the number of a nearby phone booth where he’d wait in case the pharmacist called.8
Hall’s jail snitching career started in the early 1980s in Northampton County when he said he witnessed an inmate rape and felt so disgusted he had to turn the rapist in. This sense of personal disgust became the founding myth of all the cases he snitched in, always the reason he informed against other inmates—always because of his personal disgust, never in hope of gaining anything for himself. In the early 1980s, he expanded his snitching into more serious crimes and later claimed to have provided the Philadelphia Police Department’s organized crime division with statements that led to seven murder convictions.9 That may be a typical Hall exaggeration, or not: he snitched in that many murder cases in the early ’90s, by which time his rap sheet was a thick tangle of charges, snitchings, plea deals, paroles, and probations spanning twenty years and sixty-odd arrests in four counties.10
One key to Hall’s success as a snitch was that he looked and talked like a lawyer, not the car thief, drug addict, and forger he actually was. He used legal terms and got the inmates he targeted to tell him details of their cases by offering legal advice. Occasionally, inmates thought he was a doctor because of his knowledge of prescription drugs, especially tranquilizers and painkillers. In one letter, he told Phyllis he’d just run into an inmate who kept calling him “doctor” and he couldn’t figure out why until he remembered he’d conned the guy into thinking he was a doctor years before, in another jail.11
Hall never stayed in jail long; once in, he’d snitch against a fellow inmate, giving the story to authorities in exchange for perks in jail, letters of support, or even personal appearances in court from cops and prosecutors attesting to his cooperation. All of this translated into leniency from judges and early release for Hall.
But he never stayed out of jail long, either; it was as if once he was out, the reality of being a middle-aged drug addict and criminal who’d squandered his significant intelligence would set in, and within days or weeks he’d forge a prescription or steal another car. Sometimes it didn’t take that long: he once stole a used car while walking home from jail.12
So he’d be back in jail, despondent that he was finally going to get a long sentence, which was worse than death, writing about hoarding pills for the day he would kill himself. His depression would lift when he began his next snitch, at which point he would usually become almost manic with power. It was in the glorious days of snitching, the adrenaline rush of being a big shot in jail, writing briefs better than lawyers could, telling DAs how things were going to go, that Hall lived up to his own image of himself.
Hall was at his confident, incarcerated best when he met his wife. In January 1990 he saved an inmate named Herbie Haak from an assault, and a grateful Herbie put him on the phone with his mother—Phyllis.13 Soon she came to visit, sitting with Hall in the visiting room, petite, with brown hair and big eyes. Hall couldn’t stop thinking about her eyes, he told her, the most beautiful he’d seen; she looked like Betty Boop.14 When he got out that time they dated, and when he went back in she became his research assistant for snitching. She took his calls from jail, jotted down the locations of crimes, names of victims and lawyers, sent him newspaper clippings from the library. She even went to victims’ homes, gathering bits of information for Hall to use in his stories.15
With Phyllis’s help, Hall’s file of letters of support from law enforcement grew. He carried them around jail in an accordion file—another perk that demonstrated his importance.
A January 1990 letter from Montgomery County ADA David Keightly to ADA C. Theodore Fritsch in Bucks County explained that Hall had been a particularly “fine witness” in the prosecution and conviction of Ernest Priovolos and “at least” three other Montgomery County cases, though since Hall’s cooperation in those other cases wasn’t a matter of public record, he preferred not to give any more details.16 Keightly stated that he’d agreed to write the letter in exchange for Hall’s testimony and was willing to appear in person for Hall if any judge, prosecutor, or Hall’s defense lawyer wanted him to.17
The Priovolos case was a Hall special—old, high profile, and lacking evidence. Hall testified that Priovolos admitted to killing the victim with a karate chop that sent her over a bridge. He swore he was testifying not in hope of any benefit for himself but out of “human outrage” over the crime.18 Priovolos was convicted. Two weeks later Keightly sent Hall a personal note: “At the risk of swelling your head,” he wrote, “I told the jury you are a man of astonishing brilliance, of keen intellect, and of tragic sickness. . . . Thanks again, John.” He signed the letter “Dave.”19
In August 1991, Keightly wrote another letter for Hall, this one to new Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham, explaining that Hall had been helpful in many cases and deserved a break on his current sentencing.20 That same month ADA Fritsch wrote a letter of his own to Abraham about another Hall special: Hall had come forward “unexpectedly” a few days before the murder trial of a certain Michael Dirago with “unsolicited cooperation” that changed the six-year-old case from one with a “rather slim” chance of conviction to a “strong one from the prosecution standpoint.”21
At Dirago’s trial Hall gave the jury a horrifying, invented account of the victim gurgling as she died in a car on a bridge. He wasn’t getting anything for his cooperation, he swore, and had only come forward because the murder was “revolting.”22 Dirago was convicted. Fritsch’s letter explained that Hall had provided important information in other cases, too, “without which major convictions would not have been obtained.”23
Both Fritsch and Keightly went on to become judges.
The Dirago case also earned Hall letters of support from Howard Barman, a deputy attorney general in New Jersey (where Dirago was eventually convicted because Hall’s testimony put the murder on the New Jersey side of the bridge, though the body had been dumped in Pennsylvania), and from Sergeant Thomas Mills of the Bristol Township Police, where the body was found.
Barman wrote that Hall was a remarkable person who, but for an alcohol problem, would probably be a significant member of society.24 He’d made Hall no promises about writing a letter of support, he explained, but had decided to do so on his own. Sergeant Mills wrote to DA Lynne Abraham that Hall had been of “substantial help” in convicting Dirago and that he was aware of Hall’s extensive criminal history but believed that serious consideration of leniency would be appropriate.25
Another Hall snitch hadn’t gone quite as smoothly but still earned him letters of support. Bruce Castor, chief of the trials division for the Montgomery County DA’s office, wrote in May 1993 that Hall had testified at a pretrial hearing against Thomas DeBlase, who was charged with a 1982 murder—another old, high-profile case the prosecutor might well lose.
“Not only did John Hall cooperate fully,” Castor wrote, “he testified in a straight-forward, clear, and convincing manner.”26
Despite Hall’s effort, DeBlase’s trial was held up by appeals. Castor would write to Hall again in December 1995, repeating his support and informing him that his testimony would be needed when the trial finally started the following month, January 1996.27 But by then Hall was in the middle of snitching four other homicides in Philadelphia and needed a lower profile, not the press attention that would come from being brought out to Montgomery for a case as high profile as DeBlase’s. Castor either decided at the last moment not to use Hall or was told by Philadelphia that he couldn’t.28
Hall’s legend as a snitch grew because of his specialty for these kinds of situations: old, high-profile cases with shaky evidence that prosecutors were in danger of losing. In each case he swore he was testifying out of disgust, without any promise of benefit for himself, but it just so happened that every time he did this the detectives and prosecutors involved in the case followed his court appearances closely enough to know where to send their letters of support and when and where to show up to support him. If the prosecutors in four different counties who used Hall as a snitch are telling the truth that they didn’t give him deals for his snitch work and never placed him in jail so as to target a particular inmate, the recurrent coincidences in Hall’s life were staggering.
Hall had his own explanation for these coincidences: karma.
“Too many coincidences spaced too close together. It can’t be random. It just can’t!” he wrote Phyllis. “How do these coincidences occur for him?” he asked about himself. Slipping in and out of the third person, he went on: “[He] gives justice to so many. How do I come into contact with so many that are involved in the most heinous crimes? And that the overwhelming majority are against women. And the helpless. Is this mere coincidence? Contrary to popular perception, I do not seek out these creeps. They fall into my lap. They come to me. And they are scum. Vermin. They deserve what they get from the courts.”29
With his skills of manipulation, he explained, came the responsibility to use them in a forthright manner.
“Never construe targeting with snitching,” he wrote. “They are separate and independent actions. They never merge. . . . I am extremely selective in who I attack. Only scumbags need fear.”30
In another letter on this topic he veered from something approaching introspection to bragging sociopathy.
“It is hard for me to know what’s right always,” he admitted. “For so long I’ve lived in a brutal environment where power and prowess is so necessary for survival. . . . I prevail because of my manipulative skills. If I were to apply them in business (a la Donald Trump), I would be hailed as a legend and hero. . . . There is little doubt that I will stop at nothing to get what I want.”31
Prosecutors use jailhouse informants all the time, real ones who have real information and help put away actual criminals. The problem is it’s very hard to build an honest system by creating an incentive for criminals to lie, and the confluence of a snitch’s motive to lie with a prosecutor’s need for a conviction can lead prosecutors to ignore obvious signs that a snitch is lying and make them accessories to a snitch’s perjury. As a result, false snitch testimony infects our justice system. As of 2015, false informant or snitch testimony played a role in 15 percent of the 325 DNA exonerations to that point.32
In the late 1980s the “system” of jailhouse snitching came under scrutiny when Leslie Vernon White, a convicted kidnapper, robber, and car thief who had snitched in as many as forty cases in California, used a jail telephone to demonstrate his snitching technique to a newspaper reporter. Posing as a police officer, prosecutor, and bail bondsman, White called various law enforcement authorities and gathered enough information to snitch out a fellow inmate whom he’d never actually met.33 In all, White admitted that he had lied for prosecutors in a dozen cases. A grand jury investigating White and the use of snitches in Los Angeles noted that snitch fabrications were a systemic problem. As Robert Bloom summarized the grand jury’s findings, “informants often used elaborate strategies to access information about a crime in order to enhance the substance of confessions they fabricated.”34
The grand jury report estimated that as many as 250 cases over the course of ten years could be affected,35 and its conclusions about prosecutors were sobering. The grand jury cited one case in which an ADA had actually helped White by providing him information and found, in general, that “very little effort was expended by the prosecutor’s office to investigate the background and motivation of informants or to test the veracity of their information and its sources. The prosecutor was primarily concerned with the informant’s effectiveness on the stand rather than the authenticity of the testimony.”36
What one expert on snitch testimony referred to as the “entrenched” nature of the problem became clear in 2014, when it was revealed that authorities in nearby Orange County, California, had been running an inmate snitch factory for years.37 In May 2015, Radley Balko, a conservative criminal justice reform expert, explained that snitch testimony has become a critical tool for prosecutors because it permits them to put on testimony that is damning and easy to manufacture, and allows them plausible deniability.
“Most jailhouse snitches are lying,” he wrote. “This isn’t to say that all prosecutors manufacture evidence by using jailhouse informants. It is to say the way informants are treated by the courts makes it very easy to do so.”38
Recuperating from minor injuries in the prison hospital in late June 1994 after his high-speed chase, John Hall was anxious: he was looking at twenty-five to fifty years in prison, which absolutely could not happen. He needed to snitch, and soon had an idea:39 the murder conviction of a prominent Philadelphia mob figure, Ray Martorano, had recently been overturned, and the DA, furious, embarrassed, and worried about losing the retrial, was trying to keep the case from falling apart.
Hall knew an opportunity when he saw it. He described the situation to Phyllis in a letter [emphasis all his]: “The City Nazis were in serious trouble. Very high ranking Nazi officers had lost face, and position, because of certain failures in the past.” He then switched into the heroic third person to write about himself:
He knew of these things from his intelligence work and knew he could give much needed aid to some very influential Gestapo officials in the High Command. In order to get out he knew that he would have to become a Nazi in full uniform. But you can’t just call Hitler and say you want to be a Nazi. No, he needed a ‘go-between.’ Someone who was a Nazi sympathizer, but with allegiance to the American who can reward him. Carefully, he came to select Herr Frumer, a former Gestapo officer with very good connections.40
In other words, Hall needed a lawyer and had chosen Marc Frumer, a former Philadelphia ADA (“Gestapo officer”) who’d recently gone into private practice. Hall hired him that July, writing to Phyllis that Frumer was a very special attorney, referred by a very trusted friend, who had a lot of experience as a prosecutor, knew what needed to be done to get Hall a deal, and knew how to go about doing it.
The next day, Hall wrote Phyllis praising Frumer again. He was “a special man with excellent credentials, associations, and insights. He can get the job done. . . . We have some very high cards in our hand. Very, very high cards. . . . We want certain things. Basically, we want spoons. Complete resolution and spoons.”41
“High cards” meant information on the Martorano case and “spoons” meant hugging his wife: he wanted all his pending cases completely resolved, and he wanted to go home. But, he explained, if you just handed information to the DA’s office, they’d take it and give you nothing. You needed a good lawyer to dangle the information and make them pay for it.
“Herr Frumer, formerly of the Gestapo High Command,” Hall wrote, “immediately recognized the value [of Hall’s information] to his old colleagues. And HE would make them pay,” he just needed time to “play politics. Make friends. Influence people. Open doors.”42
Frumer’s $10,000 fee was cheap, Hall wrote. And Frumer couldn’t believe his good fortune that Hall had hired him, that “he would be paid and do big, big, big favors for the Gestapo, who would be grateful to him. He would make his name known to some very powerful people.”
Hall, someone again, surged with manic confidence. A superhero was needed to get out of the trouble he was in, he explained to Phyllis. He was that superhero, and every superhero needed help from someone who could operate in the respectable world.
“Superman had Clark Kent,” he wrote. “Incredible Hulk had Dr. David Banner. Underdog had Shoe-shine Boy. Your super-hero needs one too.”43
His faithful sidekick would be Frumer, putting together the deals for Hall’s information.
“What I possess,” Hall wrote, “is, as [Frumer] put it, ‘Like heroin to junkies.’”
He’d be famous; the tabloid shows would call—Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Donahue, Geraldo. There’d be a movie about him. Once he was out and they were rich and famous, he asked Phyllis, how about a trip to Paris?
A week later he updated Phyllis on Frumer’s progress, referring to himself as the “expert.”
“Marc [Frumer] is going into this meeting [tomorrow] at two in the afternoon with some very important people. Three of them. . . . Guess what they want to discuss? Employing this expert they’ve heard about who can do amazing things. This guy is really something. He can make all of them famous. Really help their careers. This can have its price, of course.”44
This meant Frumer was meeting with officials from the Philadelphia DA’s office to negotiate the terms of Hall’s deal for his Martorano information.
One of the ADAs who worked with Hall and Frumer on the Martorano snitch was none other than Joseph Casey, the prosecutor from Walter’s first trial. Frumer’s meeting with Casey went well.
“Yes, my salesman came back from the meeting and they are extremely interested in coming to terms with my company,” Hall wrote. “While the price was only touched upon so that they had a ballpark figure, they don’t see any problems. What we have is a tentative agreement. They want to meet the expert who brings all the technical knowledge [i.e., meet with Hall to hear his stories in person]. . . . As for the buyers, they can’t wait to talk turkey . . . They need my [informant] machinery. And at any price, I’ll bet. . . . This is in no small part due to Marc. He is very, very good! And, through his friends and contacts, this sale may now proceed from dream stage to reality.”45
On August 2, Hall and Frumer signed a Proffer of Cooperation agreement with Joseph Casey to share Hall’s information about Martorano with the DA’s office.46 Hall carried the proffer with him into his interview with detectives Dennis Dusak and Patricia Brennan the next day—and proceeded to tell them a Martorano story so far-fetched it’s a wonder they kept from laughing. If they did.
He started by describing his background, his stepfather, his contacts with the mob going back to the 1970s. He said he’d once helped smuggle a hundred automatic rifles and two antitank weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Later, in jail, he’d befriended Ray Martorano himself and Martorano had come to trust him so much because of his mob background that he’d officially given Hall the title “consigliere.”47 When Hall got out that time, he was to be a hit man for Martorano but wouldn’t carry out any of the killings—here, again, we have John Hall’s favorite image of himself, the good man trying to do the right thing. Eventually Martorano came after him. Hall said that in November 1993 he was kidnapped, taken to a basement in New Jersey, and tied to a chair; one of his captors started drilling holes in his leg but left the room to get something. When the second captor made a phone call, Hall grabbed a hammer, hit him on the head, escaped, and hitchhiked back to Philadelphia.48
If the detectives asked to see the scar on Hall’s leg, it isn’t reflected on his written statement. Hall knew which mob murders the DAs needed information about, two from 1981 and two from 1993,49 so he told mob stories peppered with the names of infamous mob bosses, notoriously corrupt judges, and high-profile murder victims.
A letter he wrote to Phyllis at the time shows where the information actually came from.
“I do require those [newspaper] clippings for conclusion,” he reminded her. “I know you will do your work as always. With Marc [Frumer], we get gifts, swift and sure.”50
“Gifts” meant meetings with DAs, detectives, and FBI agents, and offers of plea deals in exchange for his information.
“Nothing can stop him,” he wrote of himself. “He does come through. He has never failed.”51
In early October, Hall wrote out an affidavit describing his Mafia stories. It began, as all his snitch stories did, with the insistence—clearly an outright lie in this instance—that he was snitching not in exchange for a deal but because of his conscience.
Hall wrote Phyllis that he was pleased with how Frumer had been handling the “salesman and public relations” responsibilities “without letting on” what Hall was actually doing: Frumer made the connections, Hall told the stories, Frumer put together the deals with the DA. Hall wrote that Frumer admitted Hall was teaching him things—“Not about law, but about procedures outside the system.”52
Hall wrote to Frumer that when the Mafia stories made him famous and the tabloids paid for his story he’d give Frumer a percentage, of course, and Frumer’s fees would skyrocket, too, as he gained prominence.
“These are mafia matters,” Frumer wrote back. “You should look the part, so I’ll get you a double-breasted suit, like John Gotti wears.”53
As Hall proceeded with his Mafia snitching in mid-1994 he was briefly transferred to Bucks County to resolve some outstanding parole violations, which he did by snitching. This time he created one of his more incredible documents: a signed, notarized affidavit that spells out how Hall read the defendant his Miranda rights and amounts to a description of the kinds of mental contortion Hall’s prosecutor allies went through in order to accept his stories.
Prosecutors were not allowed to move Hall or any other informant to target certain inmates. If a prosecutor did, Hall (or any other informant) would be considered an “agent of the state”—law enforcement—when he heard those confessions and would be required to read inmates their Miranda rights before talking to them, just as any other law enforcement officer would. Without a Miranda warning, those confessions would be worthless. The problem was, by that summer Hall’s pattern of showing up in the same cell block as high-profile defendants against whom prosecutors had weak cases and then miraculously producing “confessions” from those men was widely known among judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers. Within a few years even newspaper columnists would speculate about Hall’s jail placements.
“I don’t want to go out on a limb here,” reporter Elmer Smith would write in the Philadelphia Daily News in 1997. “But I can’t help wondering how it is that Hall keeps turning up in the right cell at the right time. Because if he is being planted in these cells, it raises serious ethical questions.”
Smith quoted an unnamed prosecutor who agreed that if someone in authority placed Hall in position to get information from another inmate, Hall was arguably acting as an agent of police.54
On this issue, Hall’s 1994 snitch in Bucks County looked bad even by his standards. In Bucks, Hall was housed with an accused child molester named Raymond Lamoureaux. A few days later, Hall met with a prosecutor to tell her Lamoureaux would confess to him. The prosecutor put him back with Lamoureaux and soon enough Hall had the man’s confession—a confession Hall wrote out and attached to a signed document of Lamoureaux waiving his Miranda rights.
But it was so clear from the timing that Hall had been put back in the cell to get information from Lamoureaux that Hall knew he had to address the issue somehow. So he wrote an extraordinary affidavit and attached it to the Lamoureaux confession.
Hall opened it by acknowledging that if he had been put back in Lamoureaux’s cell to get information about Lamoureaux’s crime, the confession could be considered a state action. And, he wrote, he understood that his meeting with the DA just before being put back in with Lamoureaux might make it look like he’d been put there to get that confession. It wasn’t true, he insisted; his placement with Lamoureaux had been “by happenstance and chance and not design”; no agent of the state of Pennsylvania nor any of its agents or police nor any prosecutorial authority of Pennsylvania or elsewhere had “intentionally created any situation likely to induce any persons named herein to be together for any purpose of deliberate solicitation of any statement to or from any of the men named in this affidavit.”55
But, Hall went on, understanding that the “happenstance” in this case might seem too convenient for the authorities, he would read Lamoureaux his Miranda rights. Just in case.
And so John Hall, who often considered his “selective targeting” a form of police work, actually Mirandized another inmate. A third inmate witnessed the whole thing.
This information for the DA took care of Hall’s parole issues in Bucks County, and he was moved back to Philadelphia to continue his work with Joseph Casey.
As Hall worked on his Martorano stories with Joseph Casey that fall, Marc Frumer gathered fresh letters of support for him from the prosecutors in some of his prior snitchings. Frumer called in a favor from Casey for Hall’s information about the Martorano case, which prosecutors were still considering using, writing to Casey that his attendance and testimony were required at a violation of probation/parole hearing for Hall. Frumer enclosed a subpoena but explained that a letter from Casey summarizing the value of Hall’s cooperation would suffice.
“Unfortunately, John is facing a potential State sentence,” Frumer explained. “Your insight and request for leniency on John’s behalf may sway the judge towards a County sentence. Obviously, John’s life and well-being is at great risk in state prison due to his cooperation.”56
Frumer was negotiating the price for Hall’s information, and this letter shows another way a prosecutor could pay: help Hall get county jail time instead of state prison time.
“These buyers have very deep pockets and will pay dearly for my product,” Hall wrote after one of Frumer’s meetings with the DA’s office.57