Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.
Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.
Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you're being a rat. You're being a narc.
Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions.
When you wear a wire, you're always in danger.
I've grown up around that sort of petty crime, getting into trouble and trying to get out of it. What's funny is my dad was an inspector in the police, so I was known as the grass.
You don't get John Gotti to testify against his driver. You get the driver to testify against John Gotti.
I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat.
How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?
A lot of black people worked with the police as snitches. We used to call them bimpees where I grew up. And, you know, they were afforded special privileges. They may have been paid by the police. But you never knew who was informing on you. We lived either next door to or - two doors away from us was a known informant in Soweto.
One man’s whistleblower is another man’s snitch.
Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.
What I had later learned was that the FBI knew I was going to New York a couple days after the raid.
Janie: Did you ever sell drugs? Cabel: Yes. Pot. Ninth and tenth grade. I was, uh...rather troubled back then. Janie: Why did you stop? Cabel: Got busted, and Captain made me a better deal. Janie: So you've been a narc since then? Cabel: I cringe at your terminology.
An unfrightened prisoner makes an unlikely informer.
To write is to inform against others.
