Man Who Showed How to Fake Confessions Indicted for Perjury

The Los Angeles County jailhouse informant who sparked a scandal by proving that he could concoct a believable murder confession from someone he had never met has been indicted for perjury.

Leslie Vernon White, who says he has made up many confessions over the years and traded them to authorities in return for leniency, was arrested Tuesday on a grand jury indictment obtained by the state attorney general’s office.

He is the second informant to be charged with perjury recently.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Bigelow said secrecy requirements prevent her from disclosing any details of the indictment until White is formally arraigned on the charges.

However, White said by telephone from jail Tuesday that he has been accused of lying under oath in connection with his testimony that Kevin Dykes confessed a murder to him in jail.

Dykes, who maintains that he was wrongly convicted of the 1986 murder of a friend in Compton, is serving a term of 24 years to life in prison.

Originally regarded as a witness rather than a suspect in the murder, Dykes was placed with informants for his own protection after his 1986 arrest for possessing rock cocaine. Three informants said Dykes confessed to the murder, however, and Dykes was charged. He was also moved to another section of County Jail, where he met White. White, too, said Dykes confessed.

White has recanted his testimony. But even if White were convicted of perjury in Dykes’ case, Dykes’ conviction seems likely to stand. The trial judge in Dykes’ case, Judith Chirlin, has already ruled that there was enough other evidence to convict him.

She cited Dykes’ statement that he served as a reluctant lookout for the killers. He said he had a gun but was too frightened to use it to stop them from stabbing his friend to death.

White, 34, was arrested at his job as a telephone salesman in Hermosa Beach, although he had offered through his attorney to turn himself in. He was held in lieu of $150,000 bail.

His arrest followed the capture two weeks ago of another longtime Los Angeles jailhouse informant, Sidney Storch, a 46-year-old check forger. Storch was arrested in New York City, where he moved after the scandal about informants faking confessions broke in Los Angeles. He has been indicted on a single count of perjury in an undisclosed case.

White said he hopes to prove that prosecutors and jailers conspired with him to feed him information that he used to make up confessions. “The kind of business the district attorney’s office did with me, I didn’t even know perjury was a crime until I was indicted this morning. I thought it was a regular way of doing business.”

His court-appointed defense attorney, Terrence Bennett, said: “There’s no question he’s quote-unquote guilty of the underlying charge. The real question is whether they’re using him as a scapegoat to cover up their own malfeasance.”

White has said he provided information to law enforcement in 150 cases and lied under oath as a prosecution witness 12 times.

In 1988, he demonstrated for jailers that he could use a jail telephone and, posing as a law enforcement officer, get enough inside information on a murder case to implicate a defendant he had never met.

Jailhouse informants testified in 150 to 250 cases in Los Angeles County during the 1980s.

In a yearlong investigation into misuse of jailhouse informants that ended in 1990, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury strongly criticized the district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices for ethical failings, but handed up no indictments.

However, the grand jury’s special counsel, Douglas Dalton, said he had referred “several matters that suggest provable criminal cases to the district attorney for consideration.”

Declaring that it had a conflict of interest, the district attorney’s office passed the matters on to the attorney general’s office.

White contends that the attorney general’s office also has a conflict of interest and should not be prosecuting him since he asked that office to investigate misuse of jailhouse informants more than a decade ago.

White, who first got in trouble with the law when he was 8 years old, is a convicted robber, kidnaper and drug abuser who was freed from prison several months ago after serving an extraordinarily stiff sentence for purse snatching and failure to appear in court.

That sentence was imposed in 1989 after he stopped cooperating with authorities and started testifying as an expert witness for the defense in cases in which other informants had been used.