Does the FBI Really Work with Informants Like Sir on NBC's Found? The Truth Explored
Sometimes you need to make a deal with the devil.
**SPOILER WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for Found Season 2, Episode 19!**
The Federal Bureau of Investigation seems to have made a deal with the devil — aka Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) — in Season 2, Episode 19 of NBC's Found: "Missing While a Casualty."
While this comes as quite a nasty shock to Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) and the rest of the M&A team, the unholy alliance between a powerful government agency and a convicted criminal does make a modicum of sense. Rather than just let Sir rot in a prison cell, the FBI presumably wants to use his unparalleled cunning and kidnapping experience to catch similar wrongdoers.
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Does the FBI really turn criminals into assets?
Yes! The idea of the FBI leveraging career criminals into valuable assets (i.e. informants) has been common practice for decades.
After all, working for the government in exchange for a lighter sentence — or even a full pardon — is often seen as more preferable to spending the rest of one's natural life in prison.
For example, Frank Abagnale Jr., the former con artist who inspired Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, ultimately joined forces with the domestic-focused government bureau to profile and catch people like himself. You've also got the two seasons of Mindhunter, which, despite its fictional cast of characters, is based on the FBI's real-world efforts to interview incarcerated serial killers in order to better understand the psychological makeup of murderers.
Yet another example: in the '70s, notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger turned informant against his enemies. Bulger's actions served as the basis for the character of Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning crime thriller, The Departed.
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The bureau's official policy on informants is as follows:
"The courts have recognized that the government’s use of informants is lawful and often essential to the effectiveness of properly authorized law enforcement investigations. However, use of informants to assist in the investigation of criminal activity may involve an element of deception, intrusion into the privacy of individuals, or cooperation with persons whose reliability and motivation may be open to question. Although it is legally permissible for the FBI to use informants in its investigations, special care is taken to carefully evaluate and closely supervise their use so the rights of individuals under investigation are not infringed. The FBI can only use informants consistent with specific guidelines issued by the attorney general that control the use of informants."
New episodes of Found air Thursdays on NBC at 10 p.m. ET and stream next day on Peacock.
