Mr. Big

Documentary directed and produced by Tiffany Burns
2007, 89 minutes

Review of the documentary by Hans Sherrer
For Justice:Denied magazine

Mr BigA quandary faces the police when they “know” who committed a crime, but they can’t arrest the person because they don’t have any physical, forensic, eyewitness or confession evidence backing up their belief that the person is guilty. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police solved that vexing problem by developing an undercover sting operation known as Mr. Big.

The sting relies on a disarmingly simple strategy to elicit a confession to a specific crime by the “mark” (a.k.a. the suspect). After using a ruse to initiate a contrived meeting with the “mark,” at some point the undercover cops brag that they have committed violent crimes, including murdering people. The reason for doing that is so the “mark” will believe the undercover cops are Mafia type criminals who are unafraid to murder a person who crosses them, or who they think will expose their crimes. Thus the “mark” is led to believe he is dealing with Mr. Big.

By bragging about his violent crimes Mr. Big conveys that to be assured the “mark” is a stand-up guy, he wants to hear the “mark’s” admission to committing a crime that Mr. Big subtly or not so subtly suggests the “mark” may have committed. So the “mark” is faced with a dilemma: If he walks away or doesn’t tell Mr. Big what he wants to hear he and his family may possibly be killed. Believing that his safety and the safety of his family members is dependent on admitting to committing the crimes suggested by Mr. Big, the “mark” follows his cues and talks about the crime during what unbeknownst to him is a de facto videotaped interrogation session. After Mr. Big gets a taped admission from the “mark” to the desired crime, he is arrested and formally charged based on his “confession.” Voila! The problem of not having sufficient evidence against the “mark”/suspect has been solved.

Mr. Big is a remarkably effective technique – with a success rate believed to be upwards of 80% – precisely because it relies on the psychological coercion of scaring a “mark” into providing the information he believes the pretend hoodlums want to hear so that he and his family won’t be harmed.

To prevent tipping off potential “marks” about the signs of a Mr. Big sting, the RCMP has never publicly revealed how it works. That information blackout has been so effective that what we know about it is largely due to a documentary appropriately titled: Mr. Big.

Mr. Big relies on three complementary story threads to show how the sting works. However, by illustrating why a Mr. Big sting is so effective at obtaining an admission of guilt those story threads also reveal its dark side: The psychological coercion inherent in the technique can make an innocent person think it is in his or her self-interest to falsely admit to committing a crime solely to placate Mr. Big. Consequently an underlying theme of the documentary is that a Mr. Big induced confession must necessarily be viewed with a strong dose of skepticism precisely because it is relied on by the police to tie the confessor to a crime when the crime scene’s evidence doesn’t.

Interviews with several persons known to have falsely confessed under the pressure of a Mr. Big sting is one story thread. A second story thread is the interview of three experts – false confession expert Professor Richard Leo, former DEA agent Michael Levine, and false confession expert Professor Gisli Gudjonsson – to explain how a Mr. Big sting can elicit a false confession. The third story thread is how a Mr. Big sting was used to elicit the “confessions” of two teenagers – Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns – to the 1994 murder of Rafay’s father, mother and sister in their Bellevue, Washington home. An elaborate Mr. Big sting in Vancouver, BC was undertaken to implicate the two Canadian citizens in the crime because the crime scene evidence that excludes them as suspects identifies that at least three other persons committed the murders.

Professor Leo states in his interview that Mr. Big type stings rely on psychological coercion and entrapment that runs afoul of legal norms in the United States. Professor Gudjonsson relates in his interview that Mr. Big type stings are not allowed in England. Former DEA agent Levine explains in his interview that the videotaped portion of a Mr. Big sting can be manipulated to mislead the viewer by only showing inculpatory statements the “mark” is led to make – while exculpatory statements are masked over or cut off. The documentary claims that the confession from a Mr. Big sting is only admissible in a United States if obtained outside the country, which is why Rafay and Burns’ confessions were allowed to be used in their Washington state prosecutions.

Mr. Big shines a bright light on the dark corner of one of the judicial system’s dirty secrets: That unreliable confessions obtained by psychologically tortuous tactics are allowed to circumvent the lack of hard evidence against a criminal defendant. It is as true in the United States as Canada that as long as a suspect can be induced by hook or by crook to make what appears to be an incriminating statement, then everything suggesting the person is not guilty – DNA evidence, fingerprint evidence, alibi evidence, other suspects evidence, and circumstantial evidence –will be ignored as insignificant by the police, the prosecutors, the judge, and to the degree they know about it, even the jury. The blind faith of those people in the truthfulness of a confession that isn’t beaten out of a suspect is contrary to the evidence that psychologically coercive “third-degree” techniques are just as likely to result in a false confession.

The difficulty with any documentary about a serious subject is changing the pace to keep the viewer engaged. Mr. Big effectively uses two techniques to change its pace. One is it intertwines the three story threads by cutting from one to another to emphasize a particular point. The other is it intersperses segments of a telephone interview with the RCMP’s head of undercover operations about Mr. Big. The officer’s long pauses and fumbling attempts to avoid answering questions about the Mr. Big sting transforms the interview into what seems like a scene in a black comedy.

Tiffany Burns is Mr. Big’s director and producer. The sister of Sebastian Burns, she put her broadcasting career on hold to produce the documentary after her brother and Atif Rafay’s convictions in 2004 for the Rafay family’s triple murders, and their sentences of life in prison without parole.

Mr. Big is an important exposé of how “confessions” literally scared out of people by police officers posing as murderous criminals are being relied on to convict people in Canadian and U.S. courts. Yet there is a significant evidence, and it is simple common sense, that any confession is unreliable when made by a fearful person who will say whatever is necessary to secure their safety and the safety of his or her loved ones. Since a Mr. Big confession distorts the truth finding function of a trial, Mr. Big raises the troubling question of why is it allowed – particularly as the key evidence of an otherwise shaky case.

Mr. Big premiered in the fall of 2007, and in June 2008 it was featured at the Seattle International Film Festival. There are plans for it to be made available for purchase on DVD, and the details will be made available on the Mr. Big website that includes information about the documentary and a video trailer, http://mrbigthemovie.com

Professor Leo’s book, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Harvard University Press 2008), is one of the most complete sources of information about police tactics to elicit admissions of guilt and the legal system’s assessment of their reliableness. It is available from Justice:Denied’s Bookshop, http://justicedenied.org/books.html

Justice:Denied Issue 39, Winter 2008, had a feature article about the Burns and Rafay case, “Mr.  Big”  Sting  Used  To  Frame Teenagers For A Family’s Murder – The Atif Rafay & Sebastian Burns Story, http://justicedenied.org/mr_big_jd-issue39.pdf