Mr. Big (sometimes known as the Canadian technique) is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder).
They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid.
The Mr. Big technique was developed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in British Columbia, with the first documented case taking place in March 1965 during the investigation of David Louis Harrison, a former Vancouver police constable who was tried and convicted for taking part in the robbery of $1.2 million of cancelled currency from the Canadian Pacific Merchandise Services warehouse in Vancouver.
Allan Richards, posing as crime syndicate hoodlum, John Clarke, and his sting partner, police operative Al Brooks.
[8] The undercover operative pays the suspect appreciable money for petty tasks, such as counting cash or making deliveries, associated with fictitious criminal activity.
As many as 50 operatives may be involved, crafting "a steady escalation in association, influence and pressure, leading up to the creation of an atmosphere in which it is deemed appropriate to encourage the target to confess".
Still, the technique also gives some innocent suspects compelling motivation to remain in the criminal organization; to maintain the new lifestyle and new friends, falsely confessing to Mr. Big may then seem an acceptable risk.
Mounting evidence against a possible third conviction complicated the developments for the Crown attorney's refiling, including the witness against Rose being off on her timing by at least two weeks and a man in California took his own life after confessing to his wife – with numerous consistent details – to murdering two people near Chetwynd in October 1983.
Fulminante agreed, confessing to Sarivola that he murdered his stepdaughter; he admitted to driving her out to the desert on his motorcycle, sexually assaulting her, choking her, making her plead for her life, and shooting her with his .357 revolver.
Nelson Hart, of Newfoundland, Canada, was charged in June 2005 with the deaths of his 2-year-old twin daughters who died as a result of drowning on Sunday, August 4, 2002.
For Mr. Hart in the circumstances in which he found himself there was very little downside to telling Mr. Big what he wanted to hear, since he believed the operatives were not police and he had been assured that any information he gave would be kept from the authorities.
[18] Writing for a unanimous majority, Justice Moldaver declared that confessions arising from Mr. Big operations would henceforth be considered "presumptively inadmissible, subject to a two-pronged admissibility analysis".
The court ruled that the onus is on the Crown to overcome this presumption by demonstrating that the probative value of the evidence resulting from a Mr. Big operation, including the confession, outweighs its prejudicial effect (prong 1).
Markers of reliability include components of the confession that coincide with evidence that is known to investigators, information that is unknown to the public, and mundane details that would only be known to the person who had committed the crime.
During the Mr. Big operation Mack participated in roughly 30 crime scenarios, none of which included high levels of violence and he was paid approximately $5,000 for his work.
The Court of Appeal for Ontario found in R. v. Kelly[21] that presumption of inadmissibility established in R. v. Hart was applicable even in circumstances without the hallmarks of a usual Mr. Big operation.
The court found that the promise of a large payout from an insurance fraud scheme had the same potential for the same dangers as traditional Mr. Big cases set out in Hart.
[22] The Supreme Court of New Zealand first ruled on the admissibility of "Mr. Big" confessions in the case of Tawera Wichman, then on trial for manslaughter in the 2009 death of his infant daughter.
Wichman's five-month-old daughter Teegan, referred to in court filings as "T", died on 8 September 2009, having been hospitalized since 4 March after suffering massive internal haemorrhaging and fractured ribs and femora.
[23][24] Two undercover police officers, "Ben" and "Scott", approached Wichman and pretended to recruit him to do various jobs for a fictitious criminal organization.
[24] On 22 June 2016, Kamal Reddy was convicted of the 2006 murders of his former girlfriend Pakeeza Faizal and her daughter Juwairiyah Kalim using evidence that the New Zealand Police had obtained from a Mr. Big operation.
Prior to the 2014 Mr Big operation, the Police had bugged Lyttle's house and phone calls in 2011, which yielded information about his profile, personality, hobbies, financial situation and vulnerabilities.
While the Crown defended the efficacy of the Police's Mr Big operation in securing Lyttle's conviction, the defence argued that his confession was just a story.
[30] In March 2022, the Court of Appeal criticised senior police officers involved in the Lyttle case for failing to disclose information per the requirements of the Criminal Disclosure Act and not seeking legal advice during the investigation.
[32] In early August 2022, the Supreme Court of New Zealand rejected a bid by Lyttle to get the Crown prosecutor to pay half of his legal costs.
The Supreme Court also criticised the prosecution's delays in bringing the case to trial, which was attributed to Police failure to comply with their disclosure obligations.
[33][34] In the early hours of 5th June 1999, at a house on the Corcrain estate of Portadown in Northern Ireland, a 59 year old Protestant civilian named Elizabeth O'Neill (who had married a Catholic) was killed instantly after a pipe bomb, that was thrown through her living room window by suspected loyalist paramilitaries, detonated as she picked it up off the floor.
[35] The prime suspect in the case, William James Fulton, who was a senior member of the Portadown based Loyalist Volunteer Force, later moved to Plymouth in south-west England, where he soon started working as a driver (on a weekly salary of £455) for a group of what he believed to be local criminals involved in the theft of lorries.
As they gained his trust, he soon started boasting about his involvement in a vast array of terrorist activities (including the murder of Elizabeth O'Neill), with tens of thousands of hours worth of audio recordings ultimately being secured as evidence.
[38] In 2006, after being tried on evidence recovered from the covert recordings, Fulton was found guilty[39] of 48 separate terrorist offences[40] and was thereafter was sentenced to a life in prison, with a minimum term of 28 years before he could be considered for release.