Actually it also goes to the resentments that build up when someone is recruited by force into becoming informants for whatever purpose.

You look at the arrest records on that, lots of borderline felony stuff, assault and mischief, a little dope posession. It all looks to me like the tried and true old school thing of being on a list of street level individuals who can be picked up and roughed around a little bit while on probation and squeezed for some information and a little work. The probationer is so vulnerable to that sort of circumstance that even with groups which are not doing background checks, we urge extreme caution in dealing with people who are currently on probation, especially the types of probation where they got arrested for a felony, but upon "successful completion of probation", it gets reduced to a misdemeanor. Don't think that prosecutors out there are entirely against using both threats and cash reward when trying to purchase testimony from individuals.

That is a particularly popular tactic with people who are on probation and somehow got in the jurisdiction of some agencies which lack the funding to send full fledged qualified undercover agents into their own infiltration operations, especially at the street level where a lot of those operations have a pretty short game plan. I mean, we are talking really classic Starsky and Hutch type stuff.

So what can and does happen in those situations, is resentment builds up, and quite frequently, the cops figure it out first, being far more experienced on how the pattern works, and they simply burn the informant, often inserting a new person into the targeted organization who manages to come up with information to "expose" the old informant, maybe even participate in killing that individual, and then thus elevating their status within the targeted organization. Stories get passed around jails and other criminal gathering type places, people compare notes, they hear the fate of others who took their path (especially in Vegas), which in that place I understand often involves being invited to meet the "big guy" at some casino hotel, but will as often as not result in being taken out of the basement in a dumpster and buried in the desert somewhere.

I will agree the whole thing was drug war blowback. The couple's lives were trapped in a revolving door life sentence to the system, and seeing its abuses first hand, it made them seek help, or at least to join someone else in the struggle, which of course, rejected them and the rest is history.