Opinion ID: 180076
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Sidney Storch

Text: Sidney Storch had a long and public history of dishonesty, starting with his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1964 for being a habitual liar. By the time of Maxwell's 1984 trial, Storch was 37 years old and a reported long-time heroin addict. He was a criminal recidivist, with four felonies and approximately 13 arrests under his belt. His crime of choice was forgery, and he was well-known with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) forgery division from both a defense and prosecution standpoint. In 1981 and 1982, Storch supplied information to the LAPD about forgery rings. Subsequently, in 1983, Storch was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department for, among other crimes, impersonating a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and Howard Johnson, the son of the well-known Howard Johnson hotel chain. At the time he was apprehended and placed in a cell with Maxwell, Storch was in possession of a false California driver's license, forged checks, and stolen credit cards. The detective who arrested Storch characterized him as a sophisticated forger and testified that he would not trust anything Sidney Storch said unless you could corroborate the information with some source. Following Storch's 1983 arrest, Storch's public defender negotiated a guilty plea deal whereby Storch's five pending cases would be consolidated for sentencing and the court would impose a total combined sentence of 36 months in prison. Storch, however, independently negotiated a sixteen-month prison term, almost two years less than the deal his public defender had been able to secure for him. In exchange for his reduced prison term, Storch agreed to testify for the prosecution at Maxwell's trial. Storch testified at Maxwell's trial in 1984. Thereafter, Storch testified for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office in no less than six cases, several of them high-profile. [5] By 1985 or 1986, Storch was classified as an informant or K-9 and was housed in the K-9 module, otherwise known as informant's row. See Hall v. Dir. of Corrs., 343 F.3d 976, 978 (9th Cir.2003) (per curiam) (explaining that the jailhouse informant who fabricated material evidence in that case was housed on informant's row). By 1988, however, Storch's informant days were over. Storch was caught fabricating lies as he testified for the prosecution in the unrelated case People v. Sheldon Sanders, No. A039120 (L.A.Super.Ct. April 25, 1988); as a result, he was marked by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office as unreliable and unusable and was later indicted for perjury. [6]