A reward poster hangs on a light pole outside the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York last week. The NYPD offered up to $10,000 for tips leading to the shooting suspect’s arrest, while the FBI offered up to $50,000.
Ted Shaffrey/AP
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Ted Shaffrey/AP
Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, was arrested this week — five days and about 300 miles from the scene of the crime — after a customer recognized him at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa.
The eagle-eyed tipster, who has not been publicly identified, notified an employee who then called 911, authorities say. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said the person who spotted Mangione is a “hero.”
But will these tipsters earn a payout? The answer is complicated.
During the dayslong, multistate manhunt, both state and federal law enforcement offered a reward for information: $10,000 from the New York Police Department and up to $50,000 from the FBI.
“The individual in Pennsylvania, who called in a tip, is eligible to receive the reward,” the NYC Police Foundation, which administers the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Program, confirmed to NPR on Friday.
There are several hefty strings attached, however.
Notably, both the NYPD and FBI stipulate that the tips must lead to an “arrest and conviction.” (The NYPD typically only requires an arrest and indictment, but the threshold is higher for rewards above $3,500, the foundation said.)
Mangione was arrested on five charges in Pennsylvania, including illegal possession of a firearm and forgery, and later charged with murder in New York. He is fighting extradition, a move lawyers say is unlikely to succeed but could delay the process by up to a few weeks — meaning a trial, let alone potential conviction, is still several steps away.
Even if that does happen, it’s not guaranteed that any one individual will get the full $60,000, especially considering taxes and the possibility of the reward being split between multiple people.
NYPD officials said more than 400 tips came in during the five-day period, with about 30 of them proving useful about the gunman’s whereabouts, according to the Associated Press.
Here’s what would need to happen for someone to get the reward.
How the NYPD tip line works
The NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Program encourages people to submit tips about violent crimes by calling a hotline or filling out an online form, a process it says is completely anonymous.
Anyone who provides information will get a reference number, which they can use to follow up on the investigation either online or by phone after at least one week.
If that person’s tip leads to an arrest and indictment, they will receive a reward of up to $3,500. A New York City Police Foundation committee conducts a case-by-case review to determine the exact amount.
The foundation has partnered with the NYPD to administer the program since 1983. It says calls to Crime Stoppers have helped solve more than 5,600 violent crimes and resulted in over $3 million in approved rewards.
The federal reward process is even more complicated
Getting rewards from the FBI is significantly more involved.
That happens through Rewards for Justice (RFJ), an interagency program that is administered by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and offers rewards for information related to certain threats to national security, including terrorism.
Notably, individuals cannot initiate the process on their own. A U.S. investigating agency — in this case, the FBI — must first nominate a person, which triggers a legal review of eligibility.
Then an interagency committee evaluates the information from the nominating agency and makes a nonbinding recommendation to the secretary of state, who has ultimate discretion over whether to authorize a reward and how much it should be.
Reward offers can reach up to $25 million, according to the State Department.
The department says determining factors include “the value of the information provided; the level of threat mitigated by the information received; the severity of danger or injury to U.S. persons or property presented by the threat; the risk faced by a source and his/her family; and the degree of a source’s cooperation.”
Since its inception in 1984, RFJ has paid over $250 million to more than 125 individuals whose efforts have “saved countless lives,” according to its website.
Because of the program’s emphasis on confidentiality, authorities don’t publicly share specifics about rewards — they typically don’t even publicize that a reward has been paid, with the exception of some high-profile cases.
RFJ paid $2 million for information that led to the 1995 capture of Pakistan’s Ramzi Yousef, one of the people convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing. In 2014, it paid $3 million to an individual who shared information that led to the arrest and conviction of Ahmed Abu Khattalah, the architect of the 2012 Benghazi attack.
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