His identification came only after he had been told by the sergeant that the purchase money had been found on him, a fact totally unrelated to the defendant's appearance. An identification obtained by telling a witness some fact to establish that the subject is indeed the perpetrator is unreliable and should be suppressed (People v. Ames, 49 A.D.2d 514; People v. Lebron, 46 A.D.2d 776). Understandably, on the evidence presented, the hearing court did not find that the undercover could identify the defendant at the trial by depending solely upon his observations of him at the social club.
In short, the police opted for a confrontation which occurred beyond the immediate needs of an on-the-scene identification, but they did not undertake the requisite precautions to insure that Mrs. Jiminez' identification was impartially arrived at. Whatever impropriety had occurred at the station house was compounded by her subsequent in-court identification only a few hours later. The inevitable result was the bolstering of a tainted identification (see People v Hanley, 32 A.D.2d 1039, mod 27 N.Y.2d 648; People v Ames, 49 A.D.2d 514; People v Cooper, 31 A.D.2d 814). The evidence adduced at the Wade hearing indicates that Mrs. Jiminez saw the perpetrator for a fleeting instant and under traumatic circumstances in which she was threatened by a man brandishing a knife. Even though she testified that she "stayed looking at his face and how he looked", she attempted to escape immediately upon seeing the knife, which occurred simultaneously with her initial observation of the perpetrator.