Pubdate: Fri, 28 Jul 2000
Source: Austin Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Austin Chronicle Corp.
Contact:  http://www.auschron.com/
Author: Nate Blakeslee, a staff writer at The Texas Observer, where a
version of this story first appeared.

COLOR OF JUSTICE-AN UNDERCOVER DRUG BUST OPENS OLD WOUNDS IN TULIA, TEXAS

Last year's most talked-about drug bust didn't take place in the high-volume
inner-city cocaine rings of Houston or Dallas, or in a major trafficking hub
like Laredo. It happened about halfway up the hot, dusty highway from
Lubbock to Amarillo, in a Panhandle county with more cows than people.

The bust put tiny Tulia (population 5,000), previously known primarily for
its bustling livestock auction, on the map, and made a star out of an
equally unknown narcotics agent.

Now, one year later, the fallout from the controversial operation has
brought revelations about both the town and the agent. And a growing body of
evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. The operation, Swisher
County's first major drug sting, began in January of 1998. The modus
operandi was one of the most common in the modern drug war: State and
federal funds, distributed through a regional drug task force, were used to
bring an undercover officer to a rural community, primarily to target
"street-level" dealers.

Using funds from the Panhandle Narcotics Task Force, the sheriff hired an
undercover agent, who began making buys in and around Tulia. Only a select
few knew about the deep-cover operation. But even those who did were not
prepared for the results: Over an 18-month period, in a town so small it can
barely support a Dairy Queen, the agent maintained his cover while allegedly
making over 100 controlled buys of illegal narcotics, mostly cocaine.

The morning of the arrests, which were finally conducted en masse on July
23, 1999, brought more surprises. Although the arrest warrants were served
at dawn, surprising most of the defendants in their beds, no drugs, money,
or weapons were seized in the roundup. Only a few of the alleged dealers
were able to raise the money to bond themselves out of jail. Many lived in
public housing or trailer homes. Of more than 100 cases filed, only one
involved delivery of an amount larger than an "eight-ball" (3.5 grams),
about $200 worth of cocaine.

By the end of the week, as the rest of the suspects were rounded up, it was
evident that the 41 persons targeted by the sting had something else in
common. Thirty-five of the arrestees came from Tulia's tiny black community,
which numbers no more than 350. Ten percent of the town's black population
had been taken down by one undercover agent.

While the black community in Tulia was devastated, the official community
response to the operation was supportive, if somewhat shocked. (That support
would wane only slightly when the county judge announced that a tax increase
would be necessary to house and prosecute that many suspects.) The local
paper, tipped off about the impending arrests, ran a photograph of young
black men in their underwear and uncombed hair being led across the front
lawn of the Swisher County Courthouse. An editorial in the Tulia Sentinel
praised the sheriff and district attorney for rounding up the "scumbags" in
town. The Amarillo Globe-News ran a laudatory interview with the undercover
agent, Tom Coleman, an itinerant lawman from West Texas with no prior
experience in undercover narcotics work. Coleman has since begun another
undercover assignment for a drug task force in Southeast Texas. For his work
in Tulia, the Department of Public Safety named him Outstanding Lawman of
the Year.

Then came the trials.

Despite the small amounts involved, many cases were enhanced to first-degree
felonies, punishable by life in prison, because the buys allegedly took
place within 1,000 feet of a school or park. The first trial set the tone
for what followed.

Joe Moore, 67, who was accused of two counts of delivering an eight-ball of
powdered cocaine to Coleman, received a 99-year sentence.

Moore had two prior felony convictions, which enhanced his sentence.

But even those with no felony convictions, who would otherwise have been
eligible for probation, received staggering sentences.

Freddie Brookins, 22, received 20 years for one count of delivering an
eight-ball. He had no prior record.

Another defendant with no priors, 23-year-old Kizzie Henry, got 25 years.
(For comparison, in another bust that made news last year, Laurie Hiett, the
wife of the head of the U.S. Army's counter-drug force in Columbia, was
sentenced for smuggling over $700,000 worth of cocaine and heroin into the
United States. She got five years.) The harsh sentences handed down early
sent a message to the other defendants, who began to accept long sentences
in plea bargains with District Attorney Terry McEachern. Fewer than 10
defendants are still awaiting trial.

Because of the disproportionate number of African-Americans targeted by the
operation, the Amarillo chapter of the NAACP has begun to investigate. A
recent report by Human Rights Watch found that the rate of admission to
prison for black drug offenders in Texas is 19 times that of white drug
offenders, and 38% of blacks sentenced to prison in Texas have been
convicted of drug crimes. (Nationwide, meanwhile, blacks constituted just
16.9% of drug users in 1996, but accounted for 37.3% of drug arrests that
year.)

But the race of the defendants is not the only troubling aspect of the Tulia
drug bust. There is also the evidence.

Agent Coleman did not wear a wire during any of the alleged transactions. No
video surveillance was done, and no second officer was available to
corroborate his reports.

Such measures, commonly employed by Department of Public Safety narcotics
agents, were too dangerous for an agent operating in a small, tight-knit
community, according to Sheriff Larry Stewart. In most cases, there were no
witnesses at all, other than Coleman himself.

Testifying in the first few trials, Coleman claimed to have recorded names,
dates, and other pertinent facts about the buys by writing on his leg.

Then there are the drugs Coleman allegedly bought in Tulia. According to his
own testimony, Coleman made contact with a community of low-income crack
smokers, primarily young black men. But strangely, almost every buy Coleman
made was of powdered cocaine.

Only a handful involved crack or marijuana. Such irregularities didn't seem
to matter to the Swisher County juries that began handing down verdicts and
sentences last winter. "Just mention drugs, and you can get a conviction in
the Panhandle," one defense attorney later said.

In recent months, as appeals and motions for retrial have been filed,
defense attorneys have begun to raise questions about Coleman's
background -- relating to his employment history and the mysterious
circumstances surrounding an indictment of his own, which came to light
during the undercover operation.

As cracks in Coleman's credibility have begun to appear, McEachern's
confidence in the cases apparently has begun to wane. Plea bargain offers
have gotten progressively lower, and now a sort of stalemate seems to have
set in with respect to the remaining cases. Meanwhile, the skepticism that
was initially confined to the black community in this racially divided town
has spread to the white community, and a few of Tulia's prominent white
residents are beginning to ask questions about exactly what has been done in
the name of justice in Swisher County.

A Dealer's Life

You don't ordinarily associate crack cocaine with shoveling shit, but drug
use in rural Texas has a logic all of its own. The Tulia Livestock Auction's
steady need for manual labor provided a ready source of cash for a handful
of young black men in Tulia who smoked -- and allegedly dealt -- crack
cocaine. Thirty-year-old Donnie Smith was one of those men.

Smith was Tulia High's Athlete of the Year when he graduated in 1989. It
turned out to be the high point of his life. He married his high school
girlfriend and had two children.

But the marriage ended badly, as did a brief stint at West Texas A&M
University in Canyon. Smith also got into trouble with the law -- a couple
of fights which led to misdemeanor charges. He found part-time work at the
sale barn, as the auction is called by locals, a last resort for unemployed
men in Tulia. He and his fellow laborers were not cowboys.

They worked "in the shit," cracking open bales of hay for the cows to eat or
running the livestock gate in the stifling, dusty barn on Mondays, when
buyers from across the Midwest came to bid on animals all day long. It
wasn't glamorous, but it was steady work, and in Tulia there wasn't much
else for someone like Smith to choose from. But the most important thing
about the job from Smith's perspective -- especially after he became
addicted to cocaine -- was that he could come in on a Saturday, work three
days, and get paid in cash when the sale ended on Monday. It was the "sale
barn" that provided Donnie Smith the money to buy crack cocaine. And it was
a fellow employee, Eliga Kelly, Smith said in an interview at Abilene's
Middleton Transfer Facility prison unit, who introduced Smith to undercover
officer Tom Coleman.

Known to everyone in Tulia's tight-knit black community as "Man" Kelly,
Eliga Kelly is an older, unemployed man who occassionally worked weekends
and Mondays at the auction, primarily, according to Donnie Smith, to support
his drinking habit.

He would become central to the undercover operation. Donnie's mother, Mattie
White, a correctional officer at a state prison near Tulia, claims that the
sheriff told her he had given the undercover agent a list of names to check
out at the outset of the operation, which led to the racial targeting of the
sting.

Sheriff Stewart now denies this, claiming that it was Coleman's chance
meeting with Kelly, and Kelly's willingness to help him buy drugs
(apparently in exchange for free alcohol), that led him into Tulia's highly
insular black community.

Sometime in the summer of 1998, Kelly introduced Smith to Coleman, who
claimed to be working construction in the town of Happy, about 15 miles
away. Kelly told Smith he had known the man for years, though Coleman had
only recently shown up in Tulia. Based on this assurance, Smith scored crack
for Coleman on three or four occasions over the course of the summer.
Although Smith was a regular crack smoker, he was not what most people would
call a dealer.

He took Coleman's money to his own supplier and used it to buy rocks for
Coleman -- as well as for himself.

According to Smith, the two smoked crack together in Coleman's truck on more
than one occasion.

Then, fed up with the drug life and wanting to become a better parent to his
kids, who lived in Tulia with his ex-wife, Smith checked himself into rehab
in Lubbock that winter and lost track of Coleman. When Smith finished the
90-day program, he returned to Tulia, where he began working for a local
farmer. He had been clean for six months when the police arrested him, along
with the dozens of others netted by Coleman, last summer.

With no prior felony convictions, Smith was prepared to plea bargain.

The small amounts he had delivered, combined with his status as a first-time
felony offender, he figured, gave him a good shot at probation.

Then he read the indictments. He was accused of delivering cocaine to
Coleman on seven separate occasions.

But only one delivery was alleged to be crack cocaine. The other deliveries
were said to be powder, in amounts between one and four grams -- making them
second-degree felonies.

The D.A. offered Smith 45 years.

Smith knew something strange was going on. "I don't mess with powder, man. I
don't shoot it and I don't smell it," he said. Unable to raise bail, Smith
sat in jail in neighboring Hale County (the Swisher County lockup was filled
by the sweep; some defendants had to be housed as far away as Levelland, 100
miles to the southwest) from July until February, when he went to trial on
the first count, a relatively minor charge of delivery of less than a gram
of crack cocaine.

On the stand he surprised everyone, including his own attorney, by admitting
that he got crack for Coleman several times (although he denied making the
specific delivery for which he stood accused). But he never delivered powder
cocaine, he told the jury. Although Coleman asked for powder, Smith didn't
know where to get it because nobody he knew used powder. It simply never
came up in his circle of friends.

But the jury convicted Smith and gave him the maximum sentence of two years.

In light of the severe sentences already handed down in earlier felony
trials, Smith's court-appointed attorney urged him to plead guilty to the
powder charges even if he believed he had been falsely accused by Coleman.
In a plea bargain with McEachern, Smith accepted an offer of 12 years.

Smith was not the only defendant in Tulia to have powder cocaine introduced
as evidence against him. In fact, virtually everyone caught in the bust was
charged with selling powder cocaine, in some instances up to a half-dozen
counts. Tulia doesn't even have a McDonalds, much less a bar or nightclub.
The per capita income is $11,000. Yet suddenly powdered cocaine, a drug
normally associated with affluent users, seemed to be everywhere -- at least
everywhere in Tulia's hardscrabble black community.

And while powder was everywhere, it only seemed to appear in small
quantities -- just enough to constitute a second-degree felony.

Could there really be 40 coke dealers in a rural Panhandle community? "Where
the drug addicts at? Where the big houses? Where all the gold teeth?" Smith
asked.

A Legal 'Lynching'

Much more cocaine passed through the town, by virtue of its location on
Interstate 27, than ever landed there.

According to defendants interviewed for this story, there were no volume
dealers in Tulia. The local drug scene was fueled by small amounts of
drugs -- usually a few hundred dollars' worth at a time -- picked up in
nearby Plainview or Amarillo. In a small town, word got around fast about
who was holding what, and users looking to score would quickly arrive at the
house with the drugs. "A good hour's run, and it's gone," said one
defendant.

Yet by most indicators, Tulia never had a serious drug problem.

In 1996, District Attorney McEachern told the Tulia Sentinel that he had
prosecuted only about 10 cases that year involving delivery or possession of
illegal drugs in Swisher County. The county attorney reported handling about
18 misdemeanor drug cases that same year, mostly for marijuana possession.
And only eight of 61 referrals to juvenile probation that year were for drug
abuse.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that property crime -- usually closely
associated with a large addict population -- was not a major problem in
Tulia, where many residents still leave their doors unlocked.

Polls of junior high and high school students in Tulia suggested some of the
lowest rates of drug use in the region, much lower than statewide or
national rates.

Yet some in the community saw a problem.

A Tulia police officer told the Tulia Sentinel in 1996 that the department
had compiled a list of "sixty known drug dealers" in town. In January of
1997, the Tulia school board adopted by a 6-1 vote a mandatory random drug
testing program for all students involved in extracurricular activities. The
one dissenting vote was Gary Gardner. One of Swisher County's most respected
citizens, Gardner is an enigma in overalls.

He lives in a rural village east of Tulia called Vigo Park, and he is the
descendant of one of Tulia's oldest farming clans. Gardner's vocabulary on
race and ethnic issues has not changed since the 1950s, yet he has emerged
as one of the staunchest defendants of Tulia's disenfranchised and one of
the most vocal critics of the 1999 drug bust that decimated Tulia's
African-American community.

Once he locked horns with the school board, Gardner says, he began having
trouble with all of Tulia's establishment, including local law enforcement.
"In these small towns it's like Mexican judo," Gardner said. "Once you mess
with one Mexican, 'ju don't know how many of his cousins will come after
you." Over the years, Gardner has intervened on behalf of several of his
Hispanic employees who fell afoul of the law and were in danger of being
railroaded by the legal system. "If you're black or Mexican in Tulia, and
you get arrested, you plea out. You have to, because you can't afford a good
lawyer," he said. Even if they could, a trial in Swisher County is simply
not worth the risk, Gardner said: "They call it McEachern's Law ...
basically, in Swisher County, whatever Terry McEachern wants from a judge or
a jury, he'll get."

When the big cocaine bust first went down, Gardner said he felt certain the
defendants were all guilty.

But as a former cop (he served briefly as a DPS trooper in the late 1960s),
he objected to the efforts by McEachern, Sheriff Stewart, and others to try
the suspects in Tulia's two newspapers. He wrote letters to each of the 45
defendants urging them to seek a change of venue. And he found that their
responses were similar. "A bunch started writing me back with the same
thing: 'I didn't sell the man that much stuff,'" he said. Gardner attended
the first trial, that of Joe Moore. "That was a lynching," Gardner said of
Moore's jury trial.

But it was Tom Coleman's testimony that really disturbed him. "He said a
thing or two that stood my hair up on end," Gardner recalled.

Deep Cover

Tom Coleman does not make a good witness.

A successful undercover agent must look like a hard-core drug user, the type
of person who would buy drugs on the street from someone he does not know.
Coleman fits the part. He is slightly built and short, with a pale, narrow
face and a goatee.

He wears his long, dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ragged ponytail that
extends down to his shoulders.

When he appeared at an April hearing in Amarillo, called to revoke the
probation of Tulia defendant Mandis Barrow, Coleman showed up wearing a dark
sportscoat over a dark shirt and dark tie, tight black jeans and cheap black
loafers.

He suffers from a form of astigmatism that causes his eyes to twitch, a
condition he attempts to control on the witness stand by tilting his head
slightly to one side, in a gesture that suggests he does not quite
understand what he has just been asked.

In testimony, he has a tendency to repeat questions before answering them,
and to hedge every possible detail about his recollections. Given the
opportunity, he offers long, rambling descriptions with plenty of irrelevant
detail.

But there are other reasons why Coleman is not an ideal witness.

After huge jury verdicts in a half-dozen trials, some cracks began to appear
in Coleman's credibility. Tulia defendant Billy Wafer's probation-revocation
hearing, held at the Hale County Courthouse in February, was the first major
setback for the prosecution. Wafer had received 10 years' probation in 1990
for a felony marijuana-possession conviction in Plainview. At the time of
his arrest in Tulia, he had served nine and a half years of the probated
sentence, with no arrests or failed drug tests.

Now he was facing up to 20 years in prison if his probation were revoked --
a decision that rested solely on the testimony of Tom Coleman. In court
Coleman testified that on January 18, 1999, he and Eliga Kelly had flagged
down Wafer as they passed him on their way to an Allsup's store on Highway
86. It was about 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. Coleman testified that he
asked Wafer to get him an eight-ball, and to meet him at the sale barn with
the drugs.

According to Coleman, a woman showed up at the sale barn about an hour later
with the cocaine.

But Wafer had a rock-solid alibi.

At the time Coleman alleged he had met with Wafer to set up the buy, Wafer
was at Seed Resources in Tulia, where he worked as warehouse foreman.

Wafer provided time cards, and brought his boss in as a witness, to testify
that there was no doubt in his mind that Wafer was at work, as scheduled,
all morning long. Eliga Kelly was not called to testify (McEachern
apparently thought that would not be necessary to win the case), leaving the
case hinging on Coleman's word vs. that of Wafer's boss, a respected member
of the community.

District Judge Edward Self declined to revoke Wafer's probation. (Wafer had
already lost his job, however, having served 30 days in jail; he and his
wife also lost a home loan they had negotiated just prior to the arrest,
and, inexplicably, his case has yet to be dismissed.)

Could Coleman have simply gotten his dates and times wrong?

According to Eliga Kelly, the transaction never occurred at all. Four days
after Wafer's hearing, still angry from the blown case, McEachern appeared
before Judge Self again, this time in Donnie White's trial, which had just
gotten under way at the Swisher County courthouse. McEachern called Kelly,
who had turned state's witness, to the stand.

Though it was hardly germane to Donnie White's case, McEachern asked Kelly
about the exchange with Wafer. Didn't he remember talking to Billy Wafer
with Tom Coleman at the Allsup's, and how a woman had come to the sale barn
later to deliver cocaine? "I remember talking to Billy," Kelly said in the
trial transcript, "but Billy told me to get out of his face." For reasons
difficult to fathom, McEachern then went rapidly through the list of those
arrested in the sting, asking Kelly if he had helped arrange drug deals with
each of them. Again and again, Kelly testified that he had not.

In at least one case, Coleman seems to have been unclear on just who had
supposedly sold him cocaine.

Coleman alleged that Yul Bryant delivered an eight-ball to him in May of
1999, shortly before the end of the undercover operation. When Bryant read
the report on his case, he found that Coleman had described him as a tall
black man with bushy hair. Bryant is 5-foot-6 and completely bald. From
other details given in the report, Bryant was able to guess the identity of
the man Coleman had described.

Bryant contacted the man, one Randy Hicks, from jail and obtained an
affidavit from Hicks, who selflessly confirmed that he was the man described
in the report.

Bryant sent that information to McEachern's office. McEachern's investigator
then called Coleman in, showed him pictures of Bryant and Hicks, and asked
him to identify Bryant, according to Bryant's attorney, Kerry Piper. Coleman
pointed to the picture of Hicks, says Piper, and the case against Bryant
(who was in Amarillo at the time of alleged buy) was quietly dismissed.

The judge decided to revoke Bryant's parole anyway, for a technical
violation, and he is serving four years in prison.

In another unpublicized indictment, Coleman named another suspect who moved
away from Tulia several years ago. Fortunately for the prosecution, as
damaging to Coleman's credibility as these cases are, none were heard before
a jury or published by any news outlet in the Panhandle.

With respect to botched identities and misremembered encounters, Coleman can
perhaps make the argument that he was overwhelmed by the size of the
operation he was running.

But there is no doubt that Coleman lied on the stand on at least one
occasion -- in response to questions he was asked about his own criminal
history.

At Billy Wafer's hearing, Wafer's attorney Brent Hamilton asked Coleman if
he had faithfully completed his application for employment as a Swisher
County law officer -- specifically, whether he had listed previous arrests
or charges filed against him. It should have been evident to Coleman that
Hamilton was on to something, yet under oath and on the witness stand,
Coleman replied that he had never been arrested or charged for anything more
serious than a traffic ticket "way back when I was a kid." In fact, shortly
after the first Tulia trial ended, a defense attorney discovered that
Coleman had been under indictment for a theft charge in Cochran County at
the same time he was running the undercover operation in Tulia.

Until 1996, Coleman had worked as a sheriff's deputy in Cochran County, his
most recent law enforcement position.

After he left the job, the county filed charges on Coleman for theft,
allegedly for buying gas for his personal use on a county credit card. When
Sheriff Stewart discovered the outstanding warrant in May of 1998, he had no
choice but to "arrest" Coleman and collect bond from him in Tulia. Yet
Coleman, already five months into the undercover operation at that point,
was not fired.

He was suspended temporarily until he got the problem "resolved." McEachern
claimed he had no knowledge of the charge (though his sheriff certainly did)
before the first three trials.

When a defense attorney presented Judge Self with the new evidence
concerning the prosecution's star witness, Self sealed it. Efforts to
introduce the evidence, along with other information about Coleman's past,
to impeach his credibility have been unsuccessful.

The theft charge was reported in a Lubbock Avalanche-Journal article in
early May, however.

Coleman has refused to answer questions about the charge. And when asked
about Coleman's background, McEachern assured this reporter that a thorough
background check had been done. "Everyone in Cochran County had the highest
recommendations for him," he said. "If you do a thorough enough exam on
anybody you're going to find something.

Who hasn't done something at one time in their life?"

Troubled History

It would not have taken a very thorough exam to determine that Tom Coleman
was not a good candidate for the job Sheriff Stewart brought him to Tulia to
do. According to records reviewed during research for this story and
interviews with past associates of Coleman, each of his last two law
enforcement assignments, as a deputy sheriff in Cochran County from 1994 to
1996, and as a deputy in Pecos County from 1989 to 1994, ended when Coleman
abruptly left town, with no notice to his employer, leaving his patrol car
parked at his house.

In both cases, Coleman disappeared owing thousands of dollars' worth of
delinquent bills.

His most recent employer, former Cochran County Sheriff Kenneth Burke, wrote
a letter to the state agency that licenses peace officers, following
Coleman's departure. "It is in my opinion that an officer should uphold the
law. Mr. Coleman should not be in law enforcement if he is going to do
people the way he did this town," he wrote. Because of strict rules
governing the admissibility of evidence about an officer's history, Tulia
juries have yet to hear the full story of Tom Coleman's law enforcement
career.

He grew up in Reeves County, the son of former Texas Ranger Joe Coleman. The
senior Coleman, who died of a heart attack in 1991, was one of the most
widely respected lawmen in West Texas. Tom left high school in the 11th
grade.

He eventually received his GED, at age 27, and shortly thereafter began work
as a jailer in the city of Pecos. His first assignment as a peace officer
was in tiny Iraan, in Pecos County.

In interviews with former co-workers and associates compiled for this story,
as well as in documented interviews conducted by a court-appointed
investigator during Coleman's 1994 divorce from Carol Barnett, an
unflattering portrait of Coleman emerges.

According to an officer (who requested anonymity) who served with Coleman in
Pecos County for several years, Tom developed a reputation as unstable and
untrustworthy. "He was a nut," the officer said. Coleman was in the habit of
carrying as many as three guns on his person at one time, says the officer.

On one occasion, according to Pecos Co. chief deputy Cliff Harris, Coleman
accidentally shot out the windshield of his own patrol car with a shotgun
while he was seated in the car.

Coleman was also a liar, according to his former Pecos County co-worker. "He
was the type of person who would tell you anything, and would turn around --
if you knew he wasn't telling the truth -- and come back and correct it," he
said. In an interview conducted during Coleman's divorce, a second former
co-worker, Pecos Co. deputy Rick Kennedy, also described Coleman as
untruthful. "Tom can lie to you when the truth would sound better," he said.
Kennedy also described Coleman as a paranoid gun nut who could not go on a
fishing trip without an assault rifle in the tent and on the boat. Nina
McFadden, the wife of another of Coleman's former co-workers in Pecos
County, described Coleman as "paranoid" and a "compulsive liar," in a second
interview conducted during the divorce.

Both McFadden and another former associate in Pecos County, Bobby Harris
(also interviewed during the divorce), said Coleman warned them that his
house was always booby-trapped when he was out of town.

According to Coleman's ex-wife, Carol Barnett, things began to go sour in
Iraan shortly after their second child was born. The family was deeply in
debt, owing thousands of dollars to merchants and vendors, who readily
extended credit to Coleman as a law officer.

Finally, reeling from his father's death and fearing Carol would divorce him
and take his son from him, he cracked, says Barnett. He wrote a note to the
sheriff blaming his troubles on his wife. Leaving his patrol car at his
house, Coleman put his two-year-old son in the family car, pawned a gun for
gas money, and drove to Sherman, where his mother had moved following his
father's death.

After a brief stint as a jailer in Denton, Coleman's next law enforcement
assignment was back in West Texas, as a deputy in Cochran County. That ended
in 1996 when, according to a letter from Sheriff Burke, Coleman walked into
the dispatcher's office in the middle of his shift and told her he was
leaving. With no prior notice to the sheriff, and without even returning his
patrol car to the station, Coleman simply left town. According to a written
account by the dispatcher on duty, Coleman told her he had to go look for
his wife, a reference to his live-in girlfriend, who had left him. Coleman
followed her to her hometown in Illinois.

The theft charge in Cochran County was filed a year after Coleman left town.
According to records reviewed during research for this story, it stemmed
from a co-worker observing Coleman using a county gas card to fill his
personal vehicle.

But what apparently spurred his former boss into action were Coleman's
debts.

According to documents reviewed for this story, the sheriff received a
half-dozen letters from the grocery store, the gas company, Coleman's
mechanic, and others, all requesting assistance in collecting debts Coleman
promised he would make good on but never repaid.

An unusual deal was worked out: Coleman would pay back the money, over
$6,700, as restitution, though the theft charge against him was for less
than $100 worth of gas. In return, the charge would be dropped, and the
vendors would not pursue civil charges against Coleman.

The Life of a Kingpin

News of Coleman's history has filtered through the black community in Tulia.
Some were not surprised. "Get a dirty man to do a dirty job," said Freddy
Brookins Sr., whose son was sent to prison -- like most of the defendants --
based solely on Coleman's testimony.

Brookins and others contend that white Tulia was ready to believe Coleman,
however problematic the details of the operation, because fear and distrust
of the black community has historically undergirded many of the public
policy decisions in the town.

Sometimes that sentiment is not too far beneath the surface.

In a transcript of the debate over the school drug-testing policy, white
board member Sam Sadler described an after-school scene his wife witnessed:
"[My son] has entered the sixth grade this year, and he is easily
influenced. ... The other evening when several bigger kids, some colored
kids -- not trying to pick on anybody -- but they had him all huddled up in
a huddle there.

You know, just really talking to him. ... And you know you do your best at
home and you try to explain, you tell and do everything you know how ... I
think that's a pretty compelling interest [to drug test], to protect my
son."

McEachern played on that fear in the first case brought to trial, that of
Joe Moore. McEachern portrayed the 67-year-old Moore, a central figure in
the black community, as a drug dealer who preyed on school kids. In the
trial, Moore, who had two prior felony convictions (one for cocaine
possession in 1990) was sentenced to 99 years for two counts of delivering
an eight-ball of powdered cocaine to Coleman.

Though McEachern described him as one of the four major dealers, if not the
major dealer, in Tulia, Moore's dilapidated house in the heart of the black
neighborhood does not suggest affluence.

His yard is filled with junk he collected to sell for scrap.

According to his girlfriend of 20 years, Thelma Mae Johnson, Moore had made
a living for the last decade largely by raising hogs, which he fed with
waste grain scavenged from grain elevators.

On the day Johnson accompanied me to view the kingpin's estate, a Hispanic
junk dealer and his son were towing off -- on four flats -- Moore's
30-year-old International Harvester truck.

Moore, who agreed to be interviewed at the Middleton Unit near Abilene,
claims he never dealt cocaine.

He is a mountainous man with huge hands and shoulders so broad that two sets
of cuffs had to be linked together when he was arrested.

He speaks slowly, in a heavy country accent through missing teeth. As one of
Tulia's longest black residents, over the decades Moore's fortune has been a
barometer for the rise and fall of black Tulia. Moore, or "Bootie-Wootie" as
he is affectionately known in the black community, came to Tulia with his
family in the 1950s. Now stooped and limping, he was once legendary for his
stamina as a hay loader and his ability to toss bales onto a truck
one-handed.

Most residents of the African-American community in Swisher County trace
their roots to farm laborers who arrived a generation before Moore and lived
in shacks on the white-owned farms where they worked.

Entire families picked cotton or soybeans and grew their own vegetables. The
second generation of black people moved off the farms to work at the town's
many grain elevators or other ag-processing jobs. By the early 1970s, most
black men in Tulia worked at the Taylor-Evans seed company.

Black women, meanwhile, worked mainly at the Royal Park garment factory.

Moore has not always been a hog farmer, and his history with Swisher County
law enforcement extends to an earlier generation. Moore made his living
during the Seventies -- black Tulia's heyday -- as a bootlegger. Like much
of the Panhandle, Swisher County never legalized alcohol sales after
prohibition. In practice, however, the county remains dry for blacks only.
Whites drink legally at two unofficially segregated private clubs outside
the city limits: the country club, where Tulia's more affluent citizens
meet, and Johnny Nix's, which caters to farmers and cowboys.

For blacks, there is bootlegging.

For 20 years, Joe Moore and his brothers ran the only bar in Tulia, stocked
with illegal beer purchased 19 miles away in Nazareth, the nearest wet town.
The juke joint, known as Funz-a-Poppin', was the worst-kept secret in town,
according to Moore. It was located in an old converted hotel in
"Niggertown," as Tulia's black west side was commonly called.

Moore was bartender, bootlegger, and eventually caretaker for his three
older brothers, each of whom died of cirrhosis.

He became a central figure in Tulia's black community, where he was known as
someone who could help out a single mother from time to time, or advise a
neighbor having trouble with the sheriff.

Moore and his brothers were convicted of bootlegging in the early 1980s and
fined, but the police never tried to shut down the bar, according to Moore.
Instead, they put him on the "slow payment plan." Every month, Moore says,
he reported to the sheriff's office and paid $200 in cash, all of which was
proceeds from bootlegging. Moore cannot read or write.

He says he received receipts for the money, but has no idea where it went,
or what happened to the records after the bar was demolished in 1992. Terry
McEachern has been trying to put him in jail, he says, ever since.

Many of the buildings on Tulia's west side (now referred to as the "Sunset
Addition"), including Moore's place, were pulled down in the early 1990s to
make room for a planned expansion of I-27 that never materialized. Moore's
girlfriend Johnson said she and some friends later tried to organize a
private social club in an empty storefront, so blacks would have a legal
place to drink and socialize.

The city quickly responded with an ordinance banning private drinking clubs
within the city limits, and the idea died. Evening entertainment for blacks
is confined mostly to house parties now, according to Billy Wafer, who moved
to Tulia from Plainview because he felt it was a better place to raise his
kids. "We get everybody over, drink, listen to music, talk real loud and
tell lies, stuff like that," he said. Since the bust, though, things have
been quiet in the black community. "Right now the atmosphere with the blacks
is real scared," he said. "We don't know which way to turn without the law
messing with us."

Losing Funz-a-Poppin' was a blow to a black community already in decline.
The closing of Royal Park in 1979, followed by massive layoffs at
Taylor-Evans in 1985, devastated black Tulia. Families relocated to
Plainview or Amarillo, to work in the beef-packing industry.

Young people increasingly began to leave after high school and not return.

Taylor-Evans finally closed its Tulia facility in 1995, leaving the Wal-Mart
Distribution Center in Plainview as the leading employer of blacks from
Tulia. Women now largely work as maids or home health care workers, or at
the nursing home in Tulia. "There just aren't many places for them to work,"
County Judge Harold Keeter explained, referring to the predicament of the
young blacks rounded up in the Tulia bust. Mattie White, who had three
children arrested in the raid, including Donnie Smith, has a different take
on the local economy. "There's plenty of kids my children's age working in
the bank and in the department stores," she said. "But they're all white."

A Dirty Job

The bust went through a brief but widespread news cycle around the state,
and Terry McEachern and Sheriff Larry Stewart have grown weary of fielding
questions, particularly about the racial aspects of the sting.

Yet several other questions about the operation remain unanswered. According
to his own testimony, Coleman resolved his Cochran County theft charge by
paying $6,700 in restitution sometime during the summer of 1998. But where
Coleman got the money is unclear.

His task force salary during that period, according to county records, was
about $23,000 per year. According to a garnishment order from the attorney
general's office, $200 of his paycheck was being garnished each month for
child support during this period.

After taxes and garnishment, he was taking home less than $1,500 per month.

How did he come up with so much money in such a short period of time?
Coleman testified in January that he received no outside income while he
worked for the task force. By February, his story had changed.

His mother had given him several thousand dollars, he testified.

By April, the scenario was that a friend of the family loaned money to his
mother, who in turn gave the money to Coleman.

Several defense attorneys are working on another theory, one that may answer
several questions about the operation.

In order to get a higher rate of return on their investment, dealers cut
cocaine with a variety of relatively inexpensive substances, usually mild
anesthetics. In at least one case, the head of the Amarillo DPS narcotics
lab testified that the powdered cocaine introduced into evidence by Coleman
was unusually weak. Wafer's attorney, Brent Hamilton, has requested that all
of the cocaine obtained in the 100-plus buys be tested at the same time, to
determine if a common source could be found (i.e. if they are all cut with
the same amount of the same substance), and to see if the same knife or
scissors was used to cut all of the baggies holding the drug. A common
source would support a devastating theory: that Coleman himself bought a
quantity of powder, perhaps in Amarillo, cut it very weak, and put it into
evidence for buys he never actually made. He could then use the task force
money for the buys he reported making to pay his restitution.

After leaving Hamilton's request pending for several months, Judge Self has
agreed to allow five randomly selected samples to be tested.

That test has yet to be performed.

Coleman would not be the first West Texas narc to con his own handlers.

In 1989, more than 25 indictments were dismissed in Sutton County when an
undercover operation put together by local law enforcement came to pieces.
Sutton County Attorney David W. Wallace says he recalls having misgivings
from the start. "I stayed as far away from it as I could.

They hired a non-DPS narcotics agent with a spotted history, or maybe they
didn't check his history at all," Wallace said. "And he goes out and looks
for people that are doing drugs.

And based on his statements he is successful. But when the trials start
coming around they find out maybe this guy isn't as honest and truthful as
he holds himself out to be."

After several cases had already gone to trial in Sutton County, the
undercover agent, Lonnie Hood, was discovered to have planted evidence and
falsified reports during an unrelated operation in Taylor County. As in
Tulia, most of the Sutton County defendants had been in jail since the day
they were arrested.

Several had already been sent to prison.

All were eventually released.

In the aftermath, both the county and the district attorney's office were
sued.

Roaming narcs-for-hire like Coleman have a poor reputation in the
law-enforcement community, says Amarillo defense attorney Jeff Blackburn.
"They're at the bottom of the food chain.

Other cops don't trust them." According to Coleman's ex-wife Barnett,
Coleman applied to be a state trooper numerous times. "He's been riding on
his daddy's shirttails for years, tryin' to be like his daddy," she said.
Coleman was working as a welder in Midland when he heard about the job in
Swisher County. After burning his bridges with his past two law enforcement
employers, deep cover may have been his last chance to redeem himself as an
officer.

But Lawman of the Year? Those who know him aren't buying it. "Tom is very
crooked," said his ex-wife. "I would not be surprised a bit" that he
fabricated buys, she said. "He's the type of guy that would do something
like that," one of Coleman's former co-workers in Pecos County agreed. "I
guarantee you Tom Coleman didn't make no 50 buys."

The Stranger in Town

Coleman declined to be interviewed for this story.

Approached outside of the courtroom in Amarillo, he would only say that his
critics have it all wrong. "I got it all straight.

I lived with them, I ate with them. I was them," he said.

But was he? Donnie Smith said he never even got close. "He was never at no
parties, man," as Coleman had claimed in court.

If he had been, "it would be like, 'He gots to go,'" Smith said. But he was
also not a member of Tulia's white community.

Why was a small community so ready to turn on its own, based solely on the
word of a stranger?

It was not as if the defendants were unknown to the juries.

The County Judge testified in Donnie Smith's case that he had known Smith
for years and helped him get into rehab the first time he became addicted,
out of fondness for the former football star. "The guilty verdicts don't
have anything to do with the evidence," one defense lawyer said. "What
they've done is they've rounded up all the people with bad reputations that
they've had trouble with in the past. Then they use this guy and his
testimony as a vehicle for the juries to run 'em out of town."

In fact, the list of defendants read like a Who's Who of Tulia High sports
heroes from years past. But that was then. "As long as you're in school,
playin' sports, and winnin' for them, you're all right," Smith said. "Once
you get out, if you don't move away, you in trouble.

That's basically the way it is. And if you're a white or Spanish guy hangin'
out with the blacks, you already in trouble." That idea seemed to have
particular resonance in the black community.

All the whites arrested in the bust had ties to the black community (though
none of them were paraded before the cameras on the morning of July 23).

Ironically, it was one of those white suspects, William Cash Love, who made
the only delivery in the entire operation of any substantial size: an ounce
(28 grams) of crack cocaine.

For that crime, along with several smaller deliveries, Love received a
sentence of 434 years.

The sentiment in the black community is that Love, a young white man who
spent his entire life in the company of blacks, and who married a black
woman (Donnie Smith's sister Kizzie), was singled out to send a message
about his lifestyle choice. "When we saw Cash, we didn't see white.

We saw black," Billy Wafer explained. "They don't want 'em crossing over."
The younger generation in Tulia is much less prejudiced, says Wafer. "The
young white kids are so intrigued by the slang, the talk, the way of life,
how them young black kids walk the street all the time," he said. "That's
what they're so fearful of, the influence on their kids, and that's the
reason things are happening the way they are now."

Nate Blakeslee is a staff writer at The Texas Observer, where a version of
this story first appeared.
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