Pubdate: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 Source: Houston Press (TX) Copyright: 2001 New Times, Inc. Contact: http://www.houston-press.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/199 Authors: Tim Carman and Steve McVicker Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) DRUG MONEY Narcotics Task Forces In Texas Spend Millions Of Dollars Each Year Busting Low-Level Users And Dealers. Is It Money Well Spent, Or Are Officers Just Addicted To Easy Cash? Just over a year ago, the small Texas Panhandle town of Tulia, located in Swisher County, made national headlines when police rounded up more than 10 percent of the city's African-Americans and jailed them on drug charges. All of the arrests and charges were based on the uncorroborated word of one officer: Deputy Tom Coleman of the Swisher County sheriff's office. Coleman was a lawman with a checkered past. He had been charged with theft in Cochran County before signing on with Swisher County, where he was working as an undercover narcotics officer. He was also known as a "gypsy cop," a sort of hired gun who bounced from one law enforcement agency to the next -- usually one of the dozens of federally funded regional antidrug task forces that have sprung up around the state since they began forming in the late 1980s. At the time of the Tulia busts, Coleman, through his employment with the sheriff's office, was once again working for a regional antidrug outfit, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force. First chronicled in the Texas Observer, the arrests soon were reported by newspapers and television and radio stations around the state as well as by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post. But the events that occurred last summer in Tulia did not happen in a vacuum. Nor was the targeting of minorities and the poor a tactic employed by only the Panhandle task force. Instead, Tulia was just the most visible example of these problems as they relate to regional drug task forces in Texas -- which last year received $31 million in federal money through a U.S. Department of Justice grant program known as the Edward Byrne Memorial Fund. By far the largest funder of these narcotics-fighting groups, the Byrne Fund has distributed billions of dollars to drug task forces across the nation. Additionally, some of those Texas task forces -- especially the ones in rural areas -- are now being accused of employing their own Tulia-like tactics in dealing with the drug problems in their communities. In places like Brady, Hearne, Caldwell, Brownwood, Chambers County and elsewhere, critics say task force members have relied on unreliable informants to make cases against small-time, street-level drug users and dealers who are nowhere close to the epicenter of the narcotics problem in Texas. Task force officials defend the program by pointing out that all illegal drugs are, well, illegal. But civil rights activists charge that the task force system is the latest example of an enormously expensive misplaced priority in the so-called war on drugs, a war that they say focuses on the poor and people of color rather than the real players in the narcotics trade. "The fundamental problem is that you have these task forces out there operating with little or no supervision, and absolutely no state or federal accountability," says Texas American Civil Liberties Union president Will Harrell. "No one is accepting responsibility. And the task forces have one motive and one motive only: to produce numbers, lest they lose their funding for the next year. But no one questions how they go about their business." ---------------------------------------- It was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that the United States declared war on drugs. In a February 1988 speech in Mexico, Reagan went so far as to proclaim that the crusade was "an untold American success story" and that illegal drug use had "already gone out of style in the United States." He could not have been more wrong, as the billions of dollars that have been spent on drugs and fighting them since prove. Each June, the beginning of the Byrne Fund's fiscal year, the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance distributes the millions in federal dollars to state agencies around the country. It is the states that send monies down the line to the various task forces within their boundaries. This past June, Texas received a fresh fix of $31,636,000 earmarked for state task forces. Just like every year, the grant was sent from the federal government to the Texas Narcotics Control Program, a branch of the criminal justice division of the Texas governor's office, with its own current two-year budget of $176 million. One of the main tasks of the TNCP is the distribution of Byrne Fund money among the state's task forces. Only multijurisdictional task forces -- the ones that include peace officers from law enforcement agencies in multiple jurisdictions -- are eligible for the grant money. Federal guidelines allow for 100 percent funding of a task force, but they also encourage in-kind funding by the participating agencies. In 1994 there was a push in the Justice Department to abolish the Byrne grants program, the reason being that the task forces were inefficient, redundant and bad about sharing information. According to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Justice Programs, the Byrne grant program "was never intended to be a continual grant to the states." Townsend, daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy and now the lieutenant governor of Maryland, adds that the funds would continue to be available for use by the states, but that the "dollars will be focused on programs that work." However, the plan to eliminate the program generated a firestorm of criticism from rural lawmakers and law enforcement agencies, and today more federal money than ever is being pumped into antidrug task forces in Texas and around the country via the Byrne Fund. And that trend shows no sign of abatement, even though, beginning with the revelations in Tulia, the last year has not been a good one for the Texas Narcotics Control Program. ------------------------------------ Hearne, Texas, is a long way from Hollywood, California. Situated on State Highway 6 about 120 miles northwest of Houston, Hearne, with a population of just over 5,000, is the largest city in Robertson County. It is an area that is less than vibrant economically. Those who own the gently rolling hills try to eke out a living working the land. Most of the rest are forced to commute to either Waco or the Bryan-College Station area for work. But despite the sleepy nature of the city, Hearne residents say that last November their town could have been mistaken for an action-adventure movie set when members of the South Central Narcotics Task Force began rounding up alleged drug dealers and users in the community. As police vehicles sped through the streets, task force members even called in a chopper for aerial surveillance. In all, 28 people were arrested. Most were black, and many were residents of Columbus Village, a federally subsidized low-income housing project located in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in east Hearne, just down the street from an elementary school. Both the school and the housing project are, by law, drug-free zones. That means that penalties for drug-related crimes committed in those areas are automatically enhanced. At first the arrests were not that alarming to Hearne residents, who had watched passively as the busts occurred every year since the late 1980s, when task forces and the Byrne Fund first came into being. But then the numbers started piling up: From October 1998 to December 2000, according to records obtained by the Houston Press under the Texas Open Records law, the eight-member South Central task force filed 574 charges, although some defendants were charged more than once. The task force's records are poorly kept, but of the suspects who had a race attached to their names, 257 out of 364 were African-Americans. Only 34 of the cases involved more than four grams of cocaine or crack. The task force made three major seizures during this period: 4.16 pounds of cocaine, 90 grams of methamphetamine and 312 pounds of marijuana. South Central's budget for this period was $972,238; if you divide that figure by the number of charges filed, it comes out to $1,694 per charge. At the same time, if you crunch the salary figures, the task force members made an average of nearly $36,000 annually. "Every year they just round up a bunch of black men and women," says Charles Workman, who is a member of the Hearne City Council as well as president of the area chapter of the NAACP. "If you've got gold teeth, you're fit to profile," says hospital administrator Helen Boone. But while the annual raids had reached the point of familiarity to Workman and Boone, last November's police action did catch the attention of both parents, since each had a son arrested during the roundup and charged with delivery of a controlled substance. "I guess in the past it's been pretty easy for them to get away with this, because blacks are easy prey," says Workman, a slow-talking man who chooses his words carefully. "Automatically, if you arrest a black kid, everybody says he's guilty, and nobody asks any questions. Blacks don't have any money to get lawyers. So it's easy to get them and send them off to prison. No problem. And they've been doing it for about 15 years." So Workman decided to do something about it. He decided to fight. Rather, he hired someone to fight for him: Brad Wyatt, a Bryan-based attorney who looks like the redheaded, freckle-faced good ol' boy next door. As Wyatt investigated, he began to see similarities in many of the 28 arrests from the November busts. Most were black, most were poor, and most lived at the Columbus Village housing project. Additionally, Wyatt says that although the crimes were alleged to have taken place seven months earlier in April, some of the defendants had solid alibis, including his client, Corvian Workman. "It just so happened that my client, at the time of this alleged drug deal, was at his grandmother's house with about 40 family members in attendance for a birthday party," says Wyatt. "Corvie was actually cooking chicken-fried steak at the party." Perhaps most significant was the fact that the younger Workman and many of the others arrested had been fingered on the word of an undercover informant, 27-year-old Derrick Megress, who was already on probation for burglary and unauthorized used of a motor vehicle. He is also an admitted former drug dealer. To avoid jail time, Megress testified, he signed an agreement with the Robertson County district attorney's office -- headed by D.A. John Paschall, who was also in charge of the task force -- to produce 20 drug arrests. In addition to his freedom, Megress earned $100 for each person he helped bust. During Workman's trial, under questioning by Wyatt, Megress admitted that he had violated the terms of his agreement with the D.A.'s office by using drugs while working as an informant. Wyatt also was able to show that, in violation of task force protocol, Megress had not been in plain view of a task force member during the alleged drug buys. Additionally, Wyatt pointed out that Megress's wife lived at the housing project. And he theorized that Megress, once out of sight of task force officers, was able to slip into his wife's unit, retrieve drugs he had already stashed there, and then bring the drugs back to the officers with the story that he had purchased them from a Columbus Village resident. Wyatt knew it would not be easy to sell his theory to a small-town jury. "You have these people from whatever walk of life they are from," says Wyatt. "They walk into a courtroom, and they see a young black man sitting at the defense table. And their first thought is 'I wonder what this guy did.' And when they hear the word 'cocaine,' they start making assumptions. The presumption of innocence is supposed to be there. But in order to get somebody to recognize that presumption of innocence, and maintain it, you got to change the way they think. And it's real tough to do. They have no point of reference. All they know is drugs and black male." In March, a Robertson County jury, composed of 11 whites and one black, deadlocked 11-to-1 for the acquittal of Corvian Workman. A few weeks after the trial, with the credibility of his informant in shambles, the district attorney of Robertson County dismissed the charges against Workman and 16 other people who had been arrested during the November roundup. Wyatt says that thinking about the 11 defendants who pled out before he raised questions about the legitimacy of the arrests sends "a chill up my spine." Both the ACLU and the NAACP have asked the Justice Department to investigate. District Attorney Paschall "does have to bear some responsibility," says Wyatt. "He took taxpayer funds, and he expended them on this confidential informant, which was a waste of taxpayers' money. In the end, he did the right thing" by dropping the charges. "But his motives may have been the scrutiny and the fact that he couldn't get a conviction. He had to cover his ass." But Paschall, who has been replaced as head of the task force, has not been the only official in Robertson County with an exposed derriere. Following the arrests in November, Hearne city councilman Workman introduced an idea that he believed would deal with the city's drug dealers and users in a more evenhanded way. Workman's plan, which initially was approved by the council, called for the city to spend $370,000 to hire North Carolina-based private security company ShadowGuard to enforce drug laws in Hearne for four months -- and to put an end to racial profiling while enforcing those laws. "From your words to God's ears," says ShadowGuard president Rick Castillo. "Because that's basically what we found. Hearne, Texas, is 50 years behind the times in terms of anything relating to affirmative action." Castillo found that in a city where African-Americans make up almost 50 percent of the population, there was not one person of color on its police force. In addition to bringing in its own officers, who would have been licensed by the state of Texas, ShadowGuard would have trained the Hearne Police Department in the area of narcotics law enforcement. The company also planned a computer system upgrade and the legally questionable installation of a closed-circuit television system throughout the city to spot possible drug deals going down -- regardless of who was making them. "You have these kids that make a few dollars" selling drugs, says Workman, who is also a Baptist minister. "Which I don't agree with. Meanwhile, the guys who are making thousands and thousands of dollars go free. ShadowGuard wasn't going to leave anybody out. And that scared a lot of people." Indeed, following the approval of the ShadowGuard contract, threatening telephone calls were made to the home of a black city councilmember, 69-year-old Thelma Drennan, one of three they want us to do? Trace it all the way back to Colombia?" ------------------------------------ The case of 30-year-old Iletha Spencer, who is also represented by Roberts, in many ways parallels that of Harrell. Spencer is an unemployed single mother of four children, who range in age from eight years to two and a half. Until recently, she and her brood lived in a federally subsidized house in Brady. In March, as part of 32 indictments handed down from a McCulloch County grand jury, she was forced to move out of the dwelling after she was arrested for selling less than a gram of cocaine to an undercover member of the Southwest Texas task force, based in Junction. Officer Larry Stamps arrived on the scene last summer when the task force set him up in a unit at a federal Housing and Urban Development apartment complex in Brady. The move was designed to ensure than any drug buys that Stamps made there would automatically carry a stiffer penalty. As part of his cover, Stamps was known at the housing project as Delbert, not Larry. Spencer was introduced to Stamps by her girlfriend Gracie, who was dating Stamps's undercover partner. Spencer says Stamps came off as the original party animal. Every time she saw him he was drinking; he would show up at all hours of the day and night looking for drugs and flashing cash at people not accustomed to having much money. Both Spencer and Gracie were impressed with the two new big spenders. "I saw the money," says Spencer. "I counted $300 or $400. He was always buying beer and stuff like that. They're dealing with people that live in low-income houses, and here this guy is forking out the money. Well, yeah, you're going to think he's cool. But I guess he knew what he was doing. He did us all like that." Eighteen-year-old Trista Hoard agrees. Hoard's 17-year-old brother, Justin, also was named in the indictments that came down this spring, about nine months after Stamps arrived. It troubles Hoard that a drug task force officer like Stamps would spend so much time hanging around teenagers from the poor side of town like her and her brother. "We all partied and barbecued at this guy's house," says the pregnant Hoard, adding that the gatherings remained fairly innocent and juvenile. "We had water fights. We would just sit out there all the time. Then he just starts throwing money at us. I mean giving us money, practically. And [the police] know that if we're living in government apartments, you don't have that much money. You throw $700 at a kid, what are they going to do? Turn around and say no? I mean, come on." Of the 32 Brady residents indicted, not one was accused of having or selling more than a small amount of marijuana, meth or coke. Twenty-year-old Neal Solomon was among those charged with delivery of a controlled substance -- one gram, to be exact. He is the son of 40-year-old white-bearded, gimme cap-wearing James Solomon, who ekes out a living at SureFed Mills. At the time the Press interviewed James Solomon in March, Neal had not yet turned himself in to authorities. Solomon acknowledges that his son has a prior conviction for possessing just over a gram of cocaine. Still, after taking a look at the Brady arrest list, he has a hard time believing that the task force is making the best use of its taxpayer-provided resources. "There's nothing I can do to get my boy out of this," says Solomon. "But in the long run, when they quit going after the little guys who are just trying to make a buck or two, they ought to try going after people who are making thousands." It's a sentiment echoed again and again, and loudly by Peggy Parker, the outspoken mother of Iletha Spencer. Parker notes that the alleged drug deals were supposed to have taken place in September 2000, or seven months before her daughter and the 31 other defendants were indicted. "If they want to get it off the streets," asks Parker, "why don't they go after the ones who are selling it out of their homes? [Stamps] knew some of them, because he was carried to their houses. For seven months he's been doing this, and he doesn't know who the drug dealers are?" While Stamps and the task force may not know the names of drug dealers higher up the food chain, the citizens of Brady are definitely aware of the suspects snared in the busts last spring. All the names were printed on the front page of the two weekly Brady newspapers for two weeks running. Many business owners clipped the box and posted it in their stores and shops. Spencer says everyone on the list is immediately turned away when applying for a job -- whether they were convicted or not. Spencer has yet to come to trial, and she declines to say whether she helped Stamps acquire any drugs. But that didn't stop her from venting. "We're not drug dealers," Spencer insists. "He didn't bust drug dealers. He busted people who went and did a favor for him and got him drugs. We weren't selling the stuff out of our houses. People knew where to get it, and they picked it up and gave it to him. But they didn't mess with the drug dealers." The Southwest Texas Narcotics Task Force, established just last year, is messing with the Press, however. It has appealed to the Texas attorney general's office regarding the paper's Texas Open Records request for information on its arrests and seizures. Stamps, meanwhile, has moved on to the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force in Palestine, where the Press tried to contact him, without success. -------------------------------- A question lingers: Why do these drug task forces remain in business despite their well-documented problems, their poor arrest records and their emphasis on low-level dealers and users? The answer is simple: Because there's money available. Established in 1988 to honor a fallen New York City police officer, the Edward Byrne Memorial Fund, in just the past five years, has distributed approximately $2.5 billion in grants to drug task forces nationally, with $160 million of it going to Texas, where it is divvied up among the almost 50 tasks forces operating in the state. Those task forces are as addicted to the federal cash injections as the junkies are to their dope. And according to critics, they're more concerned with making as many busts as possible to keep their arrest numbers up and their funding high than they are on concentrating on time-consuming investigations that might net large-scale dealers. The Texas Narcotics Control Program, the division of the governor's office that distributes Byrne Fund money to state task forces, has come under heat itself. In June the Austin American-Statesman reported that Robert J. "Duke" Bodisch, the head of the program, was reassigned when an audit revealed that he borrowed three cars from one of the task forces. The report also showed that for five years the TNCP had used Byrne funds to buy awards, gifts, alcoholic beverages and entertainment -- spending that appeared to fall outside the guidelines governing the use of the Byrne money. The Press contacted Bodisch about task forces in general before his reassignment, but he declined to be interviewed. This is not the first instance of alleged abuses of task force money. In June 1998 then-governor George W. Bush's office stopped funding for the Permian Basin Drug Task Force amid allegations of falsified meal tickets, doctored quarterly reports on confiscations, and other irregularities. The task force was abolished that summer. "Some of them are run well. Some are not run well. It's very political," says former task force officer Barbara Markham. "And it's definitely not money well spent." --------------------------------- With her skinny frame, sleepy eyes and cigarette voice, 41-year-old Markham comes off like a doper. It's a good look to have if you happen to be an undercover narcotics officer -- which she used to be. Markham got her start in law enforcement in 1983. At the time, she was in making the drug: anhydrous ammonia. The substance is in abundance in the county because farmers use it to fertilize their fields. Normally anhydrous ammonia goes for about $400 a ton; on the black market, it brings $300 a gallon. In addition to his job as sheriff, which he has held for the past five years, Yezak is also project director of the South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force. He was appointed to replace Robertson County District Attorney John Paschall early this year -- right about the time questions emerged about the drug arrests in Hearne last November. Yezak had no part in those raids, and he refuses to fault his predecessor's penchant for targeting street-corner dealers and small-time users. He points out that the possession and sale of illegal drugs is against the law, period, regardless of the amount. That said, however, Yezak also indicates that the priorities of the South Central task force will be different under his watch. He wants his team to spend more time looking at the big picture. Specifically, he plans to target the meth labs that have moved into his territory. As for the millions of dollars that pour into the Texas drug task forces each year, Yezak acknowledges that it's a lot of money but believes it is money well spent. His task force commander, Joe Davis, agrees, insisting that rural Texas counties like Robertson just don't have the tax base to adequately fund a war on drugs. One of Yezak's first moves after taking over was to hire Davis, a small dark-haired man with 16 years of law enforcement experience, away from the Brazos Valley Task Force in nearby Bryan. Brazos Valley has a reputation as a well-run operation, and Davis has a reputation as a stand-up officer -- even among criminal defense attorneys. "I can tell you this," says Bryan attorney Brad Wyatt, who defended Corvian Workman in the Hearne drug raids last November, "based on my experience with this guy in the past, things are going to change in Robertson County -- for the better." As to why he brought in Davis as the new commander, Yezak is again diplomatic, and deftly avoids saying that it was because he was unhappy with the way the unit was being run. "The old commander worked for the D.A.," says Yezak, between spitting sunflower seed shells into a cup. "He didn't work for me. If I'm going to have somebody running [the task force], and I'm the project director, I'm going to have somebody who works for me. Somebody who answers to me." Davis isn't one to criticize, either. But he believes his predecessor's problems -- indeed, the problems of the task force -- stemmed from poor supervision of confidential informants. Davis says he plans to avoid that problem by strictly limiting how and when his officers use informants. Of course, starting this month, Davis, Yezak and all the other Texas task forces really don't have any choice but to change their ways. -------------------------------------------------- On September 1, a new state law went into effect limiting the use of confidential informants in court. Drug convictions may no longer be based on uncorroborated testimony from a single informant. The new law is one of several battles won during the last session of the Texas legislature by a coalition of groups including the ACLU and the NAACP. The legislature also made it easier to obtain background information on law enforcement officers. The measure resulted from the revelations about undercover officer Tom Coleman, whose theft charge (later dropped) was discovered after his busts in Tulia as part of the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force. Meanwhile, Coleman continues his gypsy ways. He left the Panhandle task force and found new employment with the Southeast Dallas County/Ellis County Task Force in Waxahachie. This past April, however, Coleman was fired. The Amarillo Globe-News quoted Ellis County District Attorney Joe Grubb as saying Coleman's termination did not involve any of his work as an undercover officer. "It involved his relationship with an individual in the community." In addition to calling for a Justice Department probe of Coleman's actions and last summer's arrests in Tulia, the ACLU also is pushing for federal probes of the task force actions in Brownwood and Brady. What's more, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have interviewed former undercover task force officer Barbara Markham about her allegations of at least 150 trumped-up drug charges filed against persons arrested by the Narcotics Trafficking Task Force of Chambers and Liberty Counties. Markham currently works for the small Oak Forest Police Department on Lake Lewisville near Denton. After seven years of going under cover for task forces, she would never work for another one -- even if she wanted to. "I'm completely blackballed," says Markham, "but I wouldn't work for a task force again." Editorial assistant Kirsten Bubier helped compile statistics for this story.