Pubdate: Tue, 05 Mar 2002
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption)

DRUG BUSTS GONE BAD, THEN WORSE

Crime: Dallas is Hit by Claims of Planted, Fake Cocaine and Corrupt Cops 
and Informants.

DALLAS -- The bogus drug busts are notorious: Mexican immigrants were 
jailed, went broke or got deported, only to have the evidence against them 
fall apart. The bricks of white powder they were charged with peddling 
turned out to be plaster of Paris--not cocaine or speed, as police had 
claimed. In all, more than 70 arrests have come unstrung this winter in a 
very public crescendo of bad cop work and shoddy prosecution.

Now Dallas is in an uproar. Federal investigators are probing the police 
department. Scores of drug prosecutions have been dismissed. Two narcotics 
detectives have been suspended. And a scandal that started in the dingy 
streets on the outskirts of town has worked its way into the city's 
political machinery.

"It's like watching a slow train wreck," said Paul Coggins, former U.S. 
attorney for the northern district of Texas. "We may never know exactly 
what happened." If truth can be gleaned at all, it will be extracted from a 
tangled constellation of cops, drug pushers and immigrants. The informants 
blame crooked detectives. The detectives blame corrupt tipsters and drug 
dealers who, they say, were trying to rip off their clients with worthless 
products. The onetime suspected drug dealers--who are expected to file a 
bevy of civil rights lawsuits against the city--blame a vast, racist 
conspiracy.

Jose Luis Vega was beneath the belly of an old car the day police swarmed 
into the garage where he worked. It was a sticky afternoon in August, and 
Vega--a 35-year-old from Mexico who doesn't speak English--had just 
finished lunch. Before he could figure out why uniformed officers were 
rushing into Samuel's Transmission Shop, his wrists were cuffed and he was 
squeezed into the back seat of a police cruiser.

"What did I do." he called in Spanish to a passing officer who looked to be 
Latino.

"You know already," came the reply. While curious neighbors craned their 
necks, Vega was taken away. Charged with intent to deliver cocaine, he 
didn't walk out of jail until October, when the 56 pounds of powder seized 
during his arrest turned out to be plasterboard. With her husband behind 
bars, 28-year-old Adriana Vega peddled homemade tacos and menudo on the 
sidewalks of Dallas to pay the bills. "You can't imagine the anguish," she 
said.

Cynthia Barbare, a hometown defense lawyer who roams the halls of justice 
with a Yorkshire terrier tucked under one arm, has seen plenty of drug 
pushers. But Vega didn't seem the type: He bore the rugged face and greasy 
nails of a man who works for a living. The Vegas share a cramped bungalow 
in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood of Laundromats, chain-link fences and vacant 
lots across the muddy Trinity River from downtown Dallas. He drove an old 
pickup and put in long hours at the garage.

The mechanic and his wife struck Barbare as honest, but it was more than 
that. The whole bust was peculiar: Who would leave $1 million worth of 
cocaine in a broken-down--and unlocked--Cadillac on the lawn of an old 
garage. If Vega were a dealer, where was his cash. Why wasn't he packing a 
gun. Moreover, Barbare didn't understand why investigators swept in and 
arrested Vega without questioning him--he didn't own the shop or the car. 
And after all that, no federal authorities had been notified of the large 
cocaine seizure.

"There were red flags everywhere," Barbare said. "If you've got drugs in 
that volume, you want to get at the source. The first thing you're going to 
do is interrogate. The second thing you're going to do is call the feds. 
That wasn't happening."

The lawyer sent the alleged cocaine to a laboratory for testing and hooked 
Vega up to a private polygraph machine. That, it turned out, was the big 
break. As the polygraph operator listened to Vega's responses, he turned to 
Barbare with a frown.

"You're not going to believe this," the operator told the lawyer, "but I 
just did a case for [another Dallas defense attorney] that sounded exactly 
like this."

That was how Barbare began to string the rotten busts together. The 
polygraph operator was right: The details in the second case were 
uncomfortably similar. The suspect: a Mexican immigrant. The place: a 
mechanic shop. The drug: cocaine--lots of it. The arresting detectives: 
Mark Delapaz and Eddie Herrera, the same duo that put Vega behind bars.

"I knew right then," Barbare said, "there's a conspiracy here."

The day the laboratory results came back, yet another Mexican family 
trudged into Barbare's office. A mechanic named Abel Santos was stuck in 
jail, they explained. The police said he had been selling cocaine out of 
his neighborhood auto shop. He had been arrested by a pair of detectives 
who quickly were becoming familiar to Barbare: Delapaz and Herrera.

It was a setup, the family insisted. Somebody had planted cocaine in an 
abandoned car at the garage, they said, and Santos had been framed.

Barbare and Tony Wright, the other lawyer, spread the word in the 
courthouse corridors: There's phony dope out there. Get the laboratory 
tests. Don't plead out.

In some cases, it was too late. For months, nobody had questioned the 
authenticity of the drugs or the integrity of the arrests. Some of the 
mechanics and day laborers who languished in jail, unable to make bond, 
claimed they had been framed. But such complaints are common. Some of the 
court-appointed lawyers urged the suspected drug dealers to plead guilty.

"I said, 'Look, what do you think the jury will think when it's your word 
against a police officer.' " said Bill Stovall, whose client pleaded 
guilty--and was deported--because he didn't want to risk 15 years in prison 
with a trial. "He said, 'I'd rather be free in Mexico.' "

By the time winter blew down off the Oklahoma plains, the cases were 
falling apart at an alarming rate. On New Year's Eve, as scandal 
percolated, Police Chief Terrell Bolton called a news conference.

The day Bolton faced reporters, 16 drug cases had been thrown out, and 
scores more were soon to follow. Bolton admitted his detectives had paid a 
top informant hundreds of thousands of dollars for tips that ended up 
leading to phony drugs. But Bolton argued that the detectives should be 
congratulated for saving unwitting junkies from poisoning themselves with 
fake dope. "Let this be a warning: You don't know what you're getting out 
there," he said.

By mid-January, 30 more cases had been dismissed and activists were holding 
vigils outside police headquarters. What had started out as a peculiar 
plague of fake dope had grown into a federal probe--and a festering 
political problem.

Mayor Laura Miller called for an explanation. In the midst of his campaign 
for reelection, Dist. Atty. Bill Hill is fending off accusations that his 
prosecutors overlooked the faulty cases for months.

Delapaz and Herrera have been suspended with pay since late fall. Their 
lawyers say the partners are good detectives who either were led astray by 
greedy informants or duped by crooked dope peddlers. Under Texas law, they 
point out, a dealer can be prosecuted for selling any substance he believes 
is an illegal drug, even if he's mistaken.

"He's a good cop and he always has been," said Bob Gorsky, who represents 
Delapaz. "We think his name will be cleared, and he'll be back to work."

"They've been [dragged] through the mud," added Bob Baskett, a lawyer for 
the Dallas Police Assn.

The time-honored police practice of buying tips is a risky, and 
high-rolling, proposition. In 2001, Dallas detectives poured about $500,000 
into the pockets of tipsters for information leading to the arrest of drug 
dealers.

That sum was double what they had paid in 2000, but it was considered cash 
well spent until the arrests started to sour. What was touted as the 
biggest cocaine seizure in Dallas County history turned out to be a mother 
lode of ordinary gypsum powder. In the last few months, prosecutors have 
tested the evidence, reviewed arrest records and thrown out half of last 
year's cocaine busts.

The informant linked to tainted case after tainted case--the one Delapaz 
and Herrera worked with most--is a Mexican immigrant, like most of the 
suspects he helped arrest. In total, he has pocketed more than $200,000 for 
drug tips. That's $50,000 more than Chief Bolton earned last year. It's 
four times what the two detectives took home.

"When I heard that, my eyebrows shot up," former U.S. Atty. Coggins said. 
"Unless they handed over Pablo Escobar, you've got to wonder. It defies 
logic that an informant would get that much money."

But if you ask Glenn White, informants never got their hands on the cash. 
White represents a Mexican bartender whose signature appears on some of the 
tip receipts submitted by detectives in connection with dirty busts. But 
there's one hitch: White's client says that he had nothing to do with the 
arrests and that his signature was forged.

"They used him as a patsy or red herring to dilute their money trail," 
White said. "It's horrifying to think about these people strutting around 
the streets in their shiny boots and guns, and maybe they're dirtier than 
the people they're supposed to protect us from."

Since the bogus arrests came to light, the department's policies have been 
revamped. From now on, Bolton promised the City Council, all suspected 
narcotics will be shipped to a laboratory for analysis. "We will do 
whatever it takes," he said.

In the past, suspects were jailed, indicted and encouraged to enter pleas, 
even when the "drugs," as in these cases, had only been identified by field 
test, a notoriously flawed chemical experiment done by detectives at the 
time of arrest. Those days are over. The new laboratory examinations are 
expected to cost Dallas an extra $1 million next year.

But that's nothing next to the sum the city could lose in civil litigation. 
Because one thing is clear: Somebody made money at the expense of people 
who didn't speak English, couldn't pay lawyers' fees and didn't quite know 
their rights. In other words, people who were unlikely to fight back.

"They preyed on ignorance and the inability to maneuver in the system," 
said Adrian Rodriguez, district director of the League of United Latin 
American Citizens. "They picked on easy targets, and they knew what they 
were doing."
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