Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jan 2003
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
Copyright: 2003 Lexington Herald-Leader
Contact:  http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/240
Author: Tom Lasseter And Bill Estep

ADDICTED AND CORRUPTED

DRUG TRADE Infects Eastern Kentucky From Living Room To Courtroom

BEATTYVILLE - Riding down Main Street in the back of a white Corvette
convertible, Michele Moore felt like the prettiest girl in town.

On Sept. 8, 1984, everyone in Beattyville knew she was homecoming queen.

It was her parade.

Moore wore a rhinestone necklace. The sun shone on her bare shoulders and
pink dress. Her blond hair was spritzed and swept back from her face.

She carried a bouquet of roses, and waved and smiled to the crowd, pausing
now and then to adjust a silver tiara.

Her father and mother stood in front of the courthouse, waving back. They'd
saved several copies of that week's edition of The Beattyville Enterprise,
which had Michele's coronation at the top of its front page.

In her diary, Michele wrote: "Won home coming night. The real thing." She
decorated the day's borders with stars.

At age 14, she was the youngest Lee County High School homecoming queen that
anyone could remember. Michele was already thinking of the life that lay
ahead, beyond the close horizons of the little mountain town.

The crowd went by in a slow, sweet way.

Camille Congleton, 8, like so many other girls, watched Michele with wide
eyes. Maybe one day, Camille thought, she could be like Michele.

In time, like too many other girls, she would.

Today, to follow the route of Michele Moore's parade is to tour a town of
broken hearts and quiet shame.

To the left, there's the office of local prosecutor Tom Hall, who wears
cowboy boots and likes to smoke cigars. His stepdaughter stole from him,
court records say, to buy painkillers from a man who later pleaded guilty to
dealing drugs.

A couple blocks down, on the right, is the Purple Cow Restaurant, a
home-cooking diner where the local Kiwanis Club meets. Owner Hazel Davidson
had to post bond after her son was charged with selling OxyContin in 2001.

A little farther, next to the courthouse, former Circuit Judge Ed Jackson,
84, still keeps a law office and knocks away on his 1950s Royal typewriter.
His wife swore out an arrest warrant in 1997 accusing their daughter of
assaulting her, charges she later dropped. By court order, the girl was sent
to a drug-treatment center.

Near the courthouse is a parking lot where police last year said they found
magistrate Ronnie Paul Begley's son with a syringe full of an OxyContin
solution. The charges were diverted on the condition that he join the Army.

Such stories of lives undone, and many more, had piled high enough that by
2001, no one in town could deny it: Beattyville was watching its future be
destroyed, one addict at a time.

People started talking to one another -- police, parents, business leaders
and city officials.

They spoke about their individual experiences, the county's history of
corrupt law enforcement and a general frustration with the courts.

They formed a support/activist group called People Encouraging People, with
a mission of slowing drug abuse.

But prevention alone, they decided, was not enough.

So in the cold, dark morning hours of Dec. 18, 2001, Beattyville police
unveiled Operation Grinch, a Christmastime drug roundup.

Police fanned out across Beattyville to arrest more than four dozen alleged
drug dealers.

In one visit, around 4:30 a.m., police pounded on the door of a mobile home
that sat halfway up a hill behind the courthouse.

No answer. Same thing at 8:30 a.m.

Someone was inside. She just didn't want to come to the door.

When police returned in the afternoon, they smashed their way in. The
suspect was gone.

Michele Moore had fled.

A few hundred yards from where she'd taken her homecoming ride, Moore was no
longer living the life of the town darling.

She was a drug addict, a single mother of two, with a sallow, acne-scarred
face.

After years of intravenous drug use, each of Moore's arms had a half-open
sore, a little smaller than a dime, with the lumpy, gray look of dead flesh.

She was strung out on OxyContin and methamphetamine. Over the years she had
been, in her own words, punched and kicked "like a man" in front of her
children.

The police were carrying a warrant for Moore's arrest on a charge of selling
methamphetamine. She turned herself in three days later and pleaded not
guilty. (The substance turned out not to be methamphetamine -- Moore had
allegedly ripped off the undercover buyer -- and the charge was later
amended to a misdemeanor.)

Inside her mobile home, she had taken down her high school photographs.

"I couldn't look at my pictures, to look at what I was and what I'd become,"
she said.

Moore says she has been to drug treatment three times since her arrest in
December 2001.

Her future, like Beattyville's, remains very much in doubt. As for the
sores, it's hard to tell how much they've healed.

In planning Operation Grinch, Mayor Charles Beach III sought help from the
Kentucky State Police, often a key force in rural drug operations.

Busy with its own cases, KSP didn't get involved.

Beach went to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, as well, but came
away empty-handed. The agency decided that Beattyville's problems didn't
involve the type of gang activity or violent crime required for sending a
street-level enforcement team.

The city was forced to devise, execute and even fund its own large-scale
crackdown -- unusual steps for a town of its size.

Beach didn't want to go solo, but he said he understood other agencies'
reluctance to partner with local police.

"The credibility of law enforcement in Lee County left something to be
desired," Beach said recently.

In 1990, the FBI had busted Lee County Sheriff Johnny Mann and Beattyville
Police Chief Omer Noe for taking money to protect shipments of cocaine and
marijuana.

Authorities said Mann received $44,000 in payoffs and even deputized two FBI
agents who were posing as drug traffickers. He and Noe were convicted of
taking bribes.

In 1995, Sheriff Douglas Brandenburg was sentenced to nine months in prison
after pleading guilty to obstructing a drug investigation. Witnesses
testified that Brandenburg was getting $1,000 a month to protect drug
shipments.

Given that history, "we had to prove ourselves," said Beattyville police
Officer Matt Easter, who went from directing traffic outside the elementary
school to coordinating drug buys.

Step one was to round up some money. Beattyville's $500,000 general fund
couldn't begin to pay for a major sting operation.

So Mayor Beach persuaded the city council to try an alternative. Beach's
family controls the local bank, Peoples Exchange Bank, which agreed to
extend a line of credit to the city.

The cash was advanced a few thousand dollars at a time over several months.
By the end, Easter and his partner, Capt. Joe Lucas, would spend some
$15,000 on the bust.

Easter and Lucas were natural partners. The pair had been buddies ever since
Easter joined the Lee County Volunteer Fire Department as a high school
student. There he met Lucas, 13 years his senior.

"He's sort of like a second father," said Easter, who with his military crew
cut resembles a skinnier version of Lucas.

Neither officer had done undercover work before. They got a state police
detective to give them a crash course.

The three of them sat in an unmarked state police car in the parking lot of
the Save-A-Lot and went over the right way to document a drug buy, how to
set up tape recorders and other details.

Afterward, Lucas and Easter went back to their office, called an electronics
company and ordered the same kind of recorder the state police use. They
also typed up an evidence form modeled after one the detective gave them,
substituting "Beattyville Police" where it said "Kentucky State Police."

It's too simple to say all the bad things started for Michele Moore on the
day in 1994 when she ran into the mayor's cow.

Most of the pain, and medication, came after that, but tragedy had already
visited: Michele's father, Jesse Moore, died of a heart attack in 1991.

Jesse Moore was the longtime property valuation administrator for Lee
County. A former teacher in Lee and Owsley counties, he was a pillar of the
community.

More important, Jesse Moore's daughter adored him. For years, Michele sang
at county fairs. If her father was in the crowd, she'd always do Daddy's
Hands just for him:

I remember Daddy's hands

Folded silently in prayer

And reachin' out to hold me,

When I had a nightmare.

After he died, "I died inside, I guess," she recalled.

The next year, 1992, Moore left the husband she'd married at 19 and moved to
Lexington.

A licensed beautician, she got a job at Supercuts during the day and worked
at a bar a few nights a week. There was some partying -- she tried cocaine a
few times and didn't like it -- but nothing that was too far over the top,
Moore said.

Then, on a weekend trip back to Lee County in 1994, she drove into a cow
owned by Mayor Beach. Moore herniated a disc in her back and was prescribed
painkillers.

Within a year, she was hooked, she said.

Moore's daughter, Cheyenne, was born in 1996. Soon after, Moore's
relationship with Cheyenne's father ended, and she went back to Lee County
in 1997. She was pregnant with her son, Dylan, within a few months.

The prescription drugs had become a serious problem. "By '98, when I had
Dylan, I was just eating them," she said.

She tried cocaine again and liked it better this time. In a while, it was on
to methamphetamine.

Along the way, Moore said, she was beaten many times. Once, when she was
eight months pregnant, a man threw her to the floor and held a shotgun to
her head, she said.

Still, she said, she didn't feel she had many options. "There's nothing to
do. This is Beattyville," Moore said. "I come back to the same old hole."

The Grinch came for her in 2001.

Officer Easter and Capt. Lucas found it wasn't easy trying to run a drug
sting in a small town.

The Beattyville Police Department, with a staff of five, couldn't spare them
for full-time drug work. So Easter and Lucas would spend hours on accident
reports and routine arrests, only to get off shift and then start Grinch
duty. Much of the extra time was unpaid, the two said.

There were some difficulties along the way. A few times when Easter met
informants on some small country road, sitting in a city police car, people
spotted them.

If word got around that a drug buyer was meeting with the police, the
secrecy of the sting would be ruined. Gossip travels fast in a small town.

"We were in the middle of nowhere, and I thought nobody would drive by.
Well, they did," Easter said. "And you're wondering, 'Did we just get
caught?'"

Once, during the middle of the investigation, the town's drug problems came
uncomfortably close. Lucas' sister, Yvonne Lucas Angel, a dispatcher for
police and emergency services, was arrested by state police on charges of
conspiracy and complicity to sell OxyContin, and conspiracy to sell Tylox.

An indictment said she and another defendant traded drugs for a stolen
police radio, an IOU and a dog. The drug charges were dismissed; under a
plea agreement, she pleaded guilty this month to complicity in receiving
stolen property.

"No family's immune to it," Joe Lucas said.

The first Grinch undercover buy was in June 2001: four bags of poor-quality
cocaine, totaling one gram, for $100.

Over the next five months, police said, informants made 85 more purchases.
The list of alleged dealers grew to eight pages; it included sales of
methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, Lortab, Xanax, OxyContin and other
drugs.

The purchases continued through late November. "We could have kept right on
going and got twice that much," Lucas said.

In December, when it came time to start arresting people, state and federal
agencies finally sent some help: about a half-dozen officers.

Police set up a booking area at the fire station on Dec. 18, complete with a
poster of the mean one, Mr. Grinch. They ran the operation there because the
police station -- located in a renovated 1868 house -- was too small for the
rush of officers and accused drug dealers.

Carl Noble, one of those arrested, said the scene was "kind of like going to
a high school ballgame. It was crowded."

Lexington television and newspapers across the state covered the big bust.
Beach accepted congratulations, shaking hands and slapping backs.

Lawmen Gone Bad

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Coming Monday: Beattyville's fledgling war on drugs enters the courtroom
amid fears it could be derailed.
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MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk