DRUG BUSTS IN TEXAS TOWN RAISE DOUBTS Forty Of The 43 People Arrested During A Sting In Tulia Are Black. But That Group Makes Up Less Than 10 Percent Of Its Population TULIA, Texas - On the morning of July 23, 1999, Billy Wafer, a forklift driver, was swept up in the biggest drug sting in local history: In this town of only 4,500 people, 43 people were arrested, accused of selling small amounts of cocaine. Hometown juries later meted out sentences ranging from 20 years to more than 300 years. In Tulia, an isolated place ringed by cotton farms and cattle ranches on the high plains of the Texas panhandle, local officials declared the operation a stunning success. In all, 22 of the defendants were sent to prison while others received probation. The undercover agent at the center of the operation, Tom Coleman, was even named by the state as lawman of the year. But more than a year later, an operation once hailed as a victory in the war on drugs now has local minorities and others asking whether it was really a war on blacks. All but three of the 43 defendants were black, an enormous percentage considering that blacks make up less than 10 percent of the local population. In fact, roughly 12 percent of the town's entire black community was arrested. Doubts have been raised about the racial makeup of the group arrested, compounded by contentions that the investigation was flimsy at best. The sole evidence in nearly every case was the word of the undercover agent, and information about questionable episodes in his past was withheld from all but one jury. There were no videotapes or wiretaps or, in most cases, any corroborating witnesses. So now Tulia itself is on trial: Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a defendant whose case had been dismissed because of a false identification. The suit accuses local officials of singling out blacks to run them out of town. Next week the ACLU plans to file a civil rights complaint with the Justice Department seeking to revoke federal funding for the agencies that ran the sting. The reaction among most whites has been unflinching support of the operation and local officials. The local sheriff and district attorney, who defend the credibility of the agent, also deny that the sting was racially motivated or that the town is biased. "This is a good community, and I care a lot about everybody here," said Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart, who was reluctant to speak in much detail because of the lawsuit. "There has been a lot more made of this than is true." Like many places, Tulia is not immune to drugs, though city statistics show relatively modest numbers of drug arrests before the sting in 1999. Some black residents say the town does have a cluster of crack cocaine users who buy drugs in larger cities like Amarillo or Plainview. And several of the defendants had prior drug arrests, including Donald Smith, who admitted on the stand that he had sold crack to the undercover agent but who vehemently denied using or selling the more expensive powdered cocaine. "There's no big drug problem here," contended Billy Wafer, the forklift driver. "Can you see 43 dealers surviving in this small town? There would be murders and everything. Everybody would have to be doing it." The undercover agent said Wafer, 42, had sold him cocaine at a local convenience store. But Wafer's employer testified that Wafer had been at work at the time, the agent said the drug deal took place. Wafer produced his time-cards. A judge refused to dismiss the cocaine charges but decided that there was insufficient evidence to revoke Wafer's probation on a 1990 marijuana charge. His trial is still pending. The drug sting began in 1998 when Tom Coleman, the son of a Texas ranger, was hired by Stewart to run an undercover operation in Tulia under the supervision of the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force in Amarillo. Coleman had been a sheriff's deputy and a jailer in other Texas counties but was working as a welder when he got the job. Coleman underwent training with the Drug Enforcement Administration then spent more than a year undercover in Tulia, the largest town in Swisher County. Officials said Coleman, who is white, made friends and acquaintances among Tulia's blacks with the help of a black co-worker at a cattle auction where he had gotten a job. Both Stewart and the local district attorney, Terry McEachern, agree that drugs are sold and consumed by whites and Hispanics in Tulia. But, they said, Coleman could not make any headway with those groups. Critics say Coleman operated with almost no oversight. In nearly every case, there were no corroborating witnesses. He never used body wires or hidden videocameras. His reports were sometimes no more than a paragraph, sometimes with names misspelled. In some cases, Stewart said, Coleman asked him for photographs of people he said he had identified as suspects; some black residents wonder if the pictures let him identify the suspects in reports. The initial cases were tried at the Swisher County courthouse in Tulia. Seven cases went to trial, each ending in a stiff sentence, Usually, the charges involved the sale of between 1 gram and 4 grams of cocaine, a second-degree felony in Texas. But the penalties were increased on many of the charges because Coleman said the deals had occurred near a school or public park. After the initial trials, other defendants began to plead guilty for reduced sentences or probation. McEachern regards these pleas as a validation of the operation. But many black residents say the defendants pleaded guilty because they did not believe they could get a fair trial in Tulia. The two newspapers in Tulia had carried the story of the arrests on the front page, with the Tulia Sentinel, which is now defunct, describing the suspects as "drug traffickers" and "known dealers." Television stations, tipped by the sheriff, had filmed the suspects as they were brought to jail after the sunrise arrests. Despite the pretrial publicity, local judges denied motions for a change of venue. "Jurors are very, very conscientious in Tulia," MeEachern said, defending the fairness of the trials. The cases began to attract wider media attention after Van Williamson, one of the court-appointed defense lawyers, began to look into Coleman's past. In 1996, Coleman had abruptly left the sheriff's department in Cochran County, leaving behind more than $6,000 in debts to local businesses. Cochran County Sheriff Ken Burke wrote a letter to the state agency overseeing officer standards saying that "Mr. Coleman should not be in law enforcement, if he is going to do people the way he did this town." Williamson also unearthed documents from Coleman's custody battle for his two children that raised questions about his character, Social- worker interviews with acquaintances and former co-workers at the Pecos County Sheriff's Department, where he had worked, described Coleman as obsessed with guns, hot-tempered and "a compulsive liar" Except in one case, the information about Coleman's past was withheld from the Tulia juries. Coleman, who is now working undercover in North Texas, declined to comment, on the advice of his lawyer, because of the pending lawsuit. But he did talk about one case shortly after the arrests but before any of the resulting controversy. "I hate dope, and I hate dope dealers," he told the Amarillo Globe-News in 1999. "I figured that doing this, I could maybe put a few dealers in jail before they came across the path of somebody's kid." Jeff Blackburn, the Amarillo lawyer handling the ACLU lawsuit, said the defendant in that case, Yul Bryant, had been accused by Coleman of selling $160 in cocaine. In his report, Coleman initially described Bryant, who is short and balding, as a tall black male "with bushy type hair." An amended report later changed the description to a "BM (black male) with, short type hair." Bryant spent seven months in jail before a judge dismissed the case. "The question becomes, 'Can you put anyone in question in prison based on the word of this guy without corroboration?' " Blackburn asked.
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