RACISM SAID TO HAVE FUELED DRUG CASES Residents Questioning Arrests, Long Sentences In Small Texas Town TULIA, Texas -- The officers and deputies came in the morning. They arrested pig farmers and warehouse workers, single mothers and lithe young men who once were heroes and the town's pride and joy -- its high school football team. Forty-three people in all. The biggest drug raid in Swisher County's history was also the darkest day in memory for Tulia's small, tightknit African-American community. In a matter of hours, one of every six black residents had been indicted on cocaine-selling charges. At first, hardly anyone raised a voice in protest. The local paper celebrated the roundup of the "scumbags'' corrupting the town's children. Those few with doubts kept quiet, except for one man -- a self-described "hick farmer" and gadfly named Gary Gardner. Thanks in part to his efforts, Tulia now stands divided by a controversy that has thrust this town of 5,000 in the drought-stricken Texas Panhandle into the national debate about drugs, race and the criminal-justice system. Sentiment here began to turn after a series of reports about the white undercover agent who had set up the 1999 sting, a journeyman deputy with a tainted past whose word was the only evidence against most of the defendants. That information led the ACLU last week to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the county, charging the arrests were racially motivated. "I just worked the facts, and the facts show that a lot of these people aren't guilty," said Gardner, who is white. "It's like a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle you dump on the floor, and years later it begins to make sense." In the past year, Tulia's one-bench courthouse has hosted 11 drug trials, each one ending with a conviction, most without a single black person on the jury. Many of those convicted have received huge, Texas-sized sentences for selling relatively small amounts of cocaine -- crimes big-city prosecutors and judges would most likely punish with a few years of probation. The most recent trial ended last month with the conviction of Kareem Abdul Jabbar White, who got 60 years for selling one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine (street value: about $150). "These drug traffickers have been a cancer on our community long enough," one local paper editorialized. "It's time to give them a major dose of chemotherapy behind bars." Official: We're Tough On Drugs Buoyed by such sentiments, the county district attorney and sheriff have defended both the drug raid and the aggressive prosecution. "We're not a lynching county,"said Swisher County District Attorney Terry McEachern. "This is a community that's tough on drugs." And no one denies that Tulia has a drug problem. Rural communities have the nation's fastest-growing rate of cocaine and heroin use. But to some here it seems that, at best, the local authorities rounded up a bunch small-time users -- many had previous arrests for petty offenses -- and treated them as if they were million-dollar drug kingpins. "These are the young people we're supposed to be trying to help," said Charles Kiker, a retired Baptist preacher and one of a small but growing circle of who have denounced the raid as government-sponsored "ethnic cleansing." "It's not the drugs they're after," said Mattie White, a guard at a nearby state prison who had three adult children arrested in the raid, including Kareem. "They don't want these kids in this town." To these critics, the allegations behind the drug sting are patently absurd: Tulia is a poor, hardscrabble community. And yet the defendants were charged with selling powder cocaine, a rich man's habit. And why, they ask, were no guns, drug paraphernalia or large amounts of cash seized in the raid? "You see how small this town is?" asked Billy Wafer, a warehouse worker who was arrested but later freed by a judge. "How can 43 drug dealers survive in this community? Everybody in this town would have to be a drug user." William Harrell, executive director of the Texas ACLU, calls the Tulia case "the most blatant example of police and prosecutorial misconduct I've seen in my entire career. "Harrell has petitioned federal authorities to launch a criminal investigation. In response to such charges and a flood of critical publicity, local residents are organizing a rally for Monday to thank the sheriff "for making Swisher County a safer place to live." The bust has transformed Tulia into a small-town laboratory on the social impact of the nation's drug wars. So many people were arrested and put on trial that the county had to raise its property tax 5 percent to pay for it all. The first defendant to go to trial -- one of three non-blacks arrested -- got the longest sentence, 434 years. Freddie Brookin, a 22-year-old black man with no prior convictions, received a 20-year sentence for delivering an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. Other defendants began to opt for plea bargains, admitting guilt in exchange for lesser sentences. Enter Gardner, a longtime nemesis of county officials who had tangled earlier with local officials over their plan to administer random drug tests at Tulia High School. Gardner wrote a letter to each defendant, urging them to seek a trial outside of Swisher County. He looked deeper into the case and fed information to journalists in Amarillo, Lubbock and elsewhere. Soon, all of Tulia knew what only a handful inside the office of Sheriff Larry Stewart had known for months: The county's first-ever undercover narcotics officer himself had been arrested halfway through the sting on a theft warrant. Tom Coleman had run afoul of authorities in nearby Cochran County, where he had worked as a deputy. The sheriff there accused him of stealing gasoline from the county. Coleman also owed more than $6,900 in debts to local merchants. His new boss, Stewart, had Coleman fingerprinted and then released him on bond. A few weeks later, Coleman cleared his debts and paid restitution, although he denied stealing the gas. The matter was quietly dropped. He returned to his undercover work, making friends in the black community under the alias "T.J. Dawson." Coleman is said to be working undercover at a new job and could not be reached for comment. Witnesses: He's Untrustworthy When Coleman's arrest finally became news, long after the sting's climax, what many black residents had been saying all along didn't seem so implausible. Coleman, they charged, had completely fabricated most of his drug buys. In White's trial, defense attorneys produced four witnesses who testified that Coleman had cheated or lied to them -- including the vice chairman of a bank, a Pecos County prosecutor and the Cochran County sheriff. All said Coleman was untrustworthy. A tall, otherwise amiable man, Sheriff Stewart spoke about the controversy with a weary, pained expression -- confessing to being "worn out" by months of questions. "There was never any attempt to target a specific group," he said. "We wanted to attack the drug problem. These are the ones that got caught."
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