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.