DRUG CRAZED

Millions in federal tax dollars are being spent by narcotics task forces in
Texas to nab low-level users and dealers. Is this any way to wage a drug
war?

Just over a year ago, the small Texas Panhandle town of Tulia made national
headlines when police rounded up more than 10 percent of the city's
African-Americans and jailed them on drug charges. All of the arrests and
charges were based on the uncorroborated word of one officer: Deputy Tom
Coleman of the Swisher County sheriff's office.

Coleman was a lawman with a checkered past. He had been charged with theft
in Cochran County before signing on with Swisher County, where he was
working as an undercover narcotics officer. He was also known as a
"gypsy cop," a sort of hired gun who bounced from one law enforcement
agency to the next--usually one of the dozens of federally funded regional
anti-drug task forces that have sprung up around the state since they began
forming in the late 1980s.At the time of the Tulia busts, Coleman, through
his employment with the sheriff's office, was once again working for a
regional anti-drug outfit, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force.
First chronicled in the Texas Observer, the arrests soon were reported by
newspapers and television and radio stations across the state as well as by
the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post. But the events
that occurred last summer in Tulia did not happen in a vacuum.

Nor was the targeting of minorities and the poor a tactic employed by only
the Panhandle task force.

Instead, Tulia was just the most visible example of these problems as they
relate to regional drug task forces in Texas, which last year received $31
million in federal money through a U.S. Department of Justice grant program
known as the Edward Byrne Memorial Fund. By far the largest funder of these
narcotics-fighting groups, the Byrne Fund has distributed billions of
dollars to drug task forces across the nation. Some of those Texas task
forces--especially the ones in rural areas--are now being accused of
employing their own Tulia-like tactics in dealing with the drug problems in
their communities. In places such as Brady, Hearne, Caldwell, Brownwood,
Chambers County and elsewhere, critics say task force members have relied
on unreliable informants to make cases against small-time, street-level
drug users and dealers who are nowhere close to the epicenter of the
narcotics problem in Texas. Task force officials defend the program by
pointing out that all illegal drugs are illegal.

But civil rights activists charge that the task force system is the latest
example of an enormously expensive misplaced priority in the so-called war
on drugs, a war they say focuses on the poor and people of color rather
than the real players in the narcotics trade. "The fundamental problem is
that you have these task forces out there operating with little or no
supervision and absolutely no state or federal accountability," says Texas
American Civil Liberties Union President Will Harrell. "No one is accepting
responsibility, and the task forces have one motive and one motive only: to
produce numbers lest they lose their funding for the next year. But no one
questions how they go about their business."It was during the presidency of
Ronald Reagan that the United States declared war on drugs.

In a February 1988 speech in Mexico, Reagan went so far as to proclaim that
the crusade was "an untold American success story" and that illegal drug
use had "already gone out of style in the United States." He could not have
been more wrong, as the billions of dollars that have been spent on drugs
and fighting them since prove.Each June, the beginning of the Byrne Fund's
fiscal year, the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance
distributes the millions in federal dollars to state agencies across the
country.

It is the states that send money down the line to the various task forces
within their boundaries. This past June, Texas received a fresh fix of
$31,636,000 earmarked for state task forces. Just like every year, the
grant was sent from the federal government to the Texas Narcotics Control
Program, a branch of the criminal justice division of the governor's
office, which has its own current two-year budget of $176 million. One of
the main tasks of the TNCP is to distribute Byrne Fund money among the
state's task forces.

Only multijurisdictional task forces--the ones that include peace officers
from law enforcement agencies in multiple jurisdictions--are eligible for
the grant money.

Federal guidelines allow for 100 percent funding of a task force, but they
also encourage in-kind funding by the participating agencies.

In 1994 there was a push in the Justice Department to abolish the Byrne
grants program because the task forces were inefficient, redundant and bad
about sharing information. According to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then the
deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Justice Programs, the
Byrne grant program "was never intended to be a continual grant to the
states." Townsend, daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy and now
lieutenant governor of Maryland, adds that the funds would continue to be
available for use by the states, but that the "dollars will be focused on
programs that work." The plan to eliminate the program generated loud
criticism from rural lawmakers and law enforcement agencies, and today more
Byrne Fund money than ever is being pumped into anti-drug task forces in
Texas and throughout the country, and that trend shows no sign of abating,
even though, beginning with the revelations in Tulia, the last year has not
been a good one for the Texas Narcotics Control Program.Hearne, Texas, is a
long way from Hollywood, California. Situated on State Highway 6 about 120
miles northwest of Houston, Hearne, with a population of just over 5,000,
is the largest city in Robertson County. It is an area that is less than
vibrant economically. Those who own the gently rolling hills try to eke out
a living working the land. Most of the rest commute to Waco or the
Bryan-College Station area for work.Despite the sleepy nature of the city,
Hearne residents say that last November their town could have been mistaken
for an action-adventure movie set when members of the South Central
Narcotics Task Force began rounding up alleged drug dealers and users in
the community.

As police vehicles sped through the streets, task force members even called
in a chopper for aerial surveillance. In all, 28 people were arrested.

Most were black, and many were residents of Columbus Village, a federally
subsidized low-income housing project located in a predominantly
African-American neighborhood in east Hearne, just down the street from an
elementary school. Both the school and the housing project are, by law,
drug-free zones.

That means that penalties for drug-related crimes committed in those areas
are automatically enhanced.

At first, the arrests were not that alarming to Hearne residents, who had
watched passively as the busts occurred every year since the late 1980s,
when task forces and the Byrne Fund first came into being. But then the
numbers started piling up: From October 1998 to December 2000, according to
records obtained by the Houston Press, the Dallas Observer 's sister paper,
the eight-member South Central task force filed 574 charges, although some
defendants were charged more than once. The task force's records are poorly
kept, but of the suspects who had a race attached to their names, 257 out
of 364 were African-Americans. Only 34 of the cases involved more than 4
grams of cocaine or crack.

The task force made three major seizures during this period: 4.16 pounds of
cocaine, 90 grams of methamphetamine and 312 pounds of marijuana.

South Central's budget for this period was $972,238; if you divide that
figure by the number of charges filed, it comes out to $1,694 per charge.

At the same time, the task force members were paid an average of nearly
$36,000 annually. "Every year they just round up a bunch of black men and
women," says Charles Workman, who is a member of the Hearne City Council as
well as president of the area chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. "If you've got gold teeth, you're fit to
profile," says hospital administrator Helen Boone. While the annual raids
were familiar to Workman and Boone, last November's police action caught
the attention of both parents, since each had a son arrested during the
roundup and charged with delivery of a controlled substance. "I guess in
the past it's been pretty easy for them to get away with this, because
blacks are easy prey," says Workman, a slow-talking man who chooses his
words carefully. "Automatically, if you arrest a black kid, everybody says
he's guilty, and nobody asks any questions.

Blacks don't have any money to get lawyers, so it's easy to get them and
send them off to prison. No problem.

And they've been doing it for about 15 years." So Workman decided to do
something about it. He decided to fight.

Rather, he hired someone to fight for him: Brad Wyatt, a Bryan-based
attorney who looks like the redheaded, freckle-faced good ol' boy next
door. As Wyatt investigated, he began to see similarities in many of the 28
arrests from that November bust. Most of those arrested were black, most
were poor, and most lived at the Columbus Village housing project.

Additionally, Wyatt says that although the crimes were alleged to have
taken place seven months earlier in April, some of the defendants had solid
alibis, including his client Corvian Workman. "It just so happened that my
client, at the time of this alleged drug deal, was at his grandmother's
house with about 40 family members in attendance for a birthday party,"
Wyatt says. "Corvie was actually cooking chicken-fried steak at the party."
Perhaps most significant was the fact that the younger Workman and many of
the others arrested had been fingered on the word of an undercover
informant, 27-year-old Derrick Megress, who was already on probation for
burglary and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.

He is also an admitted former drug dealer.

To avoid jail time, Megress testified, he signed an agreement with the
Robertson County District Attorney's Office--headed by District Attorney
John Paschall, who was also in charge of the task force--to produce 20 drug
arrests.

In addition to his freedom, Megress also earned $100 for each person he
helped bust. During Workman's trial, under questioning by Wyatt, Megress
admitted that he had violated the terms of his agreement with the district
attorney's office by using drugs while working as an informant.

Wyatt also was able to show that, in violation of task force protocol,
Megress had not been in plain view of a task force member during the
alleged drug buys. Additionally, Wyatt pointed out that Megress' wife lived
at the housing project.

He theorized that Megress, once out of sight of task force officers, was
able to slip into his wife's home, retrieve drugs he had already stashed
there and then bring them back to the officers with the story that he had
purchased them from a Columbus Village resident. Wyatt knew it would not be
easy to sell his theory to a small-town jury. "You have these people from
whatever walk of life they are from," says Wyatt. "They walk into a
courtroom, and they see a young black man sitting at the defense table.

And their first thought is, 'I wonder what this guy did.' And when they
hear the word 'cocaine,' they start making assumptions. The presumption of
innocence is supposed to be there, but in order to get somebody to
recognize that presumption of innocence, and maintain it, you got to change
the way they think.

And it's real tough to do. They have no point of reference.

All they know is drugs and black male." In March, a Robertson County jury,
composed of 11 whites and one black, deadlocked 11-to-1 for the acquittal
of Corvian Workman. A few weeks after the trial, with the credibility of
his informant in shambles, the district attorney of Robertson County
dismissed the charges against Workman and 16 other people who had been
arrested during the November roundup.

Thinking about the 11 defendants who pleaded guilty before he raised
questions about the legitimacy of the arrests sends "a chill up my spine,"
Wyatt says. Both the ACLU and the NAACP have asked the Justice Department
to investigate. District Attorney Paschall "does have to bear some
responsibility," Wyatt says. "He took taxpayer funds, and he expended them
on this confidential informant, which was a waste of taxpayers' money.

In the end, he did the right thing" by dropping the charges. "But his
motives may have been the scrutiny and the fact that he couldn't get a
conviction. He had to cover his ass." But Paschall, who has been replaced
as head of the task force, has not been the only official in Robertson
County with an exposed derriere.

Following the arrests in November, Hearne City Councilman Workman
introduced an idea that he believed would deal with the city's drug dealers
and users in a more evenhanded way. Workman's plan, which initially was
approved by the council, called for the city to spend $370,000 to hire
North Carolina-based private security company ShadowGuard to enforce drug
laws in Hearne for four months--and to put an end to racial profiling while
enforcing those laws. "From your words to God's ears," says ShadowGuard
President Rick Castillo. "Because that's basically what we found.

Hearne, Texas, is 50 years behind the times in terms of anything relating
to affirmative action." Castillo found that in a city where
African-Americans make up almost 50 percent of the population, there was
not one person of color on its police force.

In addition to bringing in its own officers, who would have been licensed
by the state of Texas, ShadowGuard would have trained the Hearne Police
Department in the area of narcotics law enforcement. The company also
planned a computer system upgrade and the legally questionable installation
of a closed-circuit television system throughout the city to spot possible
drug deals going down, regardless of who was making them. "You have these
kids that make a few dollars" selling drugs, says Workman, who is also a
Baptist minister. "Which I don't agree with. Meanwhile, the guys who are
making thousands and thousands of dollars go free. ShadowGuard wasn't going
to leave anybody out. And that scared a lot of people." Indeed, following
the approval of the ShadowGuard contract, threatening telephone calls were
made to the home of a black city council member, 69-year-old Thelma
Drennan, one of three African-Americans on the five-member Hearne governing
body. A week after its original approval, the council took a second vote
and canceled the deal. Drennan was one of two black members to change her
vote; Workman was the lone holdout.

While Drennan says her reversal was based on the price of the plan, she
also says she doesn't believe the threats directed toward her ever will be
thoroughly investigated. "I don't know that they will ever look into it,"
says Drennan, a woman with a fragile frame who admits she was frightened by
the calls. "Somehow I get the feeling that they don't care if something
were to happen to me. It would just be one more black person gone."Hearne
isn't the only small town in Texas where the actions of anti-drug task
forces have been called into question.

While those questions don't always have racial overtones, they usually have
economic ones--task forces preying upon the poverty-stricken and the young.

This January a grand jury in Brownwood, about 125 miles west of Fort Worth,
issued 75 indictments involving 40 defendants. The indictments were the
result of undercover work, code name Operation Loser, last summer by the
West-Central Texas Narcotics Task Force based in Abilene. The West-Central
task force covers a wider area than the South Central task force.

Its budget is also larger.

According to figures obtained under the Texas open records law,
West-Central had a combined budget for fiscal years 1999 and 2000 of just
over $1 million.

In that same period, the task force filed 433 charges, at a cost of more
than $2,300 per case. Some of the busts were significant; last year the
task force seized hundreds of pounds of marijuana.

But that doesn't tell the complete story.

Some of the arrests during 1999 and 2000 were not even drug-related. The
arrest record includes suspects busted for Department of Public Safety
warrants, carrying large amounts of money, unauthorized use of a motor
vehicle, car theft, reckless driving, failure to render aid, no driver's
license or insurance and public intoxication. On two occasions, one agent
listed the offense as "pending." The January arrests followed the same
pattern of those made by other task forces around the state: The targets
were mainly the poor and/or people of color, none of the cases involved
much more than a thimbleful of drugs, and the indictments and arrests came
down about six months after the alleged drug deals had occurred, a tactic
that criminal defense attorney Kirby Roberts believes is used to make it
harder for defendants to say exactly where they were and what they were
doing at the time. Roberts, who is based in Junction, hears the same
story--and sees many of the same task force tactics--all over his part of
Texas. In fact, Roberts has stayed more than busy lately defending targets
of not only the Southwest Texas squad but also the West-Central Texas
Narcotics Task Force. Over the past six months, Roberts, a big-boned man
who resembles Salman Rushdie, has spent a considerable amount of time
driving the two-lane blacktops among the prickly pear cactus on the western
edge of the Texas Hill Country on a legal circuit that includes Brownwood,
Brady, Menard, Junction and other towns.

Roberts himself gets a bit prickly when he thinks about what he believes
are the misguided goals and unethical--if not sometimes illegal--conduct of
the members of the various task forces he encounters. Particularly
disturbing to Roberts was the case filed against Terri Rene Harrell, a
twice-divorced mother of three getting by mainly on $300 a month in child
support that she receives from her two ex-husbands. Her economic standing
was only marginally improved recently by her marriage to a Texas Department
of Criminal Justice guard. In January, Harrell was charged with delivering
a gram of methamphetamine to Scotty Chew while he was working as an
undercover officer with the West-Central task force.

Chew testified that for four or five months, as part of his cover, he often
hung out at Lakeside Tattoo on the outskirts of Brownwood, where he spent
his time shooting the breeze and helping motorists and cyclists repair
their machines.

According to his testimony, during most of his encounters the conversation
eventually got around to the subject of drugs and if anyone knew where he
could get some. It was under such circumstances that he hooked up with
Harrell and her friend Jennifer Nell Spencer in July 2000. The undercover
officer testified that when he approached Harrell about obtaining some
speed, she informed him that her friend Spencer, who would be coming by the
tattoo parlor soon, might have some contacts.

When Spencer arrived, she made a call and set up a rendezvous with her
connection along the side of a local highway.

But when the amount delivered to the meeting place wasn't enough to satisfy
Chew, the two women and the officer--along with another man named "Jerry"
in the undercover officer's car--went back into Brownwood. When the
two-vehicle caravan stopped in front of a house, the men in the lead car
went inside along with Harrell and Spencer. A few minutes later, the women
returned with the dope. Chew says it was Harrell who handed him the plastic
packet.

Roberts, however, suggests that it was actually Spencer who gave the drugs
to Chew and that the officer was embellishing his story to add Harrell to
his arrest list. What's more important, Chew admitted on the witness stand
that he did little to find out who the men in the other car were or who
owned or lived in the house from where the drugs were fetched. "No
follow-up was ever made to identify who was in that house or who the house
belonged to," says Roberts. "So there's no question in my mind that [Chew]
was just after as many [easy] arrests as possible, and not in actually
trying to get anybody of any importance. If he'd wanted to do that, he'd
have gone up the food chain a step. It was right there in front of him."
Chew, 30, has served as a peace officer in Texas since 1993. Although he
works directly for the West-Central task force, he is commissioned as a law
enforcement officer through the Coleman County sheriff's office.

He also has worked for the Erath County sheriff's office as well as the
Rural Area Narcotics Task Force and others.

In other words, he is a gypsy officer--the kind who task force critics say
bounce from one law enforcement agency to the next. During his
cross-examination of Chew, Roberts attempted to show that Chew was indeed a
dirty cop. While on the stand, Chew denied that he had ever sold drugs
himself or that he had ever exchanged drugs for sex. Chew's claims were
contradicted when Roberts called Wilda Renee Crelia, who was also facing
drug charges, to the witness stand. Roberts: "Let me just ask you, did
Scotty Chew ever supply you with any drugs or controlled substances?"
Crelia: "Yes." Roberts: "And did he require you to do anything in return
for supplying that?" Crelia: "Yes." Roberts: "And what was that?" Crelia:
"Oral sex." Despite Crelia's testimony, Harrell was convicted on the
delivery charge, but the judge who heard the case sentenced her to
probation despite a prior drug conviction. Roberts believes that decision
was significant. "She walked out of the courtroom a free woman," Roberts
says, "because I don't believe the judge liked what he heard." Chew could
not be reached for comment, but Billy Schatt, commander of the West-Central
task force, says Crelia's charges against the officer are unfounded and
calls her testimony a typical legal ploy to shift attention away from the
defendant.

He also defends Chew's and the task force's focus on street-level users and
dealers.

The task force's priorities, he says, are set by the police chiefs and
sheriffs in his 15-county region.

What may be a small-time dealer in a big city, he adds, could be a major
player in a place like Brownwood. Besides, he asks, "What do they want us
to do? Trace it all the way back to Colombia?"The case of 30-year-old
Iletha Spencer, who is also represented by Roberts, in many ways parallels
that of Harrell.Spencer is an unemployed single mother of four children,
who range in age from 2 to 8 years. Until recently, she and her brood lived
in a federally subsidized house in Brady. In March, as part of 32
indictments handed down from a McCulloch County grand jury, she was forced
to move out of the dwelling after she was arrested for selling less than a
gram of cocaine to an undercover member of the Southwest Texas Narcotics
Task Force based in Junction. Officer Larry Stamps arrived on the scene
last summer when the task force set him up in a unit at a federal Housing
and Urban Development apartment complex in Brady. The move was designed to
ensure that any drug buys that Stamps made there would automatically carry
a stiffer penalty.

As part of his cover, Stamps was known at the housing project as Delbert,
not Larry. Spencer was introduced to Stamps by her girlfriend Gracie, who
was dating Stamps' undercover partner.

Spencer says Stamps came off as the original party animal. Every time she
saw him he was drinking; he would show up at all hours of the day and
night, looking for drugs and flashing cash at people not accustomed to
having much money.

Both Spencer and Gracie were impressed with the two new big spenders. "I
saw the money," Spencer says. "I counted $300 or $400. He was always buying
beer and stuff like that. They're dealing with people that live in
low-income houses, and here this guy is forking out the money. Well, yeah,
you're going to think he's cool. But I guess he knew what he was doing.

He did us all like that." Eighteen-year-old Trista Hoard agrees. Hoard's
17-year-old brother, Justin, also was named in the indictments that came
down this spring, about nine months after Stamps arrived. It troubles Hoard
that a drug task force officer such as Stamps would spend so much time
hanging around teen-agers from the poor side of town like her and her
brother. "We all partied and barbecued at this guy's house," says the
pregnant Hoard, adding that the gatherings remained fairly innocent and
juvenile. "We had water fights.

We would just sit out there all the time. Then he just starts throwing
money at us. I mean, giving us money practically. And [the police] know
that if we're living in government apartments, you don't have that much money.

You throw $700 at a kid, what are they going to do? Turn around and say no?
I mean, come on." Of the 32 Brady residents indicted, none was accused of
having or selling more than a small amount of marijuana, meth or coke.
Twenty-year-old Neal Solomon was among those charged with delivery of a
controlled substance--1 gram, to be exact. He is the son of 40-year-old
white-bearded, gimme cap-wearing James Solomon, who ekes out a living at
SureFed Mills. At the time the Press interviewed Solomon in March, Neal had
not yet turned himself in to authorities. Solomon acknowledges that his son
has a prior conviction for possessing just over a gram of cocaine.

Still, after taking a look at the Brady arrest list, he has a hard time
believing that the task force is making the best use of its
taxpayer-provided resources. "There's nothing I can do to get my boy out of
this," Solomon says. "But in the long run, when they quit going after the
little guys who are just trying to make a buck or two, they ought to try
going after people who are making thousands." It's a sentiment echoed again
and again, and loudly by Peggy Parker, the outspoken mother of Iletha
Spencer. Parker notes that the alleged drug deals were supposed to have
taken place in September 2000, or seven months before her daughter and the
31 other defendants were indicted. "If they want to get it off the
streets," asks Parker, "why don't they go after the ones who are selling it
out of their homes? [Stamps] knew some of them, because he was carried to
their houses. For seven months he's been doing this, and he doesn't know
who the drug dealers are?" While Stamps and the task force may not know the
names of drug dealers higher up the food chain, the residents of Brady are
definitely aware of the suspects snared in the busts last spring.

All the names were printed on the front page of the two weekly Brady
newspapers for two weeks running. Many business owners clipped the box and
posted it in their stores and shops. Spencer says everyone on the list is
immediately turned away when applying for a job, whether they were
convicted or not. Spencer has yet to come to trial, and she declines to say
whether she helped Stamps acquire any drugs. But that didn't stop her from
venting. "We're not drug dealers," Spencer insists. "He didn't bust drug
dealers.

He busted people who went and did a favor for him and got him drugs.

We weren't selling the stuff out of our houses. People knew where to get
it, and they picked it up and gave it to him. But they didn't mess with the
drug dealers." The Southwest Texas Narcotics Task Force, established just
last year, is messing with the Press, however. It has appealed to the Texas
attorney general's office regarding the paper's Texas open records request
for information on its arrests and seizures. Stamps, meanwhile, has moved
on to the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force in Palestine, where attempts
to contact him were unsuccessful.A question lingers: Why do these drug task
forces remain in business despite their well-documented problems, their
poor arrest records and their emphasis on low-level dealers and users?

The answer is simple: because there's money available.Established in 1988
to honor a fallen New York City police officer, the Edward Byrne Memorial
Fund, in just the past five years, has distributed approximately $2.5
billion in grants to drug task forces nationally, with $160 million of it
going to Texas, where it is divvied up between the almost 50 tasks forces
operating in the state.

Those task forces are as addicted to the federal cash injections as the
junkies are to their dope. According to critics, they're more concerned
with making as many busts as possible to keep their arrest numbers up and
their funding high than they are on concentrating on time-consuming
investigations that might net large-scale dealers.

The Texas Narcotics Control Program, the division of the governor's office
that distributes Byrne Fund money to state task forces, has come under heat
itself. In June, the Austin American-Statesman reported that Robert J.
"Duke" Bodisch, the head of the program, was reassigned when an audit
revealed that he borrowed three cars from one of the task forces.

The report also showed that for five years the TNCP had used Byrne funds to
buy awards, gifts, alcoholic beverages and entertainment--spending that
appeared to fall outside the guidelines governing the use of the Byrne money.

Bodisch declined to be interviewed.

Part 2 To Come