DRUG MONEY

Narcotics task forces in Texas spend millions of dollars each year
busting low-level users and dealers. Is it money well spent, or are
officers just addicted to easy cash?

Just over a year ago, the small Texas Panhandle town of Tulia,
located in Swisher County, 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
antidrug 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 antidrug 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 around 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.

Additionally, 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 like 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, well,
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 that 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 around the country. It
is the states that send monies 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 Texas governor's office, with its own current
two-year budget of $176 million. One of the main tasks of the TNCP is
the distribution of 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, the reason being that 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 the 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."

However, the plan to eliminate the program generated a firestorm of
criticism from rural lawmakers and law enforcement agencies, and
today more federal money than ever is being pumped into antidrug task
forces in Texas and around the country via the Byrne Fund. And that
trend shows no sign of abatement, 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 are forced to commute to either Waco or the
Bryan-College Station area for work.

But 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 under the
Texas Open Records law, 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 four 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, if you crunch
the salary figures, the task force members made 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 NAACP.

"If you've got gold teeth, you're fit to profile," says hospital
administrator Helen Boone.

But while the annual raids had reached the point of familiarity to
Workman and Boone, last November's police action did catch 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 the November busts. Most 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," says Wyatt. "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 used 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 D.A. John Paschall, who was also in
charge of the task force -- to produce 20 drug arrests. In addition
to his freedom, Megress 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 D.A.'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's wife lived at
the housing project. And he theorized that Megress, once out of sight
of task force officers, was able to slip into his wife's unit,
retrieve drugs he had already stashed there, and then bring the drugs
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. Wyatt says that thinking about the 11
defendants who pled out before he raised questions about the
legitimacy of the arrests sends "a chill up my spine."

Both the ACLU and the NAACP have asked the Justice Department to investigate.

District Attorney Paschall "does have to bear some responsibility,"
says Wyatt. "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
councilmember, 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 tag of the plan, she also says she doesn't
believe the threats directed toward her will ever be thoroughly
investigated.

"I don't know that they will ever look into it," says Drennan, a
woman with a fragile build 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
antidrug task forces have been called into question. And 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 DPS 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, public intoxication and the mysterious "missing person."
On two occasions, one agent listed the offense as "pending."

The January arrests followed the same pattern as 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 Narcotics Task Force but also the
West-Central squad, which operates out of Brownwood about 200 miles
to the north. 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. However, 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," says Roberts,
"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. 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 eight years to two and a half. 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 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 than 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's 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," says Spencer. "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 like Stamps would spend so much time hanging
around teenagers 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, not one 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 -- one 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
James 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," says Solomon.
"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 citizens 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 the Press tried to contact him, without success.

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 among 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. And 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. The Press
contacted Bodisch about task forces in general before his
reassignment, but he declined to be interviewed.

This is not the first instance of alleged abuses of task force money.
In June 1998 then-governor George W. Bush's office stopped funding
for the Permian Basin Drug Task Force amid allegations of falsified
meal tickets, doctored quarterly reports on confiscations, and other
irregularities. The task force was abolished that summer.

"Some of them are run well. Some are not run well. It's very
political," says former task force officer Barbara Markham. "And it's
definitely not money well spent."

With her skinny frame, sleepy eyes and cigarette voice, 41-year-old
Markham comes off like a doper. It's a good look to have if you
happen to be an undercover narcotics officer -- which she used to be.

Markham got her start in law enforcement in 1983. At the time, she
was 23 years old, living in Frisco, north of Dallas, going to college
and working for Arco Oil & Gas -- and making more money than she ever
would as a police officer. But Markham found herself scrambling to
find work when the oil boom went bust. So she got herself certified
as a peace officer and then hired on as a reserve officer in Frisco,
at that time a quiet burg of about 3,000 people. At first it seemed
like there was nothing to it.

"Back then we were dealing with things like cattle in the roadway,"
says Markham.

Markham's cushy new job didn't last long. Shortly after she hired on,
Markham's chief approached her about doing some undercover work.
Thinking the assignment would be for only a couple of hours or so,
Markham agreed, unaware that what the chief had in mind would turn
her life upside down forever.

"What they wanted was to put an undercover officer in a high school,"
says Markham. "They had searched high and low throughout the county
looking for somebody who was young enough." Or someone who looked
young enough. And although she was 23, Markham could easily pass for
a 17-year-old.

After a crash course in narcotics law enforcement and armed with fake
transcripts from Wichita Falls High School, Markham slipped unnoticed
into Wylie, in Collin County. She enrolled in summer school and began
hanging out with the kids -- throwing Frisbees and riding
skateboards. Little by little they took her in.

"My goal was not to bust the kids, but to bust who was selling to
them," says Markham. "That's the way I ran my operation." When
Markham was pulled out of the school six weeks later, 20 suspects
were arrested on charges of delivery of a controlled substance. All
but two were adults.

After Wylie, Markham was assigned to Princeton High School, east of
McKinney. There, things did not go so well, as news of her arrival
preceded her among the students. For the next few years Markham
continued to infiltrate student bodies in North Texas in search of
drug dealing. But now she was pushing 30, and she'd had enough.

"I was almost old enough to be their mom," says Markham.

From high school, Markham went to working the bar scene in small
towns around Dallas before settling into a patrol job with the Colony
Police Department in 1988. When The Colony decided to join an
antidrug task force that was forming in the area, Markham was
selected as the department's representative, and she was happy to be
working drug cases again. But after she'd spent a few months with the
task force, department officials decided Markham had been working
narcotics for too long. They reassigned her to patrol in 1997. In
retrospect, Markham admits that she should have done exactly what she
was told. Instead, she signed on with the now-defunct Northeast Area
Drug Interdiction Task Force based in Rockwall, something she calls
"the worst mistake I ever made in my law enforcement career."

From the beginning, says Markham, she was troubled by the focus of
the Rockwall task force. "The thing I started noticing was that they
were only going after blacks," says Markham. She also got crossways
with her new boss.

"He wanted me to take a load of [marijuana] to Vicksburg,
Mississippi, and drop it off there," says Markham. "When I told him I
couldn't do that" because it was against the law, "I got fired."

Rockwall task force commander Mike Box III declines to address
Markham's allegations. He does acknowledge, however, that the task
force's emphasis on low-level dealers and users is merely a response
to the concerns of the community. Residents, he says, routinely call
sheriff's departments in the four-county area to complain of the drug
traffic in their neighborhoods.

After Rockwall, Markham's next stop was the Narcotics Trafficking
Task Force of Chambers and Liberty Counties in 1995. Once again,
Markham found what she describes as racial profiling.

"Basically, it came down to that white America was no longer
touched," says Markham. "If you were white, you didn't have to worry
much about task forces, because they were going after crack. But it
doesn't take any skill to make a crack bust. All you have to do is
drive up and roll down your window. It's like shooting fish in a
barrel. But the drug problems in these various counties do not just
involve black people, and it's not just crack. But that's about all
they're turning out now. It's just ridiculous."

According to Markham, the problems in Chambers and Liberty counties
run deeper than racial profiling. In 1997, after two years on the
job, Markham discovered that the task force members and their
confidential informants were setting up people for arrests. She
became aware of the practice when she and an informant went to a
house in Anahuac in Chambers County to buy some pot. Markham says
that while she and the informant were able to obtain the dope from
the woman who lived in the house, the woman refused to take their
money. Nevertheless, the informant later put in his report that the
woman had in fact taken the money. Markham questioned the informant
about the discrepancy, but she says the informant told her that it
was the task force's standard procedure to falsify statements -- that
he had done at least 150 cases the same way.

When she took the problem to her superior, Markham says, she was told
not to worry, that it would be the informant, not her, testifying in
court. Soon afterward, she was handed a list of 22 reprimands and was
fired. Markham filed a lawsuit against the task force and eventually
settled out of court. She received a mere $8,000. However, she
refused to cash the check when she realized that one condition of the
settlement called for her to remain silent.

Mike Little, district attorney for Chambers and Liberty counties and
the task force project director, did not return phone calls from the
Press.

"I think there needs to be a Justice Department investigation," says
Markham. "I think the office of the governor should be more involved
in these task forces and look into the corruption, because they are
full of corruption. But they operate like the CIA. Nobody ever knows
what they're doing, which is a good thing investigation-wise. But
accountability-wise and responsibility-wise, nobody's doing anything.
Because if anything happens, everybody's afraid they're going to lose
their federal funding. So they just let you resign, no matter what
you've done. You get a clean bill of health, and you move on to the
next task force."

If central casting ever needs a stereotypical Texas lawman, they
could turn to Sheriff Gerald Yezak. In his creased Wrangler blue
jeans secured with a belt anchored by a buckle the size of his fist,
white straw cowboy hat, elephant-skin boots and striped western
shirt, the long, tall and prematurely gray Yezak cuts an impressive
figure as he enforces the law in Robertson County, the 870 square
miles where he has spent most of his 45 years. Rolling along in his
maroon Dodge Ram 2500, Yezak seems to know everyone in the county,
greeting his constituents by name as he makes his way along the
quiet, lazy streets of Calvert, Bremond and Franklin, the county seat.

When asked if there is much violent crime in Robertson County, Yezak
smiles and says, "Well, that depends on your definition of much." He
goes on to explain that there were only three homicides in the county
last year; none so far in 2001. In other words, there's not much
violent crime in Robertson County. However, when it comes to drugs,
Yezak maintains it's a growing problem.

His biggest concern, he says, is the resurgence of methamphetamine
laboratories. Meth labs produce a distinctive and foul chemical odor,
one that's hard to hide in the close confines of urban areas. The
sparsely populated rolling hills of Robertson and other rural
counties, says the sheriff, provide meth dealers with the privacy
they need to cook their product. The proliferation of meth labs, says
Yezak, has also produced a black market for one of the key
ingredients in making the drug: anhydrous ammonia. The substance is
in abundance in the county because farmers use it to fertilize their
fields. Normally anhydrous ammonia goes for about $400 a ton; on the
black market, it brings $300 a gallon.

In addition to his job as sheriff, which he has held for the past
five years, Yezak is also project director of the South Central Texas
Narcotics Task Force. He was appointed to replace Robertson County
District Attorney John Paschall early this year -- right about the
time questions emerged about the drug arrests in Hearne last
November. Yezak had no part in those raids, and he refuses to fault
his predecessor's penchant for targeting street-corner dealers and
small-time users. He points out that the possession and sale of
illegal drugs is against the law, period, regardless of the amount.
That said, however, Yezak also indicates that the priorities of the
South Central task force will be different under his watch. He wants
his team to spend more time looking at the big picture. Specifically,
he plans to target the meth labs that have moved into his territory.

As for the millions of dollars that pour into the Texas drug task
forces each year, Yezak acknowledges that it's a lot of money but
believes it is money well spent. His task force commander, Joe Davis,
agrees, insisting that rural Texas counties like Robertson just don't
have the tax base to adequately fund a war on drugs.

One of Yezak's first moves after taking over was to hire Davis, a
small dark-haired man with 16 years of law enforcement experience,
away from the Brazos Valley Task Force in nearby Bryan. Brazos Valley
has a reputation as a well-run operation, and Davis has a reputation
as a stand-up officer -- even among criminal defense attorneys.

"I can tell you this," says Bryan attorney Brad Wyatt, who defended
Corvian Workman in the Hearne drug raids last November, "based on my
experience with this guy in the past, things are going to change in
Robertson County -- for the better."

As to why he brought in Davis as the new commander, Yezak is again
diplomatic, and deftly avoids saying that it was because he was
unhappy with the way the unit was being run. "The old commander
worked for the D.A.," says Yezak, between spitting sunflower seed
shells into a cup. "He didn't work for me. If I'm going to have
somebody running [the task force], and I'm the project director, I'm
going to have somebody who works for me. Somebody who answers to me."

Davis isn't one to criticize, either. But he believes his
predecessor's problems -- indeed, the problems of the task force --
stemmed from poor supervision of confidential informants. Davis says
he plans to avoid that problem by strictly limiting how and when his
officers use informants.

Of course, starting this month, Davis, Yezak and all the other Texas
task forces really don't have any choice but to change their ways.

On September 1, a new state law went into effect limiting the use of
confidential informants in court. Drug convictions may no longer be
based on uncorroborated testimony from a single informant. The new
law is one of several battles won during the last session of the
Texas legislature by a coalition of groups including the ACLU and the
NAACP. The legislature also made it easier to obtain background
information on law enforcement officers. The measure resulted from
the revelations about undercover officer Tom Coleman, whose theft
charge (later dropped) was discovered after his busts in Tulia as
part of the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force.

Meanwhile, Coleman continues his gypsy ways. He left the Panhandle
task force and found new employment with the Southeast Dallas
County/Ellis County Task Force in Waxahachie. This past April,
however, Coleman was fired. The Amarillo Globe-News quoted Ellis
County District Attorney Joe Grubb as saying Coleman's termination
did not involve any of his work as an undercover officer. "It
involved his relationship with an individual in the community."

In addition to calling for a Justice Department probe of Coleman's
actions and last summer's arrests in Tulia, the ACLU also is pushing
for federal probes of the task force actions in Brownwood and Brady.
What's more, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have
interviewed former undercover task force officer Barbara Markham
about her allegations of at least 150 trumped-up drug charges filed
against persons arrested by the Narcotics Trafficking Task Force of
Chambers and Liberty Counties. Markham currently works for the small
Oak Forest Police Department on Lake Lewisville near Denton. After
seven years of going under cover for task forces, she would never
work for another one -- even if she wanted to.

"I'm completely blackballed," says Markham, "but I wouldn't work for
a task force again."

Editorial assistant Kirsten Bubier helped compile statistics for this story