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 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 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.