ROBESON CLOSES DOOR ON POLICE CORRUPTION

LUMBERTON - One after another, 22 former members of the Robeson County
Sheriff's Office have been hauled into federal court over the past six
years to answer to charges that they abused their powers. As the last
defendant -- the former sheriff himself -- awaits sentencing this
week, the people he once served say they, too, have been punished as
the case dragged on. With each allegation, each guilty plea and each
sentencing, the words "corruption" and "Robeson County" made the
rounds again in newspapers and television broadcasts. Kidnapping.
Money laundering. Racketeering. Distribution of cocaine. Theft of
federal funds. Satellite TV piracy. "Every time things kind of settled
down, there'd be something else," county manager Kenneth Windley said.
"And the judge is making an example of these guys, sentencing them to
more than what the prosecution even asked for. I know some folks here
question: If this was another county, would these things apply?"

Windley had two other job offers on the table when he chose to come to
Robeson County five years ago. He knew the FBI and the State Bureau of
Investigation had been looking into problems at the sheriff's
department. He knew Robeson was one of the largest counties in North
Carolina, and one of the poorest, with the one of the highest high
school dropout rates. He knew that the racial groups -- white, black
and American Indian -- that make up almost equal parts of the
population of 130,000 often didn't get along. Windley saw all that, he
said, but also"a lot of potential." What others have seen in Robeson
is a lot of corruption. Charges of corruption in Robeson became
national news in 1988 when Eddie Hatcher and a friend stormed the
office of the local newspaper, The Robesonian, brandishing sawed-off
shotguns and claiming to have a bomb. They chained the doors and held
up to 14 people hostage for 10 hours, with Hatcher in near hysterics
claiming his life was in danger because of what he knew of local law
enforcement's involvement in cocaine trafficking. Taking over the
newspaper building, he said, was the only way to draw attention to the
corruption and save his own life.

Hatcher surrendered without injuring anyone when then-Gov. James G.
Martin agreed to have a task force investigate the claims.

Hatcher was acquitted on federal hostage-taking charges but was later
found guilty of state kidnapping and weapons charges. He served five
years of an 18-year sentence.

'Nobody's that lucky' Rumors that the sheriff's department was in
cahoots with people it should have been hauling into jail had
circulated for decades. Current Robeson County District Attorney
Johnson Britt, 48, whose father and grandfather were also lawyers,
recalls as a boy hearing suspicions that bootleggers were paying off
deputies. As moonshine went out of fashion, dope dealers were said to
enjoy similar protections, and word was that the cocaine runners who
followed did, too.

Britt, who took office in 1994, was not alone in finding it curious
then that the sheriff's highway drug interdiction team, working the
stretch of Interstate 95 that runs through the county, was able to
intercept more contraband than almost any other unit in the country.
"Nobody's that lucky," Britt said an officer from another department
told him. The officer suspected the agents were getting tips from
rival dealers. Britt also couldn't help noticing that some deputies
lived better than their salaries would seem to support. Some wore
designer clothes and heavy gold jewelry and had expensive cars, boats,
jet skis and motorcycles. He heard that a group of officers had gone
to Charlotte and had Lasik eye surgery together. Some talked about
cruises they had taken.

"I've never been on a cruise in my life," Britt said. But what finally
prompted him to ask the State Bureau of Investigation to look into the
department was a drug case that fell apart after it became clear in
court that a deputy had lied to get a search warrant. Once charges
were brought in that case, Britt said, the allegations started pouring
in.

In cooperation with the FBI, state investigators seemed to comb
through everything in the department as part of Operation Tarnished
Badge. The charges accumulated. In federal court in Raleigh, before
the same judge who had presided over Eddie Hatcher's first trial, one
by one, every officer charged pleaded guilty.

Investigators found that some deputies in the drug unit had worked
with drug dealers to learn when other dealers would be holding large
amounts of cash or drugs. The officers would raid the dealers' homes
or stop their vehicles and confiscate the drugs or money, skimming
part or taking it all and sharing the proceeds with
co-conspirators.

In one case, two deputies went to Virginia Beach and kidnapped men
they had been told would have as much as $400,000 in drug money in
their van. En route back to Robeson County, an officer shot one of the
men in the foot to try to get him to reveal where the cash was hidden.

To Britt, the most grievous charge was one of perjury against former
Sheriff Glenn Maynor, who took office at the same time Britt was sworn
in as district attorney. Maynor has admitted that he lied to a grand
jury during the investigation when he denied knowing some of his
officers were selling counterfeit satellite cards, essentially
stealing a television signal. He also admitted to having deputies
clear debris and do other yard work at his home, and to having them do
campaign work for him, all while they were on the county's clock.

Maynor, 61, left office shortly before he was charged. Britt said he
and Maynor never got along because the sheriff let his deputies get
away with shoddy work and then blamed Britt when the cases had to be
dismissed.

"Here he took an oath to enforce and uphold the law and ... he
committed perjury in the grand jury," Britt said. "It was contrary to
the oath he took and contrary to the image he portrayed."

Maynor, who couldn't be reached for comment, is scheduled to be
sentenced Thursday. Judge Terrence Boyle has said Maynor could get as
much as 10 years in prison. Not a deal-breaker Gregory Cummings,
executive director of the county's economic development office, said
that since the investigation began, not one industry scout has asked
him about it. They're more interested, he said, in the county's
available work force, the presence of a community college and
UNC-Pembroke, and infrastructure that includes one interstate and
another that is almost complete. Just last week, Piedmont Natural Gas
announced plans to build a new storage facility in Robeson County
worth more than $300 million. Bill Greene, a co-owner of Somewhere in
Time, an antiques mall on a service road off I-95 in Lumberton, holds
a view not uncommon among county residents: that lawmen who did wrong
should be punished but that some of the charges in the case seemed
gratuitous. The making and selling of fraudulent satellite TV cards
didn't seem that serious, Greene said. And the work deputies did for
the sheriff? "If he's the boss and he tells you to do it, you're going
to do it," Greene said.

In court, lawyers have said deputies may have been more vulnerable to
temptation because they were underpaid and overstretched, asked to
cover a 950-square-mile area with 120 to 130 officers; because cash
was so available; and because the people they were taking it from most
often were drug dealers.

After Hatcher's arrest for The Robesonian incident, the governor's
task force said it found no evidence of wrongdoing by the sheriff's
office. At the time, many county residents said that could only have
been because it didn't really look.

Once he heard what turned up in Operation Tarnished Badge, Britt said
he wanted to be among the first to admit that "Eddie Hatcher was right
all those years ago. He just went about it the wrong way."