CORRUPTION SURROUNDS EX-SHERIFF'S TENURE

The day Glenn Maynor became Robeson County's sheriff, he fired back
at people who had circulated rumors about drug money fueling his
campaign. "I immensely dislike drug dealers," Maynor said that
December day a dozen years ago. "And to my knowledge, no drug dealer
supported me." Today, Maynor's legacy lies in tatters because of a
four-year investigation that has exposed his deputies' involvement
with drug dealers. Twelve deputies have been charged with colluding
with drug dealers, burning homes, kidnapping dealers and stealing
money from traffic stops of couriers along Interstate 95.

Maynor resigned in December 2004 -- citing health reasons -- just as
the investigation known as Operation Tarnished Badge started to heat
up. Since then, Maynor has kept a low profile, attending weddings,
funerals, a few political functions and an occasional luncheon with
political allies. Friends say he often works out at a fitness center
to strengthen his ailing heart, but otherwise keeps largely to himself.

Maynor has not been charged, but the investigation continues. He has
declined to talk about the investigation or about the deputies
involved. It is a far cry from the high hopes of 1994, when voters
elected Maynor, the only Lumbee Indian to hold Robeson County's most
powerful and influential political post.

Throughout its history, race has been the county's great divider.
Almost an equal number of blacks, whites and Indians live in Robeson,
creating a progress-blocking battle for political control. Robeson
ranks high in poverty and unemployment, crime and drugs, teenage
pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Schools contend with
low test scores and a high dropout rate.

Maynor was seen as a man who could galvanize the three races and make
them work for a common goal -- a better Robeson County.

In many ways, Maynor did just that. Each race should be treated
fairly and equally, he said during his campaign, and one of his first
acts was to put a black, a white and an Indian in his top command positions.

He was -- many of his friends and supporters say -- a man for all
people. "No one else could have handled the transition as well or
created as good a feeling as Glenn Maynor," said Dickson McLean, a
Lumberton lawyer who once served as the county's Democratic Party chairman.

But a dozen years after his election -- after every member of his
Drug Enforcement Division has been charged with a crime -- people
wonder: What price did they pay for the hope of unity?

Glenn Maynor graduated from Lumberton's Magnolia High School in 1965.
He spent a year working for Burlington Industries and another year at
Converse before then-Councilman W.R. Hester helped him get a job at
the Lumberton Police Department.

After a year as a dispatcher, Maynor became the first Indian officer
on the police force when he was promoted to patrol officer. He left
the force in 1973 to become driver's license examiner. Two years
later, he was elected to the City Council. By then, he told a
reporter in 1998, he had begun to set his sights on the Sheriff's
Office. "When I was a police officer, I witnessed deputies treating
people wrongly," Maynor told the reporter. "Sometimes it would be
verbal abuse, sometimes it was physical abuse, and they got away with it.

"I thought, 'Why doesn't somebody do somethingUKP' Then I realized, I
was somebody." Maynor had just been elected to a second term as
sheriff when he made those statements. By then, corruption had
already begun to creep into his department, a federal indictment of
three former deputies shows. Among many other offenses, the
indictment accuses the deputies of beating up people suspected of
dealing drugs.

Lumberton Mayor Ray Pennington said he and many others don't believe
Maynor knew what his deputies were doing.

"I certainly don't place blame on him," said Pennington, who
considers Maynor a close friend. "I'm sure he is as disappointed as
anyone. "Certainly, in my mind, he would not have condoned it or been
involved in it." At this point in the investigation, the harshest
criticism of Maynor has come from Johnson Britt, Robeson County's
district attorney. Britt, who declined to comment for this story, has
said previously that investigators were looking into whether Maynor
allowed on-duty deputies to landscape his yard and work at his golf
tournament to raise campaign funds. Since then, three former deputies
have pleaded guilty to accepting money to help landscape a former
elected official's yard and work at his golf tournament while on
duty. Federal prosecutors won't name the former elected official or
say whether Maynor is under investigation. No love has been lost
between Britt and Maynor over the years. Britt has said he doesn't
know whether Maynor was aware of his deputies' wrongdoing. But if he
didn't know, Britt has said, he should have. Glenn Maynor's first
attempt at becoming Robeson County's sheriff went down in defeat in 1990.

Maynor faced Sheriff Hubert Stone, a charismatic Democrat who had
held the office for 12 years. During many of those years, rumors of
corruption ran rampant. Two years before the election, Indian
activists Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs took hostages at The
Robesonian newspaper at gunpoint in an effort to expose the alleged
corruption. A state investigation that followed failed to uncover any
wrongdoing.

Fueled in part by the takeover, Maynor's campaign platform against
Stone was simple and effective: It's time for a change.

Stone beat Maynor by a scant 2 percent of the vote. Voters cast their
ballots along racial lines, with Stone capturing the white Lumberton
voters and Maynor sweeping the Indian vote in Pembroke.

Four years later, Stone decided to step down, leaving the door open
for Maynor. Maynor again left his job as director of the Robeson
Housing Authority to seek election. He beat Lum Edwards in a tight
primary runoff, capturing about 90 percent of the Lumbee vote. He
then beat James Sanderson in the November general election.

Maynor won by turning to political methods used to get out the vote
in the 1950s. His supporters shouted his message from megaphones in
Indian neighborhoods and gave away hot dogs at polls in
Indian-leaning precincts. Supporters say Maynor is a master at
campaigning, a man who knows how to work a room like few others.

"Everybody who got to know him liked him and wanted to see him do
well," said Leroy Freeman, who helped orchestrate Maynor's campaigns.
"He never met a stranger. He just knew how to make people feel that
they were important." On the rare occasions when Maynor forgot
someone's name, Freeman said, he would greet him with, "My friend, my
friend. So good to see you." After the person walked away, Maynor
would lean over and ask somebody for his name. "Then he had their
name and he wouldn't forget it," Freeman said. A month after winning
the 1994 election, Maynor addressed about 700 supporters outside the
Robeson County Courthouse.

The late Superior Court Judge Dexter Brooks administered the oath to
Maynor, who then spoke to the crowd about what he hoped his legacy
would hold: "I want to be remembered in history as the sheriff that
united this county racially and brought it together," he said.

Maynor turned to look at about 30 deputies standing behind him and
said: "If I think or hear of any evidence that they're taking any
kind of bribe, I'll fire them." Immediately following the swearing-in
ceremony, Maynor told a reporter that he would not retain 14 deputies
who had worked for Stone. Among them was Erich Hackney, Stone's head
of the Drug Enforcement Division. Hackney, now a Lumberton
councilman, said he holds no ill-will against Maynor. He just thinks
the sheriff made a big mistake. "If I was still over the drug unit, I
feel Glenn Maynor would still be the sheriff," Hackney said. "We ran
a good ship. One of the last things I did was balance those books. I
hate that things fell apart." Hackney was replaced by Mark Locklear,
chief of detectives under Stone. Maynor chose Willie Watson, a
17-year sheriff's veteran, as his chief deputy and former Lumberton
police officer Jesse Britt as his chief of operations. By doing so,
Maynor fulfilled his promise to put an Indian, a black and a white
into the department's top positions.

Locklear said he didn't agree with Maynor's decision to fire the 14
deputies who had worked under Stone. Locklear said he thought the
decision cost the county too much experience.

But he agreed with many of Maynor's other early decisions, especially
the one to create a major crimes division.

Maynor also made good on a campaign promise to put satellite
sheriff's offices in strategic areas of the county.

"Things were positive" back then, Locklear said. Four years after the
first election, voters thought Maynor did such a good job that they
picked him by nearly a 3-1 margin over his old nemesis -- Hubert Stone.

Two weeks after the 1998 election, Maynor fired Locklear without
warning or stating a reason.

"He called me on the phone and said that my services were no longer
needed, that things would not work out between us," Locklear said.
"In short, his politics clashed with my law enforcement.

"He was just like he campaigned, an effective administrator but he
lacked the law enforcement savvy that was needed to be aware of what
his officers were doing on a daily basis." Two of those deputies --
Steven Lovin and C.T. Strickland -- worked directly under Locklear in
the Drug Enforcement Division.

"I never had any problems with them while they were under my
supervision," Locklear said. "They went beyond the call of duty. What
happened after my departure, I don't know." State and federal
investigators say they think they know. Strickland, Lovin and another
former drug unit member, Roger Taylor, have been indicted. The
indictment accuses Lovin of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars
from drug seizures on Interstate 95. Strickland, who headed the drug
unit, is accused of intimidating suspected drug dealers and stealing
money seized in drug operations. Taylor is accused of burning down a
man's home and pawnshop and with providing drugs to informants.

The deputies were arrested June 9, about 18 months after Maynor
resigned and more than three years after Operation Tarnished Badge
began. Since that day, seven other former Robeson County deputies
have been charged. All seven have pleaded guilty and have agreed to
testify against Strickland, Lovin and Taylor, whose trial is set for
March. Another former deputy, Vincent Sinclair, was charged in May
2005 with kidnapping drug dealers.

The investigation has taken a turn recently, leading to the new
charges of satellite television piracy against Strickland, Lovin and
Taylor and a guilty plea for that offense from Deputy Gary Odum.
Charges against other deputies are expected.

Pennington, the Lumberton mayor, said the bad publicity has made it
hard to recruit new businesses to Lumberton and Robeson County.
Freeman, Maynor's friend and political strategist, called it "a black
eye" for the county and its honest law enforcers.

"All three races are facing indictments. It's not a Lumbee thing. It
hurts all of us. It's devastating." Freeman questions why it has
taken so long to bring the investigation to a close. Some people
speculate that investigators are still trying to connect Maynor to
the corrupt deputies. Freeman thinks that's unfair. "I know Glenn's a
good man," he said. "I know he tried to do a good job. It's obvious
they are trying to look and trying to find any penny-ante thing and
make it into a mountain." The U.S. Attorney's Office and the Internal
Revenue Service won't say what is taking so long. Officials from both
agencies have refused to talk about the case since Taylor, Strickland
and Lovin were arrested. Maynor's detractors are hesitant to speak
out, as well. Some, such as Locklear, fear a political backlash.
Locklear lost his bid for sheriff this year but still has political ambitions.

"I'd cut my throat for the future," he said. Like many, Locklear
said, he doesn't know whether Maynor was aware of what his deputies
were doing. But he thinks it's possible that Maynor didn't know about
the corruption.

"Glenn hadn't been in the trenches, hadn't worked investigations,
didn't have grassroots knowledge, so he wasn't able to know what to
look for as to whether his employees were providing effective
service," Locklear said. Freeman also won't say publicly whether he
thinks Maynor will escape criminal charges.

Only one thing, Freeman said, is certain. "We just want it over," he
said. "The county wants it over. It should have been over a long time
ago. That's the sentiment of a lot of people. Why are they dragging it out?"