DRUG COPS' SHOCK WAVES

A Davidson County drug ring run by officers has damaged morale and
credibility. Dozens of their drug cases have been dismissed.

LEXINGTON - In the piney woods of east Texas, a state trooper last year
pulled over a Cadillac with North Carolina plates. He found three kilos of
cocaine hidden in its right front fender -- and a scandal that today
Davidson County is fighting to live down.

When the driver was arrested, the first phone call he made was to a
narcotics squad lieutenant in the Davidson County (N.C.) Sheriff's Office.
He had just lost $48,000 worth of cocaine and he knew the lieutenant would
be upset -- after all, it was the lieutenant's dope.

Lt. David Woodall bailed the man out of jail because they had an important
relationship: The man had been bringing three or four kilos of cocaine to
Woodall every couple of weeks ever since the officer had first arrested him.

Woodall wasn't using the drugs to catch criminals. Instead, he was running
a drug ring himself, along with other officers who planted, stole and sold
narcotics, and intimidated their victims and competitors through beatings
and threats of arrest or murder, according to court records outlining the case.

"It's scary what they thought they could get away with," said Georgia
Nixon, a High Point defense lawyer who used to work closely with the
officers when she was a prosecutor.

They got away with it until December, when state and federal agents shut
down the operation by arresting Woodall, four other officers and,
eventually, five accomplices. Since then, dozens of drug cases they made
have been dismissed, two convicted men have been freed and prosecutors are
concerned that trials could be tipped against them for years if jurors
blame other police for what these officers did.

Next month, the three ringleaders will be sentenced; and later this summer,
the state Court of Appeals will rule on whether a teenager serving a
14-year sentence was set up by the officers. At some point, local
authorities say, they hope Davidson County can move beyond the scandal.

In the meantime, said Davidson County District Attorney Garry Frank, it has
damaged the morale and reputation of honest officers.

"They've had to bear the brunt of the fallout from this," Frank said.
"There are some good people who are going to have to work hard to get back
to where we were."

Roy Holman, a former state trooper who is running for sheriff in Davidson
County, said people are still talking about it.

"They're looking at the credibility of our sheriff's department; it's not
there," Holman said. "This is going to hurt all law enforcement, not just
in our county, but in other counties. Jurors and the general public are
going to look at this thing and say, 'My gosh, if this can happen there, it
can happen to me.' "

Selling steroids, drugs

It began with an investigation into where local bodybuilders were getting
their steroids but quickly developed into a tale of corruption that
surprised everyone involved.

A State Bureau of Investigation agent who began working the case last
summer made an arrest that would eventually unravel the drug ring. "It just
evolved," SBI Director Robin Pendergraft said. "It kept leading us to
additional people, and eventually to the Thomasville officer."

In November, Sgt. Russell McHenry, a respected officer in the community of
24,000 people about 80 miles west of Raleigh, admitted to the SBI that he
had been using steroids and selling them to other police officers and local
weightlifters. He said he did it because his recent divorce and
child-support payments didn't leave him with enough money to live on.

McHenry told the SBI that when a local steroid supplier was arrested with
$1 million worth of the drug in California in April 2001, he began buying
through a trio of Davidson narcotics officers: Woodall, Lt. Douglas
Westmoreland and an undercover officer, Sgt. William Rankin.

McHenry described his entry into a world of rogue cops who were dealing in
not only steroids but in large amounts of cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy,
and protecting their turf through intimidation. He said the officers made
drug deals in their undercover cars in parking lots of local high schools
and shopping malls.

Some bragged that they had bought Harley-Davidson motorcycles with cash
from drug profits, and promised a new recruit that he, too, would soon be
able to afford one if he stuck with them. One officer carried "throw-down"
pills, McHenry said, that he would use to coerce victims who balked at
letting him search their homes.

At that point, the investigation intensified, Pendergraft said. The pair of
SBI agents working the case sought help from the FBI, which assigned three
agents to the case.

Agents learned that, among other crimes, the narcotics officers had broken
into the home of their steroid supplier -- Wyatt Kepley, a local
bodybuilder and son of a longtime county commissioner -- three times and
stolen $160,000 in cash.

Once, when they knew Kepley was going to be in California for a court
appearance on his earlier arrest, Woodall gave McHenry a phony sheriff's
office badge and a fake search warrant to get past Kepley's girlfriend at
his apartment.

McHenry took $42,000 cash and 16,000 vials of a steroid from the apartment,
and the officers later resold the drugs to Kepley, according to the court
records.

In January 2001, Westmoreland signed out of the sheriff's department
evidence room 60 pounds of marijuana and two kilos of cocaine, supposedly
for an undercover bust. Woodall admitted selling about 40 pounds of the
marijuana; the rest of the drugs were never returned.

That spring, Woodall and Westmoreland grew concerned that agents might be
investigating local steroid trafficking and worried that Rankin didn't have
"the heart to take the heat," and they might have to kill him, according to
an FBI affidavit filed in federal court.

Three days before McHenry's arrest in November, he and Woodall used a fake
search warrant to visit a trailer in Rowan County where they had learned a
group of dealers were selling cocaine. The officers kicked in the front
door with guns drawn and took $900 cash, three firearms and 3 1/2 pounds of
marijuana.

McHenry began wearing a hidden tape recorder and once recorded Woodall
telling him, "I don't care about police work." He said he had paid his
supplier to bring back more cocaine from Texas and threatened to kill the
man's children if he didn't return, according to the FBI.

On Dec. 12, agents lured the three Davidson detectives to the National
Guard Armory in High Point for what they said was a meeting of undercover
officers. Davidson County Sheriff Gerald Hege showed up with his officers
and was stunned when they were arrested; he had not been warned that it
would happen.

Cases corrupted

In the months since, the Davidson County District Attorney's Office has had
to sort through scores of pending drug cases to see if any of the officers
had custody of seized drugs or were involved in the investigations.

Frank, the district attorney, ended up dismissing charges against more than
40 people. Last month a federal public defender convinced the U.S.
Attorney's Office to join him in dismissing the case against a man who
pleaded guilty to a crack cocaine charge and was serving a 10-year sentence.

"The district attorney had no choice but to dismiss many cases, because the
officers' credibility was gone," Pendergraft said. "Whether they were
guilty or innocent, we'll never know."

Only one case that came out of the Davidson County scandal remains unresolved.

George Branham, a 16-year-old high school honor student, had been selling
small amounts of LSD and marijuana to friends.

An informant, who admitted at trial to having a grudge against him, worked
with the three Davidson County narcotics officers to convince Branham to
sell 1,000 hits of LSD. Any amount of more than 1,000 doses carries a
minimum sentence of 14 to 18 years.

Branham resisted, saying he had never even seen that much before, but
finally relented and arranged a deal. Woodall, Westmoreland and Rankin
arrested him.

In February 2001 a jury convicted him. Nixon, his attorney, appealed on
several grounds, including entrapment. When the drug scandal surfaced,
Nixon in January filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that the
conviction was based almost entirely on the testimony of discredited officers.

Frank says Branham's case is different because a jury already rejected the
entrapment argument, and the youth admitted in court that he was a drug
dealer. "That's not the same as a set-up," Frank said.

'We've moved forward'

Restoring faith in Davidson County's officers was important to the SBI,
Pendergraft said, because it affects all of law enforcement.

"Law enforcement officers take an oath to uphold the law," she said. "In
taking that oath, they accept the public's trust. All law enforcement
officers across the state are offended by another officer's violation of
that public trust."

Thomasville police Chief Larry Murdock, who helped the SBI investigate one
of his own officers, said he thinks the matter is behind them.

"We're ashamed, we're embarrassed," Murdock said. "But we got a lot of
support from the citizens here in town. We handled it, we didn't try to
cover it up. We've moved forward."

An emotional and apologetic McHenry was sentenced earlier this month to two
years in federal prison. Woodall, Westmoreland, Rankin and Archdale police
Sgt. Christopher Shetley will be sentenced July.