DRUG STING RAISES ISSUE OF CREDIBILITY

17% of Tulia Blacks Indicted For Dealing

TULIA -- Even in normal times, when dust rises in the West and the
afternoon sun presses against the land like a flatiron, a vast
emptiness seems to gather like lint around this small town on the high
plains of the Texas Panhandle.

But these are not normal times and now the emptiness is more
pronounced.

For the past year, Tulia has been shipping a generation off to jail.

"It's real lonesome," says Mattie White, who lives across the street
from a small park where the youths of Tulia often gather. "It's not the
same as having those kids around."

Mattie White should know. She lost three children to the exodus. She
lost a niece, a son-in-law and a dozen friends or more. All were
snagged in the summer of 1999 in an 18-month undercover drug operation
that purported to sweep 46 drug dealers off the streets.

Forty-six drug dealers in a town of 4,700 people.

At first the town's residents, even those in law enforcement, were
stunned by the breadth of the dragnet. But as the jury trials unfolded
and the plea bargains were sealed, the shock turned to incredulity.

Accusations ranging from perjury to submitting phony evidence were
leveled against the undercover officer who was imported for the sting,
and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
accused the sheriff of targeting blacks in the operation.

Of the 46 mostly adolescents and young adults who were indicted, 40
were black. The number is more than 15 percent of the town's black
population of 232. The others, Anglo and Hispanic, have close ties --
through friendships or romantic relationships -- to the black
community.

The disproportionate number of blacks caught in the sting did not
escape the attention of the Amarillo NAACP, which began its own
investigation and is considering legal action.

"We are getting ready to raise the ante," says Alphanso Vaughn, head of
the Amarillo NAACP, which has been investigating the drug busts for
several months. "I'm not ready to disclose them now, but we are going
to take some action."

Friday, as a group of Tulia residents traveled to Austin to protest the
investigation, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit
against the sheriff, the undercover officer and the district attorney
for their roles in the bust.

Beyond the race issue, questions have been raised about the methods of
the undercover officer, whose testimony was the sole basis of most of
the convictions; about the accuracy of his sworn statements and about
the authenticity of the evidence he turned over to prosecutors.

Moreover, some residents now question whether the sting really bagged
drug dealers or just a collection of young users who had found a way to
scam this stranger who came to town and asked them to help him get
cocaine.

"Tulia and this county got off into a drug-based witch hunt hysteria,"
says Gary Gardner, a white farmer who was an early and vociferous
critic of the drug busts. "I don't think there is near as much drugs
here as there's been painted to be. And it's not centered in the black
community."

Privately, local lawmen admit that the sting did not net any "major
drug dealers," but they believe it made a dent in what they saw as a
burgeoning drug problem in the town.

Three of those indicted remain at large. Of the 43 arrested, 11 were
found guilty in jury trials, one is still awaiting trial and the others
entered into plea bargains.

"We didn't put any innocent people in jail," says District Attorney
Terry McEachern. "One hundred and thirty-two jurors (11 juries) found
them guilty."

Mattie White is a guard at a local prison and talks to many of the
inmates there.

"Some of them have told me how they used to come down here from
Amarillo and sell drugs in Tulia," she says.

On cool evenings, she often sat on her front porch and smelled the
marijuana smoke wafting from the park across the street where "all
colors of kids" were hanging out.

Her son, Donnie Smith, became addicted to cocaine. He had been a star
athlete at Tulia High, but after briefly attending West Texas A&M
University, he returned to Tulia and, like most of the young people
here, found work hard to come by. He married and divorced; worked low-
paying odd jobs and tried to burn up the boredom in a crack pipe.

Like many of his friends, he found a rock of crack to be the cheapest
and most convenient diversion available. There are no social clubs or
movie houses or amusement parks in Tulia. The closest place to party is
Amarillo, 60 miles north, or Plainview, 25 miles south. The closest
place to buy liquor is 15 miles west, in a place called Nazareth.

"Most of those kids needed help," Mattie White says. "Some of them were
messed up, but they weren't drug dealers and they didn't need prison."

One of them was William Cash Love, who is white and the father of one
of Mattie White's grandchildren. He was convicted of making several
deliveries to the undercover policeman -- the largest being an ounce of
crack -- and was sentenced to 435 years in prison, partly because he
had a previous felony drug conviction.

Another defendant, also with a prior conviction, received a 90-year
sentence.

What struck some attorneys as unusual, though, were the sentences meted
out to those who had no prior convictions and would have been eligible
for probation. Instead, many of them were put away for 20 or 25 years.

The harsh verdicts apparently made some think better of fighting the
charges, so they bargained for the best deals they could make with the
district attorney.

Besides the stiff sentences, the trials revealed something else about
the attitudes of the Swisher County juries: They were willing to
overlook some oddities pointed out by the defense attorneys.

Among them: None of the undercover buys were corroborated by other
witnesses or by electronic or video surveillance and, although the
relatively cheap crack cocaine was the apparent drug of choice among
Tulia's users, nearly all the defendants were busted for delivering the
more expensive powder cocaine.

"What I want to know," says Brent Hamilton, a Plainview lawyer who was
appointed to represent some of the defendants, "is where that powder
cocaine came from, because it sure didn't come from my clients."

Amarillo attorney Van Williamson, who represented Love, agrees.

"There is no market for powder cocaine in that town," he says.

Hamilton has obtained a court order to have the powder cocaine tested
to see if it can be traced to a single source. The implication of that
effort is clear -- that the undercover officer may have provided the
powder himself, cut it with other substances and submitted it as
evidence in order to beef up the charges.

Because of an appeal by one of the defendants, the testing has been
delayed, but Hamilton says one lab technician told him that some of the
powder evidence turned in by the undercover policeman was "suspiciously
weak in content of cocaine."

Delivering an "eight ball" of powder cocaine -- 3.5 grams, about an
eighth of an ounce -- is a more serious offense than delivering a rock
of crack, which is less than a gram.

Another factor contributed to the severity of the sentences. The
indictments, based on information supplied by the undercover officer,
alleged that many of the drug transactions took place within 1,000 feet
of a school -- a first-degree felony punishable by life in prison.

The only evidence of where the deals were done and the kinds of drugs
involved was testimony from the officer, who kept no permanent notes,
he has testified, but scribbled information on his leg or stomach.

His credibility has been questioned by defense attorneys and he is the
target of a perjury complaint filed by one of the defendants.

No one disputes that drugs were readily available in Tulia, but it was
the nature of the sting, the characterization of its targets and the
severe sentences that won't let the issue go away.

The undercover operation began early in 1998, when Sheriff Larry
Stewart contacted the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force in
Amarillo, which assists local lawmen in 26 counties with federal funds
channeled through the governor's office.

Through the task force, the sheriff met and hired Tom Coleman, 41, who
had moved in and out of law enforcement in several counties in North
and West Texas. The son of a Texas Ranger, Coleman had been a jailer in
Denton, and a sheriff's deputy in Pecos and Cochran counties.

Apparently, little else was known about him when he was hired for the
Tulia job. In the subsequent trials, the sheriff and task force members
testified that each thought the other had checked him out; they now say
a background check was done and that former colleagues were interviewed
about Coleman.

In fact, defense attorneys would later learn, his law enforcement
career had been less than distinguished. He had abruptly left his jobs
in Pecos and Cochran counties, owing large debts to local merchants in
both places.

While he was conducting the undercover operation in Tulia, an arrest
warrant for theft was issued in Cochran County, where it was alleged
that Coleman had gassed up his personal car and paid with a county
credit card before leaving town in 1996.

In a letter to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, dated June 14,
1996, Cochran County Sheriff Ken Burke informed the agency that Coleman
had quit his job in the middle of a shift and skipped out on bills
totaling $6,931.82.

"It is my opinion that an officer should uphold the law. Mr. Coleman
should not be in law enforcement," the sheriff wrote.

(Efforts to contact Coleman for comment were unsuccessful. After the
Tulia sting, he took another undercover job in Chambers County near
Houston but recently left there and reportedly returned to West Texas,
leaving no forwarding address. He did not respond to requests for an
interview relayed through family members in Midland.)

Also damaging to Coleman's image and credibility was a 1994 report
prepared for the Pecos County court in which Coleman and his wife were
seeking a divorce and fighting over custody of their two children.

The family court investigator interviewed friends, relatives and co-
workers of the Colemans.

One acquaintance described Coleman as a "gun nut ... who would go stand
out in the front yard sometimes and just trigger off a blast." A former
co-worker in the Pecos County sheriff's office told the investigator,
"Tom can lie to you when the truth would sound better." More than one
of those interviewed used terms such as "paranoid" and "compulsive
liar" and "unstable" to describe him.

None of that, apparently, was known to the sheriff or the task force
when Coleman was turned loose in Tulia. His only instructions,
according to county sources, were "to buy drugs and go wherever it
leads you."

Coleman's appearance made him an ideal mole. Small, gaunt and long-
haired, he looked like anything but a policeman. An astigmatism causes
his eyes to twitch, a condition he helps control by tilting his head.

After the busts were made, Coleman told the Amarillo Globe-News that
some of the defendants just stared at him and said, "No way you're a
cop."

He worked his way into the community by taking a job at the local
livestock auction -- one of the economic engines of Tulia -- and
quickly befriended an elderly black man named Eliga Kelly, known around
town as hard-drinking but friendly and harmless. Kelly introduced him
to most of those in Tulia who helped him obtain drugs.

Lawmen here say that when the sting was initiated, they thought it
would take three months and snare perhaps a dozen dealers. After 18
months, however, Coleman claimed to have bought $20,000 worth of drugs
from the 46 people named in 132 indictments.

The warrants were served at sunrise on July 23, 1999, and the 23 who
were arrested filled the local jail and spilled over into surrounding
county jails. Local headlines trumpeted the arrests of "known drug
dealers," but defense lawyers argued later that the terminology was
inaccurate.

"There are not 50 major drug dealers in Tulia," says Hamilton, the
Plainview defense attorney. "In all of those raids, they found no coke,
no marijuana, no baggies. None of those people was able to hire their
own attorney. Does that sound like major drug dealers?"

Billy Wafer is one of the defendants awaiting trial and he has his own
theory about how the deals went down.

Wafer was convicted of marijuana possession in Plainview in 1990 and
received 10 years' probation. He was six months away from completing
that probation when he was arrested in the Tulia roundup.

Although he says he never met Coleman, he was charged with meeting the
undercover officer at a convenience store and arranging to have an
"eight ball" delivered to him at the sale barn later in the day.

However, he had a good alibi. At the time he was alleged to have been
making the deal with Coleman, he was at work at Seed Resources in Tulia
and had time cards and testimony from his boss to prove it.

At a parole revocation hearing, state District Judge Edward Self took
the boss's word over Coleman's and declined to revoke Wafer's
probation. However, while that would seem to have punctured the case
against Wafer, the district attorney did not move to dismiss the
charges and the judge did not order them dismissed.

Instead, Wafer was offered a deal. He could plead no contest to a
reduced charge and walk away with no jail time. He declined, he says,
because he is innocent and "I want the justice system to work." Another
reason, according to one defense attorney, is to preserve a possible
civil suit against Coleman and Swisher County.

"He didn't get no dealers, he got users," Wafer said of Coleman. "They
were all young and had habits but no money."

The "dealers," he says, were just middlemen who would obtain a rock of
cocaine, pinch off a little for themselves, and sell the rest to
Coleman for the full price.

"He didn't care what he got or how much he paid, just so he made the
buy," he says.

Wafer is also suspicious of the powder cocaine evidence. Those who were
busted, he says, did not have the money to trade in $200 eight balls.
Rocks of crack, costing $20, suited their tastes and budgets.

If Coleman could readily buy crack, why would he fake the evidence to
upgrade the charges to delivering the eight balls of powder cocaine?

Hamilton says it could have been to make the busts appear more
significant.

"He was named Lawman of the Year after that," he says.

Wafer has an equally troubling theory. Coleman had debts, he says.
After the warrant for his arrest was issued in Cochran County, Coleman
quickly paid nearly $7,000 in restitution to get the charges dropped.

"Where did he get that money?" Wafer asks. Perhaps, he says, the
undercover officer had obtained a small amount of cocaine, was diluting
it with another substance and submitting it to the task force as
evidence, getting reimbursed each time for purchases he never actually
made.

Wafer is the last of the 43 defendants to be tried and he has mounted a
vigorous offensive against his accuser. Last week, he filed a perjury
complaint against Coleman.

District Attorney McEachern says the complaint will be turned over to
the attorney general's office. "I want to avoid a possible conflict of
interest," he says.

Wafer alleges that Coleman lied during the revocation hearing when he
testified that he had never been arrested or charged with anything more
serious than a traffic ticket.

In fact, he had been arrested on the Cochran County warrant while the
undercover operation was ongoing.

The Cochran County theft warrant was issued on May 6, 1998, and,
according to Sheriff Wallace Stalcup, a Teletype was sent out to other
law enforcement agencies within two days requesting that Coleman be
picked up for failing to make restitution for the gasoline he had
charged to a county credit card and failing to pay the vendors he owed
when he left town.

Coleman's boss, Swisher County Sheriff Stewart, picked him up, booked
him but did not place him in jail. Coleman signed a waiver of
arraignment, was released on his own recognizance and ordered by the
sheriff to take a week of vacation and get the Cochran County problem
resolved.

Coleman denied the theft charge, but he told Stewart he would make
restitution for the gas anyway. He also agreed to settle the debts,
which he said had been accumulated in his name by an ex-girlfriend.

A week later, he returned to work and continued making buys, although
the Cochran County problem had not been cleared up.

Lt. Mike Amos says he was not aware of the theft charges until August,
when Cochran County sent another Teletype requesting that Coleman be
picked up.

Amos says Coleman was suspended until the restitution was made and the
charges were dropped on Aug. 17.

The undercover operation and lingering questions about Coleman's
credibility have left Tulia torn by distrust and suspicion.

But even if Coleman is found to have committed perjury, defense
attorneys are skeptical that it will have any effect on the convictions
of their clients.

"Any place else, you might have a chance of getting some things undone
or at least getting another look at the cases," says Williamson, the
Amarillo defense attorney. "But, this is Texas."