DIRTY COPS, DIRTY GAMES

The untold story of Dallas' bigest-ever police corruption scandal. Part two
of a special report.

Last week in Part 1: When Dallas cop Danny Maples turned himself in to
police investigators in December 1998, he vowed to tell everything he knew
about other dirty cops. But apart from Maples, only one officer, Quentis
Roper, was ever charged with a crime. Continued from Dirty Cops, Dirty Games
Part One:

Danny Maples says that, after the failed FBI sting, Roper alternated between
believing his tormentors had backed off and ranting about the injustice of
life in PI's crosshairs. One thing is clear: The La Quinta setup didn't make
Roper more cautious. A week later, on October 28, 1998, Roper and partner
Larry Coddington pulled into the parking lot of an East Dallas auto
detailing shop frequented by convicted drug dealer Homar Gracia and his
associates. Homar Gracia's Lincoln Town Car was parked in front.

At least 12 people later gave statements about what happened that evening,
and their stories didn't always match. Yet all but Roper generally agree on
the following: Coddington guarded the Lincoln and two or three Hispanic men
loitering outside, while Roper went in to find Gracia, supposedly because he
had outstanding warrants. Once inside, Roper ordered all the Hispanics
except Gracia to get out, leaving only Homar and the business owners. Roper
then commanded the auto-detail owners to close shop and go home.

With "credible" witnesses out of the way and only dopers left, Roper went to
work. He patted down Homar Gracia, found an envelope with $6,800 cash in his
pocket, and cuffed him. Locating Gracia's keys, Roper searched the Lincoln.
According to a public integrity report, in the trunk, under a spare tire,
Roper found "30 to 35 thousand dollars and 19,000.00 worth of jewelry [all
of] which was inside a Crown Royal bag."

Around this time, Gracia asked to have a private word with Roper, and the
two went around the corner. Gracia later told investigators he tried to
bribe Roper to let him go, but that Roper refused, suspecting another setup.

Coddington, meanwhile, had patted down the other Hispanic men and discovered
$1,900 on Ismael Burciaga. Coddington showed Roper the money he had
"detained" from Burciaga, and shortly afterward, Roper told Burciaga to take
a hike--without his money.

At some point, patrol officers Ronnie Anderson and Michael Baesa arrived;
they couldn't recall whether Gracia's trunk was open already. At Roper's
request, they helped search Gracia's car, as well as a second car parked
nearby. Anderson later told investigators he never saw any money at the
scene. It does not appear that Baesa was ever asked.

Baesa and Roper found cocaine in the second car, which belonged to Ismael
Burciaga, the man whom Roper had let go. Baesa went looking for Burciaga and
found him at a nearby Sonic. Burciaga, Gracia, and another man were
arrested. A total of $8,100--Burciaga's $1,900 and the contents of Gracia's
pocket--made it to the property room. The contents of the Crown Royal
bag--call it $30,000 and a lot of gold change--never did.

(Coddington would later give conflicting statements to police investigators
about what happened that evening. For example, in a January 1999 statement
to public integrity, Coddington said that Roper found Gracia's $6,800 in
cash during a search of Gracia's car, which Roper had towed as abandoned
property. Roper, in turn, said the business owner asked him to have the car
hauled away, and that the $6,800 was "found property" from inside the car.

(Months afterward, the business owner denied to investigators that he'd
asked Roper to tow the car. Some time around then, in a second statement to
public integrity and internal affairs, Coddington gave a different timeline
of events. Now Coddington said Roper had seized the $6,800 from Gracia
before the car was searched. Police investigators apparently never
questioned Coddington about the discrepancies, and Coddington did not return
phone calls from the Dallas Observer.)

Two weeks after the Gracia arrest, PI finally confronted Roper.

On November 11, Detectives Carl Lowe and Diane McLeod showed up at
Northeast. They were greeted by Roper's sergeant, who said he'd been
expecting them for some time and who had taken the liberty of ordering Roper
and several other officers who worked with him on the suspect
arrests--including Anderson, Coddington, and Baesa--to come in that night at
10 p.m. and be interviewed. All denied having done or seen anything illegal;
they were just hard-working cops being harassed by scumbucket dealers who
wanted to make drug charges go away. Roper agreed to take a polygraph.

By the next morning, Roper had, in PI lingo, "lawyered up." His attorney,
Bob Baskett, was calling PI, accusing them of entrapping Roper and other
nefarious acts. There would be no polygraph, not then and not unless Roper's
side got to dictate terms.

Roper, they knew, would not be an easy nut to crack.

Interestingly, PI made no move to interrogate Maples--a fact that Maples
claims drove Roper to distraction. "He started acting really weird," Maples
recalls. "He kept asking whether I'd been interviewed by PI. And he kept
asking if I'd ever told Eveline anything." Maples told Roper he hadn't.

Perhaps it was an effort to reassure Roper; perhaps, an act of defiance
aimed at the inspectors riding him. But on November 21, in one of the most
bizarre episodes of the whole story, Maples, who hadn't stolen any money for
six months, pulled off one last heist. Riding alone, Maples responded to a
call involving a stolen vehicle. When he arrived, other cops were at the
scene, including Roper and Coddington. Maples patted down a wiry,
Jheri-curled, streetwise man named Seneca Faggett. Faggett turned out to be
carrying $400, a little dope, and an assault rifle. Everything made it to
the property room except $149 of Faggett's money. According to a statement
Faggett later gave police, Maples said "my sergeant"--whom Maples called
"Q"--"told me to confiscate everything."

It wasn't the first time Faggett had run across "Q," whose reputation, he
later testified, was well-known on the streets. "Q ain't right," Faggett
later told a jury. "And if you can't trust the cops, you can't trust
nobody."

---- Despite Maples' act of defiance, by late November, he says, he was "an
extreme basket case." Eveline and Maples, who hardly knew each other, had
begun to quarrel, and shortly after Thanksgiving, Eveline moved out. But
there was a complication: Eveline was pregnant. She was also, it seems,
suspicious. In fact, before going on military leave in September, Maples had
taken Eveline to the storage shed where he kept his wampum. Maples showed
her the money and claimed he'd won it all gambling.

On December 2, during a conversation with her ex, a DPD officer, Schoovaerts
revealed the existence of Maples' stash. Word got back to public integrity,
which contacted Eveline, who led them to the site. On Sunday morning,
December 6, PI pulled a state district judge out of a church service to sign
a search warrant, which detectives executed around noon. The money was gone.

But all was not lost. PI now had the psychological crow bar they needed to
pry the truth from Maples.

That afternoon, as previously planned, Maples appeared at the Grand Prairie
police station, where Eveline was on duty. Maples thought he and Eveline
would exchange property, including Eveline's engagement ring. When Maples
showed up, however, Eveline was nowhere in sight; instead, he was confronted
by PI detectives McLeod, Lowe, and PI chief Lt. Ron Waldrop.

"The first thing McLeod says [is] 'The deal about Eveline's [engagement]
ring is off and she doesn't ever want to see you again,'" Maples recalls.
"Then, they say they're from public integrity and they're investigating me."

They asked him about two specific thefts. "I said, 'I don't know what you're
talking about,'" Maples recalls. "That's when [detective Carl Lowe] said,
'We know about the $50,000.'"

Maples struggled to stay calm. Four days earlier, he had removed the money
from storage, and since then, he had been hauling nearly $50,000 in
greenbacks in his Toyota 4-Runner. He left the interrogation and, in a fog,
drove back to Dallas.

"I was just trying to figure this all out, who they're talking to and all.
It was just...overload.

"I knew the next move was to talk to Roper and tell him they knew about the
money. I thought they would probably tell him, 'Look what we got: Maples'
girlfriend.'"

Maples says he believed Eveline was in danger. Equally likely, he simply
knew the jig was up. He needed leniency from the authorities and he wanted
absolution from Eveline, who obviously knew he was crooked, and whom he was
desperate to win back. He wanted to marry her, and he wanted the baby.

He went home and called his big sister, Tammie Maples Drown, a housewife in
Seguin.

"He told me he and another cop had been stealing money from drug dealers,"
recalls Drown. "He was crying. I didn't believe him; he'd never done
anything wrong in his life. Then he started to get really upset, and I knew
he was telling the truth. So I gave him a little sisterly advice. I told him
to do the right thing and turn himself in."

Maples alerted the Grand Prairie police that he was coming back to do just
that. And later that night, Maples gave his lawyers $49,000 in
cash--evidence to be handed over to public integrity.

Part one, dirty cop, was finally over; Part two, frustrated informant, was
beginning.

---- The next morning, Maples' lawyers met with PI detectives and
representatives from the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. The
negotiations were handled by Assistant DA Mike Gillett, head of then-DA John
Vance's public integrity unit and, in the waning days of the lame-duck Vance
regime, the real power behind the throne. "I distinctly recall being told
'we want Roper, and we want anyone else you've got,'" says Brook Busbee, one
of Maples' attorneys.

A deal was quickly struck: Maples would get immunity to tell what he knew,
and if he cooperated, he would get probation. With the papers inked, Maples'
attorney forked over the $49,000.

Maples told his attorneys, and his attorneys told prosecutors, that the
money had come not just from his thefts, but from the thefts of Roper and
others in Roper's "ring" of dirty cops. The claim made sense to public
integrity. The thefts that Maples and Roper worked together netted less than
$26,000; Maples' half would have been less than $13,000. Maples' own
pathetic little heists tallied up to about $3,000. In other words, somewhere
between $30,000 and $40,000 had to have come from a source other than
Maples.

On Tuesday, December 8, Maples' surrender was all over the paper, complete
with a tall tale he'd told Grand Prairie police about having been threatened
by drug dealers.

That same day, Maples finally sat down with Dallas police interrogators--and
promptly committed another act of pedicide.

To be sure, he gave them a few good leads. He told them of a beating he'd
seen involving three other cops. He gave them details from arrests he'd
witnessed, where he thought something was fishy. But because of the way
Roper ran his affairs, Maples said, he'd only heard about, not witnessed,
many thefts; thus what he knew was mostly from Roper and mostly hearsay. He
had, however, attended "get-togethers" with some of the other cops Roper had
said were dirty. Maples said that at these get-togethers, Roper had said
some incriminating things--talking in front of him and the others about
everybody "earning" and being "in the game," as well as the need for
secrecy. They were admissions of a sort, and if the story checked out, it
provided at least some evidence against other cops. Maples knew a few of
these cops by name; others, he said, had been introduced by nicknames, or
divisions, or not at all. But, Maples said, he could identify from photos
the cops he'd met.

But Maples didn't give PI what they wanted. He didn't give them Roper. And
he sure didn't give up himself. By now Maples had begun to think better of
his hasty decision to talk. It occurred to him that his interrogators might
not know everything, and Roper wasn't likely to fill them in. Though under
scrutiny, Roper was still denying everything; in fact, he had by then agreed
to take a polygraph. (He failed.) But Maples knew Roper pretty well, well
enough to bet he wouldn't break. "He's a proud person," says Maples. "Even
today, I still think he thinks he can pull this out, maybe through an appeal
or something."

Rather than 'fess up, Maples floated a three-monkey version of the story:
He'd only seen Roper take money one time, from a safe, and he'd never heard
Roper actually admit stealing anything. The way Maples told it, he merely
suspected Roper had been stealing, based on the money he said Roper gave him
"to keep his mouth shut."

The next day, Maples was polygraphed about his involvement in two thefts,
thefts in which he had downplayed his own role. He flunked.

Though they knew Maples wasn't coming clean, PI and the DA's office weren't
ready to give up on Maples. And PI had its hands full. Over an eight-week
period from December 8 until February 2, PI detectives interviewed every
officer or ex-officer who was present during 16 suspicious arrests. They
also completed interviews with every Northeast officer assigned to fourth
and first watches.

The resulting notes, transcripts, and sworn affidavits don't paint a pretty
picture. A good number of the officers at Northeast who hadn't worked on the
suspect cases--and thus, had no criminal exposure themselves--knew or
assumed the two officers worked "backward," that is, were busting into
apartments, stopping people, and searching cars without probable cause.

But among those officers who had worked the suspect cases, none admitted
having seen, heard, or suspected anything. This, despite the fact that many
of the searches were blatantly illegal; in several cases, Maples, Roper, and
other officers effectively broke in and entered without consent. In order to
search your home, the Fourth Amendment requires that officers have two
things: probable cause to believe a crime has occurred, and a warrant based
on the testimony of an informant known to be reliable--not somebody arrested
five minutes ago who says the dope's at your place. Cars are a bit easier.
As long as police stop you for something other than speeding, they have the
right to take you to jail. And if you go to jail, they can impound your car
and inventory it--that is, search it.

Of course, by getting written or verbal consent to search, police don't have
to worry about pesky Constitutional protections. So the game is to obtain
consent by hook or by crook.

In one case, an officer admitted he didn't actually witness consent to
search being given, even though he signed a form stating otherwise. Michael
Magiera told internal affairs that, while covering Roper and Maples at an
East Dallas apartment complex on March 5, 1998, "...Roper handed me a signed
Consent to Search form, and asked me to sign it as a witness. I thought this
was odd because I wasn't at the apartment to witness the Request for Consent
to Search, and there seemed to be other officers there that could have
signed it. I dismissed my thought thinking instead that I was least senior
officer out there, and this was one of those mundane aspects of police
paperwork..."

In another instance, officer Ronnie Anderson admitted in an initial
statement to PI and internal affairs that he had falsely signed his name as
the witness on the consent to search form for Rosalinda Alvarado's
apartment. Less than two months later, in another statement to public
integrity, Anderson told a different story--recalling that he had witnessed
consent to search being given.

Yet nobody at DPD seems to have cared much. In the name of the drug war, the
reality is that these transgressions go on every day; police know it, and
aren't about to do anything to stop it. Nor did they care about a handful of
miraculous dope findings by Maples or Roper in places already thoroughly
searched--some indication that Maples and Roper were, as some of the
arrested people claimed, planting dope.

And something else jumps out from the reports and interviews: In several
cases, officers--including supervising sergeants--saw Maples or Roper seize
money, but never asked them to count it or doublechecked to be sure it all
got to the property room. In one instance, Maples and Roper stole
approximately $13,000 from a safe while two sergeants were in adjacent rooms
in an apartment, supposedly supervising the search. Both sergeants saw the
safe, and one sergeant knew that money had been recovered from it, but
nobody ever made them count the dough or checked to be sure it got to the
property room. In essence, money, guns, and drugs were all being seized on
the honor system, without any checks, follow-up, or systematic oversight.

In a particularly disturbing case, witnesses told investigators that Roper
allegedly held a gun to the head of a drug suspect named John Harp and
played Russian roulette while three officers--Ronnie Anderson, Michael
Baesa, and Rodney Nelson--looked on and laughed. "So he takes hold of the
.357 pistol that was now on the table and empties all the bullets from it.
He picks up one bullet off the floor and drops it slowly into the barrel,
spins it shut...then 'Q,' he pulls the trigger, and scares us all to death,"
wrote a witness named Stonish Jackson in a statement to IAD. Added another
witness, Charles Pipkin, "The police who were in the room started laughing."

Although the arrested person and a witness passed a lie detector test on
that one, PI made no effort to polygraph the officers, all of whom denied in
sworn statements that they'd seen the alleged Russian-roulette incident.

---- It is unclear how much of this came to the attention of the DA's
public integrity unit, since there wasn't much of a public integrity unit to
pass it on to. On January 4, 1999, DPD detectives met with Mike Gillett, who
promised to look over the evidence and get back to the detectives. Gillett
never had the chance, though, because that afternoon, as his first official
act, incoming District Attorney Bill Hill canned him.

To be sure, Gillett was controversial; for years, many had charged that he
ran public integrity as his own personal vendetta machine. A number of black
cops and politicians suspected him of running a racist department, that went
after black officials such as Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price
with special zeal.

The public integrity section under Gillett included eight people: Gillett,
five assistant district attorneys, and two investigators. Within days after
Gillett got the hook, Bill Hill transferred everyone out except Assistant
District Attorney Clark Birdsall, one investigator, and a young attorney.

And Birdsall had his own problems.

"The TPOA [Texas Police Peace Officers Association, the black officers'
union] had been having meetings with Bill Hill, complaining that I was a
racist," recalls Birdsall, now a criminal defense attorney in private
practice.

Until recently, the 45-year-old Birdsall--who resembles a small,
bespectacled, slightly stooped Harrison Ford--had spent virtually his entire
legal career as an assistant district attorney, and most of that in public
integrity. (In May, Birdsall was fired for allegedly shoving his
girlfriend.) Former colleagues in the DA's office describe him as many
things, but racist is not among them. "Clark is a very principled, honorable
person who doesn't have a racist bone in his body," says one black former
DA. "What he does have is tunnel vision."

TPOA President Thomas Glover confirms that he complained to Bill Hill about
Birdsall. "I was involved in a couple of cases that put a bad taste in my
mouth about Birdsall," says Glover, a sergeant in the DPD's family violence
unit. The TPOA had long believed the DA's office was unduly aggressive when
it came to prosecuting black police officers--and that Birdsall was part of
the problem.

As Glover recalls, Hill and his new deputy, Mike Carnes, were "very
receptive" to the TPOA's concerns. "[Hill] said he wouldn't stand for it,
for any sort of racial bias," says Glover. And, Glover says, Hill also made
him a promise: "Mr. Hill said he would personally review every case where a
police officer was charged."

Hill apparently made good on his promise; according to Birdsall, "management
started messing with my cases." Roper's case, Birdsall says, was
particularly sensitive. As PI's investigation continued and new witnesses
against Roper came to light, Birdsall recalls, he attempted to add a count
to Roper's indictment. Roper fought back aggressively, testifying before the
grand jury, which ended up no-billing the count, splitting along racial
lines.

Birdsall says after that, management virtually shut him down. "They refused
to let me go back [to the grand jury] with corroboration," Birdsall recalls.
"They accused me of piling on."

---- Throughout the spring and summer of '99, Clark Birdsall was struggling
to keep his job, to keep Roper's case, and to get as much of it as he could
to a grand jury. Under the circumstances, he says, expanding the probe to
other officers was not a high priority. Things weren't going well for DPD's
Public Integrity Unit, either. Both Maples and Roper's ex-wife said they
thought Roper kept money in a safe deposit box in Houston, but with nothing
more specific to go on, PI was after a needle in a haystack the size of the
Bayou City. PI did know of one safe deposit box in Dallas, but they didn't
get around to executing a search warrant on Roper's box until April '99.
When they finally opened it, they found no money. They did find something
interesting, though, in bank records: Roper had visited the box on dates
that corresponded with the alleged thefts.

Nor were they getting many new leads from Maples, for by early spring, the
relationship between detectives and their star witness had become positively
chilly.

It started as a contest for Eveline's loyalty. From the moment she gave them
a statement, PI detectives seem to have viewed Eveline as their witness, and
any further contacts by Maples as a form of witness tampering. Maples, in
turn, viewed the turning of his fiancee as dirty pool, a form of
psychological coercion roughly on par with torture on the rack.

It got beyond personal, well into weird. In court, Eveline later admitted
she was still sleeping with Maples as late as June 1999--two months after
detective Diane McLeod helped Eveline file a harassment complaint against
him. Maples wrote Eveline letters, which she read and then turned over to
public integrity. Maples knew PI was scouring his mail, so he filled his
letters with disinformation and provocations. Not surprisingly, PI
detectives developed an almost visceral dislike for Danny Maples, and vice
versa.

---- With the DA's one-man integrity squad preoccupied and DPD integrity
pissed off, the task of prying the truth out of Maples fell largely to
internal affairs. A DPD unit that reports directly to the police chief,
internal affairs is charged with recommending officer discipline for a wide
range of crimes and misdemeanors. Though they can't make criminal cases,
they do have an important weapon: They can force officers to give statements
or else lose their jobs.

As always, there's a catch. Since an officer has no Fifth Amendment right
not to participate in this process, courts have ruled that IAD statements
cannot be used against cops in a criminal proceeding. Dallas city attorneys'
rulings have interpreted this to mean that, absent a court order, IAD can't
share its files with DPD public integrity or the DA's office.

Working under these rules, on June 21, IAD sergeants Gary Brown and Julian
Bernal sat down for the first of three marathon sessions with Maples. At
first, it looked like they might need truth serum; Maples was clinging to a
hoary old saw about drug dealers threatening his loved ones, and suggesting
that he, personally, never took anything from anybody.

But Brown and Bernal were veteran interrogators: patient, shrewd, and able
to pinpoint Maples' weaknesses. They encouraged his desire for absolution.
They sympathized with the extenuating circumstances. They played to his
deep-seated need to please those in power. Bernal's superbly rendered
good-cop routine finally broke Maples; by the end of a session on July 1, he
was pledging to spill his soul to PI, even to the evil detective McLeod.

Maples followed through. During two meetings in July 1999, Birdsall and the
PI detectives debriefed Maples, and this time, they came away confident he
was telling the truth. Asked about every theft in the two indictments,
Maples confessed his crimes.

"Gradually," Birdsall recalls, "Maples did come clean. The detectives
thought so, too."

---- Maples' final IAD interview took place on September 24, 1999. This
transcript is markedly different from earlier ones, free of stuttering and
evasions. Maples is clearly unburdening himself, spilling all kinds of
details. For example, Maples told IAD he was present when Roper hired, ahem,
"topless dancers" (read: prostitutes) to entertain at a private
"get-together" during which at least two officers availed themselves of the
ladies' services. Two other officers told IAD similar tales, and Roper
himself admitted arranging such evenings on at least five occasions. In the
instance Maples referred to, Roper used Maples' cell phone to summon the
lads and lasses in attendance.

That's just one with easy corroboration. Maples told IAD about bad traffic
stops and invalid searches on certain arrests. He named officers whom Roper
had told Maples were in on specific thefts, including at least one officer
who knew Maples was stealing, but allegedly covered for him.

Little of this seems to have been news to IAD. Since December, internal
affairs had been doing its own investigation into the thefts--those
involving Maples as well as those in which Roper pinched the loot while
other officers were present in the same room or close by. By the time of
Maples' statement, they had compiled a thick stack of witness and officer
affidavits--documents that tend to back up what Maples had to say.

They also had a bunch of pieces Maples didn't. For example, they had
statements from four witnesses to the alleged Russian-roulette incident.
They had officers admitting they had falsely "witnessed" verbal or written
consent to search being given. They had affidavits suggesting that Roper may
have been planting drug evidence, and a bunch of cops who never seemed to
see drugs being found, but didn't question when Maples or Roper found drugs
in areas they'd already searched.

Most important, they had witness statements suggesting several officers
besides Maples and Roper must have known about the thefts.

IAD didn't have truth serum, but they did have the next-best thing: the
ability to force officers to take polygraphs, and to discipline those who
refused.

Yet IAD made no move to polygraph officers, not even on the obvious
question: whether anyone besides Danny Maples was in on, or knew about,
Roper's thefts. They didn't touch the cases in which officers admitted they
falsely "witnessed" verbal or written consent to search being given. Nor did
they wade into the issue of planting drug evidence--an issue that appears
repeatedly in the arrests IAD reviewed.

They accepted at face value officers' statements explaining away apparent
incidents of brutality, such as the time Roper and another officer allegedly
slammed an arrested person into a fence in anger. Ditto for the officers'
denials that they ever saw Roper play Russian roulette with John Harp.

They stuck to the easy cases, sustaining 32 official charges against six
officers. Twenty-seven of those 32 charges were against Roper or Maples, who
were finally fired in February 2000 after spending more than a year on paid
administrative leave.

Only four other officers--Michael Baesa, Ronnie Anderson, Rodney Nelson, and
Gerardo Huante--had "sustained findings" against them, for administrative
slip-ups the officers themselves admitted. While the findings went in the
officers' personnel files, the officers weren't disciplined in any other
way.

Michael Magiera, the only officer who admitted he'd falsely witnessed a
consent to search--and who stuck to his initial statement--was written up
and "counseled." If other officers flip-flopped on important points from
affidavit to affidavit, IAD didn't seem to care.

But IAD wasn't totally derelict. They did nail Roper for stealing Harp's
12-pack of beer.

---- Of course, IAD couldn't make criminal cases. And nobody seems to have
been bothering the people who could, namely PI and the DA's office, either
because they couldn't, or wouldn't, or because, as they knew, Birdsall had
his hands full just trying to get Roper indicted on that final theft count.
As it was, the DA's office was forced to dismiss 25 drug cases Maples and
Roper had pending when they were indicted. And since Maples and Roper were
convicted, the DA's office has helped secure the release of two people from
the state penitentiary--both of whom were convicted, it now seems, on
Maples' and Roper's false testimony. In addition, the DA's office says it is
reviewing other cases.

And it turned out that Birdsall had foes in places other than the TPOA. In
October 1999, following the resignation of police chief Ben Click, longtime
DPD officer Terrell Bolton was sworn in as the new police chief. "Bill Hill
told me that, at Bolton's swearing-in, Bolton turned to [Hill] and said he
had a problem with public integrity--that it was a racially prejudiced
department," Birdsall recalls. (Through a deputy, Mike Carnes, Hill declined
comment on this and other questions surrounding Maples' and Roper's cases.
Bolton did not respond to several requests for comment.)

In early November, Hill transferred Birdsall out of public integrity and
into the DA's civil litigation section. Hill did, however, allow Birdsall to
keep the integrity cases he already had.

In January, Eric Mountin took over as new public integrity chief. Mountin
quickly got an underling: Heath Harris, a young assistant district attorney.
Hill told Birdsall he could indict Roper on the additional counts, so long
as Mountin and Harris, who is black, agreed.

They did. On March 3, Roper was reindicted with an additional count:
stealing $42,000 from Homar Gracia. But, as ever, there was a catch.
Birdsall and others say Birdsall was informed he couldn't use Danny Maples
as a witness, because "it wouldn't look good" to have a white officer, who
was getting probation out of the deal, testify against a black officer,
against whom the state was seeking serious time.

At Roper's trial, a succession of drug dealers, junkies, and illegal aliens
testified against the handsome, beefy cop, who never seemed to realize he
was in trouble, that their story might make more sense than his. Roper stuck
to his blanket denial, claiming the whole thing was a plot by criminal
defense attorney Frank Perez and his clients. For the first few days of the
trial, the blue wall was parked in the courtroom behind him, complete with
guns, uniforms, and scowls. DPD headquarters issued a hasty directive, and
the guns and uniforms disappeared--if not the cops themselves, many of whom
testified that Roper was a fine, upstanding member of a fine, upstanding
force.

If it was meant to send a message to the jury, it backfired. "A lot of the
police officers [who] testified for Roper, we didn't believe them," says one
juror, who asked that his name not be used. As for Roper himself, "we
thought that he was very arrogant, and not very truthful."

Birdsall, prosecuting his last PI case, begged management to use Maples. On
the next-to-last day, they relented--but the judge refused to allow it
because of a technicality. Roper took the stand and didn't always help his
own cause. The jury, consisting of four blacks, one Hispanic, and seven
whites, took slightly more than two hours to convict.

Roper's friends and family seemed stunned, and even more stunned when Roper
was sentenced to 17 years. One burly man burst into the hallway, pouring out
his heartfelt grief. "This is bullshit," he wailed. "Bullshit."

Letters of protest by the dozens poured into the court from members of the
black community, which held out Roper as a hero and a role model, claiming
that the system made a terrible, terrible mistake. Roper's supporters are
religious in their faith, convinced that he will turn out to be another
Joyce Ann Brown or Lenell Geter.

In the wake of the verdict, a host of black police officers and officials
have questioned the conviction. Thomas Glover is quick to say that, speaking
for himself and not the TPOA--an organization to which Roper did not
belong--he has some questions. "The concerns I had were the usual ones--use
of witnesses who got something out of the deal, conviction of a black
officer by use of drug dealer testimony."

Indeed, it is not Roper's conviction so much as the quality of the evidence
used to convict him that upsets black officers, in particular. To them, it
seems but one more instance of a phenomenon they believe to be true: that
black men are routinely indicted and convicted on the basis of evidence that
would not be deemed sufficient to indict and convict a white man.

Glover goes so far as to say that black cops should not be indicted, much
less put away, based solely on testimony from drug dealers, drug users,
prostitutes, and illegal aliens, all of whom, he says, stand to gain from
testifying. "That's not enough," says Glover. "That's not enough to convict
[an officer], based on the word of these people."

---- Maples' testimony does seem to have gotten some attention. A week
after his court appearance, the FBI met with the DA's office and the DPD
public integrity squad in a debriefing session. "I think they got
embarrassed [by their role in the failed sting]," says one person familiar
with the probe. "And I think they've always been concerned that the
investigation didn't go far enough."

Admittedly, many of Maples' leads are not very concrete. Because of the way
Roper ran his affairs, Maples says, he can't know for sure who else, besides
him, got money from Roper. And some of the cops Maples named hotly dispute
his story. "He's never even met me!" exclaims one. "We never socialized."

But none of the other cops has been, nor is likely to be, subjected to a
full-fledged investigation of the type used to make cases against Roper and
Maples. Three of the officers named by Maples were interviewed and asked if
they were corrupt; not surprisingly, they denied it, and the matter was not
pursued.

The DPD has had its fill of Maples, the rat, for whom everyone seems to have
developed quite a dislike. IAD is still on the job, investigating the
officer who came to Maples' jail cell and allegedly told him he'd "better
pray," as well as a handful of other names that came up along the way. But
it's a safe bet that if the probe, which many officers view as a witchhunt,
nails anyone, it will be on the most trivial of charges.

For, as Eric Mountin knows, there's a larger problem. "You know," he says,
"Dallas is the weirdest city. It has corruption. It has a racial problem.
Just because it's a big city. But what makes it strange is, nobody wants to
acknowledge these facts."

Dallas Observer Editorial intern Elisa Bock contributed to this report.