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. "Danny Maples' jury gave him two
years," marvels former Dallas police officer Quentis Roper. "And they felt
bad about it. Geez Louise, he had jurors crying for him. There were jurors
laughing when they convicted me."

It is a Friday afternoon in late May, and Roper is speaking from inside the
Dallas County jail. It's an almost unbelievable place to find Roper, 33, a
former Rice University quarterback and Pinkston High School class president,
a gifted student, devoted son, and doting father, a genuine hero to his
community, a man who joined the Dallas Police Department because he wanted
to help others. Instead, in April, a Dallas County jury convicted the
handsome black cop of helping himself to $144,000 from 10 people shaken down
during arrests.

Roper still insists he's innocent. Comparing himself to former Dallas City
Councilman Al Lipscomb, he says he was convicted in a political trial
because "It is not the right time for any public official to be in trouble."
Nevertheless, on May 14, state Judge John Creuzot sentenced him to 17 years
in the state pen; in August, he was sent to the Goree Unit in Huntsville.
Barring a major miracle--namely reversal on appeal--Roper will be there
until at least April 2002. And getting out then may take a minor miracle,
since Huntsville is not the place where a Rice-educated former cop is likely
to do easy time.

On this May afternoon, however, Roper was focused not on these unpleasant
realities, but on Danny Maples, the rat who did him in. "I don't understand
why they were all so afraid of that idiot Maples," fumes Roper. "I told my
attorney that we ought to subpoena Maples, so the jury could see how this
all got started. This guy is as non-credible as the drug dealers."

Like Roper, Danny Maples is a former Dallas cop, now doing time for stealing
$27,000 from seven people. Unlike Roper, Maples admitted he was guilty and
turned state's evidence. As a result, Maples' immediate future will be far
easier. This spring, a jury gave Maples just two years' punishment, making
him eligible for parole as early as next month. And since Maples is
cooperating with federal authorities looking into DPD corruption, he will do
his time in the Dallas County jail, the Ritz-Carlton of local pokeys.

Maples never testified against Roper. Yet Roper knows it is what Maples
said, and gave, to authorities that made the difference, that made it
possible to take the word of drug dealers, illegal aliens, and prostitutes
over one of the finest of Dallas' finest. And when Maples turned himself in,
he brought along mute witnesses: $49,000, cash which Maples said represented
his cut of what he, Roper, and other officers had stolen.

Roper and his supporters have no ready explanation for the money. When
pressed, they say Maples must have taken payoffs from dealers, or have
stolen it himself. And then, they get down to brass tacks.

"You got this crazy-ass white boy who come in and everybody believe what he
say, just because he white and Quentis black," charges Patriece Alexander,
Roper's fiancee and, until May, his live-in girlfriend. "And you won't never
understand what it's like, 'cause you aren't in a black skin."

Though they overstate the case, there is a troubling aspect to Danny Maples'
story: Danny Maples. It isn't so much that Maples fancies himself a novelist
and tries to pawn off a slim manuscript on a reporter, seeking help finding
an agent and a publisher. It isn't his fondness for tall tales, or his
tendency to exaggerate, or his active imagination, evident in letters to a
former girlfriend; verisimilitude isn't Maples' strength, and his lies are
usually awkward, self-aggrandizing, and easy to spot, like the one about the
Mexican mafia having put out a contract on his life.

It isn't even that he seems to be enjoying his, oh, five seconds of fame so
far. No, the troubling part is that Danny Maples is a storyteller--and
despite that, when you take apart what he says and put it back together and
check it against mountains of witness statements and court records, so much
of his story holds up.

That, and the fact that he and Roper nearly got away with it.

"Had I kept my mouth shut," Maples acknowledges, "I'd be out there now.
There are a lot of officers who did, and who are."

And in the end, many of Roper's friends and supporters cite this, too, as
evidence of Maples' insanity. "[Dallas police Public Integrity] didn't have
anything on either of them until Maples turned himself in," says one,
amazed. "What kind of fool would do
that?"

---- The way Maples tells it, he was haunted by Dostoyevskian guilt,
constantly fighting the urge to confess. He claims the turning point was
Rafael Lopez, the illegal alien who cried when Roper and Maples shook him
down at a traffic stop in April 1998. Lopez, who had just been paid for his
work on a construction crew, begged to be left at least $100 to get from the
border to his home in central Mexico. According to his statement, both Roper
and Maples refused. "I felt awful," Maples says. "That's why I stopped his
friends" and gave them contact numbers for the jail--so they could reach
their buddy Lopez--as well as public integrity.

There is also some indication that, during the arrest, Roper and Maples had
words. Roper says Maples wanted to arrest Lopez and he didn't; Maples says
he wanted to return Lopez's money, but Roper told him no. When they arrived
at the jail with Lopez, Maples later told investigators, "I [said] we agreed
on drug dealers, this kid is not a drug dealer, this is not right."

Raskolnikov or not, Dallas police Internal Affairs Division documents do
suggest that, during this period, Maples-the-thief was often seized by an
irresistible impulse to shoot himself in the foot. During another April
heist, for example, Maples showed a security guard the $1,600 he pocketed--a
move that virtually guaranteed he would be nabbed. "I would do things like
that," Maples says now. "I was subconsciously trying to get caught, to get
out of a bad situation, when I didn't have the courage to do it myself."

Maples later told investigators that Roper had been pressuring him to
recruit more officers and to "produce"--that is, pull off his own thefts and
share the proceeds with Roper. Public integrity and internal affairs
documents show that, through the middle of May 1998, Maples had pulled off
exactly two of his own thefts. To get Roper off his back, Maples says, he'd
begun making up tales about thefts and simply tithing to Roper from money
Roper had previously given him.

Then came the public integrity sting, which Maples and Roper spotted. The
May 21 setup seems to have helped Maples locate his misplaced cojones;
shortly afterward, Maples claims, he finally got up the gumption to tell
Roper he "didn't want to do it any more."

In response, Maples says, Roper urged him to stay "in the game." And just 10
days after the failed sting, Maples pulled another heist, an amateurish and
astonishingly wishy-washy job. In the wee hours of May 31, 1998, a
20-year-old kid named Joshua Jordan and several friends pulled into the
driveway of Jordan's mother's East Dallas house. He had just gotten out of
the car when he noticed a couple of figures around the corner. Jordan, who
was packing, later said he thought they were about to break into his
mother's house; he exchanged a round of gunfire with the dark figures and
went inside to call police.

Unfortunately, the figures Jordan shot at were the police, investigating a
burglary at a nearby store. Within minutes, Jordan was on the ground and the
premises was a sea of blue uniforms. Maples was one of several officers who
arrested Jordan; Maples patted him down and found his wallet, which had $650
tucked inside.

At least two cops on the scene later recalled seeing Maples with Jordan's
wallet, and Maples says he commented aloud that Jordan deserved to have his
money confiscated for shooting at a cop. When no one followed up, Maples
says, he simply pocketed Jordan's cash. (If any cops overheard Maples'
comment, they never told internal affairs. Maples claims one cop later
assured him, "Don't worry, I didn't give you up" to internal affairs.)

Maples apparently tried one other interesting tactic he had picked up
somewhere along the way. Joining several cops searching the bushes along the
perimeter of the scene, Maples emerged carrying a purple Crown Royal bag. As
officer Jason Sibley later recalled, "Officer Maples took me to the rear of
the squad car and showed me a Crown Royal tie bag. The bag was in the trunk,
and he told me it contained some drugs, and that it belonged to the
suspect." Everyone took Maples at his word.

It seems that Maples later decided the drugs weren't needed. Jordan was
charged with aggravated assault of a police officer, and the Crown Royal bag
never made it down to the property room.

After that, Maples says, he flat-out refused to steal. And when Roper
finally saw he couldn't lure Maples back "into the game," Maples says Roper
tried to buy his silence.

In late June, Maples says, Roper asked him to come by Roper's apartment.
"There were stacks of money in his living room," Maples recalls. And he
said, 'Why do you want to mess this up? We've got a good thing going here.'

"I said I just couldn't. And that's when he walked back into the bedroom and
came out with a shopping bag full of cash. And he said 'Here. Keep your
mouth shut.'"

Maples says he took the money, more than $30,000, and put it in his
apartment safe. Later that summer, he moved it to a storage unit
nearby.

By the end of the summer, a number of cops at the Northeast Operations Division noticed that Maples and Roper weren't such fast friends any more. Roper later told investigators that "a rift occurred" between the two sometime before Maples went on military leave for the National Guard, on September 1, 1998. When Maples returned a month later, he asked to be transferred to deployment, a new area of duty. For his part, Roper continued to generate complaints in which Maples played no role. According to Roper's indictment and internal police records, in three separate incidents between May 28 and October 28, Roper illegally pocketed nearly $100,000.

Three nights before Joshua Jordan's arrest, Roper, riding alone, pulled over
a black 1995 Ford Mustang driven by Federico Leyva. What happened next was
hotly disputed. Roper said he saw marijuana "clutched" in passenger John
Gabriel Leyva's hand. John Leyva said that Roper had the hooch, which he
planted on Leyva only after running his prints--presumably to be sure Leyva
wasn't an undercover officer. In any event, Roper searched the car and found
a purple Crown Royal bag containing $4,200 in cash inside the center
console. Roper next searched the trunk, where he found a larger bag that,
the Leyvas said, contained somewhere around $24,000. A second cop, Michael
H. Baesa, had by then arrived; he saw Roper snag the cash from the trunk and
the purple Crown Royal bag of cash. But Baesa says in an IAD statement that
the pile of cash was not counted at the scene.

Instead, Roper seized and handled the cash by himself.

John Leyva was arrested for drug possession.

The next day, Federico Leyva appeared at the jail window inquiring about the
$24,000. When Sgt. Marvin Henson checked Roper's arrest report, he found no
mention of money. As Henson later told an investigator, "I later asked
officer Roper what happened to the money, and he told me that he put it on
another [report]." And, indeed, Roper had--although only $12,400 made it to
the property room. "I did not check or inquire further," Henson writes in a
statement to internal affairs.

On June 25, Roper made yet another traffic stop that led to a stash o' cash.
Roper found drugs on the driver and leaned on him to cough up the name of
his dealer; within minutes, Roper was at Frank Alvarado's apartment,
starting to kick in the door. Rather than lose his door, Alvarado later
recalled, he opened it, whereupon Roper "with his gun pointing at me, pushed
me to the floor." After making a pregnant Rosalinda Alvarado and her small
son sprawl as well, Alvarado swore that Roper "started going through the bed
sheet[s] asking 'where are the drugs?'"

He found the drugs, six guns, and $106,000 cash in a "pink party bag."

In an attempt to paper over his illegal entry, affidavits show, Roper took
Rosalinda Alvarado into a bedroom alone and handed her a piece of paper. "I
then asked officer Roper what it was for and he told me it was to keep my
son from going to Child Protective Services. So I signed it," Rosalinda said
in a statement to investigators. The form was a consent for the search that
had, of course, already occurred. The signing of the form was subsequently
"witnessed" by officer Ronnie Keith Anderson, who Mrs. Alvarado swore was in
another room.

Frank Alvarado was arrested on drug charges and Rosalinda Alvarado on
outstanding tickets; both were taken to Lew Sterrett Justice Center. A day
later, the bag of cash showed up at the DPD property room--some $49,000
short.

But Roper's pursuers weren't far behind. Since at least November 1997, DPD's
Narcotics Division had been monitoring Roper's reports and noticing some odd
patterns. When Roper confiscated drugs, money, or guns, the seized property
often did not appear in an arrest report. Instead, Roper would file a
separate "found property" report, listing "City of Dallas" as the
complainant and the gun or money as the perpetrator. Many of these found
property reports contained no cross-reference to an arrest report, making it
impossible to tell what arrest, if any, produced the orphaned booty.

"His report writing is not correct," detective Carl Lowe later explained to
a grand jury. "It's meant to hide...we have no way of contacting these
people because all we got is just a found property [report], City of Dallas
[listed] as the complainant. We don't know who lost the gun because we have
no way of tracing it...My assumption is he's probably taking some of these
guns off people and then letting them go, and then using the money that he's
confiscating [at the same time] and putting it in his pocket."

Narcotics noticed something else they thought strange. Not only would Roper
fail to indicate in many arrest reports that he had seized cash, but he
would wait several hours, sometimes even a day, before filing a separate
found property report. The narcs thought they understood what was up; as one
put it, Roper was "waiting to see if anyone raised a stink about the money"
before deciding how much, or even whether, to pocket the cash. They spotted
the Alvarado arrest when it came in and immediately noticed that nearly 24
hours elapsed between the time of the arrest and Roper's "found property"
report claiming he recovered just $57,000. The narcs called public
integrity, which quickly found Frank and Rosalinda Alvarado, who said Roper
had skimmed $49,000.

The more public integrity dug, the more disturbing similarities became
apparent. A number of witnesses claimed Roper exhibited "crazy" behavior.
Four witnesses swore that, during a shakedown in January 1998, Roper put a
gun to a man's head and played Russian roulette after the man refused to
give Roper his name. (The witnesses also swore that this happened in front
of three other officers, who laughed at Roper's antics.) Another man,
Michael Hayes, swore that less than 24 hours later, as Roper was relieving
him of $830, Roper pulled out a gun and "began talking crazy, putting the
gun to his [Roper's] head and saying didn't I wish there was bullets in it?"

Roper seems to have pursued cash with similar recklessness. On at least four
occasions in the summer of 1998, Roper turned up in the middle of the night
banging on the door of an elderly Hispanic man, Apolinar Rodriguez, who had
drug-dealing relatives: Sandra Rodriguez, his daughter, and Homar Jaime
Gracia Jr., his grandson. "He handed my Dad, who doesn't speak or read
English, a piece of paper saying if he signed, [Roper] wouldn't take him to
jail," recalls Apolinar's daughter, who witnessed several of the incidents.
"Then he used it to search the house." Once inside, the family says, Roper
would rifle the premises, looking for cash on the theory Homar might be
hiding loot at his granddad's.

A family member called Homar Gracia, who in turn called his lawyer, Frank
Perez, and asked him what to do.

"I get a page in the middle of the night from Frank Perez," recalls a
narcotics detective. "Mind you, Roper's doing this shit in the middle of an
ongoing public integrity investigation, and Roper knows he's under
investigation.

"Perez says, 'Roper is holding Homar's grandfather hostage, what do I do?' I
said, 'Whatever you do, don't go over there.' So I page [public integrity
detective] Diane McLeod, and she pages Roper's sergeant or something.
Anyway, the thing gets resolved."

Despite such antics, PI still didn't think they had enough to make a move on
Roper. Cases against cops are among the most difficult to win, and there
were problems. A few witnesses didn't want to get involved in a case against
cops. Because of medical problems, a few witnesses, such as Frank and
Rosalinda Alvarado, could not take polygraphs. A few witnesses, like Joshua
Jordan, had flunked theirs. And while there were a good number of witnesses
who had passed, PI had no evidence of either Roper or Maples living beyond
his means. Unfortunately for the detectives, Maples was a saver, not a
spender; his bank and credit card records suggested he was the sort who
liked to pinch a nickel. And if Quentis Roper was spending money, he was
operating strictly on a cash basis. Since their attempted stings had gone
south, PI had no marked bills they could trace, no videotape--just the
testimony of drug dealers, illegal aliens, and junkies. While the detectives
thought these statements trustworthy, who knew what a jury would think?

PI wasn't ready to give up; they called the FBI and asked for help setting
up yet another sting. But in retrospect, it seems highly unlikely that
either Roper or Maples would have been arrested had Danny Maples not fallen
in love.

---- Thirty-six-year-old Eveline Schoovaerts is not easy to overlook.
On the first day of Maples' sentencing, all heads turned as the statuesque
Belgian-born strawberry blonde in strappy black heels, a plunging neckline,
and dangerously slit skirt sashayed to the stand. Like Erin Brockovich in
church, she swept thick bangs out of heavily made-up eyes, sighed, and
claimed she was terrified of Maples, her ex-lover.

Maples met her while he was in the police academy; at the time, Schoovaerts
was married to one of Maples' classmates. By the time Maples heard from her
again in the summer of 1998, Schoovaerts had divorced and was working as a
dispatcher for Grand Prairie police. They got engaged in September, while
Maples was on a month-long military leave; by October, Eveline and her
4-year-old son had moved in.

Maples behaved terribly. He was jealous, possessive, domineering,
insecure--and under mounting pressure. For if Maples thought he had
extricated himself from the thefts, he was wrong; at the same time Maples
was acquiring his new family, PI was turning up the heat. In October, Maples
noticed a new box in the trunk of his police cruiser. He drove his squad car
to a city garage and asked a mechanic about the box. "It's a tracking
device," the mechanic said and then disconnected the wire.

For the next two months, Maples and a crew of PI detectives played
psychological cat-and-mouse. When Maples disconnected the tracker, they
assigned him a live tail. To make sure they knew he knew, or just to be a
smart-ass, in late October, as he was being followed, Maples whipped around
suddenly, waited for the PI detective to do the same, and ticketed his tail
for making an illegal U-turn. In turn, detectives subpoenaed Maples' bank
records. (PI subpoenaed Roper's accounts, too.)

"We knew they were investigating us," Maples says. "But we didn't know how
bad they really wanted us until the FBI showed up."

On October 21, Maples was riding by himself when he got a message over the
MDT, the computer terminals cops have in their cruisers. It was Roper,
summoning Maples to a La Quinta Inn on Interstate 30. When Maples arrived,
Roper, who was with his new partner, Larry Coddington, explained he had just
gotten a tip from narcotics that a Jamaican drug dealer was in a certain
room.

Before they could go in, Maples got another call from dispatch. Roper and
Coddington said they'd wait for Maples to return. And while they waited,
Roper saw something suspicious.

"They didn't count on Roper running counter-surveillance," says Clark
Birdsall, the assistant district attorney who would later prosecute Roper.
"He looks across the freeway and, to his surprise, finds a woman looking
through her binoculars at him. So he hotfoots it across [to the Taco Bell,
where she was parked], and he sees her sitting there with her FBI raid
jacket and radio."

When Maples returned from his call, Roper and Coddington were waiting. "They
said, 'It's a setup, but let's go in anyway,'" says Maples.

The resulting videotape shows an extremely hacked-off Roper, waving at the
camera and talking trash to whomever might be listening in. The undercover
Jamaican tried to bribe the officers, telling them he had a safe nearby, and
if they'd go with him, he'd pay them off. They accompanied him, seized the
money--$19,999--and promptly booked him into Lew Sterrett. The money--every
marked penny of it--made it to the property room. On the way home, Roper
sent out a message on the MDT: "Thanks for the money, Louis Freeh."

(End of 1 of 2 parts, Dirty Cops, Dirty Games)
Editorial intern Elisa Bock contributed to this report.