COLOR OF JUSTICE

Where the drug addicts at? Where the big houses at? Where the gold
teeth?

- -Donnie Smith

I got debts no honest man can pay

- -Bruce Springsteen

When you think about crack cocaine, you think of burglaries, pawned
televisions, and gang violence You don't ordinarily think of shoveling
shit But that's what the drug life meant to Donnie Smith, who was,
until an extraordinary and controversial drug sting last summer, part
of the crack problem in the tiny Panhandle town of Tulia.

Smith worked at the Tulia Livestock Auction, or the "sale barn," as
locals call the sprawling an auction grounds just west of town. More
than 100,000 head of cattle per year are sold at the year-round
auction, located on a hot, windy stretch of Highway 86 about fifty
miles south of Amarillo. The auction's weekly livestock sales provide
another year's stake for Swisher County ranchers, and the related
commerce the auction generates provides much of the cash that keeps
the nearby town of Tulia, population 5,000, in business. The auction's
steady need for manual labor also provided a ready source of cash for
a handful of young black men in Tulia who smoked - and allegedly dealt
- - crack cocaine. Thirty-year-old Donnie Smith was one of those men.

Swisher County attacked its crack problem with the sort of campaign
that has become commonplace since Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs
almost two decades ago. Using funds from a regional drug task force,
the local sheriff hired an undercover agent, who began making buys in
and around Tulia. Only a select few knew about the deep cover operation.
But even those who did were not prepared for the results: over an
eighteen-month period, in a town so small it doesn't even have a Dairy
Queen, the agent allegedly made more than 100 controlled buys of illegal
narcotics. Early on the morning of July 23, the arrests finally came. By
the end of the week, it was evident that the forty-one suspects targeted by
the sting had something in common. Thirty-five of the arrestees came from
Tulia's tiny black community, which numbers no more than 350. Ten percent
of the town's black population had been taken down by one undercover agent.

The local paper ran a photograph of young black men in their underwear
and uncombed hair being led across the front lawn of the Swisher
County Courthouse. An editorial in the Tulia Sentinel praised the
sheriff and district attorney for rounding up the "scumbags" in town.
The Amarillo Globe-News ran a laudatory interview with the undercover
agent, Tom Coleman, an itinerant lawman from West Texas with no prior
experience in undercover narcotics work. Coleman has since begun
another undercover assignment for a drug task force in Southeast
Texas. For his work in Tulia, the Department of Public Safety named
him Outstanding lawman of the Year.

Because of the disproportionate number of African-Americans targeted
by the operation, the Amarillo chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. has gotten
involved. But race is not the only troubling aspect of last summer's
drug bust in Tulia. There was a notable absence of drugs - at least,
in any appreciable quantity - in the Tulia drug underworld exposed by
Agent Coleman, and the evidence presented didn't seem to fit the
patterns of drug use in the community. And Coleman, upon whose sole
testimony virtually all of the
prosecutions were built, has a questionable past of his own.

Although the arrest warrants were served at dawn, surprising most of
the defendants in their beds, no drugs, money, or weapons were seized
in the roundup. Only a few of the alleged dealers were able to raise the
money to bond themselves out of jail. Many lived in public housing or
trailer homes. Of more than 100 cases filed, only one involved delivery of
an amount larger than an "eightball" (3.5 grams), about $200 worth of
cocaine. Despite the small amounts involved, many cases were enhanced to
first-degree felonies, punishable by life in prison, because the buys
allegedly took place within 1,000 feet of a school or park.

If the "dealers" did not fit the usual profile, Tom Coleman m.o. was
no less unorthodox. Agent Coleman did not wear a during any of the
alleged transactions. No video surveillance was done, and no second
officer was available to corroborate his reports. Such measures, commonly
employed by Department of Public Safety narcotics agents, were too
dangerous for an agent operating in a small, tight-knit community,
according to Larry Stewart. In most cases, there were no witnesses at all,
other than Coleman himself. Testifying in the first few trials, Coleman
claimed to have recorded names, dates, and other pertinent facts about the
buys by writing on his leg.

Then there is the evidence: the drugs Coleman allegedly bought Tulia.
Coleman made contact with a community of crack smokers, primarily
young black men like Donnie Smith. But strangely, almost every buy
Coleman made was of powdered cocaine. Only a handful involved crack or
marijuana. Such irregularities didn't seem to matter to the Swisher County
juries that began handing down verdicts and sentences last winter. "Just
mention drugs, and you can get a conviction in the Panhandle," one defense
attorney later said.

The first two trials resulted in verdicts of ninety-nine and 434
years, respectively. Most amazing have been the sentences for
defendants with no prior felony convictions, who would otherwise have
been eligible for probation. Freddie Brookins, twenty-two, received twenty
years for one count of
delivering an eight ball. He had no prior record. Another defendant with no
priors, twenty-three-year-old Kizzie Henry, got twenty-five years. The
harsh sentences handed down early sent a message to the other
defendants, who began to accept long sentences in plea bargains with
District Attorney Terry McEachern. Fewer than ten defendants are still
awaiting trial.

In recent months, defense attorneys have begun to raise questions
about Coleman's background - relating to his employment history and
the mysterious circumstances surrounding an indictment of his own,
which came to light during the undercover operation. As cracks in Coleman's
credibility have begun to appear, District Attorney Terry McEachern's
confidence in the cases apparently has begun to wane. Plea bargain offers
have gotten progressively lower, and now a sort of stalemate seems to have
set in with respect to the remaining cases. Meanwhile, the skepticism that
was initially confined to the black community in this racially divided town
has spread to the white community, where a few of Tulia's prominent white
residents are beginning to ask questions about exactly what has been done
in the
name of justice in Swisher County.

A DEALER'S LIFE

Donnie Smith's creased face and wire-rim eyeglasses make him appear
ten years older than his age. A short, slightly-built man, he speaks
in a rural Panhandle accent, occasionally breaking up his sleepy
cadence with bursts of street jargon. Although everyone in Tulia's tiny
black community lost a friend or
relative to the bust, Smith's family was hit hardest. "My little brother's
in county jail and he hadn't went to court yet. My little sister got
twenty-five years. My cousin got six years on a plea bargain. And my uncle
got eighteen years. And all the people that got busted are friends of mine.
Friends and relatives," Smith said earlier this month in an interview at
Abilene's Middleton Transfer Facility prison unit. Donnie's mother, Mattie
White, a correctional officer at a state prison near Tulia, claims that
after the bust, the sheriff told her he had given the undercover agent a
list of names to check out. Sheriff Stewart now denies that he pointed the
agent in the direction of Tulia's black community. Stewart says he hired
Coleman because of complaints about dealing to high school students, and
that the operation happened to be steered toward the black community when
Agent Coleman befriended an older black man, who served as Coleman's
introduction to the drug community in Tulia.

Donnie Smith was Tulia High's Athlete of the Year when he graduated in
1989. It turned out to be the high point of his life. He married his
high-school girlfriend and had two children. But the marriage ended badly,
as did a brief stint at West Texas A&M University in Canyon. Smith also got
into trouble with the law - a couple of fights led to misdemeanor charges.
He found part-time work at the sale barn, a last resort for unemployed
men in Tulia. He and his fellow laborers were not cowboys. They worked "in
the shit," cracking open bales of hay for the cows to eat or running the
livestock gate in the stifling, dusty barn on
Mondays, when buyers from across the Midwest came to bid on animals
all day long. It wasn't glamorous, but it was steady work, and in
Tulia there wasn't much else for someone like Smith to choose from.
But the most important thing about the job from Smith's perspective -
especially after he became addicted to cocaine - was that he could
come in on a Saturday, work three days, and get paid in cash when the
sale ended on Monday. It was the "sale barn" that provided Donnie
Smith the money to buy crack cocaine. And it was a fellow employee, Eliga
Kelly, who introduced Agent Tom Coleman to Donnie Smith.

Known to everyone in Tulia's tight-knit black community as "Man"
Kelly, Eliga Kelly is an alcoholic who often worked weekends and
Mondays at the auction to support his habit. Sometime in the summer of
1998, Kelly introduced Smith to a white stranger who called himself T.J.
Dawson. Dawson, actually Agent
Coleman, said he was working construction in the town of Happy, about
fifteen miles away. Kelly told Smith he had known the man for years,
though Coleman had only recently shown up in Tulia. Based on this
assurance, Smith scored crack for Coleman on three or four occasions
over the course of the summer. Although Smith was a regular crack smoker,
he was not what most people would call a dealer. He took Coleman's money to
his own supplier and used it to buy rocks
for him - as well as for himself. According to Smith, the two smoked
crack together in Coleman's truck on more than one occasion. Then, fed up
with the drug life and wanting to become a better parent to his kids, who
lived in Tulia with his ex-wife, Smith checked
himself into rehab in Lubbock that winter and lost track of Coleman.
When Smith finished the ninety-day program, he returned to Tulia,
where he began working for a local farmer. He had been clean for six months
when the police arrested him, along with dozens of others netted by
Coleman, last July.

With no prior felony convictions, Smith was prepared to plea bargain.
The small amounts he had delivered, combined with his status as a
first-time felony offender, he figured, gave him a good shot at probation.
Then he read the indictments. He was accused of delivering cocaine to
Coleman on seven separate occasions. But only one delivery was alleged to
be crack cocaine. The other deliveries were said to be powder, in amounts
between one
and four grams - making them second-degree felonies. The D.A. offered Smith
forty-five years.

Smith knew something strange was going on. "I don't mess with powder,
man. I don't shoot it and I don't smell it," he said. Unable to raise
bail, Smith sat in jail in neighboring Hale County (the Swisher County
lockup was filled by the sweep; some defendants had to be housed as
far away as Levelland, 100 miles to the southwest) from July until
February, when he went on trial on the first count, a relatively minor
charge of delivery of less than a gram of crack cocaine. On the stand
he surprised everyone, including his own attorney, by admitting that
he got crack for Coleman several times (although he denied making the
specific delivery for which he stood accused). But he never delivered
powder cocaine, he told the jury. Although Coleman asked for powder,
Smith said, he didn't know where to get it because nobody he knew used
powder. It simply never came up in his circle of friends. The jury
convicted Smith and gave him the maximum sentence of two years. In light of
the severe sentences already handed down in earlier felony
trials, Smith's court appointed attorney urged him to plead guilty to
the powder charges even if he believed he had been falsely accused by
Coleman. In a plea bargain with McEachern, Smith accepted an offer of
twelve years.

Smith was not the only defendant in Tulia to have powder cocaine
introduced as evidence against him. In fact, virtually everyone caught
in the bust was charged with selling powder cocaine, in some instances
up to a half-dozen counts. Tulia doesn't even have a fast food restaurant,
much less a bar or
nightclub. The capita income is $11,000. Yet suddenly powdered cocaine, a drug
normally associated with affluent users, seemed to be everywhere - at
least everywhere in Tulia's hardscrabble black community. And while
powder was everywhere, it only seemed to appear in small quantifies -
just enough to constitute a second-degree felony. Could there really be
forty coke dealers in a rural Panhandle community? "Where the drug addicts
at? Where the big houses? Where all the gold teeth?" Smith asked.

MEXICAN JUDO

By all accounts, there was cocaine in Tulia. But much more cocaine
passed through the town, by virtue of its location on Interstate 27,
than ever landed there. Crack cocaine began to appear in the late 1980s,
particularly in the
black community. According to defendants interviewed for this story, there
were no
volume dealers in Tulia. The local drug scene was fueled by small
amounts of drugs - usually a few hundred dollars' worth at a time -
picked up in nearby Plainview or Amarillo. In a small town, word got
around fast about who was holding what, and users looking to score
would quickly arrive at the house with the drugs. "A good hour's run,
and it's gone," one defendant said.

Yet by most indicators, Tulia never had a serious drug problem. In 1996,
District Attorney McEachern told the Tulia Sentinel that he had prosecuted
only about ten cases that year involving delivery or
possession of illegal drugs in Swisher County. The county attorney
reported handling about eighteen misdemeanor drug cases that same
year, mostly for marijuana possession. And only eight of sixty-one
referrals to juvenile probation that year were for drug abuse.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that property crime - usually closely
associated with a large addict population - was not a major problem in
Tulia, where many residents still leave their doors unlocked. Polls of
junior high and high school students in Tulia suggested some of the
lowest rates of drug use in the region, much lower than statewide or
national rates.

Yet some in the community saw a problem. A Tulia police officer told the
Tulia Sentinel in 1996 that the
department had compiled a list of "sixty known drug dealers" in town.
In January of 1997, the Tulia school board adopted by a six-to-one
margin a mandatory random drug testing program for all students
involved in extracurricular activities. The one dissenting vote was
Gary Gardner. One of Swisher County's most respected citizens, Gardner
is an enigma in overalls. He lives in a rural village east of Tulia
called Vigo Park, and he is the descendant of one of Tulia's oldest
farming clans. He is a self-described redneck who likes to tell friends it
took him
twenty years to find a wife smart enough to marry. His vocabulary on race
and ethnic issues has not changed since the 1950s. Yet he has emerged as
one of the staunchest defendants of
Tulia's disenfranchised and one of the most vocal critics of the 1999
drug bust that decimated Tulia's African-American community.

Gardner objected to the school drug testing policy because he felt it
was unconstitutional, and would eventually result in a lawsuit. When
he failed to convince the board of its folly, he fulfilled his own
prophecy, refusing to allow his son to be tested and going to federal
court to file a suit against the school district. Unable to find a lawyer
to take the case, Gardner trained himself in the law, taking his
eighteen-year-old son with him to the law library
at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and buying his own books from the
law school bookstore. "The law's a simple deal," he says. "If you went
to Bible school, can take a motor apart, and can read, you can be your
own lawyer."

Once he locked horns with the school board, Gardner says, he began
having trouble with all of Tulia's establishment, including local law
enforcement. "In these small towns it's like Mexican judo," Gardner
said. "Once you mess with one Mexican, 'ju' don't know how many of his
cousins will come after you." Over the years, Gardner has been the
meanest cousin of them all, intervening on behalf of several of his
Hispanic employees who fell afoul of the law and were in danger of
being railroaded by the legal system. "If you're black or Mexican in
Tulia, and you get arrested, you plea out. You have to, because you
can't afford a good lawyer," he said. Even if they could, a trial in
Swisher County is simply not worth the risk, Gardner said: "Basically,
in Swisher County, whatever Terry McEachern wants from a judge or a
jury, he'll get."

When the big cocaine bust first went down, Gardner said he felt
certain the defendants were all guilty. But as a former cop (he served
briefly as a D.P.S. trooper in the late
1960s), he objected to the efforts by McEachern, Sheriff Stewart, and
others to try the suspects in Tulia's two newspapers. He wrote letters
to each of the forty-five defendants urging them to seek a change of
venue. And he found that their responses were similar. "A bunch started
writing me back with the same thing: 'I didn't sell the man that much
stuff,"' he said. Gardner attended the first trial, that of Joe Moore.
"That was a lynching," Gardner said of Moore's jury trial. But it was the
testimony of Tom Coleman that really disturbed him. "He said a thing or two
that stood my hair up on end," Gardner recalled.

DEEP COVER

Tom Coleman does not make a good witness. This is due in part to some of
the same qualities that make him a good narc. A successful undercover agent
must look like a hard-core drug
user, the type of person who would buy drugs on the street from
someone he does not know. Coleman fits the part. He is shghtly built
and short, with a pale, narrow face and a goatee. He wears his long,
dirtyblond hair pulled back in a ragged pony-tail that extends down to his
shoulders. When he appeared at an April
hearing in Amarillo, called to revoke the probation of Tulia defendant
Mandis Barrow, Coleman showed up wearing a dark sports coat over a
dark shirt and dark tie, tight black jeans and cheap black loafers. He
suffers from a form of astigmatism that causes his eyes to twitch, a
condition he attempts to control on the witness stand by tilting his
head slightly to one side, in a gesture that suggests he does not quite
understand what he has just been asked. In testimony, he has a tendency to
repeat questions before answering
them, and to hedge every possible detail about his recollections. Given the
opportunity, he offers long, rambling descriptions with plenty of
irrelevant detail.

But there are other reasons why Coleman is not an ideal witness. After
huge jury verdicts in a half-dozen trials, some cracks have begun to
appear in his credibility. Tulia defendant Billy Wafer's
probation-revocation hearing, held at the Hale County Courthouse in
February, was the first major setback for the prosecution. Wafer had
received ten years probation in 1990 for a felony marijuana possession
conviction in Plainview. At the time of his arrest in Tulia, he had
served nine and one-half years of the probated sentence, with no
arrests or failed drug tests. Now he was facing up to twenty years in
prison if his probation were
revoked - a decision that rested solely on the testimony of Tom
Coleman. In court Coleman testified that on January 18, 1999, he and
Eliga Kelly had flagged down Wafer as they passed him on their way to
Allsup's store on Highway 86. It was about 9:00 in the morning on a
Monday. Coleman testified that he asked Billy to get him an eight
ball, and to meet him at the sale barn with the drugs. According to
Coleman, a woman showed up at the sale barn about an hour later with the
cocaine.

But Wafer had a rock-solid alibi. At the time Coleman alleged he had met
with Wafer to set up the buy,
Wafer was at Seed Resources in Tulia, where he worked as warehouse foreman.
Wafer provided time cards, and brought his boss in as a witness. His boss
testified that there was no doubt in his mind that Wafer was at work, as
scheduled, all morning long. Eliga Kelley was not called to testify
(McEachern apparently thought that would not be necessary to win the case),
leaving the case hinging on Coleman's word versus that of Wafer's boss, a
respected member of the community. District Judge Edward Self declined to
revoke Wafer's probation. (Wafer had already lost his job, however, having
served thirty days in
jail; he and his wife also lost a home loan they had negotiated just prior
to the arrest.)

Could Coleman have simply gotten his dates and times wrong? According
to Eliga Kelly, the transaction never occurred at all. Four days after
Wafer's hearing, still angry from the blown case, McEachern appeared
before Judge Self again, this time in Donnie White's trial, which had
just gotten underway at the Swisher County courthouse. McEachern
called Kelly, who had turned state's witness, to the stand. Though it was
hardly germane to Donnie White's case, McEachern asked Kelly about the
exchange with Wafer. Didn't he remember talking to
Billy Wafer with Tom Coleman at the Allsup's, and how a woman had come to
the sale barn later to deliver cocaine? "I remember talking to Billy,"
Kelly said, "but Billy told me to get out of his face." For reasons
difficult to fathom, McEachern then went rapidly through the list of those
arrested in the sting, asking Kelly if he had helped arrange drug deals
with each of them. Again and again, Kelly testified that he had not.

In at least one case, Coleman seems to have been unclear on just who
had supposedly sold him cocaine. Coleman alleged that Yul Bryant delivered
an eight-ball to him in May
of 1999, shortly before the end of the undercover operation. When Bryant
read the report on his case, he found that Coleman had described him as a
tall black man with bushy hair. Bryant is five-foot-six and completely
bald. From other details given in the report, Bryant was able to guess the
identity of the man Coleman had described. Bryant contacted the man, one
Randy Hicks, from jail and obtained an affidavit from Hicks, who selflessly
confirmed that he was the man described in the report. Bryant sent that
information to McEachem's office. According to Bryant's attorney, Kerry
Piper, McEachern's investigator
then called Coleman in, showed him pictures of Bryant and Hicks, and asked
him to identify Bryant. Coleman pointed to the picture of Hicks, according
to Piper. The case against Bryant (who was in Amarillo at the time of
alleged buy) was quietly dismissed. The judge decided to revoke Bryant's
parole anyway, for failure to report regularly to his parole officer, and
he is serving four years in prison. Fortunately for the prosecution, as
damaging to Coleman's credibility as these two cases are, neither were
heard before a jury or published by any news outlet in the Panhandle.

With respect to botched identities and misremembered encounters,
Coleman can perhaps make the argument that he was overwhelmed by the
size of the operation he was running. But there is no doubt that Coleman
lied on the stand on at least one
occasion - in response to questions he was asked about his own criminal
history. At Billy Wafer's hearing, Wafer's attorney Brent Hamilton asked
Coleman if he had faithfully completed his application for employment as a
Swisher County law officer - specifically, whether he had listed previous
arrests or charges filed against him. It should have been evident to
Coleman that Hamilton was on to something, yet under oath and on the
witness stand Coleman replied that he had never been arrested or charged
for anything more serious than a traffic ticket "way back when I was a
kid." In fact, shortly after the first Tulia
trial ended, a defense attorney discovered that Coleman had been under
indictment for a theft charge in Cochran County at the same time he was
running the undercover operation in Tulia.

Until 1996, Coleman worked as a sheriff's deputy in Cochran County, his
most recent law enforcement position. After he left the job, the county
filed charges on Coleman for theft, allegedly for buying gas for his
personal use on a county credit card. When Sheriff Stewart discovered the
outstanding warrant in May of
1998, he had no choice but to "arrest" Coleman and collect bond from him in
Tulia. Yet Coleman, already five months into the undercover operation at
that point, was not fired. He was suspended temporarily until he got the
problem "resolved." McEachern claimed he had no knowledge of the charge
(though his
sheriff certainly did) before the first three trials. When a defense
attorney presented Judge Self with the new evidence concerning the
prosecution's star witness, he sealed it. Efforts to introduce the
evidence, along with other information about Coleman's past, to impeach his
credibility have been unsuccessful. The theft charge was reported in a
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal article in early May, however. Coleman has
refused to answer questions about the charge. And when asked about
Coleman's background, McEachern assured me that a thorough background check
had been done. "Everyone in Cochran County had the highest recommendations
for him," he said. "If you do a thorough enough exam on anybody you're
going to find something. Who hasn't done something at one time in their life?"

LAWMAN OF THE YEAR

It would not have taken a very thorough exam to determine that Tom
Coleman was far less than a good candidate for the job Sheriff Stewart
brought him to Tulia to do. According to records reviewed by the
Observer and interviews with past associates of Coleman, each of his
last two law enforcement assignments, as a deputy sheriff in Cochran
County from 1994 to 1996, and as a deputy in Pecos County from 1989 to
1994, ended when Coleman abruptly left town, with no notice to his
employer, leaving his patrol car parked at his house. In both cases,
Coleman disappeared owing thousands of dollars in delinquent bills. His
most recent employer, former Cochran County Sheriff Kenneth Burke, wrote a
letter to the state agency that licenses peace officers,
following Coleman's departure. "It is in my opinion that an officer should
uphold the law. Mr. Coleman should not be in law enforcement if he is going
to do people the way he did this town," he wrote.

Because of strict rules governing the admissibility of evidence about
an officer's history, Tulia juries have yet to hear the full story of
Tom Coleman's law enforcement career. He grew up in Reeves County, the son
of former Texas Ranger Joe Coleman. The senior Coleman, who died of a heart
attack in 1991, was one of the most widely respected lawmen in West Texas.
Tom left high school in the eleventh grade. He eventually received his
G.E.D., at age twenty-seven, and shortly thereafter began work as a jailer
in the city of Pecos. His first
assignment as a peace officer was in tiny Iraan, in Pecos County.

In interviews with former co-workers and associates compiled for this
story, as well as in documented interviews conducted by a
court-appointed investigator during Coleman's 1994 divorce from Carol
Barnett, an unflattering portrait of Coleman emerges. According to an
officer (who requested anonymity) who served with Coleman in Pecos
County for several years, Tom developed a reputation as unstable and
untrustworthy. "He was a nut," the officer said. "He was very
paranoid." Coleman was in the habit of carrying as many as three guns
on his person at one time, according to the officer. On one occasion,
according to Pecos County chief deputy Cliff Harris, Coleman accidentally
shot out the windshield of his own patrol car with a shotgun, while he was
seated in it.

Coleman was also a liar, according to his former Pecos County
co-worker. "He was the type of person who would tell you anything, and
would turn around - if you knew he wasn't telling the truth - and come
back and correct it," he said. In an interview conducted during
Coleman's divorce, a second former co-worker, Pecos County deputy Rick
Kennedy, also described Tom as untruthful. "Tom can lie to you when
the truth would sound better," he stated. Kennedy also described Coleman as
a paranoid gun nut who could not go on a fishing trip without an assault
rifle in the tent and on the boat. Nina McFadden, the wife of another of
Coleman's former co-workers in Pecos County, also described Coleman as
"paranoid" and a
"compulsive liar," in a second interview conducted during the divorce. Both
McFadden and another former associate in Pecos County, Bobby Harris (also
interviewed during the divorce), alleged that Coleman
warned them that his house was always booby-trapped when he was out-of-town.

According to Coleman's ex-wife, Carol Barnett, things began to go sour
in Iraan shortly after their second child was born with albinism,
which left her with very poor eyesight. Though Tom doted on his first
child, a son, he shunned his infant
daughter, and became more and more abusive toward Carol, physically and
emotionally. The family was also deeply in debt, owing thousands of dollars
to merchants and vendors, who readily extended credit to
Coleman as a law officer. Finally, reeling from his father's death and
fearing Carol would divorce him and take his son from him, he cracked,
according to Barnett. He wrote a note to the sheriff blaming his troubles
on his wife. Leaving his patrol car at his house, Coleman put his
two-year-old son in the family car, pawned a gun for gas money, and drove
to Sherman, where his mother had moved following his father's death.

Carol eventually recovered her son and, after a bitter, lengthy
battle, won a divorce from Tom and custody of the children. According
to Carol, after years of not paying child support, Coleman eventually
gave up all parental rights to both children so that he would not have
to pay. Carol filed a complaint against Tom for criminal non-support,
in an effort to collect the back child support he owed. During the
time Coleman was working in Tulia, according to an garnishment order
from the attorney general's office, his paycheck was being garnished
$200 per month for child support.

During the divorce, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms
confiscated an illegal weapon from Coleman. The gun was an automatic
assault rifle Coleman had acquired from his father's collection when
he passed away. (Coleman has admitted to this incident in a hearing;
though the judge ruled the information inadmissible.) According to
Barnett, Coleman also inherited over 4,000 rounds of ammunition from
his father, along with tear gas canisters and live World War Il-era
grenades, which he stored in a cupboard in the couple's bathroom.

After a brief stint as a jailer in Denton, Coleman's next law
enforcement assignment was back in West Texas, as a deputy in Cochran
County. That ended in 1996 when Coleman's live-in girlfriend, Carla
Bowerman, took her child and fled to Illinois, according to Barnett,
who was in contact with Bowerman at the time. Barnett said she urged
Bowerman, in the interest of her own safety, to leave Coleman while he
was away at work and to take a circuitous route to her destination.
(Reached at her home in Illinois, Bowerman declined to be interviewed
for this story.) According to a letter from Sheriff Burke, Coleman
walked into the dispatcher's office in the middle of his shift and
told her he was leaving. With no prior notice to the sheriff, and without
even returning his patrol car to the station, Coleman simply left town.
According to a written account by the dispatcher on duty, Coleman told her
he had to go look for his wife (though he and Bowerman were never actually
married). According to Barnett, Coleman followed Bowerman to her parents'
hometown of Patoka, Illinois. He lived and worked in Illinois until he
returned, alone, to Midland in 1997, where he was working as a welder when
he applied for the assignment in Tulia.

The theft charge in Cochran County was filed a year after Coleman
left town. According to records reviewed by the Observer, it stemmed
from a co-worker observing Coleman using a county gas card to fill
his personal vehicle. But what apparently spurred his former boss
into action were Coleman's debts. According to documents reviewed by
the Observer, the sheriff received half a dozen letters from the
grocery store, the gas company, Coleman's mechanic, and others, all
requesting assistance in collecting debts Coleman promised he would
make good on but never repaid. An unusual deal was worked out:
Coleman would pay back the money, over $6,700, as restitution,
though the theft charge against him was for less than $100 worth of
gas. In return, the charge would be dropped, and the vendors would
not pursue civil charges against Coleman.

BOOTIE WOOTIE'S EMPIRE

News of Coleman's history has filtered through the black community
in Tulia. Some were not surprised. "Get a dirty man to do a dirty
job," said Freddy Brookins Sr., whose son was sent to prison - like
most of the defendants - based solely on Coleman's testimony.
Brookins and others contend that white Tulia was ready to believe
Coleman, however problematic the details of the operation, because
fear and distrust of the black community underlies almost all public
policy decisions in the town. Sometimes that sentiment is not too
far beneath the surface. In a transcript of the debate over the
school drug testing policy white board member Sam Sadler described
an after-school scene his wife witnessed: "[My son] has entered the
sixth grade this year, and he is easily influenced... The other
evening when several bigger kids, some colored kids - not trying to
pick on anybody - but they had him all huddled up in a huddle there.
You know just really talking to him.... And you know you do your
best at home and you try to explain, you tell and do everything you
know how.. .I think that's a pretty compelling interest [to drug
test], to protect my son."

McEachern played on that fear in the first case brought to trial,
that of Joe Moore. McEachern portrayed the sixty-seven-year-old
Moore, a central figure in the black community, as a drug dealer who
preyed especially on school kids. In the trial, Moore, who had two
prior felony convictions (one for possession of cocaine in 1990) was
sentenced to ninety-nine years, for two counts of delivering an
eight ball of powdered cocaine to Coleman.

Though he was described by McEachern as one of the four major
dealers, if not the major dealer in Tulia, Moore's dilapidated house
in the heart of the black neighborhood does not suggest affluence.
His yard is filled with junk he collected to sell for scrap.
According to his longtime girlfriend, Thelma Mae Johnson, Moore had
made a living for the last decade largely by raising hogs, which he
fed with waste grain scavenged from grain elevators. On the day
Johnson accompanied me to view the kingpin's estate, a Hispanic junk
dealer and his son were towing off - on four flats - Moore's
thirty-year-old Interational Harvester truck.

Moore, who agreed to be interviewed at the Middleton Unit near
Abilene, claims he never dealt cocaine. He is a mountainous man with
huge hands and shoulders so broad that two sets of cuffs had to be
linked together when he was arrested. He speaks slowly in a heavy
country accent through missing teeth. As one of Tulia's longest
black residents, over the decades Moore's fortune been a barometer
for the rise and fall of black Tulia. Moore, or "Bootie-Wootie" as
he is affectionately known in the black community, came to Tulia
with his family in the 1950s. In his youth he worked as a farm
laborer with his family. Now stooped and limping, he was once
legendary for his stamina as a hay loader and his ability to toss
bales onto a truck one-handed. Most residents of the
African-American community in Swisher County trace their roots to
farm laborers who arrived a generation before Moore and lived in
shacks on the white-owned farms where they worked. Entire families
picked cotton or soybeans and grew their own vegetables. The second
generation of black people moved off the farms to work at the town's
many grain elevators or other ag-processing jobs. By the early
seventies, most black men in Tulia worked at the Taylor-Ivins seed
company. Black women, meanwhile, worked mainly at the Royal Park
garment factory.

Moore made his living during that period - black Tulia's heyday - as
a bootlegger. Like much of the Panhandle, Swisher County never
legalized alcohol sales after prohibition. In practice, however, the
county remains dry for blacks only. Whites drink legally at two
unofficially segregated private clubs outside the city limits: the
country club, where Tulia's more affluent citizens meet, and Johnny
Nix's, which caters to farmers and cowboys. For blacks, there is
bootlegging. For twenty years, Joe Moore and his brothers ran the
only bar in Tulia, stocked with illegal beer purchased nineteen
miles away in Nazareth, the nearest wet town. The juke joint, known
as Funz-a-Poppin', was the worst-kept secret in town, according to
Moore. It was located in an old converted hotel in "Niggertown," as
Tulia's black west side was commonly called. Moore was bartender,
bootlegger, and eventually caretaker for his three older brothers,
each of whom died of cirrhosis. He became a central figure in
Tulia's black community, where he was known as someone who could
help out a single mother from time to time, or advise a neighbor
having trouble with the sheriff.

Moore and his brothers were convicted of bootlegging in the early
1980s and fined, but the police never tried to shut down the bar,
according to Moore. Instead, they put him on the "slow payment
plan." Every month, Moore says, he reported to the sheriff's office
and paid $200 in cash, all of which was proceeds from bootlegging.
Moore cannot read or write. He says he received receipts for the
money, but has no idea where it went, or what happened to the
records after the bar was demolished in 1992.

Many of the buildings on Tulia's west side (now referred to as the
"Sunset Addition"), including Moore's place, were pulled down in the
early nineties to make room for a planned expansion of 1-27 that
never materialized. Thelma Mae Johnson, Moore's girlfriend of twenty
years, said she and some friends later tried to organize a private
social club in an empty storefront, so blacks would have a legal
place to drink and socialize. The city quickly responded with an
ordinance banning private drinking clubs within the city limits, and
the idea died. Evening entertainment for blacks is confined mostly
to house parties now, according to Billy Wafer, who moved to Tulia
from Plainview because he felt it was a better place to raise his
kids. "We get everybody over, drink, listen to music, talk real loud
and tell lies, stuff like that," he said. Since the bust, though,
things have been quiet in the black community. "Right now the
atmosphere with the blacks is real scared," he said. "We don't know
which way to turn without the law messing with us."

Losing Funz-a-Poppin' was a blow to a black community already in
decline. The closing of Royal Park in 1979, followed by massive
layoffs at Taylor-Ivins in 1985, devastated black Tulia. Families
relocated to Plainview or Amarillo, to work in the beef-packing
industry. Young people increasingly began to leave after high school
and not return. Taylor-Ivins finally closed its Tulia facility in
1995, leaving the Wal-Mart Distribution Center in Plainview as the
leading employer of blacks from Tulia. Women now largely work as
maids or home-health care workers, or at the nursing home in Tulia.
"There just aren't many places for them to work," County Judge
Harold Keeter explained, referring to the predicament of the young
blacks rounded up in the Tulia bust. Mattie White, who had three
children arrested in the raid, including Donnie Smith, has a
different take on the local economy. "There's plenty of kids my
children's age working in the bank and in the department stores,"
she said. "But they're all white."

A DIRTY JOB

As the bust briefly made news around the state, Terry McEachern and
Sheriff Larry Stewart have grown weary of fielding questions,
particularly about the racial aspects of the sting. Yet several
other questions remain unanswered about the operation. According to
his own testimony, Coleman resolved his Cochran County theft charge
by paying $6,700 in restitution sometime during the summer of 1998.
Where Coleman got the money is unclear. His task force salary during
that period, according to county records, was about $23,000 per
year. After taxes, and the $200 per month garnished for back child
support, he was taking home less than $1,500 per month. How did he
come up with so much money in such a short period of time? Coleman
testified in January that he received no outside income while he
worked for the task force. By February, his story changed. His
mother had given him several thousand dollars, he testified. By
April, the scenario was that a friend of the family loaned money to
his mother, who in turn gave the money to Coleman.

Several defense attorneys are working on another theory, one that
may answer several questions about the operation. In at least one
case, the head of the Amarillo D.P.S. narcotics lab testified that
the powdered cocaine introduced into evidence by Coleman was
unusually weak. In order to get a higher rate of return on their
investment, dealers cut cocaine with a variety of relatively
inexpensive substances, usually mild anesthetics. Wafer's attorney,
Brent Hamilton, has requested that all of the cocaine obtained in
over 100 buys be tested at once, to determine if a common source
could be found (i.e. if they are all cut with the same amount of the
same substance), and to see if the same knife or scissors was used
to cut all of the baggies holding the drug. A common source would
support a devastating theory: that Coleman himself bought a quantity
of powder, perhaps in Amarillo, cut it very weak, and put it into
evidence for buys he never actually made. He could then use the task
force money from the buys he reported making to pay his restitution.

After leaving Hamilton's request pending for several months, Judge
Self has agreed to allow five randomly selected samples to be
tested. That test has yet to be done. In the meantime, according to
Hamilton and other defense attorneys, since the testing plan was
first proposed (and Coleman's credibility in general has been
challenged), plea offers from the district attorney have gotten much
more reasonable.

Coleman would not be the first West Texas narc to con his own
handlers. In 1989, more than twenty-five indictments were dismissed
in Sutton County when an undercover operation put together by the
district attorney came to pieces. Sutton County Attorney David W.
Wallace says he recalls having misgivings from the start. "I stayed
as far away from it as I could. They hired a non-D.P.S. narcotics
agent with a spotted history, or maybe they didn't check his history
at all," Wallace said. "And he goes out and looks for people that
are doing drugs. And based on his statements he is successful. But
when the trials start coming around they find out maybe this guy
isn't as honest and truthful as he holds himself out to be." After
several cases had already gone to trial in Sutton County, the
undercover agent, Lonnie Hood, was discovered to have planted
evidence and falsified reports during an unrelated operation in
Taylor County. As in Tulia, most of the Sutton County defendants had
been in jail since the day they were arrested. Several had already
been sent to prison. All were eventually released. In the aftermath,
both the county and the district attorney's office were sued.

Roaming narcs-for-hire like Coleman have a poor reputation in the
law-enforcement community, according to Amarillo defense attorney
Jeff Blackburn. "They're at the bottom of the food chain. Other cops
don't trust them." According to Coleman's ex-wife Barnett, Coleman
applied to be a state trooper numerous times. "He's been riding on
his daddy's shirttails for years, tryin' to be like his daddy," she
said. Coleman was working as a welder in Midland when he heard about
the job in Swisher County. After burning his bridges with his past
two law enforcement employers, deep cover may have been his last
chance to redeem himself as an officer. But Lawman of the Year?
Those who know him aren't buying it. "Tom is very crooked," Carol
Barnett said. "I would not be surprised a bit," that he fabricated
buys. "He's the type of guy that would do something like that," one
of Coleman's former co-workers in Pecos County agreed. "I guarantee
you Tom Coleman didn't make no fifty buys."

Coleman declined to be interviewed for this story. Approached
outside of the courtroom in Amarillo, he would only say that his
critics have it all wrong. "I got it all straight. I lived with
them, I ate with them. I was them," he said.

Coleman was not one of them. Donnie Smith said he never even got
close. "He was never at no parties, man," as Coleman had claimed in
court. If he had been, "it would be like, 'He gots to go,'" Smith
said. But he was also not a member of Tulia's white community. Why
was a small community so ready to turn on its own, based solely on
the word of a stranger? "The guilty verdicts don't have anything to
do with the evidence," one defense lawyer said. "What they've done
is they've rounded up all the people with bad reputations that
they've had trouble with in the past. Then they use this guy and his
testimony as a vehicle for the juries to run 'em out of town." It
was not as if the defendants were unknown to the juries. The County
Judge testified in Donnie Smith's case that he had known Smith for
years and helped him get into rehab the first time he became
addicted, out of fondness for the former football star. In fact, the
list of defendants read like a Who's Who of Tulia High sports heroes
from years past. But that was then. "As long as you're in school,
playin' sports,. and winnin' for them, you're all right," Smith
said. "Once you get out, if you don't move away, you in trouble.
That's basically the way it is. And if you're a white or Spanish guy
hangin' out with the blacks, you already in trouble."

That idea seemed to have particular resonance in the black
community. All the whites arrested in the bust had ties to the black
community (though none of them were paraded before the cameras on
the morning of July 23). Ironically, it was one of those white
suspects, William Cash Love, who made the only delivery in the
entire operation of any substantial size: an ounce (28 grams) of
crack cocaine. For that crime, along with several smaller
deliveries, Love received a sentence of 434 years. The sentiment in
the black community is that Love, a young white man who spent his
entire life in the company of blacks, and who married a black woman
(Mattie White's daughter Kizzie), was singled out to send a message
about his lifestyle choice. "When we saw Cash, we didn't see white.
We saw black," Billy Wafer explained. "They don't want 'em crossing
over." The younger generation in Tulia is much less prejudiced,
according to Wafer. "The young white kids are so intrigued by the
slang, the talk, the way of life, how them young black kids walk the
street all the time," he said. "That's what they're so fearful of,
the influence on their kids, and that's the reason things are
happening the way they are now."