TULIA: RACE, COCAINE AND CORRUPTION IN A SMALL TEXAS TOWN

Basic Books, UKP15.99

ONE morning in the summer of 1999, 47 people were arrested in the
Texas Panhandle town of Tulia and charged with dealing cocaine. From
the start, the indictments should have appeared suspicious. Most of
those arrested were black; in fact they represented one in every five
black adults in Tulia.

Was it really credible that such a significant proportion of a very
small community were dealers? And who were they dealing to? They were
accused of dealing in powdered cocaine, but crack was the local drug
of choice.

The arrests were all the result of an undercover operation by one
police officer, Tom Coleman, and his word was pretty much the only
evidence backing the charges. But Coleman was the son of a Texas
Ranger. The local sheriff, district attorney and, as it would turn
out, judges were prepared to back prosecutions on the thinnest of evidence.

Blakeslee's riveting account of what proved to be a gross miscarriage
of justice does not shy away from the moral complexities of the case.
While some of the defendants led blameless lives, some used and even
dealt in drugs and would fall back into that world after their
release. Public apathy at the time seems in part to have been prompted
by a belief, particularly among whites, that if the accused were not
guilty as charged they were probably guilty of something.

Most of the defendants were classified as indigent, and lawyers were
appointed on their behalf. These lawyers were, with one exception,
useless and did little or no work on the background to the cases. The
exception, Paul Holloway, began digging into Tom Coleman's background.
He discovered he had left his previous police job in another part of
Texas in disgrace, leaving behind debts. He had been indicted for
stealing police property for personal use, a charge dropped only when
he paid off everything he owed.

The doubts about the case deepened further when it emerged that during
an earlier job, in Pecos County, Coleman had an abusive relationship
with his wife and was drummed out of town after a public meeting was
held to get rid of him.

Holloway began to suspect Coleman had repaid his debts using money
given to him to buy drugs for the undercover operation. The theory,
confirmed much later, was that Coleman cut the powder to such an
extent that it was unusable, but would still register as containing
cocaine on a police test. The implication, never proved conclusively,
was that Coleman framed at least some of the defendants and in effect
sold the adulterated cocaine to himself.

At the trials, all of this counted for nothing. The evidence about
Coleman's background was ruled inadmissible. The judges began handing
out sentences which, on the face of it, were absurd. Cash Love, a
25-year-old white man who had a child with a black woman, was given
361 years. Joe Moore, a 58-year-old black man who was something of a
pillar of the community, was given 90 years. Realising they could not
win, the defence lawyers urged many of the defendants to accept plea
bargains.

FOR THE MAJORITY of the white folks of Tulia, backed vocally by their
local newspaper, this was just fine. But not for Gary Gardner, a
bankrupt white farmer who steps into this story straight from the
pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel. While fighting against the verdicts, he
was urged by radio producers not to refer to black people as "niggers"
on air. But Gardner knew and liked Joe Moore and could not believe he
was a drug dealer. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money on
court transcripts, and together with an oddball collection of
campaigners, including Nate Blakeslee, a Texas journalist and the
author of this book, they set out to turn Tulia into a national cause
celebre.

They attracted the attention first of the New York Times, then the
BBC, then a high-powered team of Manhattan civil rights lawyers who
succeeded in staging another hearing on the cases with a new judge.
Eventually the defendants were released and pardoned by the state
governor. Tom Coleman, his credibility destroyed, was tried and
paroled; his career as a police officer was ruined.

This is strong stuff and would make an interesting tale in almost any
hands. But Nate Blakeslee uses his considerable journalistic skill and
invaluable local knowledge to turn his account of what happened in
Tulia into something exceptional.

There was racism, of course. But, with the possible exception of Tom
Coleman, no one involved seemed a virulent racist. They pandered,
rather, to the background racism of the white community. But the
American system of electing justice officers gave the DA, the sheriff
and the judge every interest in pressing on even when they must have
had doubts. Then there was the peculiar status of the Texas Rangers,
an elite unit which has the responsibility, among other things, for
policing the police. At one stage Coleman produced two Rangers as
character witnesses. In the eyes of a Tulia jury, that was more than
enough to trump the manifest contradictions in his evidence.

There was the system which produced the "jump-out boys", narcotics
officers who earned their nickname from carrying out vehicle searches
without cause. They were part of narcotics task forces set up under a
federal system which matched local funds if police would co-operate
across county lines. Then rules were brought in to allow the narcs to
keep much of the money they found, until eventually they relied on
asset seizures to keep them in a job the following year. Officers were
allowed to work undercover after only a few weeks' training. Coleman
appears to have taken abuse of the system to an extreme, but
incentives for abuse were built in.

In the background, the economy exerted a steady influence. Overfarming
was draining the aquifer which underlies the Dustbowl, leading to a
concentration of farms, fewer jobs and farmers going bust. Lack of
employment and the breakdown of family life meant few of the Tulia
defendants had lives ordered enough to provide them with alibis.

Blakeslee's handling of these complexities is masterful, and provides
many respectable reasons to read his book - by the end he does not
need to hammer home the wider implications for current debates about
the fight against terrorism, or drugs, or organised crime. But there
is a more basic reason: this account is utterly compelling. The next
time you feel the urge to pick up a thriller, don't. Read Tulia instead.