WHAT A DRAG

One bleak February afternoon a few years ago, a federal undercover
agent sat listening to a surveillance radio in the parking lot of
Rudy's Tenampa Taqueria on Westport Road near State Line. With several
kilograms of sham cocaine in the trunk of his black Ford Mustang, the
agent was ready to bust a group of buyers. When they finally arrived,
the trap worked perfectly, netting a Jamaican gang leader and two of
his nephews.

The uncle was Christopher McFarlane, who had spent fifteen years
funneling $20 million worth of cocaine through the Kansas City metro
as part of the Jamaican Waterhouse Posse, a violent network named for
a neighborhood in the island's capital, Kingston. One of McFarlane's
nephews busted that day was a midlevel drug dealer who regularly
bought large amounts of cocaine from him and sold it in Topeka.

The other nephew with McFarlane in the parking lot at Rudy's was a
University of Kansas football player named Tywanne Aldridge. By most
accounts, Tywanne's worst offenses until then had been making a fake
ID for an underage friend and eating some 'shrooms with his buddies at
Worlds of Fun one night.

By the time their trial was over almost a year later, two of Tywanne's
dealer cousins (one of whom was arrested a few months after the Rudy's
bust) had been acquitted. Their uncle McFarlane, courted by
prosecutors for the juicy information he could offer about the
international drug trade, had bargained for a reduced sentence of nine
years. But Tywanne, who had just graduated with a degree in cellular
biology, faced so much prison time that he panicked and fled the country.

When federal agents caught him this summer, with help from Spain's
national police, he was living an enviable life in a popular tourist
spot -- getting paid to play for the Drags football team on the
outskirts of Barcelona near the Mediterranean coast. Now Tywanne sits
in federal prison and likely won't get out until he's nearly forty.

Tywanne's friends say he spent his life trying to get away from drugs.
But that was impossible once he got to know Dominic Castaneda, a
government informant who was apparently eager to whittle down his own
ten years-to-life sentence any way he could.

By the time Tywanne started playing football for KU, he had been
immersed in drug culture for so long that he could talk just like a
dealer. But around his athlete friends, the guys with whom he spent
most of his time, he was a well-spoken student who took his health so
seriously that he wouldn't drink soda.

One friend remembers stopping by McFarlane's house one day with
Tywanne and noticing the big-screen TV and lots of electronics and
nice furniture.

"What's your uncle do?" the friend asked.

"Aw, you don't want to know. Nothing, man," Tywanne
answered.

Years earlier, McFarlane had introduced a constant supply of drugs
into the Aldridge family's life.

Stacy Aldridge had gotten pregnant with Tywanne when she was just
fourteen years old -- the result of one drunken night at a high school
party, she tells the Pitch. Tywanne's father, an older friend of
Stacy's, left town and joined the Marines not knowing about her
pregnancy. Even after he found out, more than a year later, he didn't
have much to do with his son. By the time Tywanne was in elementary
school, Stacy had a steady job operating a forklift at T&T Popcorn, a
small factory near the railroad tracks on the northeast edge of
Lawrence. Her life was looking pretty good, all things considered,
when she started dating a man who used drugs. Before long, she was
getting high with him, she says.

Stacy came from a large Lawrence family and had three sisters who were
also dabbling in drugs. When Jamaican Chris McFarlane came into their
lives in the mid-'80s, she says, the dope started to flow freely.

McFarlane was among the tide of young and mostly poor men who fled
Jamaica after hundreds died amid political unrest between the People's
National Party, supposedly aligned with Fidel Castro, and the Jamaican
Labor Party, purportedly backed by the CIA. McFarlane arrived in the
United States in 1985 and lived for a year in Miami before joining
some of his cohorts in Kansas City, Missouri, with plans to start up a
drug-running "posse."

Trafficking drugs from other Jamaicans in Miami and New York and from
Mexicans in California, McFarlane and his group set up drug houses in
Kansas City, Missouri's inner city. But McFarlane soon moved to
Lawrence, where he met the Aldridge sisters.

He enrolled in classes at KU, where, Stacy says, he built an
upper-middle-class, white clientele that included many students as
well as a few professors and lawyers. Soon McFarlane married one of
Stacy's sisters, and the couple moved into a house across an alley
from Stacy's place at Ninth and Missouri streets.

Stacy started selling for McFarlane. When customers rang her doorbell,
she'd run across the alley to raid McFarlane's supply, then deliver
the money to him. He paid her in dope.

Every day, Stacy would come home from work and hide out in the
bathroom snorting cocaine and eventually smoking crack. Eight-year-old
Tywanne took refuge in his bedroom.

"My poor baby," Stacy tells the Pitch. She says she has been clean now
for almost two years. But when Tywanne was a kid, she says, "I'd take
a hit and I'd get real paranoid. He'd see me running to the window and
saying, 'The police are coming. The police are coming. They're going
to take my son away!'"

For the most part, McFarlane didn't use drugs. As a dealer, he needed
to stay alert. So Tywanne hung out at his house, and McFarlane would
take him swimming or to his tae kwon do lessons. Tywanne also became
close to his Topeka cousins, Preston Gardenhire and Monroe Lockhart,
both of whom started dealing drugs at a young age through their
uncle's connections, according to court testimony.

By the time Tywanne was in high school, Stacy says, her drug habit had
grown so bad that she couldn't stand for him to be around to witness
her decline.

"He just hated drugs," she recalls. "The people I hung around with
used to work out every day stopped going to the gym. He stopped
eating. He avoided his old friends, holing up in his bedroom alone to
watch movies. Milliren would try to coax him to go out and get food,
but Tywanne would say, "No, man. I'm not hungry," then eat a pack of
gummy worms for dinner.

Sometimes, though, the two would have 2 a.m. talks, and Tywanne would
open up about how he didn't want to show his face around anymore, how
his public defender had seemed distracted and harried and how
McFarlane had money from his previous drug deals to hire a good attorney.

"The dude started crying," Milliren says. "I'd never seen a dude
cry."

Castaneda was still working for the FBI. One night in mid-March 2000,
he followed two suspected drug dealers to By George's bar in Overland
Park, where he got drunk and taped his conversation with them. As he
was driving home on a suspended license, a police officer pulled him
over and told him to step out of the car. When Castaneda refused, the
officer pulled him out. Castaneda threw a fit, cursing and screaming
that he was an FBI agent. He struggled with the cop, then put his
hands over his ears and started chanting. He was arrested and charged
with drunken driving. But at a hearing the next morning, a federal
judge decided to let Castaneda stay out on the streets.

Three weeks later, after he missed several phone check-ins with the
feds, a judge finally sent him to prison.

At the same time, though, the life of a snitch was looking pretty good
to McFarlane. By the end of March, he'd joined the club. He met with
FBI agents and told them, "I'm willing to cooperate in any way that
would benefit me." Apparently, that meant pleading guilty to
drug-conspiracy charges and ratting on his nephews in court.
Otherwise, he'd be looking at a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years
to 45 years. He'd been around the drug trade long enough to know that
an especially cooperative informant could cut a sentence in half. And
he had what the feds wanted -- a juicy story about Caribbean gangsters
ruling Kansas City.

Hungry for information on a group they thought was responsible for
about twenty homicides, agents accepted McFarlane's help and promised
not to charge him with his prior drug crimes, which were numerous. He
made a list of his buyers and suppliers and drew a chart of his drug
network. Tywanne's name wasn't on the list, though McFarlane later
testified that Tywanne had bought drugs from him once or twice.

Like Castaneda, McFarlane stayed out on bond doing covert work for the
FBI. McFarlane told agents he was worried that Lockhart (who had
worked as an over-the-road trucker and a drug dealer for years) or
Lockhart's father (who'd served time for murder) might try to hurt
McFarlane or his two little girls. The FBI knew that Topeka police
suspected that Lockhart was a "major drug distributor" who might have
been involved in a killing, so agents wired McFarlane and sent him to
hang out with Lockhart. While McFarlane was taping, Lockhart told him
repeatedly that he'd kill him or anyone else who testified against him
in court.

McFarlane also set up a bust, helping the FBI catch three of his
Mexican suppliers.

The FBI cut him a check that summer for $3,500 -- one month of
government per diem pay. "The FBI was concerned for his safety and
paid the money for rent and for food expense for himself and his two
children," Schoeberl later testified.

In August, after McFarlane had promised to testify that Gardenhire and
Lockhart had each given him $10,000 to invest in the drug purchase
Castaneda and Tywanne had arranged, the FBI arrested Lockhart.

The case went to trial in November 2001, with Castaneda and McFarlane
as star witnesses for the prosecution. Castaneda stuck to his story --
Tywanne had approached him about buying drugs and had pursued him
relentlessly -- though cell phone records showed that it was Castaneda
who called Tywanne relentlessly and that the football player had never
called him.

McFarlane claimed that Tywanne, though not a hardened dealer like
Gardenhire and Lockhart, had sold drugs a few times before the bust.

In Tywanne's defense, his close friends testified that Tywanne was a
good guy who wasn't into drugs. Tywanne took the stand, too,
testifying that Castaneda had pushed the drug deal on him. "He just
kept saying, you know, we can make a lot of money, we can make a lot
of money," Tywanne said.

In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregg Coonrod portrayed
Lockhart, Gardenhire and Tywanne as coldhearted, gun-slinging criminals.

Tywanne's public defender, Stephen Moss, said that Castaneda and
McFarlane weren't credible witnesses, and he argued that his client
had been induced by Castaneda to act as a middleman. "Is it
coincidence that right at the time Castaneda has just been indicted
and is looking at ten years to life, all of a sudden Tywanne Aldridge
comes up and says, 'Hey, I want to buy cocaine?' Is that coincidence?
Of course it's not coincidence. It's clear Dominic Castaneda had the
motive and the intent to set people up to shave time off his own
sentence. That is clear."

On November 30, the jury deliberated all afternoon before acquitting
Lockhart and Gardenhire. But the jury members couldn't decide on
Tywanne, telling the judge they were hung. The judge sent them back,
and within half an hour they had found Tywanne guilty of conspiracy to
purchase cocaine.

Because he'd been out on bond throughout the trial, the judge let
Tywanne stay out until his sentencing, as long as he wore an ankle
bracelet and checked in with the court as scheduled.

Tywanne finished his classes and graduated from KU. He also got an
estimate from his lawyer of the amount of time he'd probably serve: at
least ten years.

Life in Spain was a dream compared with sitting in federal prison.
With enough income to afford an apartment on the edge of very hip
Barcelona, it didn't matter that sprinting and tackling for the Drags
(Catalan for Dragons) wasn't exactly making Tywanne rich. When the
Drags gathered at 10 p.m. for nightly practice at the stadium in an
industrial suburb, Tywanne always played hard. During games, he was
even better, helping propel his team toward the Euro Bowl.

The American football phenomenon had hit Europe in the mid-'70s, when
small European teams would sometimes play against American soldiers.
In the summer of 2001, more than 800 clubs from 14 countries belonged
to the European Federation of American Football. The best of those
competed in the Euro Bowl each winter.

The players' salaries and lifestyles varied widely from club to club
- -- in Germany, which had the strongest American football tradition,
some clubs could afford to pay their best players a few thousand
dollars a month. In other countries, the poorest clubs would offer to
feed a player and put him up with some guys from the team.

By the time the U.S. Attorney's office got word that Tywanne hadn't
checked in and sent FBI agents to Lawrence to look for him in March
2001, it was too late.

Tywanne's close friends and family knew he was traveling in Europe.
Milliren says Tywanne called him every few months at odd hours, like 4
a.m. "He always forgot about the time difference," Milliren says.
Loyal to his friend, Milliren never reported the calls to
authorities.

It hadn't been hard for Tywanne to foil the federal monitoring system.
Stacy says that while her son was finishing college, Lockhart and
Gardenhire helped him get a passport. The cousins bought his car and
promised to send him money for it. That spring, Tywanne sold some of
his things, bought plane tickets to Prague, cut his bracelet and
borrowed a car to get to the airport, his mom says.

But his cousins never sent the money they'd promised him. For a while,
Tywanne lived on the streets of Prague, scrounging for food with
Gypsies and other outcasts, Stacy says. She says she often pawned her
belongings to send her son money.

After Tywanne found out about the European football clubs that
sometimes recruited coveted American players, though, he started
playing for a Prague team.

By the summer of 2003, Tywanne had been in touch with Bart Barnard, an
assistant coach from the University of New Mexico who was traveling to
Spain to take over as head coach of the Drags. The team offered
Tywanne room and board and a modest salary. Tywanne would join the
team's stable of American players, along with a squad of Spanish
players who didn't get paid.

"He was a heck of a player for us," Barnard says. "He was real
aggressive and real charismatic on the field and inspired the other
players to play harder."

Tywanne and his teammates would usually hang out at Mexclat, a bar
owned by one of the players, eating tapas and drinking beer or coffee.
Tywanne smiled a lot and made friends easily. He spoke decent Spanish
and some French.

Although no one knew his secret, Barnard recalls that Tywanne
sometimes seemed very lost. And even by the standards of a city where
twentysomethings walk down the street smoking joints, Tywanne's
marijuana habit drew attention. "Basically, everyone was just like,
wow, he smokes a lot of pot," Barnard says.

Last summer, the team was gearing up for a tough Euro Bowl game
against the Stockholm Mean Machines. While the Drags practiced on the
field, some players noticed ten guys loitering around the parking lot.
People assumed they were soccer players who had just finished practice.

As one of the players' girlfriends was leaving the stadium, she saw
Tywanne walking up the hill toward practice. The loiterers, undercover
agents from the Spanish equivalent of the FBI, drew guns. A few of
them jumped Tywanne, threw him in a dark, unmarked car and sped away.

When Spanish TV stations reported the arrest and the details of
Tywanne's conviction, the news astounded many of the athlete's
teammates, Barnard says. The Spanish Football League's Web site
published a story about the arrest and trial. "The Drags have
distanced themselves from Aldridge, saying that each player's private
life is his own responsibility, not the team's," the story announced
in Spanish.

"Everyone was shocked when they finally knew the story, because Ty was
such a nice guy," Barnard says. "Such a great guy, just a guy that was
here in Europe to play some ball, see the world."

At the Euro Bowl a few weeks later, the Drags barely won a few tough
games, beating the Moscow Patriots on their home turf and winning the
much-anticipated game in Switzerland against the Mean Machines by just
one point. "We were all still pretty upset about Ty," Barnard says of
that game. Nonetheless, the team went on to win the Euro Bowl
championship in its class.

The U.S. government extradited Tywanne over the summer, and in late
October a judge sentenced him to thirteen years without parole.

He will remain in prison longer than McFarlane, who is scheduled to be
released in less than eight years. Castaneda is already out; he was
released in December 2002 after serving less than two years.

Tywanne spent a couple of months in Leavenworth before the feds
transferred him in early December to the place that will likely be his
home for a long, long time, the Federal Correctional Institution in
Texarkana, Texas.

There, his mother says, he has started a job teaching GED classes for
the other inmates.