McCreary County, November 2002

TURNING INFORMANT

The Law

David Perkins woke up on a misty, overcast morning with trouble at his door.

The DEA was there, with a warrant.

Perkins put on some clothes. The police put on the shackles.

DEA Agent David Gray, Perkins would soon learn, knew a surprising amount of
information about his business.

Gray had recordings of Perkins discussing competition in the drug trade. He
had recordings of Perkins talking about the amounts of drugs he'd bought.
He even had recordings of other people talking about going to Chicago to
buy cocaine for Perkins.

Gray's criminal complaint for Perkins' arrest chronicled the names, dates
and places behind several OxyContin and cocaine deals.

It was as though Gray had been there all along.

He hadn't, but David Valentin had.

When Valentin and his attorney were meeting with a federal prosecutor in
2002 to discuss the gun charges, David Gray walked into the room,
introduced himself and delivered some bad news:

There was evidence from informants that Valentin had been dealing drugs.

"David Gray come in and said they had me on the sale of 100 Oxys that was a
year old," Valentin said. "And that's when I started with him."

During a June 18, 2002, interview with the DEA, Valentin outlined Perkins'
operations. He also turned over recordings of Perkins, according to court
documents.

"The only part I regret is ever getting involved with them, which was the
worst mistake in my life," Valentin said of Perkins and the others. "I
don't feel bad about anything that I said or done; everything I've told has
been the truth ... and I stick with everything that I said to the DEA."

Court records indicate that Valentin was the first to cooperate in what
would become a chain of people offering information against Perkins.

They fell like dominoes:

. Eight days after Valentin talked, another confidential source was
interviewed by the DEA in Somerset. He repeated the thrust of Valentin's
allegations: that Perkins was operating a large-scale cocaine operation.

Steve Gibson, Perkin's neighbor and friend for years, confirmed that he was
that source.

. The same day that Gibson spoke with the DEA, a third informant was
interviewed in London. The informant said he had bought cocaine from
Perkins on several occasions. He agreed to try to buy from Perkins while
wearing a wire.

And Ralph Grundy did just that.

. About two months after Gibson and Grundy spoke with the DEA, the Shelby
County traffic stop took place. Valentin took the driver, Angela Miller, to
law enforcement officials. She gave a statement, which meshed with
Valentin's, that implicated herself and others, according to a court document.

Steve Gibson called a sheriff's deputy that summer, scared that his role as
an informant was going to get him killed.

"He called me once (and said) they're going to kill me tonight," said
Lowell Dolen, a deputy with the McCreary County Sheriff's Department.

Less than a month after Gibson met with the DEA, he filed charges against
Perkins, saying that on July 6, 2002, Perkins shot into his home with a
gun, and on July 9 launched bottle rockets at the house until it caught on
fire. Those charges were dismissed when a grand jury did not indict.

The two alleged attacks never happened, Perkins said.

Many of the drug dealers interviewed for this story said that they have at
one point or another considered the possibility of a co-defendant taking
revenge.

David Valentin said he's certain about the implications of his actions.

"I'm going to end up dead or killing somebody in prison ... from all the
f------ people I've f------ testified against," he said.

There was another drug dealer in McCreary County who tried to barter
information for a lesser sentence: David Perkins.

Faced with the pressure to come up with testimony about other drug dealers,
Perkins said, he turned on his own family.

Perkins told the DEA that his brother-in-law, Dewayne Harris, had
participated with him in the cocaine business.

After police arrested Harris, they later picked up his wife, Edna --
Perkins' sister.

"I told them about Dewayne and that pretty much f----- me with my family,"
Perkins said.

Now, Perkins too was scared.

He told law enforcement officials that his sister was trying to hire
someone to kill him.

Edna Harris said that, although she thinks Perkins concocted lies for the
DEA in hopes of shortening his sentence, she would never harm him.

"I would love to ask him why, why did he lie? But I would never hurt him,"
she said. "He got himself into this mess, and then dragged us right into it."