THE ROGUE COP OF TULIA, TEXAS

It Was the Biggest Drug Bust the Town Had Ever Seen, and Tom Coleman Was
Its Hero. But Then It All Went Wrong.

Tulia, Texas. You'll find it on Route 27, at the end of a flat and
featureless landscape south of Amarillo, a small town famous for nothing
until suddenly notoriety blew in like a dust storm.

Tulia, Texas: bypassed by time, population 5000 and falling, some
agriculture, some cattle, but where depressed wheat and beef prices and a
vanishing watertable have left the community facing hard times.

Tulia, Texas: rusting cars and tractors left like wounded dinosaurs in
shabby car lots, a red-neck cafe for drivers passing through, hard,
weathered faces looking older than their years, 29 churches - one for every
172 believers. And lots of cliches.

Sheriff Stewart actually wears a 10-gallon hat, walks like Gary Cooper and
speaks fluent Texan. Bobby Sue Gayler, blue rinse-widow of a former
sheriff, runs the local museum; she's sweet, courteous, sincere to a fault.

And, sure enough, Tulia's black population really is on the other side of
the tracks, only 400 of them, mostly dirt poor. There's the Pentecostal
church where the beat of the handclapping and tambourines bursts through
the broken windows of the ugly building. And just across the derelict,
rubbish-strewn field there's old Leroy Barrow. Fifty-plus, he's the alleged
drugs godfather of Tulia, yet lives in a squalid $200 ($A330) caravan on a
waste dump. Odd place Tulia, Texas.

On July 23,1999, one-tenth of Tulia's black population was arrested in a
much publicised pre-dawn raid. Forty-six people, 39 of them black, were
hauled off - half-dressed and unkempt as one tends to be at 4am - to the
local jail.

They were charged with numerous drug-dealing offences, most involving
dealing in expensive powdered cocaine. Curiously for such a huge drugs
bust, no cash, drugs or firearms were uncovered by the ski-masked cops who
turned over the defendants' modest homes and shacks.

One week later, the local newspaper, the Tulia Sentinel, celebrated the
arrests with unambiguity: "We do not like these scumbags doing business in
our town. (They are) a cancer in our community, it's time to give them a
major dose of chemotherapy behind bars." And the headline the following
week? "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage."

The jury in the trials comprised all white (bar one man) Tulia residents,
all of whom presumably read the Tulia Sentinel. Everything was now set for
the appearance of the hero of the hour - Tom Coleman, the undercover
narcotics cops who ran the whole sting operation single-handedly.

Tom Coleman has an accent that cuts rawhide; he walks tall and with menace.
His stubble hair crowns a bull neck that looks out of place on his trim and
well-kept figure. Of course, he wears a black cowboy hat and boots and is
as Texan as a lasso.

To run the sting, he posed as T. J. Dawson, a pony-tailed white-trash biker
with a girlfriend whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with the
help of liberal quantities of powdered cocaine. His clever excuse for not
taking it himself in front of the people who allegedly sold it to him was
that he was on probation and liable to spot-urine tests by the police.

Coleman used an unusual modus operandi for an undercover narcotics cop. He
worked without a partner, without a wire, without video surveillance,
without fingerprint evidence and without a notebook. He wrote notes on his leg.

The entire weight of evidence against all the suspects was based on his
honesty and integrity, and the bags of cocaine (known on the street as
"eightballs") he allegedly bought from the defendants.

In court, Coleman was regarded as the cavalry who rescued the town from
drugs hell. "During the trial," says Coleman proudly, "when the jurors had
the opportunity, they would mouth a silent 'thank you' as they passed me.
Others would hold their hands by their crotch and give me a secret thumbs
up and a wink."

The first prison sentences handed down were so punishing that many
defendants knowing only too well what happened to a black drug dealer in a
white Texan town, changed their pleas and bargained for the best they could
get. The judge handed out a total of 800 years in prison and 100 years on
probation. Tulia rejoiced, Coleman's back was sore from the slaps, and he
was nominated and awarded Texas Lawman of the Year.

Then, a few little cracks appeared in the walls of certainty that
surrounded the affair.

It turned out that the judge in all the cases had refused to allow the
defence lawyers to inform the jury that Coleman's work record was, in his
own words "a little spotty". He was, in fact, what Texans call a "Gypsy
Cop", freelance paladins who ride from county to county taking short-term
contracts with small impoverished sheriffs' departments, then moving on and
out. They are men with no real community loyalty, poorly paid bottom
feeders in the deep sea of law enforcement in Texas.

Coleman's previous job as a sheriff's deputy in Cochran County ended in
tears when he walked out in the middle of a shift owing $7000 locally in
unpaid bills and facing a charge of stealing government property. The
sheriff then sent a note to the state's main employment office for lawmen
in Texas reporting unequivocally: "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."

But when the Sheriff of Tulia hired Coleman, he did not bother to check on
that less than glowing recommendation. "I liked Coleman," drawled the
Sheriff in his office, "he was a very outgoing man, very clean cut, I felt
good about him. No, I didn't ask if there were any notes on his file." Does
he think perhaps he should have asked? "Possibly," he smiled, "it would
have been a good question."

So a jury, ignorant of Coleman's background, overheated by the prejudices
of a local newspaper editor, and dazzled by Coleman's undoubted glamour (he
is the son of a Texas Ranger, lawmen with semi-divine status in the state),
slammed the door on impartiality and doubt.

Take Billy Sue Gayler. As we walk round the neat and clean (everything in
the white parts of Tulia is neat and clean) museum she runs in town, she
quietly and convincingly parades her colour blindness. "At Christmas and
Thanksgiving, we help the local Afro-Caribbeans out with cash, we give them
turkeys, we help those without decent cookers to cook them. I am known and
liked over there." This is true. And yet and yet.

Billy Sue Gayler sat on one of the juries yet couldn't even remember the
name of the young black man she sentenced to 53 years in jail (in Texas
juries often set the sentence, too). When I ask her about the case I am
keen to understand why she believed Coleman but not the young black
defendant. "Coleman was honest with us on the stand," she says. "He agreed
he was no angel... that he'd been around. His is not an easy job, but he
did walk the walk and talk the talk."

Shouldn't lawmen be very close to the angels? "It takes all kinds of us in
this world to keep the rest of us alive and to do the things that we know
need to be done. So I took it that he was good, the right one for this job."

But the defendant was not accorded the same degree of impartial trust. He
had pleaded not guilty, yet something in Billy Sue's breast seemed to
demand some kind of public abasement from him despite his plea of
innocence. "The way they (defendants) sit there," she tells me angrily, "he
didn't turn to us, he didn't give us anything. I waited for him to turn to
me and say, to all of us, and say, 'I'm sorry that this has happened', or
to say, 'I want to go back and get some education, I want to do better'. I
never heard one bit of encouragement from that young man and that young man
was old enough to know that he should be running to do better."

But how on earth could this defendant perform such a public mea culpa if he
had pleaded not guilty? "I don't know, but I have a feeling, and I'm very
intuitive, and I did the best I could do, and I know that he was guilty."

"There is a racial element in all this," says Jeff Blackburn, the Amarillo
lawyer working pro-bono for most of the defendants on appeal, "but it's not
an overtly racist sort of approach. Frankly, I think the people in a
community like Tulia are so racist that they don't know they're racist.
They don't need conspiracies or closed doors to take decisions to go after
black people because this is how things have been done for a long time.
There's a lot of accidental racism involved, much of it racial profiling."

Part of the problem lies with Coleman's real employers, the Texas Panhandle
Regional Narcotics Task Force based in Amarillo. These taskforces were
created under president Ronald Reagan and are mainly federally funded.
Their purpose is to help small impoverished towns such as Tulia deal with
sophisticated big-city drug dealers who might invade the boonie communities
of the South and South-West.

But to requalify for the big federal grants, the taskforces need lots of
arrests and convictions, and who easier than black labourers and
sod-busters in tired agricultural communities like Tulia. These are
defendants who often cannot afford lawyers, who are often painfully
inarticulate, and a few of whom, yes, just like the whites, smoke the odd
crack cocaine pipe or spliff.

Take for example the supposed drugs godfather of Tulia, old Leroy Barrow, a
man of such criminal power and menace that when arrested, his bail was set
at a whopping $750,000. You could buy half of Tulia for that kind of money.

When I met Leroy (he plea-bargained and got probation), he was doing his
usual thing. As a dignified vagrant, he collects used Coke cans, crushes
them and sells them for $30 a week.

"That man fooled the whole town," says Leroy, angrily speaking of Coleman.
"He took the whole of Tulia for a ride and he has destroyed my life. Now I
receive no welfare, I am without a job, I have nothing."

Coleman is adamant. "Those people sold me narcotics, they are guilty, all
of them."

Well not quite. Five of Coleman's cases have unravelled. Tania White faced
a 99-year prison sentence for selling Coleman cocaine. But there was a
problem. Her lawyer, Jeff Blackburn, proved that she was hundreds of
kilometres away at the time, in Oklahoma City cashing a cheque. Case
dismissed. "A typo, that's all, a mere typo. I was right, she's lying,"
snorts Coleman.

Ramona Strickland was charged with selling Coleman $100 worth of cocaine.
Coleman's official report had something scratched out. When the lawyers
examined it under special lights, they discovered Coleman had originally
described Strickland as six-months pregnant. But she wasn't. Case dismissed.

"I only saw her through a crack in the door, she looked pregnant enough,"
blusters Coleman.

Yul Bryant was described by Coleman as a tall black male with bushy hair.
Bryant is short and bald. Case dismissed. "I had the right man but he gave
the wrong name," asserts Coleman.

Billy Don Wafer's workmates proved through time sheets that he was at work
when he was allegedly selling Coleman cocaine. Case dismissed. "They're all
lying," snarls Coleman. But even if Coleman's overall credibility and
integrity had taken tiny knocks there remained the indisputable evidence of
the eightballs that he turned in to his bosses at Amarillo. They were,
after all, bags of cocaine. Yes? Well not quite. Under Texas law, it is not
necessary for the prosecution to prove any more than that the bag of
cocaine contained some of the drug, no matter how infinitesimal. A police
forensic expert confirmed there was some cocaine in each bag Coleman
allegedly bought, but the quantity had never been revealed.

In London and Sydney, the average quantity of cocaine in a bag sold on the
street is 85 to 90 per cent pure. When some of Coleman's bags were
subsequently tested for cocaine content, the results were astonishing. They
ranged from a high of 11.8 per cent to a low of 2.9 per cent. That's
insufficient to intoxicate a prairie rabbit let alone a fully grown and
randy (if mythical) Texas girl.

The next oddity in the case came from knocking on endless doors in Tulia.
The story from those who have used drugs recreationally (and there are
some) as well as those who don't, was invariably the same. There is no
powdered cocaine in Tulia. The reason is that it is far too expensive for
the poor. The recreational drugs of choice are marijuana and some crack.
But everyone I spoke to was adamant. There's no powder on the streets of
Tulia. It's strange that there was a sudden outbreak of this drug when
Coleman arrived to start his undercover sting.

There is one final piece to this jigsaw. I have in my possession the
confidential ex-parte application made by one of the lawyers representing
several defendants. It was presented to the judge in chambers. One section
states: "Counsel will also be able to present testimony that Coleman
purchased large amounts of cocaine in Amarillo while this investigation was
under way."

If this is true, and it does remain unsubstantiated, then it is odd that no
one has been charged with selling Coleman cocaine in Amarillo. I have
spoken to a lawyer involved in the ex-parte application. He has given me
the name of one of his clients, already in prison for drug-related
offences, as the man who sold Coleman cocaine in Amarillo. It appears that
the cocaine has never been accounted for.

When Coleman turned in his eightballs to the Regional Task Force in
Amarillo, he was given the street price per bag so that he could go back to
Tulia and buy another bag. It has been calculated that he received several
thousand dollars in official police buy money for his purchases.

At the conclusion of the case everyone seemed happy. Coleman received the
accolade of all those arrests and convictions, and he paid off his debts to
Cochran County (including payment for the theft of government property,
thus avoiding a trial). He says his mother gave him the $7000 to repay the
debts. The Panhandle Task Force got its arrests and indictments. Tulia
cleared its streets of its perceived "scumbags and garbage". Sheriff
Stewart will be re-elected for the umpteenth time by a grateful citizenry.

Only a few clouds still remain. Both the Panhandle Task Force and Coleman
have declined to answer questions about the controversial aspects of this case.

Meanwhile, the FBI and the Texas state attorney's office are investigating
Coleman's operation. The district attorney who handled all Coleman's cases
has been charged with drunken driving in nearby New Mexico.

The judge who heard the cases in Tulia has excused himself from hearing
several appeals following an indiscreet letter he wrote to the local paper.

After he left Tulia, Coleman took another gypsy cop assignment in another
county. He was fired on the spot following allegations of sexual
impropriety and lying. He now works as a gas pipe inspector. Sixteen
defendants remain in prison for long terms.

Tulia is coping. "Tulia will recover, what with our churches and our
membership of the churches," says Billy Sue Gayler. "When we finally decide
to get down on our knees and pray to God to show us the way to go, then we
will survive. And those of us that have pioneer blood in us will survive too."

Says Coleman: "If I had to do it all over again I'd do exactly the same."