AMERICAN TRAVESTY

When 46 People Were Arrested For Drug Offences In The Sleepy Texas Town
Of Tulia, The Local Lawman Was Hailed As A Hero. But There Was A Problem
- Almost All Of The Defendants Were Black, And There Wasn't A Shred Of
Evidence. Andrew Gumbel Reports On An Extraordinary Story Of Racism And
Police Corruption

Kizzie White was still fast asleep when the police came knocking on her
door in the early hours on 23 July, 1999. She had no idea what they could
possibly want. After all, she was an ordinary 24-year-old mother of two
small children living in Tulia, a small, dusty farming town of 5,000 souls
in northern Texas. She had never been in trouble for anything in her life.

They told her, to her astonishment, that she was under arrest on drugs
charges and ordered her out of the house.

She asked if she could at least put her clothes on, but they said no. "I
had on boxers and a T-shirt with no underclothes on. With no shoes on," she
recounts much later. "Basically, they took me out half-naked."

When the squad car reached the Swisher County courthouse in the centre of
town, she saw that dozens of others had been arrested just like her. Men
were being paraded across the courthouse lawn in their underwear, their
hair uncombed and their faces lost in bewilderment. Every last detainee, as
far as she could see, was black, while the arresting officers were
uniformly white. To add to the humiliation, local photographers, tipped off
in advance, were now busy capturing the bizarre scene for the next day's
front pages.

The town's now-defunct newspaper, The Tulia Sentinel, ran a headline on the
affair announcing: "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage". An editorial on
the inside pages lavished praise on the police for rounding up the town's
drug-dealing "scumbags". The racist undertone of the coverage could not
have been more clearly signalled; whether or not the police had actually
arrested a single drug-dealer, it was incontrovertible fact that they had
hauled in more than 10 per cent of Tulia's black population, including one
in every two adult males.

Six non-blacks were also arrested, but all of these either lived in the
black neighbourhood in Tulia - a shanty area of tenements and trailer
homes officially known as the Sunset Addition but popularly referred to by
white folks as "Niggertown" - or were closely tied to black families.

In all, 46 people were caught up in the police dragnet, although not
quite all of them were arrested that morning. They included Kizzie's
husband, a white man named William "Cash" Love, her brothers Donnie
and Kareem, her sister Tonya, an uncle and five cousins. To believe
the indictments subsequently handed down by the district attorney's
office, these impoverished farming people were running a high-class
racket in powder cocaine. Each of them, prosecutors maintained, had
been caught selling the stuff to an undercover narcotics agent called
Tom Coleman. Kizzie White, for example, was accused of selling to
Coleman no fewer than seven times.

The accusations seemed beyond a joke. After all, none of the 46
people arrested showed the slightest outward sign of material gain
that would surely come from the heady lifestyle of a cocaine dealer.
When they were arrested, police found no money, no weapons and no
trace of illicit drugs of any kind at their houses. There were no
fingerprints on the drugs that had been seized. The authorities
subsequently failed to produce any photographs, tape-recordings or
other concrete evidence that the alleged drug trades had taken place
at all.

By now - with the issue finally commanding national attention,
including a recent series of hard-hitting op-ed pieces in The New
York Times and a clutch of high-society fundraising events on the
East Coast to keep the legal defence battle going - it is clear the
accusations were a joke. And yet their cases proceeded through the
court system, often with terrifying efficiency. Kizzie was sent away
for 25 years. Her brother Kareem got 60. Her brother Donnie, who
admitted a history of crack cocaine use but insisted he was not a
dealer, went down for 12 years. The man fingered as the alleged
ring-leader of the cocaine racket, a 57-year-old pig farmer called
Joe Moore, was given 99 years even though he was charged with just
two counts of selling an eight-ball (about 3.5 grams, or $200 worth)
to Agent Coleman. Even worse off than him was Cash Love, Kizzie's
husband and the only defendant accused of making any sizeable sale.
Accused by Coleman of selling a whole ounce of cocaine, on top of a
number of smaller deliveries, he was sentenced to 434 years in state
prison. (Could he have been treated with such mercilessness because
his inter-racial marriage was abhorrent to mainstream opinion in
Tulia? His family certainly thinks so.)

What made this calamity all the more extraordinary is that it all
hung on the word of one man, and a singularly unalluring, unreliable
one at that. Tom Coleman claimed that the mass arrests were the
result of a painstaking, 18-month undercover operation in which he
worked at a "sale barn" digging pig dirt with the townsfolk and
slowly put the word out that he might be interested in purchasing
drugs.

Something about his story, however, did not add up from the start. To
secure 100 cocaine sales without blowing his cover, as Coleman
claimed he did, would be an extraordinary feat for an experienced
narcotics cop. For a first-timer like Coleman - he had worked in law
enforcement before, but never in narcotics - it would have to be
little short of miraculous, and not even his staunchest defenders
have suggested he is a miracle-worker. This was a man who never kept
records, never filmed or taped anything, never brought a single
colleague in on the job. What notes he made he scrawled on his leg,
yanking up a trouser leg with one hand while he wrote down a name or
date with the other. Later, during preparation for the trials, he
claimed he had indeed kept records on paper, but that a secretary at
the sheriff's department had accidentally thrown them into a rubbish
skip.

His reliability was immediately thrown into doubt. Asked how he
identified Freddie Brookins, a young man later sentenced to 20 years
behind bars, he admitted that he got the name, and a picture, from
the police and worked backwards from there. "I believe I talked to
the sheriff on this occasion," Coleman said, according to court
papers. "I gave him the description of the subject. And I believe the
sheriff asked city policy officers, or somebody, and told me - says,
'Well, we got a Freddie Brookins'."

This was not a fail-safe identification method, to say the least. One
defendant, Billy Don Wafer, managed to prove Coleman wrong - and
escape the cold grip of the criminal justice system - by proving
through employee time sheets and the testimony of his boss that he
was at work at the time he was alleged to be selling cocaine.

Another defendant, Yul Bryant, had his case dismissed because Coleman
described him as a tall man with bushy hair. In fact, Bryant is 5ft
6in and bald. There are doubts whether the two men ever met before
trial.

Throughout, Coleman made a singularly unattractive witness - not
least because of an astigmatism that caused him to jog his head to
one side when answering questions and look as if he did not entirely
understand what was being asked. Short, slight and pale, he was
capable of looking downright shifty. He would hedge every answer and
let his words ramble on, as though he wasn't sure himself what the
point was.

Worse, he out-and-out lied. He told one defence lawyer who asked
about his background that he had never been arrested or charged
for anything other than a traffic ticket "way back when I was a kid".
The truth, however, was that he was under indictment even as he
worked on his undercover operation in Tulia - something that the
lawyer quizzing him did not know at the time. While working in
Cochran County, another rural area of Texas, he had racked up
thousands of dollars in debt with his employers and then, one fine
day, simply walked off the job mid-shift and disappeared. The
indictment related to the use of a work credit card to buy petrol for
his personal use, but it was clear that dissatisfaction with him ran
much deeper than casual abuse of petty cash. After he ran out, the
Cochran County sheriff wrote a letter to a state commission on
police standards declaring: "Mr Coleman should not be in law
enforcement if he's going to do people the way he did this town."
Technically, the indictment should have disqualified him from
working the drugs beat in Tulia, but someone along the line clearly
turned a blind eye.

Over the past three years, as more details have trickled out about
Coleman's character, the less attractive he has seemed. Two
former co-workers have described him as a "compulsive liar",
while another said he was a "nut" who carried at least three guns
with him at any one time. Once, while sitting in a police patrol car,
he accidentally blew out the windscreen with a shotgun lying on his
lap.

His former wife says she believes he was incapable of securing
100 undercover cocaine sales, but it was perfectly conceivable that
he had fabricated them. In a videotaped interview in which he was
invited to discuss the racial dimension of the Tulia blitz, Coleman
freely admitted he used the word "nigger" in casual conversations
and during the course of his work. He said he didn't think the word
was "as profane" as it once was.

None of this made the blindest bit of difference in the courtroom. In
almost every case, Coleman's word was good enough for the
prosecution, the judge, and the jury - which, incidentally, never
included a single African-American. Of the 46 people originally
indicted, just four have had their cases dropped. A fifth died before
coming to trial. The rest got probation at best, and hard time at
worst. More than three years after the original bust, 14 people
remain behind bars - something for which the townsfolk in Tulia,
the sheriff and district attorney are yet to demonstrate the slightest
hint of bad conscience. Tom Coleman didn't do half badly out of the
whole affair: the attorney-general of Texas named him Outstanding
Lawman of the Year.

It is impossible to understand what happened in Tulia without first
understanding the racial politics of this part of the Deep South, and
the way in which that feeds into the US government's zealous
prosecution of its self-declared war on drugs. In the words of Jeff
Blackburn, a lawyer from Amarillo now leading the charge to try to
exonerate those arrested and tossed in jail, Tulia is an "isolated,
weird land-that-time-forgot kind of place", a town that never wanted
to accept the consequences of the civil rights movement. Until now
it has been small enough, and out of the way enough, to be able to
pretend simply that civil rights never even happened.

One way the continuing racial apartheid has manifested itself is
through alcohol. Swisher County is officially dry, but Tulia's white
majority can easily drink at one of two private whites-only clubs. If
black people want to drink, they have to do it illegally, exposing
them to the wrath of the law. Joe Moore, the pig-farmer and
supposed ringleader of the cocaine racket, got caught twice during
the Eighties for bootlegging - and perhaps some of the animus
towards him from that earlier time spilled over into his drugs trial.

Black community leaders and big-city civil rights activists strongly
suspect that at least part of the agenda behind the mass arrests
was to run Tulia's black population out of town. Yes, they concede,
there was a drug problem, as there is across much of rural
America where small farms are dying and communities drying up,
but the issue was a handful of crack addicts, not a secret cabal of
high-level dealers. If there was any powder circulating in Tulia, it
was being sold and consumed by the white population, not the
blacks.

The only possible motivation for the police round-up, they say, was
sheer malice. There is even speculation that Coleman made up
the incriminating cocaine packets for profit - buying a small
amount of the drug, cutting it to make it stretch to dozens of
eight-ball doses, then claiming the full street cost of the drugs back
from his government employers. Coleman has refused to answer
that charge.

"It was a mass lynching that day," says Randy Credico of the New
York-based William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.
"Taking down 50 per cent of the male black adult population like
that, it's outrageous. It's like being accused of raping someone in
Indiana in the 1930s. You didn't do it, but it doesn't matter because
a bunch of Klansmen on the jury are going to string you up
anyway."

On top of the racial ill-will came the war on drugs, and its own
tendency to target racial minorities and the poor. Coleman was
hired by the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force, based 50
miles from Tulia in Amarillo, one of almost 1,000
semi-autonomous drug task forces around the US with a mandate
to root out the networks of drug production and distribution in even
the remotest rural areas. The problem is, such task forces depend
on the states and the federal government for funding, and that
funding in turn is almost entirely dependent on demonstrable
results, as measured in arrests and convictions. One can begin to
see the mutual attraction between Coleman and the narcotics guys
in Amarillo: he was unscrupulous enough to give them the
numbers they needed, and they in turn represented an ideal
opportunity for him to redeem his faltering career. Coleman thus
came to resemble Nick Corey, the grotesque Texas sheriff in Jim
Thompson's classic crime novel Pop. 1280, who is so awash in a
sea of corruption that he can dissociate from reality entirely without
anyone seeming to notice until it is tragically too late.

"That's Tom Coleman all over," says Jeff Blackburn. "He was a
wayward loser, and this was his big chance, so he grabbed it. In
some ways I feel sorry for him - I won't be sending him Christmas
cards or anything. But really he's just a sick pawn in someone
else's game. The drug task forces have gone completely out of
control, and there are Tom Colemans running riot all over the
place. The only thing that makes him different is how provably
corrupt he is."

Thanks to Blackburn and his backers from various campaign
groups, notably the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People's Legal Defence Fund, there has been some
modest progress in stopping the rot that Coleman created in Tulia.
Negative publicity about the fiasco has been instrumental, and in
recent months the Swisher County district attorney has shown a
certain reluctance to follow through with the outstanding cases -
apparently out of fear that any new trial would turn into an
embarrassing media circus.

In April, another sibling of Kizzie White's, Tanya, managed to clear
her name after proving - with Jeff Blackburn's help - that she was
not in Tulia at the time that Coleman said she was selling him
cocaine, but was in fact cashing a cheque in Oklahoma City, some
250 miles away. That was the first major victory for the defence
since the affair began. Then, three weeks ago, the final defendant
due to come to trial, Zuri Bossett, had her charges dropped by the
district attorney. Not only was there no evidence against her other
than Coleman's word, she also seemed to lead an exemplary life
that had nothing whatsoever to do with drug-dealing. According to
Blackburn, the only thing the prosecution had against her was her
name - and on the indictment they weren't even capable of
spelling that right.

The next stage in the battle will be a major habeas corpus writ
arguing that the evidence was so tainted, and court procedure so
compromised, that a federal judge should immediately quash the
sentences against every last defendant and either throw out the
cases or order new trials. Blackburn and his fellow campaigners
also intend to launch a flurry of civil suits demanding tens of
millions of dollars in compensation for the treatment of their
clients. "I've deemed it my mission to bring these people into the
20th century, never mind the 21st," Blackburn says. "If the
community leaders can't put this situation right by themselves,
we're just going to have to force-feed them some justice."

Interestingly, the key leaders in question - the county sheriff and
the district attorney - have gone deathly quiet. Tom Coleman has
been equally reticent about addressing the mounting accusations
of misconduct against him. For all the kudos attached to his
Lawman of the Year award, he lost his job as a narcotics
investigator in Tulia. He tried a similar line of work in another part
of Texas, but got fired for alleged sexual misconduct with a fellow
agent. He is now believed to be working in Waxahachie, outside
Dallas, as an investigator for a private credit institution.