Part 2

THE NUMBERS GAME - AN INSIDE LOOK AT A TEXAS DRUG TASK FORCE

In 1999, then-assistant commander Dearl Hardy organized a raid on Al T's, a
popular Cajun restaurant in Winnie, in Chambers County. Allegedly
responding to reports of drug dealing at the restaurant, Hardy and two
dozen officers surrounded the place during business hours on a Friday
night. "These guys were dressed like SWAT teams and came in with vests and
guns, and I mean not pistols, but fuckin' machine guns," recalled Herbert
Thibodeaux, who owned Al T's at that time. But Hardy's intelligence on Al
T's proved unreliable: No dope of any kind was found, nor any evidence of
dealing.

In fact, Hardy had never even obtained a search warrant, entering on the
pretext of a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission investigation. "It was
clean as a whistle," Thibodeaux said. That's why he was surprised to read
on the cover of the Beaumont Enterprise the next morning that 15 pounds of
marijuana had been seized and several arrests made in a raid on his
restaurant. The news was repeated all that day on the radio in Liberty.
Thibodeaux called the radio station and discovered that Hardy, as was his
custom, had distributed a press release following the raid. To cover his
mistake at Al T's, Hardy cleverly worded the release to make it appear that
a number of unrelated seizures and arrests made by the task force in the 24
hours leading up to the raid had actually taken place at Al T's.

With the help of Anahuac defense attorney Ed Lieck, Thibodeaux confronted
Mike Little and Hardy about the release's bogus account. "They're like
children," Ed Lieck said of the task force. "They get caught in a lie, they
amend it, then they amend the amendment," he said. Little eventually issued
a profuse apology, but the damage was already done, Thibodeaux said. "I
spent fifteen years building up my business, and it took them fifteen
minutes to ruin it," said Thibodeaux, who sold the restaurant shortly
thereafter. "I had people calling me for weeks asking if it was okay to
bring their kids in there."

The same level of professionalism prevails on the highway.

Whatever else it may be doing, the task force has always kept at least two
interdiction officers on the interstate at all times.

If the interdiction stops running, the money stops flowing.

The highway is also where most of the big dope seizures come-not from
undercover work, but from making stop after stop, until an officer gets lucky.

The CCNTF has only a short segment of interstate to work with-30 miles of
I-10 that runs through northern Chambers County, plus a tiny stretch of
I-59 that cuts through northern Liberty County near Cleveland. Fortunately,
just to the west is Houston, a major hub for drug traffic.

In the eastbound lanes are cars carrying dope out of Houston, bound from
Mexico to points east. It's the westbound lanes that carry the cash,
stashed away in cars and trucks driven by mules back up the supply chain
toward Mexico. Officers cruise the highway in marked cars, scanning for the
vehicles that look like couriers.

The more stops a task force makes, the more dope and cash it will find.

Interdiction is a tricky game. A call to action for an ordinary highway
patrol officer is any moving violation.

But interdiction officers work in reverse: They identify likely drug
suspects-using what is known as a profile-then wait for them to make a mistake.

If you have out of state plates, look haggard, unshaven and tired, or, as
numerous studies have shown, if you are a minority, you have a good chance
of getting stopped by a task force, often on the slightest pretext.

In theory, you need probable cause to suspect that a crime is being
committed to stop and search a car. But in practice, according to a former
CCNTF interdiction officer, the pressure to get stats leads to some corner
cutting. "The name of the game is find Mike money, find Mike dope," he
said. "They don't care how it happens."

Often a search will turn up a sizeable amount of cash, but no dope or
evidence that a crime has occurred.

Ordinarily, this would be a dilemma: It is not illegal to carry large sums
of cash. In those cases, according to a former prosecutor under Mike
Little, the task force used what was commonly referred to as a "quick
claim," a ready-made legal form carried by interdiction officers.

By signing it, a suspect does not acknowledge ownership of the seized cash,
but he relinquishes any ownership he may have had. More often than not,
once the officer had the money and the signed waiver, the suspect was
simply let go, according to the prosecutor. "It's 'Hey buddy, how you doin'
tonight,'" the prosecutor said, describing a typical stop. "It's just real
good old boy: 'Yeah, you can sign this and be on your way,'" the prosecutor
said. "It wasn't lost on the defendant that that's the quickest way to get
the hell on down the road." The CCNTF case logs are heavily sprinkled with
entries noting seizures of currency with no case filed against the suspect.

The use of such claims by task forces is common, according to Jesse
Salazar, a former prosecutor for a drug task force in the Valley. "They
really can't file anything on them. But they're going to maybe scare them a
little bit and they're gonna put a piece of paper in front of them and say
you want to get on your way, just sign over the money," Salazar said. "It's
highway robbery." Salazar, who currently works as a prosecutor in Hidalgo
County, came to Austin at the request of McAllen State Representative Juan
Hinojosa to help draft legislation outlawing this practice.

The bill was part of a package of task force reform bills filed last session.

The bill passed, and it is no longer legal for officers to offer to let
someone go in exchange for cash.

A former CCNTF interdiction officer, who asked not to be identified, said
things got particularly bad when Dearl Hardy became assistant commander in
early 1997. Currency seizures had been down for the past few quarters. "We
were told to turn up the heat," the officer said. But Hardy took things too
far, he said. In one incident, the officer said, he followed a likely
courier all the way to the county line, but felt he could not get probable
cause to do the stop and search.

Instead, he radioed Jefferson County authorities, who eventually made the
stop and seized 100 pounds of pot. The stat went to Jefferson County and
Hardy was livid, the officer said. "He said, 'You don't need probable cause.

The law says you can stop a felony in progress.' I said, 'Yeah, so?' He
said, 'Well, every one of those cars is a felony in progress.'" That's when
the officer began to consider leaving the task force, he said. "Yeah, our
job is to get the crooks.

But do it according to Hoyle. Play by the rulebook," he said. "As long as
you're making cases for 'em, you can do pretty much anything you want," the
officer said. "But if it all goes wrong, they'll pin it on the cop and say
'We didn' t know.'"

Things Often Went Wrong.

Defense attorney Ed Lieck recalled one case in which his client had been
stopped by the task force on I-10-or so it appeared. Lieck discovered two
different police reports for the same incident. When he confronted
prosecutors, it was determined that a sheriff's deputy had in fact made the
stop, but had done so against a standing order from then-sheriff Phil
Burkhalter, who preferred to leave highway interdiction to the task force.

So the deputy called task force interdiction officer Layne Mooney to the scene.

Mooney, only too happy to get the stat, wrote up a false report claiming
that he made the stop. "It's perjury, tampering with evidence,
falsification of the facts," Lieck said. The case was dismissed.

No charges were filed against either officer.

By the time the falsification came to light this spring, Mooney had left
the task force to work for the Chambers County Sheriff's office, where the
sheriff asked him to resign.

"Task force cases were always the worst," says one former prosecutor who
served under Mike Little. "When I was first there I was so green that I
didn 't know-I took everything they said as the gospel," the prosecutor
said. "But it didn't take long to figure out you can't trust them," the
prosecutor said. "I just remember lost videos, 'broken cameras' so to
speak, microphones not working," the prosecutor said. "Any prosecutor that
had any sense at all, we all complained about it," the prosecutor said.

Little is one of 11 district attorneys in Texas who are project directors
for drug task forces.

That is a problem in the eyes of some attorneys. "You have an inherent
conflict of interest when you have a D.A. that owns his own police force,"
Ed Lieck said. "The potential for abuse grows exponentially." Jay
Kimbrough, executive director of the governor's criminal justice division,
disagreed. "A prosecutor is responsible for ensuring that you're not rubber
stamping any police officer's actions, regardless of which department they
work for," he said.

In theory, prosecutors act as a check on officer malfeasance, a sort of
quality control mechanism.

As cases get prepared for grand jury, a prosecutor goes over them carefully
in the presence of the officer. Searches, arrests, handling of
evidence-everything is reviewed.

Bad cases get kicked out. But because CCNTF officers actually work for Mike
Little, things do not work that way in Chambers and Liberty Counties,
according to one former prosecutor. "The attitude I always got from [task
force officers] was, 'You're not going to do anything to me, I'm working
for your boss, so if he tells you to accept this case, you're going to
accept it.'"

Things were very secretive around the district attorney's office, the
prosecutor said. "One of the reasons for that, I believe now, is that...
they were the only ones who really wanted to know the dirty stuff.

They were very, very cautious about hiding it from the rest of the
prosecutors." When enough prosecutors began complaining about the quality
of cases, Little eventually directed that all "intake," that is, initial
processing, of task force cases go through his chief investigator, Harvey
Simmons, rather than through his prosecutors. Simmons is not an attorney.

After Simmons had vetted them with the task force, they went to the
prosecutors, who had very little discretion. "It was pretty much just
prosecute and don't ask," the prosecutor said.

In any case, the quality of the task force's work is rarely on display in
the courtroom or tested before a jury. The vast majority of cases plead
out. Drug cases accounted for 51 percent of all criminal cases filed in
Chambers County in 2000. There were no acquittals that year. "These are the
easiest cases in the world to make because it's the cop's word against some
thug. And the defense attorneys, shit, they just want to move them, they
don't want to try them, 'cause they know that dope cases are losers.

I mean juries in this part of the world want to convict dope dealers," the
prosecutor said. The odds of beating the task force's preferred case, a
controlled buy, are long. "You've got no audio, no video, you've got a cop
that hasn't been besmirched, and all the paperwork looks right," Barbara
Markham explained. "At that point, you're toast." Defense attorney Walter
Fontenot said the decision to plead out is not a difficult one. "They put a
lot of pressure on you to take a plea, and your client probably already has
a rap sheet like a roll of toilet paper," he said. "Look, that's something
a lot of people do not understand. It's that people with bad records will
plead guilty because they know when they get to court the probability of
them winning is next to zero, just because of their record," he said. "But
whether or not they actually committed the offense, that's a completely
different story."

Having Mike Little in charge of the task force has also vastly decreased
the odds of a dishonest officer being prosecuted, according to several
former officers and prosecutors. The task force has had its share of bad
apples, like Layne Mooney, who was allowed to resign and never prosecuted,
and who still testifies in ongoing cases, according to Ed Lieck. One
notorious case is Donald Lawrence, who worked undercover for the task force
in Liberty County in the mid-'90s. Lawrence was allowed to resign after a
confidential informant he worked with regularly accused him of stealing
task force funds. (Donald Lawrence could not be reached for this story.)
Reached at his home in Liberty County, the snitch (who asked not to be
identified) said that on several cases he helped Lawrence make, the officer
would buy perhaps $150 worth of dope and report that he had spent $200,
pocketing the remainder.

A source close to the Liberty County Sheriff's office confirmed the
snitch's account, adding that Lawrence also allowed confidential informants
to make buys out of his presence, and then reported that he had made the
buys himself. "He was so dirty, I wanted to quit working with him," the
snitch said. According to the Liberty County Sheriff's Office source, the
suspect cases were never prosecuted. They totaled perhaps 50 to 75, meaning
Lawrence could have stolen as much as several thousand dollars from the
task force. Yet Little allowed Lawrence to resign, rather than firing or
prosecuting him. "If you're part of the system, you escape," the snitch said.

According to two former CCNTF officers with direct knowledge of the events,
Dearl Hardy was also accused of wrongdoing, shortly after he became
assistant commander in 1997. According to the officers, Hardy had rented
furniture using his undercover identification, because he could not get
credit using his real name. His ruse was discovered when Hardy's pager
number was reassigned to another officer, who began receiving pages from
several different merchants, looking for someone who owed them money.

The name they gave was Hardy's alias.

Depending on the amount of goods Hardy obtained, such fraud could be a felony.

Yet commander Don Palmer did not take action against Hardy. It was not
until the summer of 1999 that Hardy was asked to resign, following
Markham's lawsuit and several other embarrassing incidents.

Eighteen months later, he was back in the drug war, as chief deputy in
Chambers County.

"Nobody lasts long, and everybody seems to leave under a cloud," said one
former prosecutor under Mike Little. "I've actually had [D.A. investigator]
Harvey Simmons tell me himself: There's a thin line between a narc and a
thug. And nobody cares, as long as they're making their cases." Undercover
officers have to be kept on a short leash, said veteran officer Jack Kelly,
who was the commander of the task force before Mike Little took over. "If
you turn somebody loose and let 'em go with no hands on 'em-well, what
would happen if you do that running a regular job?" he said. "If you pick
your people right, if you do enough background on 'em," it's not hard to
keep a task force staffed up with honest officers, Kelly said.

Does The Ccntf Do Thorough Background Checks?

In the spring of 2000, they hired Tom Coleman, the narc involved in the
widely disparaged Tulia operation. As the Observer reported that summer,
Coleman had an extremely shady past as a law officer, as interviews with
his former employers or a review of his official state licensure records
would have shown.

Coleman did not last long in Chambers County. He was reportedly forced out
when he could not account for undercover funds he had checked out to make
buys, according to a former CCNTF officer.

The relentless drive for stats at the task force has led to some
unconventional accounting. Task forces, like all law enforcement agencies,
routinely pad their stats by filing as many extraneous cases as possible
against a suspect, fully knowing that many of them will never be
prosecuted. The CCNTF logs are sprinkled with such cases.

For example, suspects charged with possession or sale of marijuana also
have a case logged against them for failure to obtain a tax stamp, that is,
selling marijuana without giving the government its cut. Other, non-drug
related charges-like evading arrest and obstruction of justice-also make
their way into the log books.

The CCNTF's quarterly reports are also punctuated with enormous seizures of
powdered cocaine, marijuana, and currency.

But more often than not, these are not task force cases but cases made by
the DEA, which has branches in Beaumont and Galveston. For years the task
force lent an officer to the DEA. According to Markham, the officer would
be seldom seen, since little DEA work actually went on in Chambers or
Liberty Counties. But by virtue of having an officer assigned to the DEA,
the task force could claim it assisted in the high-level dealer busts made
by the agency.

Any sharing of information by the task force with the DEA also leads to an
assist being recorded in the logbook, if a subsequent arrest is made by
federal agents.

Though misleading, none of these bookkeeping maneuvers are fraudulent as
such. But CCNTF officials may have crossed the line with another type of
case padding.

For many months, the case logs and the corresponding quarterly reports seem
to show scores of cases that do not appear to be legitimate task force
cases at all.

From 1996 to 1998, a Polk County Sheriff's deputy named Mike Nettles was
assigned to the task force.

According to several former task force officers, Nettles used to bring a
stack of case reports to the task force office in Mont Belvieu every few
months to be entered into the task force case logs. These were ostensibly
task force cases made in Polk County by Nettles. As an assigned officer,
Nettles was not employed directly by the task force, but was under their
supervision; thus his cases counted as task force cases.

But according to Barbara Markham, the reports Nettles brought to the task
force consisted primarily of drug-related busts made by officers who had
nothing to do with the task force.

Nettles was simply collecting every report he could from Polk County,
including those made by DPS, local police departments, and the Polk County
sheriff's office, and bringing them to the task force to be claimed as its
own. Markham said she first realized what was going on when she was asked
to enter a stack of reports dropped off by Nettles into the task force case
logs. "It occurred to me that Nettles' name didn't appear anywhere on these
reports," she said. Reached at the Polk County Sheriff's Office, where he
is now chief deputy, Nettles declined to comment on the allegations.

Reviewing the logs, Markham was able to identify for the Observer the
Nettles cases she had entered, which were in her handwriting. Other large
blocks of Polk County cases delivered previously by Nettles were not
difficult to spot. Unlike the other cases in the logs, the Nettles cases
are out of chronological order, and they tended to be dropped in just
before the end of a quarter, when case statistics were reported to the TNCP
in Austin. If all the Nettles cases are indeed bogus, it would represent a
considerable inflation of the task force's yearly statistics for cases,
arrests, and seizures (see sidebar, "Padding the Books"). Millions of
dollars of federal money is doled out every year in a grant process
dependent largely on evaluations of these reports.

The report form itself clearly warns against making fraudulent entries.

Nettles is no longer with the CCNTF, but Liberty County currently has an
officer assigned to the task force.

And there is evidence that Little has secured a source of stats in Chambers
County. A new sheriff, Monroe Kreuzer, took office in January. In a move
that surprised many in Chambers County, he hired Dearl Hardy (who had found
work as a school police officer after leaving the task force) as his chief
deputy.

According to Jack Kelly, who served briefly as a deputy in the new
administration, Hardy is directing his deputies to send all drug cases to
the task force. "I made a bust about four one morning on a guy and he had
about a gram of cocaine on him," Kelly said. "And so I went through the
normal procedure like we'd always done. Put the guy in jail, came in and
field tested the dope, did a report on it." Kelly said he was preparing to
turn the dope in for DPS lab analysis, when Dearl Hardy walked in and told
him to stop. "He said, 'You don't do that.' And I said, 'Oh? Since when?'
And he said what you do is you call the task force, they come pick up the
dope, you write a supplement and [the case] is theirs," Kelly recalled. "I
said, 'Well how in the hell can you write a supplement when you're the one
that initiated the case?' [And Hardy said] 'Nope, that's what we do.'"
Kelly said he signed the evidence slip to Hardy, handed him the dope, and
left. A few days later, he resigned.

Why would Hardy be helping out Little, who only lately let him go? Several
observers in Chambers County have speculated that Hardy and Little cut a
deal: Little helped Hardy get the chief deputy spot, despite his past, and
Hardy agreed to supply Little with stats for the task force. "I know a lot
of other people made the comment that Little had fired [Hardy] before, and
now they're the best of buddies," Kelly said. Asked about Kelly's story,
Hardy denied directing stats to the task force and he said he never told
Kelly to write up the case as though it were not his own. "That would be
falsifying a report," he said.

"If you've ever taken physics, electricity will follow the path of least
resistance," said Walter Fontenot. "And it's the same thing in law
enforcement. Boy, if you can bust something easy, go after the easy ones.
Something hard? Well, that takes time, that takes energy, that takes
brainwork." Fontenot said he would just as soon see the task forces
abolished and the money given to the DPS narcotics division.

Progress is difficult to measure in the drug war. Washington demands
numbers because numbers don't lie. But the numbers in this part of Texas
are getting a good workout.

According to Markham, the FBI often chips in some confidential funds to a
task force investigation so it can count the stats for its own records. (A
snitch working on those cases might earn $100 per case, instead of $50.)
And DPS sometimes counts cases made by local authorities, if they feel its
officers have been of assistance in the investigation. The task force,
meanwhile, is counting everybody's stats.

The same case can be tabulated four or five times in the great scoreboard
of the war on drugs.

But is anybody even keeping track?

There is a federal audit requirement for task forces, but real oversight is
with the TNCP, which administers the grant. As the CCNTF's bookkeeping
demonstrates, the annual rankings can be deceiving. The TNCP does send
someone out to do a performance review of each task force once a year, but
the resulting report falls far short of an audit. Task forces also have to
complete an annual state audit accounting for the expenditure of seized funds.

Yet as Representative Juan Hinojosa's staff discovered in researching task
forces last year, only about 30 percent of the task forces even comply with
this requirement. Hinojosa has formally requested an interim legislative
study of the task forces, and the request is pending.

The director of the TNCP has also recently been demoted, following an
unflattering audit that revealed that federal funds had been used for
unauthorized purposes, including party favors for the annual drug task
force convention.

According to Jay Kimbrough, a major reorganization is underway at TNCP. All
task forces will now be required to adhere to DPS policies and procedures,
and DPS will have a supervisory role over the task forces.

Project directors will still be able to pick their own commanders, but
several new DPS narcotics captains will be hired in the coming months, and
their duties will include field supervision of the task forces, Kimbrough
said. Kimbrough, who took over the governor's criminal justice division
last summer, also said that under his direction the TNCP will not focus so
much on statistics. "I' ll be more interested in their following protocol
and procedures," he said.

Back in Chambers County, the FBI has begun conducting interviews for a
possible public corruption investigation, after being contacted by Barbara
Markham and others with knowledge of the task force.

After her firing, Markham found herself blackballed in the area and had to
return to the Metroplex to find work as a patrol officer.

After a lackluster performance last year, the CCNTF suffered a substantial
cut in it's annual grant for the first time ever. But with almost $800,000
in program income socked away, Little was still able to keep the outfit
running full bore. By all accounts, crack is still easily obtained in
Liberty and Chambers Counties, the location of the marketplaces no secret
to anyone.

The task force has taken to cruising through the areas in marked cars, just
so the dealers know they are there.

Indeed, if drug sales were to decline, it's unclear if that would be good
news or bad news to the task force.

The narratives that accompany each quarterly report sometimes strike a
strange tone, like a commodities broker trying to assuage a client.
"Highway seizures were off a bit this quarter," one report read, "but crack
sales are still strong."