Part 1

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

(Also see sidebar "Padding the Books" at the end of this story.)

One afternoon last summer, a former undercover narc named Barbara Markham
drove me through the piney backroads of Chambers and Liberty Counties, 3000
square miles of sparsely populated pasture and swampland between Houston
and Beaumont. We were on a tour of crack dealing hot spots in the region,
the areas Markham used to work when she was an officer for the Chambers
County Narcotics Task Force (CCNTF), a federally funded,
multi-jurisdictional outfit headed by the local district attorney.

Her job had been to buy drugs, usually crack, from street-level dealers.

As we drove, Markham pointed out now and again an empty shack where a
dealer had been holed up or a trailer, separated from the road by a muddy
ditch, where a task force snitch had until recently lived.

In Chambers County, Markham explained, the task force has focused on the
black side of Anahuac, known as "the Quarters," and a small, mostly black
rural community named Hankamer in the northern portion of the county.

In Hankamer, we drove down a sunken and pitted blacktop road past a series
of dilapidated frame houses and trailers.

They were set close to the road in small lots carved out of the woods, many
with piles of tires and rubbish or rusted-out cars in their yards.

Several people stood on their stoops or leaned across car hoods to talk,
stopping to stare as we passed. This neighborhood, known by the task force
as one of the county's "open-air drug markets," is a favorite target,
Markham said, for so-called "street sweeps," in which a large contingent of
cops will suddenly descend upon a popular hang-out, often someone's front
yard, and detain everybody, checking IDs, patting people down for drugs or
weapons, looking for outstanding warrants.

In Liberty County, undercover officers cruise through the rural towns of
Ames and Raywood, looking for street dealers.

Larger towns like Cleveland, Dayton, and Liberty each have their streets
known for crack dealing.

In Dayton, we swung through the small public housing project, site of many
previous undercover operations. Not far from there we stopped to talk to
three young black men drinking beer in front of a small frame house.

Between them, they'd had numerous run-ins with the task force.

One had just gotten out after serving five years in prison for selling a
few rocks of crack to a CCNTF undercover officer.

None reported being asked to name his supplier. "They might get you with
maybe $200 or $300 in your pocket, but you ain't no big time dealer," one
said. "You're just getting by, spending it on clothes and booze.

And then here comes Mr. Goddamn Jump-Out Man."

By all accounts, the task force has done a good job of rounding up
street-level dealers.

The problem, according to Markham, who left the task force in a cloud of
controversy in the spring of 1997, is that Mr. Jump-Out Man has done little
else, a fact that has made the task force's presence in the area
controversial. "It's just too easy-they never go up the chain," said
Liberty defense attorney Walter Fontenot, who frequently represents poor
black defendants with drug charges. "I have never understood the reason for
their existence.

It just seems to be a governmental bureaucracy that's in existence for
appearance only," he said. "Crack buys is basically it. But I mean heck,
you and I can do the same thing.

Crack buys? Man, I can take you to about five crack places here in Liberty
County and you and I can make the crack buys," he said. Fontenot, who is
black, said the drug war in Liberty County is caught in a vicious cycle.
"If you dig into this stuff, you will find that most people are black, most
people are poor, and they just cop out and get probation, and a couple of
years later the probation is revoked, because they go back to the same
thing because that's all they know," he said. It's much the same in
Chambers County, according to Anahuac defense attorney Ed Lieck. "It's all
about numbers," said Lieck. "More number means more money.

I've been doing this for ten years, and law enforcement is about money," he
said. "Anybody who tells you different is lying to you."

The money in question comes from Washington. Task forces like the CCNTF are
funded through federal grants that pass through the Texas Narcotics Control
Program, a department of the governor's criminal justice division.

Across the country, the task force model of drug enforcement has come under
increasing fire in recent years from judges, prosecutors, and civil
liberties advocates.

The amount of federal drug war money flowing to the states has not
slackened, however, even as the public's faith in the effort has steadily
dwindled.

Well into their second decade, federally funded drug task forces have
become a whole new tier of law enforcement, one with very little
accountability to any governing body. In Texas, there are currently some
four dozen task forces in operation, mostly in rural areas, each one a
little fiefdom with its own territorial and financial prerogatives to
defend. As the objective of victory grows more remote, other, less
ambitious objectives prevail.

For those who have become addicted to the annual grants, keeping the
program alive has become an end in itself.

Few have thrived in this system better than the Chambers County Narcotics
Task Force. Currently headed by area District Attorney Mike Little, the
CCNTF is one of the oldest continuously funded task forces in Texas.
According to interviews with former CCNTF agents, prosecutors, snitches,
defense attorneys, and local law enforcement officers, it has also
developed a well-earned reputation for greed, sloth, inefficiency and
corruption. Yet it consistently scores near the top in the all-important
annual ranking of the task forces and has been blessed each year with a
bigger and bigger grant. What is the secret to its success?

A close examination of the CCNTF reveals as much about the system itself,
that is, the task force model of law enforcement, as it does about Mike
Little's outfit.

Records obtained under the Texas Open Records Act-including internal case
logs which list the name, race, and infraction for each and every case made
by the task force-show conclusively what drug war critics have argued for
years: that task forces like the CCNTF amass impressive stats by focusing
the majority of their efforts on street-level dealers, which are the
easiest cases to make, all but ignoring dealers higher up on the supply chain.

The Texas Narcotics Control Program does not require the task forces to
report the racial breakdown of their cases, but the internal case logs tell
an unmistakable tale of disproportionate impact: Row after row and page
after page of black defendants, most of them street-level crack dealers.
And a careful examination of the case logs has revealed something else:
regular and apparently fraudulent padding of the statistics reported by the
task force to the TNCP every quarter, presumably in an effort to improve
the task force's annual ranking and its fortunes in the competition for
federal funding.

A three-month investigation has revealed much more: How the drive for stats
compels the task force to bend rules in almost every aspect of its
operations, from undercover work, to suspect identifications, to the
seizure of currency and cars on the highway, which is the source of a large
portion of the task force's annual budget.

"I think that's the key to this whole problem: It's numbers by any means,
and nobody is doing an assessment of the methods used," said Will Harrell,
executive director of the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union. Statistics from small-time crack busts, income from highway stops:
It 's a winning formula, one that Harrell and others say is all too common
across the state.

But who really wins?

Prior to the late 1980s, most serious Texas narcotics work outside of the
big cities was handled by the Department of Public Safety, which has its
own sizeable narcotics division.

But Washington was looking for innovation. If the feds were losing the war
on drugs in rural America, the answer, it was felt, was to get local
authorities involved.

In Texas, grant money began flowing from the U.S. Department of Justice
straight to the Governor's office, bypassing the DPS altogether. With
millions in federal funds to disburse, the governor's new Texas Narcotics
Control Program encouraged local police departments, sheriff's offices, and
district attorneys to combine their efforts in regional task forces.

Applicants had to promise to provide a 25-percent match for whatever funds
they received from the grant program. Initially, the grants were envisioned
as seed money; the funds would help set up the task forces, which would
gradually become self-sustaining. Fourteen years later, Washington's
attention has long since turned to crop eradication in places like Colombia
and Afghanistan and to interdiction along the nation's borders.

Yet the task force money has not stopped flowing, and back in rural Texas,
out of the limelight, the drug war is still going strong.

There are now over 700 officers working for task forces in Texas, compared
to only 260 narcotics officers at DPS. This fiscal year the TNCP will
distribute more than $31 million in federal funds; more than $350 million
has flowed to Texas task forces since 1987.

In fact, the task forces have become self-sustaining, after a fashion.

Many outfits were initially dependent on money from city and county
governments for their matching funds.

This meant the task forces were accountable in some degree to those elected
officials.

Now, however, most make their matching funds through what is called
"program income," that is, currency and assets, primarily cars, seized
during task force operations. Under Texas forfeiture law, law enforcement
agencies may keep seized money and proceeds from the auctioning of assets
associated with a crime.

Although county governments still technically have budgetary oversight of
the task forces, they have no real say in how task forces spend their
money, and they do not generally share in the proceeds of task force
forfeitures. Increasingly, task force program directors, flush with grant
money and program income, hire their own officers, rather than borrow them
from area agencies.

Money is hard to come by in Chambers County. A good portion of the surface
area is swamp and Gulf coast marshlands; the area is known as a
birdwatcher' s paradise more than anything else. Just across Galveston Bay
is Pasadena, home of one of the largest refinery complexes in the world,
but not much of that industry spills over into sparsely populated Chambers
County, which has been gradually losing people as the oil industry has
declined.

When Mike Little took over the task force in June of 1992, it was a small
outfit headquartered in the sleepy county seat of Anahuac, population
2,252. Operations were limited chiefly to highway interdiction along the
30-mile stretch of I-10 that runs through the northern portion of the
county. Little, who serves as District Attorney for both Chambers and
neighboring Liberty County, apparently recognized the drug war for what it
was: a growth industry in an area badly in need of growth.

He immediately set about expanding the task force's size and range.

In his first year, he brought Liberty County into the fold, establishing
working agreements with local governments in Liberty (the county seat),
Dayton, Cleveland, and even Baytown, a Harris County suburb of Houston. The
office was moved to Mont Belvieu, about halfway between Anahuac and
Liberty. Later, Little would bring on board Polk County, which borders
Liberty County to the north, effectively tripling the force's original
jurisdiction. (Polk County eventually left the task force.) Little hired a
new commander and new investigators, and immediately began making
undercover cases with a vengeance. In the first year under Little, who did
not respond to requests for an interview for this story, the task force
made 621 cases, more than it did in the previous five years combined.

Little's emphasis on stats has paid off. As the task force's numbers have
improved, its annual budget has grown, from about $450,000 in 1995 to about
$710,000 last year. Little has used the money to hire more officers.

He now has eleven, virtually all of them commissioned as D.A.'s
investigators working directly for Little. He has also hired a special
prosecutor and legal secretary in the D.A.'s office to work on task force
cases.

All told, Little has assembled a force that, in terms of manpower and
budget, rivals that of either sheriff's office in his jurisdiction. In a
region where county governments are starved for cash, Little's officers
drive nice new cars and SUVs, purchased in part with seized currency and
trade-ins of seized vehicles. "That task force is his baby. He's never
going to give that thing up," said one area defense attorney.

Yet even as Little has expanded his operation, some in the community have
questioned the task force's effectiveness. "Anytime it's anything of any
quality or quantity it's DPS, and I've got the utmost respect for DPS,"
said Walter Fontenot. "They are professionals. But these other, peripheral
agencies-I just don't know what they do."

Former task force agent Barbara Markham witnessed what they do firsthand.
She has become the task force's most outspoken critic, testifying at the
state Legislature on behalf of drug war reform bills and taking her story
to whomever will listen, including the FBI. Markham came to the task force
in August of 1995 with 10 years of undercover narcotics experience with
local police departments and task forces in North Texas. A short woman with
hawkish features, a fragile frame, and a serious smoking habit, Markham,
now 41, did her first undercover work in a North Texas high school, posing
as a student at the age of 26. She came to the CCNTF well recommended, with
a reputation for being able to buy dope from anyone, and several awards to
her credit. "Barbara is an excellent narcotics officer," said Don Jones, a
23-year veteran of DPS narcotics, who supervised Markham when she worked
undercover at a Denton-area task force in the early 1990s. "If Barbara says
something is true, I would believe it." Nineteen months after going to work
for Mike Little, Markham was fired, ostensibly for incompetence. The real
reason for her firing, Markham says, was her unwillingness to play ball the
way it was played at the task force. "People don't understand-everybody's
talking about Tom Coleman," Markham said, referring to the officer who
conducted a now-notorious undercover operation (chronicled in the Observer)
in the Panhandle town of Tulia, which led to a civil suit and an ongoing
FBI investigation. "Well, there are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out
there," she said.

During her tenure at the CCNTF, Markham was one of three undercover agents.
In the entire time she worked there, she says, her two fellow undercover
agents, Lynell "Tyree" Beals and John Davis, did virtually nothing but
street-level crack buys, one and two rocks at a time. Street-level buys are
the simplest of any undercover operation.

An undercover officer, sometimes accompanied by a snitch (or "confidential
informant") drives to a house, or more often than not, a street corner,
buys a few rocks, and drives off. When the officer has made enough buys in
a given area over a six-or twelve-month period, warrants are obtained for
all suspects and a roundup or "bust-out" is made, usually with the
assistance of every available cop in the area. This is how one former CCNTF
officer described a typical bust-out: "It's probably better known as a
free-for-all. You get a bunch of warrants, search and arrest, get 'em all
ready to go, get 30 or 40 officers from different jurisdictions, anybody
who wants to come along can play. During the course of this, the wrong
doors get kicked-you could wind up in Billy Graham's house. A whole lot of
illegal searches and seizures go on."

More than anything, a focus on street-level buys means targeting black
suspects. The result of that focus is spelled out in the case logs, the
actual handwritten logs in which task force officers record every case they
make, each highway stop and undercover buy. The logs list the defendant's
name, sex and race, as well as the date the buy or stop was made, the
charge, and the amount of dope or money seized, if any. The logs also note
whether an arrest was made or not. Together with the task force's quarterly
reports, which summarize the information in the logs for TNCP review, the
logs provide a statistical snapshot of the daily drug war in action.

In the case of the CCNTF, it is not a flattering picture.

Cases in the logbook fall into two general categories: possession and
delivery (sale). As a general rule, possession charges come from highway
stops by interdiction officers, and delivery cases come from buys made by
undercover officers.

Considering just the delivery cases listed on the quarterly reports, the
emphasis of the task force's undercover operations becomes starkly clear.

From December 1993 to November 2000, task force agents recorded 1,483
buys. Of those buys, 1,088, or 73 percent, were of crack cocaine.

The focus on crack accounts for the striking racial bias of the task
force's overall operation.

Virtually every one of those 1,088 buys involved a black suspect.

Polk and Liberty Counties are only about 13 percent black, Chambers County
about 10 percent.

Yet an analysis of all of the cases filed by the task force from 1995 to
1999, including undercover, interdiction, and miscellaneous cases, reveals
that approximately 57 percent involved black suspects. (In a few cases, the
race of the suspect was not recorded in the logs.) "Is it just black folks
that are selling dope... or are they just the easiest to get?" asked Walter
Fontenot. "Those numbers are consistent with what we have discovered across
the state," said Will Harrell, director of the Texas ACLU. "There is a
clear and demonstrable pattern. They are making choices about who they go
after, and I think it's because these are more vulnerable people," he said.

What really opened Markham's eyes, however, was not the racial bias of the
task force's operations, but the methods officers used to make their cases.
Audio and video surveillance were never used in street-level buys, Markham
said. "Mike [Little] said he didn't want juries to become dependent on
having audio to convict," she recalled.

Markham said Beals and Davis were repeatedly reprimanded for their sloppy
police reports, for which they often failed to complete such basic tasks as
getting witness statements from confidential informants. Sloppiness was the
rule at the task force, according to Markham. Early on, she was asked to
inventory the evidence vault. Drugs were mislabeled or missing altogether.
Procedures were unclear and turnover was high. "Everybody there seemed to
be either new to the business or had just been let go from somewhere else
for some reason," she said.

But it wasn't until the winter of 1996 that Markham discovered how out of
control things had really gotten at the task force.

Markham was serving light duty that winter due to an injury sustained in a
car wreck.

That's how she came to be responsible for filing paperwork in the office's
master file, where a copy of every case made by every officer is kept. Over
the course of the previous summer and fall, Tyree Beals had worked
undercover in Polk County, doing street-level crack buys with the aid of a
confidential informant named James McCloud. When Markham tried to file some
lab reports on crack cocaine bought by Beals during his Polk County
operation, she was unable to find any of his cases in the master file.
Checking with Beals, she discovered that he hadn't written up a single case
report for any of the dozens of buys he had made, though some of them were
now up to six months old. "I found out how just how lazy he really was,"
she said. (Beals' supervisor, Commander Don Palmer, declined to comment on
Markham's allegations, citing a settlement agreement signed by the task
force pursuant to a lawsuit filed by Markham upon her firing.

According to Palmer, the agreement prevents task force employees, including
Beals, from discussing allegations made by Markham.)

Beals' lassitude was a serious matter.

He had kept notes on his buys, but they were minimal-literally scraps of
paper which listed names, dates, amounts and locations. "He had to sit
there at his desk and recreate all of those case reports from memory," she
said. But most crucially, Beals had never done identifications of his
suspects, according to Markham. He had written names in the case logs, but
he had never confirmed them, she said. The ID is one of the trickiest parts
of a street-level deal. An undercover officer typically works in a
community in which he is not known, and in which he is not necessarily
familiar with the locals.

An officer may get a name from a defendant or from a confidential
informant, but it is frequently incomplete, or a nickname, or simply wrong.

An accepted method of identifying suspects after a buy is made is to
promptly contact the local police department or sheriff's office, who can
often provide a photo lineup of suspects for the officer to look at. Many
departments maintain big notebooks of photos of anyone they have ever
booked, divided by sex and race, with names on the back.

Markham says she typically tried to do photo IDs for her own cases within a
few days or (under extenuating circumstances ) a couple of weeks at most,
before her memory of the suspect's face began to fade. Beals had waited
months. "Guess what? I'm sorry, but there's no way you can remember a guy
you bought from five months and fifty cases ago," Markham said. In fact,
there does seem to be some confusion about just who the suspects were in
these cases.

According to arrest warrants obtained by the Observer, a Polk County
bust-out in late November of 1997 resulted in 10 arrests in cases made by
Beals in the summer and fall of 1996. Six of the warrants contained names
that differed from those Beals had written in the case logs. The case
numbers, dates, and charges matched, but the names did not. Some were
close: A case logged as "Derrick Johnson" resulted in the arrest of one
Derrick Ramon Petty. A "Kenneth Harrell" became Darrell Wayne Harrell. But
others were not at all similar: A warrant for Terry Lynn Jackson bore the
case number for the suspect Beals had logged as "Tommy Phillips." Jimmy
Dewayne Davis was arrested for a case logged as Charles Knight. Michael
Deon Burch's case was logged as Eric Davis.

Could they all have been honest mistakes, or aliases?

Asked about the discrepancies, Markham was skeptical.

More likely, she said, is that the names Beals provided could not be
located in the stacks of photos maintained by Polk County authorities, and
Beals either guessed or was coached into making the IDs for the warrants.
"They'll say, 'We don't have a Kenneth Harrell... are you sure it wasn't
Darrell Wayne Harrell?'" she said. Six months after the fact, who's to say
if it was or wasn't? There are a lot of Harrells in the area, Markham said.
"Once you get your name on the list, you 're screwed."

The last straw came shortly thereafter for Markham. Beals swore by his
snitch, James McCloud. "He called him his super snitch, because he brought
the dopers right to you," Markham recalls.

As she returned to duty, Beals suggested she make some cases in Liberty
County using McCloud. Agents often share snitches among one another and
with other agencies.

The best snitches are paid informants; they make a living of sorts doing
nothing but helping narcs set up deals.

The standard fee paid by the CCNTF was $50 per case, according to Markham.
The task force set up an apartment for McCloud in a public housing complex
in Dayton, just outside of Liberty, and he and Markham went into business.

Right from the start, Markham had misgivings about McCloud. In no time,
McCloud had arranged for a dealer to come to the apartment with some
marijuana. But when the dealer arrived, McCloud took him into the kitchen,
out of Markham's sight.

The dealer soon left, without Markham having observed any deal taking place.

McCloud returned from the kitchen with a baggie of pot. He immediately set
about writing up a CI witness statement, in which he claimed to have
witnessed Markham receiving the pot directly from the dealer. "I told him
that just wouldn't work," Markham said. His witness statement was false,
and the case was only marginally prosecutable, because she had not
witnessed the actual transfer of pot and cash. Then McCloud said something
very disturbing. "He said, 'That's how we did all of our cases up in Polk
County,'" she said. (McCloud could not be reached for this story.)

In a second incident, McCloud brought Jackie Semien, a young woman from the
complex, to the apartment.

After Markham briefly left the apartment and returned, she noticed that a
blunt (a marijuana-filled cigar) had been placed on the coffee table.

She tried to offer Semien five dollars, but she wouldn't take it. Instead
McCloud took the bill. Shortly thereafter, Semien left, and once again,
McCloud offered to write up a witness statement alleging a direct transfer
from the suspect to Markham. Markham is now convinced that Semien was
brought to the apartment under false pretenses by McCloud and set up, and
that the dope was McCloud's all along. (Semien declined to be interviewed
for this story.

However, when Markham first brought this story to KHOU television in
Houston, Semien confirmed Markham's version of events in an interview that
aired last year.)

After one more questionable deal, Markham complained to her superiors,
assistant commander Dearl Hardy and commander Don Palmer. "They told me,
'That's the nature of the beast,'" Markham said. (Citing the settlement
agreement, Hardy declined to comment on Markham's allegations.) If she had
not seen the deals, they reassured her, then the confidential informant
would testify in court.

No Problem.

Markham made it clear she wouldn't work that way, and shortly thereafter,
she was fired.

Markham later sued the task force over the firing.

In a deposition obtained by the Observer, Hardy defended the task force's
use of McCloud, alleging that the force had made 120-150 cases with him.

Other task force operations have been severely flawed.

Continued at: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1841/a02.html