Charles Brown
Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:16:14 -0700
The Jump-out Boys J. Robert Lennon London Review of Books, vol 28, no 15, 3 August 2006 Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town by Nate Blakeslee · Public Affairs, 450 pp, £15.99
On a summer morning in July 1999, a massive drug bust took place in the
Texas panhandle town of Tulia. In a few hours, beginning before dawn,
the towns police force, the county sheriff and his deputies, a group of
state troopers, and the agents of a special drug task-force had rounded
up dozens of men and women, all of whom were accused of selling cocaine
crack and powder to an undercover operative, a narc, called Tom
Coleman. When the operation had finished, 47 Tulians, almost all of them
black, found themselves in jail.
At the outset, the bust seemed almost flawless. Coleman, the son of a
Texas Ranger and a one-time officer of the year, had posed as a
construction worker down on his luck, infiltrated the underworld of
Tulia, and caught dozens of dealers in the act. Among the arrested were
some familiar faces that certain Tulians were happy to see behind bars.
One was a former juke-joint owner and bootlegger called Joe Moore. These
days, Moore made his living raising pigs and cows, but local police
still remembered his more disreputable days. Hed been busted for
cocaine possession a couple of times in the past, and had gone to prison
briefly each time. But Moore now commanded great respect in the black
community, and many were shocked by his arrest. A giant man, heavy,
broad and tall, he appeared imperturbable and unimpeachable and yet he
was Colemans prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulias drug trade.
Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star
athlete, he had graduated from high school against the odds. But he was
soon getting into fights and taking drugs. A failed marriage and a
series of dead-end jobs didnt help. He was known to be on crack, and to
have sold small amounts of the drug.
But if Moore and Smiths arrests seemed at least plausible, there were
plenty of other suspects whose supposed relationship to the drug trade
strained credibility. One woman no longer even lived in Tulia: she
worked as a nurse in a town many miles away, where she was when the
supposed drug deals took place. Most puzzling, however, was the arrest
of Freddie Brookins Jr. The son of a hard-working pillar of the black
community, Freddie was quiet, plain-spoken and studious, and had
excelled in athletics, basketball and football. He was ambitious, and
rejected, Nate Blakeslee writes, the gangster culture so many of his
peers seemed to admire. And though he had suffered some setbacks after
high school his girlfriend had a baby, he never got the scholarship he
strove for he continued his education in trade school and stayed
employed. He wasnt known to use drugs, let alone sell them. On the
morning of the bust, he was dragged naked from his house, handcuffed,
and read his rights on the front porch. Tom Coleman, who took part in
the sting, had been wearing a ski mask. He took it off and jeered:
Recognise me now? Freddie Brookins had never seen the man before in
his life.
In a town of only 5000 inhabitants, a town of 20 churches that prided
itself on its conservative values, a bust like this represented a major
clean-up, a removal from the streets of people whom the local paper, in
its coverage of the bust and subsequent trials, referred to as
scumbags. It was a cause for celebration. But many of the defendants
had no former convictions, and had never even been arrested. Nobody
confessed, and many, like Freddie Brookins, claimed never to have met
Tom Coleman. Not a single gramme of cocaine was found in any of the
suspects homes, even though the raids happened before dawn, waking most
of them.
Later that morning, when the county jail was filled with the people he
had busted, Coleman strolled past the cells. You niggers quit sellin
them drugs! he called to the prisoners. Almost four years later, as the
cases crumbled, he faced the suspects again, from the witness stand.
There, he repeatedly perjured himself, lying about his methods, about
his past, about his accusations. It became clear that none of the
accused had sold him cocaine. The suspects were freed and later
pardoned, and Coleman and the town of Tulia were humiliated in the
national media.
Blakeslee, a reporter for the Texas Observer, a left-leaning
fortnightly, broke the Tulia story in 2000, in an 8000-word article that
earned the notice of both the national media and a phalanx of lawyers,
whose pro bono work eventually overturned the convictions of the
supposed dealers. In Tulia, his first book, Blakeslee displays a firm
command of an extraordinarily complex narrative; he draws together the
histories of the town and its inhabitants, including those of Moore,
Smith and Brookins, and shows that this egregious injustice was not a
freak occurrence, but rather the product of years of disappointment,
resentment, political manoeuvering and wishful thinking. It is a
cautionary tale, not just for this small Texas town, but for every town;
indeed, for all of America.
One thing that turned out to be true about Tom Coleman is that his
father was a Texas Ranger. The Rangers are an elite division of the
Texas state police, known for their bravery and investigative acumen;
there are only a hundred or so active at any given time. But Joe
Coleman, Blakeslee says, was cruel and abusive, and his son was a high
school dropout with a persecution complex. On the strength of his
fathers reputation Coleman got a job as a prison guard, but barely
avoided being fired for laziness. Still, he managed to get himself made
a deputy sheriff and was assigned the small town of Iraan. There, he
would pull people over for no reason and wander out of his jurisdiction,
then brazenly lie about it. After his father died in 1991, he became a
gun nut, collecting a large and illegal arsenal of antique weapons, and
over-arming himself for routine police matters, often carrying three
guns at a time. He abruptly left two police jobs in order to avoid being
fired, and went through two marriages and contentious divorces, leaving
his ex-wives in terror of meeting him again. He owed thousands of
dollars to dozens of people in several counties. He was said to have
carried a KKK card and was widely known as a vocal racist. At his last
job before being assigned to the drug task-force that conducted the
Tulia busts, Coleman was caught stealing gasoline: he was actually
arrested for this while working undercover in Tulia. At every turn, with
the help of his fathers friends in the Rangers, he managed to avoid
conviction, and his record was consistently swept under the carpet.
Coleman worked undercover without any immediate supervision, and the
convictions handed down by the court in Tulia were based entirely on his
word, and not backed up with a single photograph, video or sound
recording. The only physical evidence was the cocaine Coleman himself
presented to other law enforcement officers. So why did so many people
end up in jail?
The answer is complicated. Part of it, Blakeslee argues, is certainly to
do with race. Few Tulians had any doubts about the defendants guilt.
The head of the Chamber of Commerce, Lana Barnett, was blunt: We know
these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell. If
anything, Blakeslee writes, Barnett felt the system was stacked in the
defendants favour. She resented her tax dollars being spent on
providing attorneys for indigent defendants, for example. If you cant
afford insurance, then you dont go to the doctor, she pointed out. If
you cant afford to hire a lawyer, then you go without, she said. The
chair of the county Democratic Party, Delbert Devlin, agreed: Theyve
grown up doing nothing but cheating and stealing and thats all they
know. He also said that he did not know of any instance of a white
person cheating a black person in Tulia.
Yet the races had always coexisted more or less peacefully in Tulia,
despite the towns near unanimous disdain for civil rights law in the
1950s and 1960s. Blacks Donnie Smith and Freddie Brookins among them
had propelled the high school football team to many victories, and the
parks, stores and other local institutions had been smoothly integrated.
But Tulians believed first and foremost in looking after their own,
and white Tulia resented what they saw as a disproportionate amount of
welfare money being given to blacks. However, as Blakeslee points out:
The total tax dollars invested in poverty programmes in Swisher
County, controversial though it may be, is dwarfed by the subsidies
the county receives through various federal farm programmes. In
1999, farm subsidies totalled $28.7 million for Swisher County . . .
which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of
race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or
indirectly.
Even with Coleman exposed and the defendants freed from prison, many
still seem to believe that Coleman had been guilty of nothing more than
faulty record keeping. The idea that blacks were shiftless,
drug-dealing criminals, and that whites were merely trying to maintain
order and look after their own, has been difficult to overcome, even
after hard evidence was put before Tulia in an embarrassingly public
way.
It wasnt just race, though, that allowed Coleman free rein: it was also
a culture of law enforcement that had become deeply flawed, in thrall
(once again) to government dollars; and a justice system packed with
partisans and hypocrites. One source of the trouble was the drug
task-force to which Coleman had been appointed, an organisation
operating under the auspices of the Edward Byrne Memorial State and
Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant.
Byrne was a New York City police officer murdered in 1988 by drug
dealers; George H.W. Bush used the case in his election campaign, during
which he accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime. In November of
the same year, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the opening
salvo in the War on Drugs, which has done little to curb drug abuse
and much to increase a national prison population that was already
disturbingly high. The Byrne Grant was established under the act, and
offered states funding for, among other things, multi-jurisdictional
task-force programmes.
These programmes were to be co-ordinated by local officials, not DEA
agents. The intention was to get more narcs on the streets. But with no
federal oversight, the Byrne money has been misused: in many parts of
rural America, it has become a form of pork. Byrne-funded drug
task-forces in Texas (known in the panhandle as the jump-out boys)
arent subject to the same rigorous training and testing requirements as
most other Texan law enforcement agencies, and they work unsupervised
and unmanaged. In some sparsely populated areas, Byrne money represents
a major source of income to law enforcement officials, and task-forces
are staffed, if need be, with inexperienced, unscrupulous officers, in
order to keep the money flowing. Officials in Swisher County did
everything they could to ignore Tom Colemans shortcomings. His
references went unchecked, his records were left unopened, his arrest
was kept quiet, and the proper reports of it were never filed.
During the Tulia drug trials, some of the defence lawyers tried to
discredit Colemans evidence by drawing attention to his past
unreliability. But the judge, Ed Self, a George W. Bush appointee, would
hear none of it. The revelations of Colemans unfitness for the job, his
debts, his violent temper, his racism, werent permitted as evidence.
One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith was sentenced to 12 years
in prison; Freddie Brookins got 20. Other sentences ranged from a few
years to Joe Moores stunning 90 years in jail all for uncorroborated
drug sales that never took place. Before long, nearly every defendant
had been sent to prison, and Coleman had escaped with his reputation as
an über-narc intact.
Almost immediately, a man called Gary Gardner began to wonder about the
case. He was a retired bankrupt, in fact farmer, cropduster and
descendant of pioneers and railroaders; bowlegged, corpulent,
straw-hatted and outspoken, he had acquired a reputation in the Tulia
area as an eccentric and enthusiastic troublemaker after suing the Tulia
school district over its new drug-testing policy, with which his son,
Hollister, had refused to comply. At the time of the Tulia busts, the
drug-testing case was still making its way through the courts, and
Gardner, newly self-schooled in the complexity of drug policy, smelled a
rat.
Gardner wasnt an enemy of law and order and, exhausted from his battle
with the school board, wondered if this was a battle worth fighting, and
if so, whether he was the one to fight it. But he had read the
self-satisfied words of Tom Coleman and the sheriff, and he had seen the
humiliating photographs of the suspects in the paper, and the demeaning
headlines calling them garbage. He wrote to all the defendants in
prison, encouraging an independent investigation into Colemans
character. The officer, he wrote, reminded me of a cow buyer I knew
several years ago whose cheques were never any good and always talked
too much about his personal accomplishments . . . I think perhaps
someone outside of the local law enforcement system should investigate
this mans background.
The defendants hired lawyers, who publicised their cases. Slowly, over a
period of years, appeal cases were built. Thanks to an avalanche of
media coverage, the defendants cases caught the attention of an
increasing number of supporters, starting with a local trial lawyer,
Jeff Blackburn; a comedian-turned-activist, Randy Credico; and an NAACP
Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney, Vanita Gupta. Their
dedication lured a number of high-powered city lawyers to join them,
working pro bono, and before long this team had torn Colemans
credibility to shreds. Judge Self had himself removed from the cases,
and his replacement, a Dallas judge called Ron Chapman, proved far less
willing to reject evidence that weakened the prosecutions case.
Spectators in the courtroom looked on in astonishment and, at times,
glee, as Coleman perjured himself over and over, tying himself in knots
to remember which lies he told when. The prisoners were freed, pardoned
and awarded $6 million compensation.
Blakeslee is a reporter, not a social critic, and he sticks to the
facts. But he makes it clear, in various small ways, that the trouble
with Texas is the trouble with America. Faith, he tells us, is king. No
church captured the spirit of Tulia, he writes, like the Church of
Christ . . . the intolerance of the Church of Christ is legendary.
Anti-gay, anti-welfare, anti-urban, this Christian sect is setting the
agenda for America, as it set the agenda in Tulia.
But it isnt just the politics its the faith itself. Faith is the
engine of injustice in Tulia, as it is in America as a whole: not the
religious kind of faith, but the kind that convinces people that the
world is conforming to their idea of it, however much evidence there may
be to the contrary. Blakeslee describes the hapless prosecutor Terry
McEachern (who later in the trial was caught driving drunk down the
highway with a woman not his wife) instructing a jury on how to
determine innocence or guilt:
As was his habit, he emphasised the portion of the law that says
that a reasonable doubt is one that is based on reason and common
sense, underlining those two terms for the jurors with his felt
pen. Common sense, a notion that appealed to rural jurors, was
really what being on a jury boiled down to, in McEacherns view. He
was a master, Paul Holloway [a defence attorney] said later, at
changing beyond a reasonable doubt, to something more akin to a
gut instinct.
Gut instinct, in this case, was the widespread and long-held conviction
that black people were criminals. Remember Lana Barnett: We know these
people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.
Blakeslee mentions other cases, tangential to the drug busts, that
reveal Tulians willingness to convict and condemn their fellow
citizens, not according to the facts, but to their prejudices. Most
remarkable is the case of David Johnson, a 36-year-old black man, who
was arrested for the murder of his white ex-girlfriends son. The
medical examiner had ruled that the child died of pneumonia, but four
years later, after the couple fell out, Johnsons girlfriend had a dream
in which Johnson murdered the boy. This, coupled with doubts about the
post mortem (the examiner had resigned amid accusations of falsifying a
different autopsy), sent Johnson to prison for ten years, in spite of a
complete absence of physical evidence, and medical records confirming
that the child had gone to the doctor seven times over four months and
had been taking antibiotics for ten days before he died.
Blakeslee mentions as an aside, in the middle of his account of the
appeal, that President Bush began his invasion of Iraq that evening.
Bush is from Midland, just down the road from Tulia. When, after
Hurricane Katrina, the rapper and record producer Kanye West accused
Bush of not caring about black people, the president appeared genuinely
shocked. I was reminded of his denial when I read, in Blakeslees book,
the words of a Tulia store clerk: I believe were equal as far as we
work together, but I dont believe in the interbreedin.
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