The Usual Suspects

By Dave Mann, Texas Observer. Posted November 3, 2004.

It began, as many drug stings do, with a lucky break. In November 2002, a traffic cop pulled over a driver ferrying crack cocaine on U.S. Highway 79 into the small east Texas town of Palestine. Police believed they had caught a glimpse into a drug ring that was smuggling crack from Houston and Dallas into rural Anderson County, 40 miles southwest of Tyler. The Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force, a regional alliance of local, state and federal law enforcement, promptly launched an investigation.

When the arrests came two years later, residents of Palestine must have been surprised to learn that their small town apparently had more crack dealers than restaurants. On Oct. 13, teams from the Anderson County sheriff's office, Texas Department of Public Safety, U.S. Marshall's Service, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) started at 7 a.m. and swept through tiny Palestine (population 17,000) to round up an astonishing 40 indicted drug dealers.

More arrests followed in the coming days. In all, a total of 72 Anderson County residents were detained on various state and federal drug dealing charges. After the arrests, the U.S. Department of Justice put out a celebratory press release that boasted of cracking a large Anderson County drug distribution ring.

"This coordinated effort shows the success that can be achieved when resources and people are pooled together," U.S. Attorney Matthew Orwig said in the statement. Curtis Bitz, head of the Dogwood Trails task force, told the Lufkin Daily News, "There's no question as to whether they did it or not."

An examination of the charges, however, raises questions about the drug bust, especially about the sheer number of people charged as dealers. Could there really be 72 crack dealers in little Palestine? And is it only a coincidence that all 72 of them are black?

There seemingly were at least a few dealers in town. Four of the defendants who were indicted in federal court were allegedly caught with hundreds of grams of both powdered and crack cocaine, and with stashes of guns and cash. If they were the real dealers, what was everyone else doing? Many of the defendants, a third of them with no prior records, are charged with delivering crack to a single confidential informant. None of the deliveries exceeded four grams. In some instances, it was less than a gram, about the size of a Sweet-N-Low packet.

Many of the suspects appear to be poor crack addicts swept up in the drug sting. Charged as dealers, they now face sentences of 20 years to life in state prison.

Yet again, a regional drug task force targeted an African-American population in a small Texas town, charging apparent crack addicts as dealers. All of this brings to mind the now-infamous Texas Panhandle town that has become synonymous with all that's wrong with the war on drugs – Tulia.

In the 1999 Tulia drug bust, a single undercover cop took down 10 percent of the tiny town's black population on trumped-up charges of cocaine dealing. The Tulia scandal, and similarly botched drug task force stings around the state in recent years, revealed two sad truths about the drug war in Texas: It disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, and it too often entraps low-level addicts and street-level dealers into serious drug-dealing charges. (Blacks comprise 12 percent of Texas' population, and studies show that whites and blacks are equally likely to use drugs. Yet 70 percent of drug offenders in Texas state prisons are black, according to the ACLU of Texas.)

After the abuses of Tulia and other scandals, the ACLU successfully pushed a bill through the Legislature that now requires confidential informants to provide at least one form of outside corroboration for their evidence in drug stings.

All over Texas, federally funded drug task forces, with little oversight from state officials, have employed the same strategy. The task force targets a minority community and sends in an undercover officer or confidential informant armed with public funds to buy drugs. Over the course of a long investigation, the undercover officer befriends a group of addicts. Eventually, the undercover cop asks his addict friends to get drugs for him. When an addict goes to his or her dealer and scores a small amount of drugs for the cop, he or she has stepped into a felony charge of delivery of a controlled substance and, because of harsh sentencing guidelines, could face decades in jail.

The Dogwood Trials task force's investigation followed a familiar pattern. Soon after the November 2002 traffic stop on U.S. 79, law enforcement officials began working with a confidential informant named Othella Kimbrew, according to court documents. Almost all of the defendants delivered, or offered to sell, small amounts of crack to Kimbrew over the course of two years, according to Anderson County indictments.

Dave Mann is a staff writer for the Texas Observer.

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