Cops as Junkies
A tour through the dismal day-to-day world of narcotics agents, where anything goes. Anything and everything.
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"I'm not stupid enough to believe everything prisoners tell me. I know they're con artists and jailhouse lawyers. But when you hear the same modus operandi in a number of drug cases. . . .when you hear the names of the same undercover agents playing the same illegal tricks. . . .where there is smoke there has to be a little fire. These agents are putting themselves above the law. There is no law in this country that allows an agent to use drugs, falsify evidence and lie on the witness stand. These guys are making it harder and harder for the rest of us to make a legitimate case. I talked to Duane Osborne when he was up here. Some of the stories he told make Texas sound like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. And the really troubling part, there is no public outcry. People just seem to accept it."
The prisoners I interviewed had several things in common: they were all under 30, all veterans and, except in one case, all started using drugs in Viet Nam. Since guilt has already been established by juries, the cases I am about to relate—those of Ron Arnot and David P.—were selected to give the reader the widest possible contrast, not only in terms of how laws are applied, but how people who are not otherwise criminals come in contact with this selective application.
Consider first, Ron Arnot, a young Viet Nam veteran from Western Pennsylvania who got 25-years hardtime for the crime of possessing several grams of heroin. Arnot was convicted in roughly the same span of time, and in the same Austin courtroom, where Duane Osborne got probation for a far more serious offense. What was the difference? Arnot was not a cop: his flaw, while terribly human, was not activated in the line of duty.
When I talked to him in early June, Arnot had been in Travis County Jail nearly three years. He was healthy and in good spirits. He had gained nearly 70 pounds since his days on the street, and he talked a lot about his commitment to God. He found God while doing 14 days cold turkey in an isolation cell. He memorized the 23rd Psalm (his only reading material) while beating his elbows and knees raw on his cell walls. However dismal the future, Arnot had learned to face it.
Arnot got his first taste of drugs from an Army surgeon in Viet Nam. He was not wounded in battle, although that's the story his friends and family believed when he came home. Only recently did his mother learn he did not win a Purple Heart. Arnot got a broken jaw in a bar room brawl, but even that didn't take him straight to drugs.
"I have a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people," he told me in the tiny interview room. "What really happened, this doctor wiring my broken jaw happened to look down at my chest. . . .at my nipples which had always been unusually large. Kids used to tease me about it. I'd always wear a shirt at the beach. He asked if it bothered me, made me feel inferior, and I had to admit it did. He suggested this simple operation to remove the fatty tissue. So they take me in and give me a pre-op shot of what I learned later was demerol.
"Well, well, well! Man, what is this stuff! I never felt anything that good. After the operation, my chest was flat and I felt like king of the mountain. This nurse I knew got me some more demerol and for a while things kind of got strung out. . . ."
All of Arnot's friends in Viet Nam used drugs: alcohol, tobacco, grass, hash, speed, downers and a relatively weak rusty brown heroin that they snorted. Back at Fort Bragg after Viet Nam, Arnot got heavy into heroin and was busted by a close friend, Turner, a fellow drug user who, as it turned out, got his supply from the CID (Criminal Investigative Division). Arnot was busted for a bag of grass that Turner planted in his car. Though the case reeked of entrapment, a courtmartial sentenced him to 15 months of hard labor at Leavenworth. After serving nine months of his sentence, Arnot was freed and restored to honorable rank by an appeals court.
But Arnot had turned the corner. Embittered by the war, confused by his treatment in the army, he moved to Austin and dived into the drug scene.
Arnot was busted in his friend Arnold's house on Bayor Street, the breadbasket of Austin's drug culture. He was sitting at the kitchen table, cutting Arnold's stash when the narcs broke down the door. An informer, a black youth Arnot had bought drugs from many times, supplied the information used to obtain the search warrant. Arnold, the man who owned the illegal drug, got 10-years probation. He moved to New York before Arnot's trial, and refused to return and testify. The last time Arnot heard, Arnold was a skyjack marshal.
Like Arnot, David P. served in Viet Nam, with the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. Unlike Arnot, he was never strung out on drugs. "I smoked pot in Viet Nam, like everyone else," David told me. "It was no big deal. I first turned on in the eighth grade at St. Edward's boy's school in Austin. Catholics are very advanced in certain areas." When I talked to David, he had been in Travis County jail 122 days for violating the terms of his probation, to wit: two cops caught him drinking.
David got hung in the tentacles of the law during a three-day toot in San Antonio, celebrating the joys of turning 21. Though the girl with him, his main alibi, claimed "we were just out riding around," there is strong evidence that they were staying at the Howard Johnson's Motel in San Antonio the weekend that David is alleged to have been in Austin, selling two grams of pure cocaine to a narc we will call Steakly.
Agent Steakly (not his real name) is a superzealous, scar-faced narc ("ugly as homemade soap") who operates throughout north and central Texas. His was a name I heard many times while investigating reports of unsavory activities in undercover work.
Attorneys for David P. produced hotel records and three hotel employees who saw their client at the Howard Johnsons that weekend, but the prosecution claimed that only proved David was a seasoned dealer, having set up his alibi. The sale was supposed to have taken place on Sept. 24, 1971, between 9 and 10 p.m. David returned his girl friend to her San Antonio college dorm before the 10:30 p.m. curfew. The jury had to believe David could accomplish both of these things and still drive 90 miles.
Harder to swallow was the simple economics of the case. The state charged David with selling two grams of 100 percent pure cocaine for $40. Even if there was such a thing as 100 percent cocaine—and there is nothing close—the street price for two grams of 40 percent coke is at least $200. David's motel and gas bill totalled more than $90, which meant that if he did sell to Steakly he did so out of uncommon kindness and brotherhood.
There were only two witnesses to the sale: David P. and Agent Steakly. It was word versus word. The jury, somewhat reluctantly it appeared, found David guilty and handed him two (one for each gram) 10-year probated sentences.
I asked David if he knew Agent Steakly.
"Yeah, I met Steakly several times," he said. "I was introduced to him by a junkie named Tibbs, a fellow who grew up in my neighborhood, a fellow I'd known for 17 years. Tibbs and Steakly brought some pot over to my place, and after we'd turned on Steakly got real mellow and said, "Hey, man, like you know where we can score any coke?' I told him I had no idea. Everytime I saw Steakly—three times in all—it was the same routine. He would bring some grass to my house, and sooner or later he'd ask if I could score him some coke. The last time I talked to Steakly was about 15 minutes before he and eight other narcs pulled me out of bed at 5 a.m. and told me I was under arrest. Steakly called just before they came—I guess to make sure I was home. He asked if I'd run across any coke yet. . . .I hung up on the bastard."
After his trial, David P. found another job and another girl, this one the teenage daughter of Austin's most remarkable redneck, a former UT football player who has a reputation for pole-axing hippies and anit-war demonstrators who wander too close. This man is a close, personal friend of the judge who sentenced David. On Jan. 26, 1973, two Austin patrolmen stopped David and told him he had run three red lights. They never bothered to issue him a ticket, but they did run a radio check on him, and when they learned he was on probation for drugs, they hauled him in on a DWI. They didn't give him a breath or blood test, but took him straight to jail, as is the practice with probation violators. David stayed in the slammer until April 3, six weeks later, when he was brought before the judge who offically revoked his probation and sent him back upstairs.
In June, after spending more than four months in jail, David P. was again brought before the judge and offered this alternative—he could go back to jail, or he could get out of the state and stay out for the length of his probation. Davis was last seen on a plane to Louisville, Ky.
The case of Charles McDonald, a prominent Waco attorney and businessman, rounds out the file.
In the spring of 1972, McDonald had a run-in with two DPS narcs outside Nero's bar in Waco. The run-in cost McDonald five broken ribs, a punctured eardrum, and multiple severe contusions and abrasions of the chest, stomach and head—not to mention a formal charge of assaulting a police officer. The McDonald case occupies the better part of a thick file in the offices of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Says William Reid, general counsel of the TCDLA: "It was absolutely unbelievable what happened."
Briefly, here is the story:
A task force of narcs, usually about a half dozen, had been hanging out at Nero's for several weeks. Nero's is a garish, ear-mauling rock place that caters to young people, some of them, no doubt, dope users. The narcs, however, were there for pleasure as much as business. There had been several incidents before the night McDonald was beaten. One narc propositioned a Nero's waitress, a Baylor student, in that blunt way that some men succumb to power-he threaten to bust her unless she put out. Another night, there was a hassle when the task force refused to leave at closing time. One narc pulled his gun and tried to shoot out a light in the men's room. He missed. Later that same night, the narcs went to an abandoned grocery store where they challenged a motorcycle gang known as the Bandidoes to a shootout.
On Saturday night, the night of the beating, the task lorce was celebrating the fruits of victory: 92 sealed drug indictments, handed down by a cooperative Waco grand jury. The record is twisted as to what happened next, but this much everyone agrees on—Agent Billy Clifton and attorney Charles McDonald (who owns the building where Nero's is quartered) had words, at which time Clifton strong-armed the much older, much smaller attorney to the parking lot, where the beating took place. After that, Clifton and Agent Bobby Adams took McDonald to jail.
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