Reporter
Snow Job
Two aggressive Dallas cops. One confidential informant. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine. Fifty-three drug traffickers busted. Sound too good to be true? It was.
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Barbare had Vega take a polygraph test. After the examiner told her that the test indicated Vega was telling the truth, he said, "This is going to sound weird, but your case sounds exactly like a case I just did for Tony Wright [another Dallas defense attorney]." Barbare immediately called Wright, who told her that he was representing a Mexican immigrant named Jesus Mejia, a 39-year-old auto mechanic who had been arrested in May at a West Dallas auto shop for selling about $80,000 worth of cocaine to Alonso. The polygraph showed that Mejia too was telling the truth.
"Who were the officers who did the arrest?" Barbare asked Wright.
"Two guys named Delapaz and Herrera."
Within a couple of days of that conversation, another Hispanic family—knowing nothing about Vega or Mejia—arrived in Barbare's office and asked her to represent their relative Abel Santos, who had been in jail since July for allegedly selling 28 pounds of cocaine to a DPD informant. As she flipped through Santos' police report, Barbare saw the names of Delapaz and Herrera. The cops claimed that an informant had met Santos, who agreed to sell a stash of cocaine that he kept in an old truck in the parking lot of an auto-repair shop where he worked.
Was it possible that the cops and their informant had discovered a major operation to sell cocaine out of auto shops? Or, Barbare wondered, were they involved in a scam in which they drove around late at night, dumped bags full of cocaine into unlocked cars parked at auto-repair shops, then showed up the next day to make a spectacular bust? Did they think they could get away with it as long as they targeted poor Mexican immigrants whose court-appointed attorneys would be far more willing to negotiate plea bargains than fight for their clients in court?
ALTHOUGH BARBARE SAYS SHE MADE her suspicions clear to top drug prosecutors in August, she had no concrete evidence to help Vega or Santos—and the prosecutors were not going to give her a break. The only thing she could do was ask for lab tests of the seized drugs. Wright also ordered tests for his client Mejia. Then they sat back and waited.
By November 1 the lab results had arrived. The "cocaine" that the three men were supposedly trying to sell was Sheetrock. Yet Dallas police officials did not pull Delapaz and Herrera off their beat or cut off their relationship with Alonso, and Dallas County prosecutors did not inform other defense attorneys representing clients who had been arrested by Delapaz or Herrera that they should also ask for lab tests. In fact, later that month, one Hispanic defendant arrested by the two officers was allowed by prosecutors to plead guilty to possession of cocaine.
Throughout October and November, other defense attorneys who had represented clients arrested by Delapaz and Herrera began demanding lab tests too. The lawyers for the two men arrested with the 169 pounds of "cocaine" said their clients were merely Hispanic day laborers who had been approached on a street corner by Alonso and Delapaz and hired to drive the van to a fast-food restaurant and wait for further instructions. The lawyer for the Hispanic man arrested with "cocaine" in his Ford Escort said his client was also a day laborer who had been asked by Alonso to follow him to a location where he would be put to work. When he did, police officers surrounded him. In both cases, the cocaine turned out to be Sheetrock. It was also discovered that "methamphetamine" supposedly found by Delapaz and Herrera in other busts was also Sheetrock.
On December 31, when the scandal was about to go public—WFAA-TV reporter Brett Shipp and his producer Mark Smith were first on the story—Chief Bolton called a press conference in which he denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the police should be applauded for finding the fake drugs, which he said could be deadly if ingested or inhaled. Since his appointment as Dallas' top cop in 1999, Bolton has been a lightning rod for controversy. He has fought turf wars with the local FBI office, been accused of trying to prevent an investigation into bribery by Dallas strip clubs, and been roundly criticized by his own officers for summarily demoting almost all of the assistant chiefs at the department and replacing them with less experienced police officials who were more supportive of him. Not only did his demotions cost the city $6 million in settlements after the former assistant chiefs sued, but they led to allegations that his new assistant chiefs weren't good at their jobs.
At his press conference, Bolton tried to make the case that suddenly there were fake drugs being sold in Dallas by devious dealers because security along the U.S.-Mexico border had increased sharply since the fall, shrinking the supply of real drugs. "Let this be a warning," he proclaimed with a straight face. "Since September 11, you don't know what you're getting out there."
What Bolton didn't address was the burning question of why the police field tests came up positive during two dozen busts involving fake drugs between May and October. Defense attorneys noted that officers other than Delapaz and Herrera were conducting those tests. Phil Jordan, the former head of the Dallas office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, told reporters that any experienced narcotics officer should have been able to open a bag of ground-up Sheetrock, which is made of gypsum, and know immediately from its texture and feel that it was not cocaine. How could DPD supervisors not have been suspicious of Alonso's ability to make so many big busts without dealers catching on to him? And how could those supervisors have allowed Delapaz and Herrera to make so many arrests that were the result of the uncorroborated allegations of their informant? And why, if these busts were so significant, did the DPD not bring in federal agents to question the men being arrested to discover who their suppliers might be?
Then Bill Hill had a press conference of his own. Hill is no idiot: He made his top assistants, including the ones who should have caught wind of the scandal months earlier, answer most of the questions. It didn't exactly help him, however, when one of those assistants told the press that prosecutors were the "victims" because they were having to work extra hours at night reviewing cases involving narcotics officers. To his credit, Hill went on Nightline to answer questions about the scandal, but then, at the end of the show, he refused to apologize to anyone who had been falsely arrested, jailed for months, and in some cases, deported back to Mexico. He continued to insist that he was not sure the Hispanic suspects who had been arrested were innocent.
By February 25, however, Hill had ordered the dismissal of eighty cases in which Delapaz, Herrera, or Alonso had participated. In more than a quarter of those, the cocaine or methamphetamine seized turned out to be Sheetrock. That's not to say that Delapaz and Herrera had never caught real drug dealers selling real drugs. But their work and credibility were so tainted that Hill had no choice but to wipe the slate clean.
Bolton, meanwhile, had put the two officers on administrative leave and suspended the department's investigation until the FBI had concluded its own. Delapaz's defense seemed shaky when the Dallas Morning News reported that he had filed for personal bankruptcy in mid-December after questions were raised about his busts. In the bankruptcy petition, he and his wife listed $328,000 in debts, including a $224,000 mortgage and $62,000 in credit card bills. Considering his salary, why had he accumulated such debt in the first place?
WHATEVER THE ANSWER, IT IS unlikely that anything like this can happen again in Dallas. Hill now requires lab tests to be conducted in all felony drug cases. But the fallout from the Sheetrock Scandal continues: The FBI is said to be investigating other narcotics officers and informants who may have worked with Alonso. Bolton wrote a cryptic letter to the FBI suggesting that they investigate "all members of the criminal justice system," leading a few lawyers to suggest that he was hoping the feds would investigate the DA's office and take the heat off of the DPD. "What everyone knows is that somebody's going down," says Barbare, who is suddenly the toast of Dallas' legal community. She has even been asked by one local television station to do commentary on the Andrea Yates murder trial in Houston.
As for her clients Vega and Santos, Barbare is representing them in civil suits they will be filing against the city for civil rights violations. At least ten others who were falsely arrested have also hired lawyers to file lawsuits. There is little doubt the City of Dallas is going to be paying out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in settlements. The poor Hispanics who almost got their lives destroyed by illegal arrests and prosecutions are about to learn the flip side of what the American legal system is all about. "They're going to get rich," says Barbare. "But after all, isn't that the American way?"
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