Reporter
Bust Town
It's been two years since Tulia's tainted drug arrests first came to light. How much has changed there? Not nearly enough.
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"Propaganda is a funny animal," said Gary O. Gardner, a farmer who lives in the nearby village of Vigo Park. Few reporters on the Tulia beat have filed their stories without a visit to Gardner's compound, where he holds court from a converted pool room piled high with transcripts, writs, and affidavits, along with the occasional box of ammo. If Moore is the mayor of black Tulia, then Gardner, who is white and hails from one of the area's original farming clans, is the mayor of rural Swisher County. Critical of the busts from early on, he has now made it his personal crusade to get Moore and the others out of prison. He blames politicians like McEachern for creating the atmosphere in which the busts could happen. "If you're gonna make your living off the backs of somebody that you want to convict, you have to make 'em the enemy," he said. "And in Tulia, everything is blamed on the black drug dealers."
That kind of sentiment, repeated in essence on newsstands and in living rooms across the country, has hit white Tulia hard. Almost every week a letter appears in the Lubbock or Amarillo paper from an aggrieved Tulian, protesting the treatment the good people of the town have received. "I feel we have been persecuted, but it doesn't really surprise us because we know what the media can do to a town," said Glenna Reynolds, one of the letter writers. Recent revelations have not dissuaded Reynolds, who doesn't fully support Coleman but does believe that most, if not all, of the defendants were guilty, possibly including Tonya White, who proved that she was in Oklahoma at the time of the alleged drug deal. "I just know her potential for being involved in drugs," Reynolds said. She did concede that at one point she thought some of the sentences were longer than they should have been—she does not now—and she hopes people are getting rehab in prison. More than anything, though, she's ready for it to be over. "I just wish they would allow us to heal and work our way through this thing," she said.
Thelma Mae Johnson, Joe Moore's longtime girlfriend and the leader, along with an Anglo minister named Alan Bean, of the local opposition to the busts, wants this to be over too—but only if it ends with everyone's release. She has little sympathy for those who feel the town has been vilified. "When it comes to saying we've shamed our community by bringing the media here, I would say that when this bust came down and you paraded those people in front of the cameras and said, 'Look, it's the biggest drug bust in Texas!'—it would seem to me that's what put Tulia on the map."
WHAT BECAME OF THE OTHER players in the sting? Officer Coleman—presented with an Outstanding Lawman of the Year award by Cornyn following the busts—has since been fired from two narcotics postings and has gone to ground in Waxahachie; his lawyer deflects the media inquiries that still regularly come, from Court TV to the London Independent. Thirteen of the defendants are still in prison and serving long sentences, despite the fact that the state legislature passed several reforms in 2001 in response to what one member termed the Tulia fiasco; a team of attorneys, led by Jeff Blackburn, of Amarillo, and Vanita Gupta, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Washington, D.C., has taken up their cases. The governor's office has reorganized the grant program that funded the operation, putting agents like Coleman under the supervision of the Texas Department of Public Safety. An FBI investigation announced two years ago seems to have petered out. Local authorities, for their part, have refused to condemn McEachern and Stewart's handling of the cases or to call for the release of those still incarcerated. "The lesson in all of this is that there is no political benefit to ruling for these defendants, and the judges saw that clearly," one defense attorney said. "They asked themselves, 'Am I going to give up my career for these people?' And the answer was 'No.'" Or as one person in the black community put it, more succinctly, "There are a lot of good, honest people in this community. They just don't have any balls."
Paul Holloway found that out the hard way. An attorney in nearby Plainview, Holloway took on several of the cases in the original sting as a court-appointed attorney, and it was he who discovered much of Coleman's personal and professional history. The son of a well-known Texas Ranger, Coleman had, as deputy, skipped town on two different sheriff's offices over the past five years; in Cochran County, he also left $7,000 in unpaid bills. In interviews and documents collected by Holloway and other defense attorneys, former co-workers and associates of Coleman's in both towns referred to him as a pathological liar and a paranoid gun nut. Cochran County's sheriff filed charges against him in an effort to collect restitution and placed a letter in his official file warning future employers not to hire him in law enforcement. Deep cover in Tulia was apparently his last chance to make good. Sheriff Stewart discovered the Cochran County warrant about six months into Coleman's tenure but decided to continue the undercover operation anyway. (Stewart would not be interviewed for this story.)
Holloway packaged up what he thought he had found and presented it to district judge Ed Self. He asked for money for expert witnesses, though he figured he wouldn't need them. "I thought that if somebody knew about Tom, it would all be stopped," Holloway said. Instead, Self sealed the information Holloway had spent weeks collecting and denied his request. "Do you know what this means, Judge?" Holloway asked to no avail.
"My kid is twelve years old," Holloway told me as we rolled through the wide, quiet streets of Plainview in his gold Mercedes, "and we just watched To Kill a Mockingbird. I told him the difference between me and Atticus Finch is this: At the end of the trial—this complete railroading of an innocent man—Atticus turned to his client immediately and said, "Don't worry. We're going to appeal.'" But Holloway's grasp of reality would not allow him to do that in Tulia. "I took an oath as a lawyer not to disgrace this system, but I knew in my heart they would win no appeals. If this will be stopped, it will be when the prosecutor puts a stop to it."
THAT'S NOT LIKELY TO HAPPEN any time soon. McEachern, who was pressured last summer to drop the two remaining cases from the sting, said he could not talk to me for this story either, citing pending appeals and a Department of Justice investigation, which, depending on whom you ask, is or is not still ongoing. "I wish I could tell you my side, because you'd hear a completely different story," he said. Asked if he still stood by Coleman after the dismissed cases, the troubling revelations about his past, and his disastrous record since leaving Tulia, McEachern did not answer directly. "I'll stand by what ninety-six jurors have found," he said. "I'll always stand by them."
And so far, the white citizens of Tulia have stood by him. The New York Times doesn't carry much weight in this town. If anything has put a dent in the picture McEachern painted for them of the drug problem here, it might have been another spectacular bust, one that barely made the papers but which everyone in town knew about shortly after it occurred. In June 2000, as the Observer story was going to press, a white teenager in Tulia told authorities that an older man had offered him cocaine in exchange for sex. The accusation became a jaw-dropper when the boy revealed the man's name: It was Charles Sturgess, one of the owners of the Tulia Livestock Auction. Tulia is built around that cattle auction, and Sturgess was one of the biggest wheels in town. Sheriff Stewart, who went to church with the Sturgess family and bought cows from Charles, asked the local Texas Ranger to conduct the investigation. The Ranger wired the boy and sent him back out to meet with Sturgess, who made the same proposition once again as they cruised slowly through a pasture that night in his truck. The Ranger swept in and arrested Sturgess, but the most important revelation was yet to come: A search of the truck yielded three and a half ounces of powdered cocaine. In one single bust of a prominent white man—and a completely fortuitous one at that—many times more cocaine had been seized than in any single buy during Coleman's entire eighteen-month undercover operation.
That much cocaine is more than one person can use. How many kids did Sturgess give cocaine to? Tulia will never know the answer to that question. A few months after he bailed himself out of jail, Sturgess drove his truck out to a piece of deserted ranch property and shot himself dead.
NOBODY TOLD JOE MOORE ABOUT Sturgess' death. When I gave him the news, he was amazed by every detail—except for the cocaine. Moore has lived in Tulia longer than most; he worked for Sturgess on occasion, just as he had for Sturgess' father. "I been around hustlin' and gamblin' all my life," he said. "I know what someone looks like when they've been using something." Moore also knew what a cop looked like, which is why, he said, he warned everyone he knew to stay away from Coleman when he came to town, and why he says he ran Coleman off his property when he came by to ask for dope.
Nonetheless, Moore will spend his sixtieth birthday, this January, in all likelihood where he has spent his last three—in prison in Abilene. His health has not been good. Prison doctors had him on the wrong medication for diabetes for months, and the concrete and steel is hard on his back and knees, which are battered from a lifetime of hard work. But he eagerly examines the updates his defenders send him every month and keeps a careful eye on his parole date. "I'm gonna make it," he told me. "I'm gonna make sure I make it."
Nate Blakeslee is the editor of the Texas Observer.
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