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.
(1) Kareem White, serving 60 years, (2) Landis Barrow, 20 years, (3) Jason Williams, 45 years, (4) Freddie Brookins, Jr., 20 years, (5) Dennis Allen, 18 years, (6) Chris Jackson, 20 years, (7) Daniel Olivarez, 12 years, (8) Cash Love, 99 years, (9) Timothy Towery, 18 years, (10) Mandis Barrow, 20 years, (11) Willie Hall, 18 years, and (12) Kizzie White, 25 years.
ON THE ROADSIDE BILLBOARDS AND church signs of the Panhandle, religion is sold chiefly as a form of encouragement, and when you get out on Interstate 27, it's easy to see why. Heading north from Lubbock, you soon find yourself in what is sometimes referred to as the Big Nothing: thousands of square miles of featureless High Plains dotted with little towns whose very names—Friendship, Happy, Progress, Pep—seem to be a defense against the ominous feeling of being a lone body, without cover or companionship, in a place that big and flat; a feeling of being conspicuously vertical, like a prairie dog caught too far from his hole with a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Over the past two years, few communities in this area have needed uplift more than the people of Tulia, who have seen their town, and all its secrets, exposed to the glaring spotlight of the national news media.
When I first visited Tulia on assignment for the Texas Observer, in the spring of 2000, little had been written about the previous summer's now-famous drug busts. The story I came back with was a sort of perfect storm for drug-policy-reform advocates, neatly illustrating much that has gone wrong with the nation's domestic drug war. Sheriff Larry Stewart of Tulia, a ranching and farming town of five thousand roughly halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo, had used grant money from the governor's office to hire Tom Coleman, a gypsy cop with no experience in undercover work and, as it was later revealed, a checkered past. Coleman worked deep cover in Tulia for eighteen months with almost no supervision, during which time he reported making more than 130 drug buys, mostly small amounts of powdered cocaine, from 46 dealers. Although the deliveries were small, an unusually high percentage of them were alleged to have taken place near a school or a park, making them first-degree felonies.
Coleman's success seemed too good to be true, and it was. In not one single case did he wear a wire nor did anyone ever corroborate his claims with eyewitness or video evidence. When the arrests finally came, not one single suspect was found to be in possession of drugs. Perhaps most striking of all, 39 of the suspects were black in a town with fewer than 300 black residents. Few of the alleged dealers could afford to make bail. Several were known to be crack addicts, people who had neither the money nor the connections to acquire powdered cocaine. In a handful of the cases, Coleman botched the identification of his suspects so badly that the charges against them were quietly dismissed. None of that seemed to matter to the district attorney or to the juries that heard the first half a dozen cases, pronounced the defendants guilty, and handed down sentences of up to ninety years.
Defenders of civil liberties, particularly the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, in New York, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, flogged the Observer story to everyone within range of a fax machine, and it gradually gained momentum; before long the New York Times re-reported it for page 1. Yet nothing concrete came of the publicity—almost none of the jailed defendants were released until they were paroled—and just as quickly the attention of the media and other interested parties dried up. Or it would have had it not been for a series of columns this summer by Bob Herbert of the Times, whose better-late-than-never outrage resuscitated the controversy. Suddenly, two years later, the black residents of Tulia are once again being asked to give interviews to the broadcast and print media, and so are the local authorities, particularly Stewart and district attorney Terry McEachern, who have learned by now to let someone else answer the phone. And the wheels of state government have finally begun to turn: Shortly after Herbert's sixth column on the subject, Texas attorney general John Cornyn—in a hotly contested campaign for a U.S. Senate seat against, it should be noted, an African American—finally announced that he would support a state investigation into the Tulia arrests. (He had been begged to investigate for more than a year.)
It was a good time, I decided, to return to Tulia. So in September, I made another trip up I-27 to check in on the people I had interviewed on my first visit and to see how the town had survived its newfound notoriety.
SINCE I LAST INTERVIEWED HIM, in May 2000, Joe Moore has had a lot of time to think about what happened in Tulia and why. Moore, who was accused of delivering about $400 worth of cocaine to Coleman, was the first to go before a jury, and his trial set the pattern for what was to follow. The state began its case one day at nine o'clock, presenting a baggie of cocaine as its sole piece of evidence and Coleman as its only witness. Moore's court-appointed lawyer called no witnesses. At noon the next day, he was sent away for ninety years.
If you ask Moore how this came to pass, he will begin with a short history of black Tulia. Much of that story—as the 59-year-old related it to me from a visitation booth in Abilene's Robertson Unit, where he is beginning his fourth year of incarceration—is about sheriffs and highway projects. When he first came to Tulia, in the fifties, the sheriff was a man named Darrell Smith. At that time, the black community was on the north side of town, and Smith used to drive through it almost every Friday and Saturday night. "His main thing was, he wanted us people to go to bed at twelve. He'd drive down there and if he didn't see any lights, he'd like to kick the door down." Moore laughed as he said this, showing the five teeth he has left in his giant head, one of them capped by the prison dentist in stainless steel. For all his toughness, Moore continued, Sheriff Smith was honest, and people respected him.
Later, when U.S. 87 was extended into Tulia from the north, the highway department bought everyone out, and the black residents were encouraged—with promises of free running water—to relocate to the northwest side, west of the railroad tracks, in an area that came to be known as the Flats. John Gayler was the sheriff then, a fair man with a live-and-let-live philosophy. "As long as you didn't come across the tracks," Moore told me, "Gayler wasn't gonna mess with you."
Those were good days for Moore, who quit the backbreaking work of loading hay and opened a little juke joint stocked with bootleg beer bought in Nazareth, the nearest wet town. Not only blacks but also white businessmen and ranchers, in town for the cattle auction held every Monday, would stop in to drink and gamble, and Moore was selling one hundred cases of beer a week. "Nobody messed with me. My place was wide open," Moore said. He became known as the mayor of Sunset Addition, as whites called the neighborhood. Blacks just called him Bootie-Wootie.
In the late eighties a new highway—an expansion this time of I-27—was slated to be built, meaning anywhere from thirty to one hundred shacks in the Flats had to go. "They broke their deal with us," Moore said. Meanwhile, a new sheriff, Paul Scarborough, and his deputy, Larry Stewart, had taken office, and Moore says, they had a different view of his business. They began to arrest him, something Sheriff Gayler had rarely done (Stewart denies that this represented a change in policy). Moore went to prison for possession of cocaine in 1990. He did just three months, but while he was inside, his joint was pushed down. When he got out, Moore turned to raising hogs, leaving the hustling life behind. "That was my life: rattlesnakes, hogs, and calves," he said. Until Tom Coleman came to town.
MOORE'S CHRONOLOGY THROWS TULIA'S FIXATION with drugs into a new light. Beginning with a few arrests in the mid-nineties, building momentum with a school drug-testing policy passed in 1996, and culminating in the big busts of 1999, the drug war in Tulia coincided roughly with the razing of the Flats and the black community's move across the tracks—essentially pushing black and white Tulia into the same space for the first time ever. Of course, the timing also corresponded with the arrival of crack in the tiny towns of the Panhandle but not with the arrival of drugs per se; Tulians black and white had always had access to them, though perhaps not in proportion to their counterparts in the bigger cities. So why now, and why black Tulia?
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