Life and Meth
Since the arrival of cheap, homemade speed in East Texas five years ago, the drug has torn apart countless families and turned kids into addicts—and there’s no end in sight.
(Page 3 of 3)
Graham needed a partner, and in 2001 he found Kim Courtney, a third-generation cop from Palestine who had made hundreds of cases by working undercover, from $20 crack buys to major meth lab busts. Courtney had been the valedictorian of her police academy class and went on to receive one of the DEA’s highest accolades, the Administrator’s Award of Honor, for her undercover work, but her strength lay in her ability to make men think she was just a pretty face. She had been a twirler in high school, and she knew how to play the part. “When I’m undercover, I always act like a dumb blonde, and I giggle a lot,” she said. “If people start asking me too many questions about who I am, I’ll get up in their face and say, ‘Why are you getting all in my business? I’m not getting in your business!’ And they always back down.” If Courtney cocks her head to the side and lets loose a barrage of abusive language, she can transform herself from the woman she is—an attractive, fortyish mother of two who always double-checks the mirror to make sure her lipstick isn’t smudged—into a foul-mouthed, strung-out crack addict in need of a fix. “Nobody’s better,” said Graham.
For both Graham and Courtney, undercover operations are dangerous work. During one deal, a meth cook made a point of showing Courtney his machine gun. “If any cops come out here, this is how I’ll take care of them,” he told her. Graham had his cover blown during a meth deal in Shelby County when the woman who came to the door recognized him. “I said into my wire, ‘It’s not looking real good for the home team right now,’” Graham remembered. “I was easing my hand toward my back pocket when everyone in the room decided to clear out.”
Graham has better luck working with informants who agree to wear a wire while making a meth buy. This establishes probable cause, which allows Graham to obtain a search warrant, organize a group of local sheriff’s deputies, and raid the house. But that too can be dangerous. The more advanced meth cooks have surveillance cameras, radio scanners, night-vision goggles, guns, and explosives. Sometimes meth labs are booby-trapped; the first one Graham entered, in 1999, had an electric current running through its front doorknob. Earlier this year, he called the ATF into a lab after finding a homemade bomb. “We’ve been lucky,” Graham said. “These people are very volatile. By the time we find them, maybe they’ve been up for ten days or they’re in a state of psychosis. They spend a lot of their time thinking about cops.” He recounted some of their paranoid fantasies: “They’ll say, ‘We’ve been expecting you. We saw you in the trees.’ Or they’ll tell us that they know about our special hologram projectors or our helicopters that fly in ‘whisper mode.’”
During a raid, after the entry team has handcuffed everyone inside, Graham and Courtney strap on respirators and what they call their “bunny suits”: the white jumpsuits that are usually worn by Hazmat teams. Dismantling a lab is often more dangerous than the raid itself. If an amateur meth cook has mixed the wrong ingredients or heated them too quickly, the air inside can be noxious or potentially combustible. Red phosphorus is particularly dangerous; when it burns, it turns into a lethal, odorless nerve gas. Federal law requires anyone who dismantles meth labs to be certified by the DEA, and both Graham and Courtney have received training at the agency’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. The polluted interior of a meth lab can look otherworldly. “I had to take down a wall in a mobile home once, just to get it ventilated,” he said. “The air inside was cloudy.”
Inside meth labs, Graham often finds children. “You’ve got a whole generation of kids being brought up who are watching Mom and Dad cooking dope,” he said. “This is normal life to them. Dad’s in the trees with his binoculars, looking out for cops. Meanwhile they have no food. They’re dirty and carrying around bottles of spoiled milk. They’re exposed to everyone who comes into their house to buy meth, people who will take advantage of them in any way they can. These are people who are oversexualized because of the drug, so we see a lot of incest and sexual abuse.” He can recite a litany of cases. There was the man who got his teenage daughter hooked and then sold her body out for the drug. The baby who was found crawling on a floor covered with dirty needles. The man who kept his son out of school because the teenager could cook better speed. The child who was brutally beaten when his addicted mother flew into a rage. “It’s the kids that get to you,” Graham said.
Sometimes the futility of it all can get to Graham. Most of the people he arrests plead out to lesser charges and see little prison time. For each cook he puts away, there is always another guy who has decided to start making speed himself. Of the hundreds of people he has arrested, he knows of only fifteen who have sought treatment and only one who has stayed clean. He takes comfort in the fact that things could be worse. “If no one had been working meth these past few years, there’s no telling how bad it would be now,” he said.
A few weeks after the informant’s meth buy in Spurger, Graham returned to Tyler County with a search warrant in hand. He met with a county judge, who read through the document, signed it, and wished Graham good luck. Later that afternoon, behind closed doors at the sheriff’s department, Graham held a briefing for everyone who would help execute the raid: Sheriff Wolf, his deputies, Courtney, two other task force members, and the local game warden. Graham went over the layout of the house and assigned officers to the entry team. Before heading to Spurger, he fielded questions about the dealer they hoped to arrest. “I don’t know if this guy’s going to be violent,” Graham warned the group. “We should assume he will be.”
“He got in a knife fight a little while back,” offered one sheriff’s deputy.
“Well, I want everyone to leave the house the way they came in,” Graham said. “I don’t know if there will be weapons, but expect them.”
“We have reason to believe there will be children in the house?” asked a CPS worker who had been asked to come along.
“Yes, a ten-year-old boy.”
“Any dogs?” one of the deputies asked.
“I don’t know. We do know that he has a police scanner, so no talking on the radio. We need radio silence until entry has been made.”
At the end of the meeting, the team suited up in bulletproof vests and loaded their pistols. The team piled into the backs of two pickups and crouched down out of view. After a bumpy half-hour ride through the woods, the two pickups took a hard left turn into town and pulled up to the white farmhouse.
Sheriff’s deputy Elbert “Bubba” Sheffield led the entry team, running up the front walkway with half a dozen officers behind him. “Police!” he called out before kicking in the front door. “Search warrant!”
The door swung open, and deputy Sheffield saw a boy who looked to be about ten years old standing motionless, halfway down the stairs inside the house. His father was a few feet away, frantically trying to pull something out of his pocket. “Get down on the floor!” the deputy yelled at the man. “On the floor! Put your hands behind your back!”
“Please don’t hurt my dad!” the boy screamed.
Behind him, inside the house, the entry team saw windows covered with blankets and black plastic. There was little light except for the glare of a bare bulb. Pink insulation hung from the ceiling through cracks that ran the length of the kitchen. A pot of stew that was days old sat on the stovetop, rotting. Parts of the floor were damp and covered in piles of unwashed clothes. Propane bottles lay scattered across the living room. The tinny, magnified sound of a police radio scanner echoed through the house.
The man was handcuffed and led outside. “What are they doing to my dad?” his son asked, trembling. “I want to be with my dad.” He looked up at the officers in black bulletproof vests holding guns.
“What’s going on?” the man’s wife asked, incredulous, as she was also led away by a sheriff’s deputy. She was in her twenties, but most of her teeth were missing. She was slight, and her skin was covered with sores.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s bullshit.”
Sheriff’s deputies fanned out across the house. Closets were opened, drawers were emptied, the attic searched. The officers found no glassware or pH strips, no red phosphorus or muriatic acid. The garage held nothing but empty boxes. It soon became clear that the local supply of meth was being cooked somewhere else. The house contained several grams of meth, a few glass pipes, and more than $1,000 in cash but no lab. Outside, Courtney read the handcuffed woman her Miranda rights. The CPS worker asked her if she wanted to place her son in the care of a family member while she was in jail. The woman became hysterical. “What have I done?” she shrieked.
Courtney held up a plastic bag of meth that had been found. “You’ve got kids running around this house and you don’t know where this came from?” she said. “I guess it just fell out of the sky.”
Her son sat on the back of a pickup, his head buried in his lap. Every now and then, he wiped tears away with his knees. After a few minutes had passed, the CPS worker gently told him that it was time to go. “I don’t want to go,” the boy said. “I want to be with my dad.” The social worker talked to him until the boy finally relented. “I love you, Momma!” he called out, as he followed the man to his car. Just before he climbed inside, he broke away and ran to his father, hugging him around the waist. His father stood rigidly above him in handcuffs. The boy finally let go and walked back to the car. As the car pulled away, he turned in his seat, craning for a view of his father.
LATER THAT EVENING, back at the task force office in Nacogdoches, Graham sat under the fluorescent lights, studying the meth that was seized in the raid. The powder was bright white and crystalline, as jagged as broken glass. He rarely saw meth that clean—the kind made with laboratory-grade equipment, from a large-scale meth operation—and he knew that the Spurger drug bust could lead him to meth cooks higher up the food chain. All Graham could hope for was that the boy’s father would start talking and lead him to his supplier.
Before he turned out the lights and headed home, Graham asked the question that had been nagging him all evening. “Who do you think that kid thinks is the bad guy: his dad or the cops who hauled him off to jail?” he said. “His dad is his hero. This is the only life he knows. In ten years, we’ll be looking for him.”
My Library
