Tulia

The courtroom on the second floor of the Swisher County courthouse was not designed with great deeds in mind. It is a utilitarian facility of fluorescent lights and cheap linoleum and hard-backed church pews for the gallery, a courtroom where trials are run as efficiently and economically as the farms and ranches of the plainsmen whose hard-earned tax money built it. Yet it had been the scene of Coleman's greatest triumphs as a police officer, the place that had made him, however briefly, a hero. Posing as a down-and-out construction worker, Coleman had worked undercover for eighteen months in Tulia, during which time he reported making over 100 purchases of illegal drugs, mostly powdered cocaine. The suspects were arrested in a massive raid in July 1999. When the smoke had cleared, Coleman's one-man operation had netted no fewer than forty-seven cocaine dealers, most of them black. It was a stunning success. For his accomplishment, Coleman was named an Officer of the Year, the most coveted award among Texas narcs. He went to Austin to have his picture taken with John Cornyn, the state attorney general (later elected U.S. Senator). The papers called him a one-man wrecking crew, a lone ranger. In fact, he was the son of a Texas Ranger, the mythical corps of elite lawmen celebrated the world over for their prowess and bravery. Coleman had finally filled his father's giant boots.

The last time Coleman had appeared in this courtroom was in September 2000, when he testified against Kareem Abdul Jabbar White, the last person to stand trial in the bust. White had been sentenced to sixty years in prison in that trial, another in a long list of impressive convictions for Coleman, who by that time was already at work on a new undercover operation in another corner of Texas. Things weren't like that anymore. Coleman was no longer a cop, for one thing. He had been fired from two narcotics assignments since leaving Tulia, and was now driving a truck for a gas company, checking lines in the desolate ranching country south of Dallas. But that was just the beginning of Coleman's troubles. In the intervening two and a half years, the following facts about Coleman's past had become public knowledge: that he had no experience whatsoever in undercover narcotics work prior to coming to Tulia; that he had walked off the job as a deputy sheriff in two small west Texas towns, in each case abruptly leaving town with thousands of dollars in unpaid debts; that one of the sheriffs he'd worked for in the past had filed criminal charges on Coleman, resulting in his indictment while working undercover in Tulia; that he was widely reputed to be both a racist and a pathological liar; and that he was obsessed with guns and paranoid fantasies.

The story of the Tulia sting became a national scandal. Troublesome facts about Coleman's methods were the subject of investigative reports in dozens of media outlets, from the New York Times, to Court TV, to the Independent of London: how Coleman never wore a wire, videotaped his buys, or had a second officer observe him; how the vast majority of his alleged buys had no corroboration whatsoever; how most of the evidence was powdered cocaine, despite the fact that Coleman had infiltrated a community of low-income blacks where marijuana and crack were the most commonly used drugs; how Coleman's reports typically consisted of a few paragraphs with virtually no description of the defendants; and how Coleman grossly misidentified suspects in a handful of cases that were quietly disposed of by the district attorney after the indictments were issued.

The sheer number of cases Coleman made in Tulia, a town of just 5,000, seemed to defy logic. Further, thirty-eight of the forty-seven defendants came from the town's tiny black community, which numbered perhaps 350 people, roughly half of whom were children. In one single bust, 20 percent of the black adults in Tulia were hauled away. If every fifth person on the black side of town was dealing cocaine, some observers pointed out, then who was left to buy it? And why was so much powdered cocaine and so little crack being peddled in Tulia's hardscrabble black community, where unemployment hovered around 50 percent? This conundrum did not concern the district attorney, Terry McEachern, who prosecuted the cases with characterisic zeal. Nor did it seem to concern the jurors in the original trials. Despite the small amounts of cocaine involved, they handed down staggeringly long sentences, even for defendants with no prior records. As the questions about Coleman began to mount, local authorities, including the man who had hired Coleman, Swisher County sheriff Larry Stewart, stood by the operation. The national press attention only seemed to harden their resolve: there would be no retrials. The sentences would stand.

Now, after two and a half years of stalemate, Coleman was back in Tulia because a small group of defendants—four of the sixteen who were still serving time—had managed against long odds to secure a postconviction hearing to determine whether or not they were entitled to new trials. It was a day that many in Tulia had thought would never come: at long last, Coleman would be cross-examined under oath on every aspect of his background and his investigation in Tulia, with the nation watching. The stakes could not have been higher. Lives were on the line, as well as careers, but something larger seemed to hang in the balance as well. After the national media took hold of the story, Tulia became ground zero in a broader debate about drug policy that had been simmering for years on talk radio, Sunday morning talk shows, Capitol Hill, and state legislatures across the country. The hearing had become a referendum on the state of the drug war itself.

Coleman's gold watch and pinky ring flashed as he sat down in the witness chair and adjusted his tie. American troops had begun their attack on Iraq the night before, and Coleman wore a flag pin in his lapel. He was slightly more heavyset than the last time he had been in Tulia, his ruddy Irish face pudgier and more florid. He also had a new mustache and haircut—the sides shaved close like a Marine's and the wavy red top grown out and slicked back. The four defendants, men he had not laid eyes on in over three years—since testifying against them in this very courtroom—had been bused in from state prison to attend the hearing. They sat on Coleman's immediate left in street clothes, their legs discreetly shackled, staring down at him grimly from the jury box.

At the end of the row of inmates sat Joe Moore, the man the prosecution had called the "kingpin" of Swisher County's drug underworld. He certainly didn't look the part of a major cocaine dealer. He wore what had been his usual uniform in the free world, a pair of crisp blue overalls, delivered to his jail cell by a local farmer friend. For his court appearance, he had added a white cotton dress shirt underneath. Even hunched over on the jury bench, he dwarfed the three young men seated at his side. At sixty, he was built like a past-his-prime George Foreman: a giant balding head stacked on top of shoulders that were almost as deep as they were broad, and a torso that only got broader as it moved down.

Moore was no stranger to the inside of a courtroom. He was the last of a long line of small-time hustlers from the Flats, the old black neighborhood west of the railroad tracks. His varied and storied career had earned him a number of different monikers in Tulia. Around the courthouse he was sometimes called the Mayor of Sunset Addition, as the Flats were officially known. In less charitable circles his name was King Nigger. To blacks he was affectionately known as Bootie Wootie, or simply Bootie. In a town where black people had always made money for other people—generally by hard labor—Moore had a knack for making money for himself. Over the years he had run his own hay-hauling crew, owned a barbecue joint, and dabbled in a variety of moneymaking schemes. What made him notorious in Tulia, however, was Funz-a-Poppin', the illicit juke joint he operated in the Flats. For over a decade, until his bar was leveled in the early 1990s, Moore was Tulia's chief bootlegger, and there was great demand for his services in a dry county like Swisher.

While the three young men seated next to him fidgeted and occasionally nodded to an acquaintance in the gallery, Moore watched the proceedings with an unblinking stare, as though his life were riding on it. And it was. He was doing ninety years.

Coleman avoided looking at Moore and his companions. There really was no safe place in the courtroom for him to rest his gaze. The front two rows of the gallery were filled with reporters, and behind them the pews were rife with other defendants busted by Coleman, men and women who had served relatively short sentences or had been placed on probation. Together with their relatives and friends, they had been in high spirits all week, watching attorneys for the defendants parse every aspect of Coleman's operation in Tulia, as they had been doing among themselves for years. Sitting in the gallery had felt at times like attending a horror film or a Holy Roller church service, with the audience murmuring and occasionally shouting in response to the action up front. Now that Coleman was finally before them, a strange, expectant silence filled the courtroom.

Donnie Smith had shown up late for the hearings that morning. He wore a clean white T-shirt and blue jeans, his hair tied down in cornrows, each short tail bound by a simple rubber band. He found a seat in the rear, about ten rows behind his mother, Mattie White. He saw that she had a new hairstyle for the hearings—bobbed short in the back and spiky on top. Mattie, a guard at the state prison west of town, had good reason to be concerned about her appearance. She had been interviewed a dozen times in the past thirty days about her son Kareem and her daughter Kizzie, who were still locked up from the bust. In the past year, her family had been profiled in People and in the column of a well-known writer for the New York Times.

Mattie rarely mentioned Donnie in those interviews, and he did not anticipate getting any airtime today, either. Donnie, a thirty-two-year-old former high school sports star, had also been busted by Coleman. Unlike his younger siblings Kareem and Kizzie, however, Donnie was a crack addict. He had been out of prison a little over a year, after serving thirty months of a twelve-year sentence. He stayed clean for about nine months, but now he was using again, and his mother was barely talking to him. Donnie would disappear for weeks at a time and then show up at her tidy frame house unannounced, asking for money. He was sleeping wherever he could find a bed. He preferred his mom's house or his ex-wife's public housing duplex in the Flats, where his two sons lived. If he wasn't welcome at either place, which was often the case, he would crash on the floor of his dad's trailer home nearby. He also had a number of girlfriends around town he could call on in a pinch.

Donnie would have made a good interview for the Times man or anyone else who cared to talk to him. He was not what most people would call a drug dealer, but he was one of the few defendants to actually admit spending time with Coleman. In the summer of 1998 Donnie had known him as "T.J.," a skinny, ponytailed white man who had begun hanging around the cattle auction, where Donnie worked as a day laborer a few days each month. Shortly after the two met, Coleman flagged Donnie down on the side of the road and asked him if he knew where to score. Desperate for money, Donnie acted as an intermediary for Coleman on several occasions over the course of the summer, each time purchasing tiny amounts of crack from a dealer, pinching off a bit for himself, and delivering the remainder to Coleman.

Technically that was a fourth-degree felony, punishable by up to two years in a state jail, a sort of intermediate prison for low-level offenders. Coleman called on Donnie at least two more times for this service before Donnie disappeared. His little brother Kareem had convinced him to go to a ninety-day rehab center in Lubbock. It was Donnie's second time through the center, and both times he had gone voluntarily. When he got home that winter, he went to work as a hired man on a local farm.

He had been clean for six months when the big roundup came in the summer of 1999. With no prior felony convictions, Donnie was prepared to plea-bargain. The small amounts he had gotten for Coleman, combined with his status as a first-time felony offender, he figured, gave him a good shot at probation. Then he read the indictments. He was accused of delivering cocaine to Coleman on seven separate occasions. Only one delivery was alleged to be crack cocaine. The other deliveries were said to be powder in amounts between 1 and 4 grams, making them second-degree felonies. The first plea District Attorney Terry McEachern offered Donnie was forty-five years.

In the end, Donnie managed to dodge the much longer sentences his siblings received. Yet, after a year back in Tulia, he still seemed trapped. Almost five years after he first met Coleman, he found himself right back where he was: broke, strung out, and alone. Despite his troubles, Donnie had always thought of himself as the popular, talented star he had been in high school, when the whole town seemed to love him. It was only since the bust that he came to realize how people in Tulia really felt about him. The revelations about Coleman, he discovered, didn't seem to faze most white Tulians. In fact, many of them seemed to blame him and his fellow defendants for bringing the curse of the media spotlight down on their town.

Donnie had no steady job, and being an ex-convict on parole had not improved his prospects of finding one. He was tired of the manual labor jobs he normally wound up with anyway. He wanted to become a long-distance trucker or have his own barbershop in Dallas. He wanted to reconcile with his ex-wife and move his family to some big city, far from all of this, someplace with good jobs and nice houses. He wasn't sure how he was going to do that. But he knew why he was in the courtroom today, even if nobody wanted to interview him. He had to get Coleman behind him.

The small section of the courtroom between the witness chair and the gallery was so crammed with attorneys that there was no room for the two sides to have their own separate camps. Instead they sat face-to-face across a row of three narrow tables lined up end to end, their knees practically touching underneath. On the near side with his back to Coleman sat District Attorney Terry McEachern. He was flanked by two young assistant prosecutors, a special prosecutor he had hired just for the hearing, and a fifth attorney provided by the county's insurance company.

In a part of the state where dressed up usually means a western jacket over starched blue jeans, McEachern wore an expensive gray suit and imported leather shoes. He was perhaps the only male native of Swisher County to use hairspray, and his silvering black hair was nicely complemented by gold wire rim glasses. In his early fifties, he was a big man, with a full, well-tanned neck and sensitive eyes that women found attractive. McEachern presided over one of the busiest district attorney's offices in the panhandle. In his seventeen years as the chief prosecutor for Swisher County and neighboring Hale County, he had personally tried over 500 cases. He did not believe in preparation; often he would read the case file for the first time during his opening statement. His knowledge of the law was relatively limited, and he was not particularly good at oral argument. But he knew how to pick a jury and he was an outstanding politician, and that made all the difference. He had built his career on aggressive prosecution of his two bread-and-butter charges: drunken driving and drug crimes. No matter what the charges were, he liked to tell juries that drugs and alcohol (the sale of which was still illegal in much of the panhandle) were bound to be involved somehow, along with the two other basic elements of trouble: sex and money. McEachern's rhetoric squared nicely with what jurors heard in church every Sunday, and this was not an accident. Defendants in his district usually didn't take their chances on a trial, and when they did, jurors—the righteous plainsmen and women McEachern knew so well—almost never let him down.

Things were different this time around. There was no jury to appeal to. The defendants were in the jury box, looking down at him. A visiting judge whose politics McEachern could only imagine sat at the top of the dais. His career hinged on whether or not a former narc—a man he knew next to nothing about—could hold it together on the stand for one more day. And on the other side of the table sat thirteen attorneys, including representatives from some of the most prestigious law firms in the country. It was shaping up to be the worst week of his life.

Vanita Gupta was the reason the attorney's well was so full. She was an unlikely nemesis for a career Texas prosecutor. Standing perhaps five-foot-two, with long black hair and a slender frame, she was just twenty-eight years old and looked a good five years younger. Born in Philadelphia to Indian immigrant parents and raised in England, her experience as a criminal defense attorney consisted of a single summer at the Washington, D.C., public defender's office. Gupta first heard about Tulia in the fall of 2001. She had been out of New York University law school for exactly four months and had just landed her dream job: attorney for the storied NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. Founded in 1940 by civil rights pioneer and eventual Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, LDF litigators had argued some of the most famous civil rights cases in American history, including Brown v. Board of Education, the seminal school desegregation case. The transcripts of the Tulia trials were her introduction to the legal system in Texas, and she had never encountered anything like it. Gupta had spent the past year and a half of her life working on the cases for ten to twelve hours a day, poring over court documents, visiting defendants in prison, and traveling back and forth between Tulia and New York. Now she was surrounded by a team of top corporate attorneys from two of Washington's most prominent firms, which she had recruited to the cause, at the turning point in a case every civil rights attorney in the country had heard of, in the middle of a state she knew almost nothing about.

As the only local attorney on the defense team, Jeff Blackburn knew the courts of the Texas panhandle all too well. He was a sole practitioner from Amarillo who made his living from clients who walked in off the street, mainly people facing drug or DWI charges. Coleman's operation in Tulia had been funded by an Amarillo-based drug task force that Swisher County belonged to, and Blackburn had butted heads with agents and supervisors of that same task force on many occasions. He lived with his teenage son in the back of his office building, a converted paint factory in a blue-collar neighborhood not far from the freeway. Blackburn, who was in his mid-forties and had thin brown hair that resisted styling, was not particularly handsome. But he had an abundance of charisma and never failed to put on a good show in court, where he was known as a skilled trial attorney. It was his advocacy for civil rights, however, that had made him one of the best-known defense attorneys in Amarillo. As an articulate liberal in an extremely conservative town, he had become unofficial spokesperson for the town's downtrodden. He knew virtually everybody in town, and he had a knack for interjecting himself into high-profile cases and getting his face on TV. The reporters and producers for the local news stations loved his gravelly smoker's voice and his penchant for bitingly sarcastic one-liners.