Drug Money

Indeed, following the approval of the ShadowGuard contract, threatening telephone calls were made to the home of a black city councilmember, 69-year-old Thelma Drennan, one of three African-Americans on the five-member Hearne governing body. A week after its original approval, the council took a second vote and canceled the deal. Drennan was one of two black members to change her vote -- Workman was the lone holdout. While Drennan says her reversal was based on the price tag of the plan, she also says she doesn't believe the threats directed toward her will ever be thoroughly investigated.

"I don't know that they will ever look into it," says Drennan, a woman with a fragile build who admits she was frightened by the calls. "Somehow I get the feeling that they don't care if something were to happen to me. It would just be one more black person gone."

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Hearne isn't the only small town in Texas where the actions of antidrug task forces have been called into question. And while those questions don't always have racial overtones, they usually have economic ones -- task forces preying upon the poverty-stricken and the young. This January a grand jury in Brownwood, about 125 miles west of Fort Worth, issued 75 indictments involving 40 defendants. The indictments were the result of undercover work -- code name Operation Loser -- last summer by the West-Central Texas Narcotics Task Force based in Abilene.

The West-Central task force covers a wider area than the South Central task force. Its budget is also larger. According to figures obtained under the Texas Open Records law, West-Central had a combined budget for fiscal years 1999 and 2000 of just over $1 million. In that same period, the task force filed 433 charges, at a cost of more than $2,300 per case. Some of the busts were significant; last year the task force seized hundreds of pounds of marijuana. But that doesn't tell the complete story. Some of the arrests during 1999 and 2000 were not even drug-related. The arrest record includes suspects busted for DPS warrants, carrying large amounts of money, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, car theft, reckless driving, failure to render aid, no driver's license or insurance, public intoxication and the mysterious "missing person." On two occasions, one agent listed the offense as "pending."

The January arrests followed the same pattern as those made by other task forces around the state: The targets were mainly the poor and/or people of color, none of the cases involved much more than a thimbleful of drugs, and the indictments and arrests came down about six months after the alleged drug deals had occurred, a tactic that criminal defense attorney Kirby Roberts believes is used to make it harder for defendants to say exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time.

Roberts, who is based in Junction, hears the same story -- and sees many of the same task force tactics -- all over his part of Texas. In fact, Roberts has stayed more than busy lately defending targets of not only the Southwest Texas Narcotics Task Force but also the West-Central squad, which operates out of Brownwood about 200 miles to the north. Over the past six months, Roberts, a big-boned man who resembles Salman Rushdie, has spent a considerable amount of time driving the two-lane blacktops among the prickly pear cactus on the western edge of the Texas Hill Country on a legal circuit that includes Brownwood, Brady, Menard, Junction and other towns. Roberts himself gets a bit prickly when he thinks about what he believes are the misguided goals and unethical -- if not sometimes illegal -- conduct of the members of the various task forces he encounters.

Particularly disturbing to Roberts was the case filed against Terri Rene Harrell, a twice-divorced mother of three getting by mainly on $300 a month in child support that she receives from her two ex-husbands. Her economic standing was only marginally improved recently by her marriage to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice guard.

In January Harrell was charged with delivering a gram of methamphetamine to Scotty Chew while he was working as an undercover officer with the West-Central task force. Chew testified that for four or five months, as part of his cover, he often hung out at Lakeside Tattoo on the outskirts of Brownwood, where he spent his time shooting the breeze and helping motorists and cyclists repair their machines. According to his testimony, during most of his encounters the conversation eventually got around to the subject of drugs and if anyone knew where he could get some.