Drug Money

It was under such circumstances that he hooked up with Harrell and her friend Jennifer Nell Spencer in July 2000. The undercover officer testified that when he approached Harrell about obtaining some speed, she informed him that her friend Spencer, who would be coming by the tattoo parlor soon, might have some contacts. When Spencer arrived, she made a call and set up a rendezvous with her connection along the side of a local highway. But when the amount delivered to the meeting place wasn't enough to satisfy Chew, the two women and the officer -- along with another man named "Jerry" in the undercover officer's car -- went back into Brownwood. When the two-vehicle caravan stopped in front of a house, the men in the lead car went inside along with Harrell and Spencer. A few minutes later, the women returned with the dope. Chew says it was Harrell who handed him the plastic packet.

Roberts, however, suggests that it was actually Spencer who gave the drugs to Chew, and that the officer was embellishing his story to add Harrell to his arrest list. What's more important, Chew admitted on the witness stand that he did little to find out who the men in the other car were, or who owned or lived in the house from where the drugs were fetched.

"No follow-up was ever made to identify who was in that house or who the house belonged to," says Roberts. "So there's no question in my mind that [Chew] was just after as many [easy] arrests as possible, and not in actually trying to get anybody of any importance. If he'd wanted to do that, he'd have gone up the food chain a step. It was right there in front of him."

Chew, 30, has served as a peace officer in Texas since 1993. Although he works directly for the West-Central task force, he is commissioned as a law enforcement officer through the Coleman County sheriff's office. He also has worked for the Erath County sheriff's office as well as the Rural Area Narcotics Task Force and others. In other words, he is a gypsy officer -- the kind who task force critics say bounce from one law enforcement agency to the next.

During his cross-examination of Chew, Roberts attempted to show that Chew was indeed a dirty cop. While on the stand, Chew denied that he had ever sold drugs himself, or that he had ever exchanged drugs for sex. However, Chew's claims were contradicted when Roberts called Wilda Renee Crelia, who was also facing drug charges, to the witness stand.

Roberts: Let me just ask you, did Scotty Chew ever supply you with any drugs or controlled substances?

Crelia: Yes.

Roberts: And did he require you to do anything in return for supplying that?

Crelia: Yes.

Roberts: And what was that?

Crelia: Oral sex.

Despite Crelia's testimony, Harrell was convicted on the delivery charge. But the judge who heard the case sentenced her to probation despite a prior drug conviction. Roberts believes that decision was significant.

"She walked out of the courtroom a free woman," says Roberts, "because I don't believe the judge liked what he heard."

Chew could not be reached for comment, but Billy Schatt, commander of the West-Central task force, says Crelia's charges against the officer are unfounded, and calls her testimony a typical legal ploy to shift attention away from the defendant. He also defends Chew's and the task force's focus on street-level users and dealers. The task force's priorities, he says, are set by the police chiefs and sheriffs in his 15-county region. A small-time dealer in a big city, he adds, could be a major player in a place like Brownwood. Besides, he asks, "What do they want us to do? Trace it all the way back to Colombia?"

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The case of 30-year-old Iletha Spencer, who is also represented by Roberts, in many ways parallels that of Harrell.

Spencer is an unemployed single mother of four children, who range in age from eight years to two and a half. Until recently, she and her brood lived in a federally subsidized house in Brady. In March, as part of 32 indictments handed down from a McCulloch County grand jury, she was forced to move out of the dwelling after she was arrested for selling less than a gram of cocaine to an undercover member of the Southwest Texas task force, based in Junction.

Officer Larry Stamps arrived on the scene last summer when the task force set him up in a unit at a federal Housing and Urban Development apartment complex in Brady. The move was designed to ensure than any drug buys that Stamps made there would automatically carry a stiffer penalty. As part of his cover, Stamps was known at the housing project as Delbert, not Larry.