The Jump-Out Boys Originally published in The London Review of Books, 2006. Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town by Nate Blakeslee Public Affairs, 450 pp On a summer morning in July, 1999, a massive drug bust took place in the small Texas panhandle town of Tulia. In a few hours, beginning before dawn, the town's entire police force, the county sheriff and his deputies, a group of local state troopers, and the agents of a special drug task force had rounded up dozens of men and women, all of whom were accused of selling cocaine—crack and powder—to an undercover operative, a narc, named Tom Coleman. When the dust cleared, 47 Tulians, almost all of them black, found themselves in jail. At the outset, the bust seemed an almost flawless operation. Coleman, the son of a Texas Ranger and a one-time Officer of the Year, had posed as a construction worker down on his luck, infiltrated himself into the underbelly of Tulia, and caught dozens of dealers in the act. Among the arrested were some familiar faces, ones that certain Tulians would be happy to see behind bars. One of these was a former juke-joint owner and bootlegger named Joe Moore. These days, Moore made his living raising hogs and calves, but local police still harbored ill feelings about his more disreputable days. He'd been busted for cocaine possession a couple of times in the past, and had gone to prison briefly each time. But Moore commanded great respect in the Tulia black community, and his arrest came as a terrible shock to many. A giant man, heavy, broad, and tall, Moore appeared imperturbable and unimpeachable—and yet he was Coleman's prize, the kingpin of the Tulia drug underworld. Another suspect caught in the bust was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he had beaten the odds and graduated from high school. But he proved unable to run very far from his problems—a broken home, poor test scores, siblings and friends whose lives had gone off-track—and soon found himself getting into fights and taking drugs. A failed marriage and a series of dead-end jobs pushed him farther into despair, and he was known to be on crack, and to have sold small amounts of the drug. But If Moore's and Smith's arrests, disappointing as they were, seemed at least somewhat plausible, there were plenty of other suspects whose supposed relationship to the drug trade strained credibility. One woman no longer even lived in Tulia—she worked as a nurse in a town many miles away, and claimed to have been there when the supposed drug deals took place. Most puzzling, however, was the arrest of Freddie Brookins, Jr. Son of a hard-working pillar of the black community, Freddie was quiet, plain-spoken, and studious, and had excelled in track, basketball, and football. He had high hopes for his life, and rejected, Blakeslee writes, the “gangster culture so many of his peers seemed to admire.” And though he suffered some setbacks after high school—his girlfriend gave birth to a baby out of wedlock, and Freddie never got the scholarship he strove for—he nevertheless bettered himself, continuing his education in trade school and staying employed. He wasn't known to use, let alone sell, drugs in Tulia. On the morning of the bust, he was dragged naked from his house, cuffed, and read his right on the front porch. Tom Coleman, in on the sting, had been wearing a ski mask, and he took it off in front of Freddie and jeered, “Recognize me now?” Freddie Brookins had never seen the man before in his life. In a town of only 5,000 inhabitants, a town of twenty churches that prided itself on its conservative values, a bust like this represented a major cleanup, a wholesale removal from the streets of people whom the local paper, in its coverage of the bust and subsequent trials, would refer to as “scumbags.” It was cause for celebration. But many of the Tulians arrested had no former convictions, or even arrests. Nobody confessed, and many, like Freddie Brookins, claimed never to have seen Tom Coleman. And, most unsettlingly, not a single ounce of cocaine, in any form, was found in any of the suspects' homes, despite the fact that the raid happened before dawn, rousing most of them out of a sound sleep. Later that morning, when the county jail was filled with the people he had busted, Tom Coleman allowed himself the pleasure of a stroll past the cell doors. “You niggers quit sellin' them drugs!” was his comment to the suspects. Almost four years later, as the cases crumbled around him, he would face the suspects again, this time from the witness stand of a courtroom. There, he would repeatedly perjure himself, about his methods, about his past, about his accusations. It would become clear that he had lied, that none of the accused had sold him cocaine. The suspects, most of whom had been sent to prison in the wake of the bust, would be freed, and later pardoned, and Tom Coleman and the town of Tulia humiliated in the national media. How on earth all this managed to happen, and what it did to the people it happened to, is the subject of Nate Blakeslee's gripping Tulia. Blakeslee, a reporter for the left-leaning monthly Texas Observer, broke the Tulia story in 2000, in an 8,000-word article that would earn the notice of both the national media and a phalanx of lawyers whose pro-bono work would eventually overturn the convictions of the supposed Tulia dealers. Though Tulia is his first book, Blakeslee nevertheless displays a firm command over what proves to be an extraordinarily complex narrative; he draws together the histories of the town and its families, including those of Moore, Smith, and Brookins, and shows that this egregious injustice was no freak occurrence, but rather the product of years of disappointment, resentment, political maneuvering, and wishful thinking. It is a cautionary tale, not just for this small Texas town, but for every town; indeed, for all of an America deep in the throes of its own political and moral crisis. * One thing that actually turned out to be true about Tom Coleman was that his father was a Texas Ranger. The Rangers are an elite division of the Texas state police, known for their bravery and investigative acumen; there are little more than one hundred active at any given time. But Joe Coleman, Blakeslee tells us, was cruel and abusive, and his son became a high school dropout with a persecution complex. Tom Coleman earned his GED at the age of 27, and on his father's reputation got a job as a prison guard, where he barely avoided being fired for laziness. Still, he managed to get himself deputized and was assigned the small town of Iraan to patrol. There, he would pull people over for no reason and wander out of his jurisdiction, then brazenly lie about what he was doing. After his father died, he became a gun nut, collecting a large and illegal arsenal of antique weapons, and over-arming himself for routine police matters, often carrying three firearms at a time. He abruptly left two police jobs in order to avoid being fired, and went through a pair of marriages and contentious divorces, leaving his ex-wives living in terror of encountering him again. He owed thousands of dollars to dozens of people in several counties. He was said to have carried a KKK card and was widely known as a vocal racist. At his last police job before being assigned to the drug task force that would lead to the Tulia busts, Coleman was caught stealing gasoline from the county's pumps, and, incredibly, he would be arrested for this crime while working undercover in Tulia. At every turn, with the help of his father's friends in the Rangers, he managed to avoid conviction or incarceration, and his record was consistently swept under the rug. How, then, was this man given a position of such grave responsibility? Coleman was permitted to work undercover without any immediate supervision, and the convictions handed down by the court in Tulia were based entirely on his word, which he did not back up with a single photograph, video, or sound recording. The only physical evidence was the cocaine Coleman himself presented to law enforcement officers. The answer is complicated. Part of it, Blakeslee argues, was certainly race. Most Tulians admitted no doubt about the defendants' guilt. The head of the Chamber of Commerce, Lila Barnett, was blunt: “We know these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.” If anything, the author writes, ...Barnett felt the system was stacked in the defendants' favor. She resented her tax dollars being spent on providing attorneys for indigent defendants, for example. “If you can't afford insurance, then you don't go to the doctor,” she pointed out. “If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, then you go without,” she said. This attitude, Blakeslee explains, stems from the pioneer worldview, the idea that no one is entitled to survive except by the fruits of their own labor. And blacks in Tulia were widely perceived to be the antithesis of this ethic. Even the chair of the county's Democratic Party, Delbert Devlin, agreed: “They've grown up doing nothing but cheating and stealing and that's all they know.” Blakeslee goes on to further characterize Devlin's position: “Devlin said he did not know of any instance of a white person cheating a black person in Tulia.” Ironically, the races had always more or less gotten along in Tulia, despite the town's near-unanimous disdain for civil rights law in the 1950's and 1960's. Blacks—Donnie Smith and Freddie Brookins among them—had propelled the high school football team to many victories, and the parks, stores, and other local institutions had been smoothly integrated. But Tulians believed first and foremost in “looking after their own,” and white Tulia resented what they viewed as a disproportionate amount of welfare dollars being given to blacks. However, Blakeslee writes, The total tax dollars invested in poverty programs in Swisher County, controversial though it may be, is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through various federal farm programs. In 1999, farm subsidies totaled $28.7 million for Swisher County...which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or indirectly. This kind of cognitive dissonance seems to permeate every conversation Blakeslee has with whites in Tulia, to the extent that, when all is said and done, Coleman exposed, and the defendants freed from prison, many “still seem to believe that Coleman had been guilty of nothing more than faulty record keeping.” The ideas that blacks were shiftless, drug-dealing criminals, and that whites were merely trying to maintain order and look after their own, were difficult to overcome, even after hard evidence was put before Tulia in an embarrassingly public way. It wasn't just race, though, that gave Coleman free rein in Tulia: it was also a culture of law enforcement that had become deeply flawed over time, in thrall to (once again) government dollars; and a justice system packed to the gills with partisans and hypocrites. One source of the trouble was the drug task force to which Coleman had been appointed, an organization operating under the auspices of the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant. The Byrne grant had been named after a New York City police officer slain in 1988 by drug dealers. That year, George H. W. Bush used Byrne as a battering ram to accuse Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, of being soft on crime, and Congress responded by passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which stood as the opening salvo in what is still known as the “War on Drugs,” a war that, from any reasonable standpoint, has done little to curb drug abuse, and much to increase a national prison population that was already disturbingly high. The Byrne Grant was funded under the Act, and offered states funding for, among other things, “multi-jurisdictional task force programs.” These programs were to be coordinated entirely by local officials, not DEA agents. The intent was to get more narcs on the streets. But with no federal oversight, all small counties had to do was agree to join forces and fight drugs, and Byrne money would come their way. The result was widespread abuse, and Byrne money has, in many parts of rural America, become a form of pork. Byrne-funded Texas drug task forces (known in the panhandle as “the jump-out boys”) aren't subject to the kind of rigorous training and testing requirements of most Texas law enforcement agencies, and they work unsupervised and unmanaged. In some sparsely populated areas, Byrne money represents a veritable fortune to law enforcement officials, and task forces are formed, when necessary, out of inexperienced, unscrupulous officers, in order to keep the money flowing. The Drug War, Blakeslee writes, “had the potential to become a money-making enterprise,” and few jurisdictions were eager to kill the goose that kept laying this golden egg. And so, when it was time for Swisher County officials to take stock of what they had in Tom Coleman, they did everything they could to fail to notice his shortcomings. His references went unchecked, his records were left unopened, and his arrest was conducted on the sly, and the proper reports of it never filed. Of course, even after the bust, there were still trials to be held. The jury, certainly, would be overwhelmingly white, but surely the defense lawyers, the judge, would take Coleman's checkered past into consideration. Wouldn't they? A few enterprising lawyers did, or tried to, anyway. (Others, shamefully, didn't even return their clients' phone calls from jail.) But presiding judge Ed Self, a Bush appointee (that's Governor George W. Bush, now the president), would hear none of it. All revelations of Coleman's past, his unfitness for the job, his debts, his violent temper, his racism, were made out of the jury's earshot, and weren't permitted to be presented as evidence. One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith received a sentence of twelve-and-a-half years in prison; Freddie Brookins got twenty. Other sentences ranged from a few years to Joe Moore's stunning 90 years in jail—all for uncorroborated drug sales that never took place. Before long, nearly every defendant had been sent to prison, and Coleman had escaped with his reputation—the über-narc reputation, not the other one—intact. * Almost immediately, a man named Gary Gardener began to wonder about the case. He was a retired—bankrupt, in fact—farmer, crop duster, and descendant of pioneers and railroaders; bowlegged, corpulent, straw-hatted and outspoken, he had come to develop a reputation in the Tulia area as an eccentric and enthusiastic troublemaker. He had earned this reputation by suing the Tulia school district over its new new drug-testing policy, with which his son, Hollister, had refused to comply. At the time of the Tulia busts, the drug-testing case was still making its way through the courts, and Gardener found himself, newly self-schooled in the complexity of drug policy, smelling a rat. But Gardener was no enemy of law and order, and was exhausted from his battle with the school board that had once counted him as a proud member. He wondered if this was a battle worth fighting, and if it was, whether he was the one to fight it. But he had read the smug, self-satisfied words of the sheriff and Tom Coleman, and he had seen the humiliating photographs of the suspects that had run in the paper, and the demeaning headlines calling them garbage. He wrote a letter to all of the defendants, in prison, questioning Coleman's veracity, and encouraging an independent investigation into his character. “The officer,” he wrote, “reminded me of a cow buyer I knew several years ago whose checks were never any good and always talked too much about his personal accomplishments...I think someone outside of the local law enforcement system should investigate this man's background.” The defendants, by and large, took Gardener's words to heart. They hired lawyers, who publicized their cases. Slowly, over years, appeal cases were built, and the tide began to turn. Thanks to an avalanche of media coverage, the defendants' cases caught the attention of an increasing number of supporters, starting with local trial lawyer Jeff Blackburn, former comedian-turned-activist Randy Credico, and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney Vanita Gupta. Their dedication to the case lured others, high-powered city lawyers working pro bono, and before long this team had torn Coleman's credibility to shreds. Judge Self had himself removed from the cases, and his replacement, Dallas Judge Ron Chapman, proved far less willing to reject evidence that weakened the prosecution's case. Spectators in the courtroom looked on in astonishment and, at times, open glee, as Coleman perjured himself over and over, tying himself in knots to remember which lies he told when. The nightmare was over. The prisoners were freed, pardoned, and garnered six million dollars in lawsuits. * Does all of this sound a little bit familiar? Corrupt Texans siphoning away government money for ineffectual programs? Faked evidence being used as a pretext for an all-out attack on innocent, but much-hated foes? Hypocrites projecting their own foibles onto others? The connection is unavoidable. In the present regime ruling the United States, we have a case of Tulia writ large. Nate Blakeslee is a reporter, not a social critic, and he sticks to the facts. But he lets us know, in various small ways, that the trouble with Texas is the trouble with America. Faith, he tells us, is king. “No church captured the spirit of Tulia,” he writes, “like the Church of Christ...the intolerance of the Church of Christ is legendary.” (63) Anti-gay, anti-welfare, anti-urban, this Christian sect has now set the agenda for America, as it set the agenda in Tulia. But it isn't just the politics—it's the faith itself. Faith is was the engine of injustice in Tulia, as it is in America as a whole—not the religious kind of faith, but the kind that convinces otherwise sensible people that the world is conforming to their idea of it, even as contradictory evidence is staring them in the face. Blakeslee tells us about hapless prosecutor Terry McEachern, who will, before the trials are over, be caught driving drunk down the highway with a woman not his wife; here, McEachern is instructing a jury on how to determine innocence or guilt: As was his habit, he emphasized the portion of the law that says that a reasonable doubt is “one that is based on reason and common sense,” underlining those two terms for the jurors with his felt pen. Common sense, a notion that appealed to rural jurors, was really what being on a jury boiled down to, in McEachern's view. He was a master, [defense attorney] Paul Holloway said later, at “changing 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' to something more akin to gut instinct.” Gut instinct, in this case, was the widespread and long-held conviction that black people were criminals. Remember Lana Barnett: “We know these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.” And it was not a view to which many Tulians would have offered up much of an argument. And Blakeslee mentions other cases, tangential to the drug busts, that nevertheless reveal Tulians' willingness to convict and condemn its fellow citizens, not according to the facts, but to their own preconceived ideas. Most remarkable is the case of David Johnson, 36, a black man, who was arrested for the murder of his white former girlfriend's infant son. The medical examiner had ruled that the child died of pneumonia, but four years later, after a falling-out between the couple, Johnson's girlfriend had a dream in which Johnson murdered the little boy. This, coupled with doubts about the examination's veracity (the examiner had resigned amid accusations of falsifying a different autopsy), sent Johnson to prison for ten years, in spite of a complete lack of physical evidence, and medical records confirming that the child had gone to the doctor seven times over four months, and had been taking antibiotics for ten days, before he died. It isn't for nothing, then, that Blakeslee lets us know, in the middle of the appeal, that “President Bush began his invasion of Iraq that evening.” * President Bush, of course, is from Midland, just down the road from Tulia, and it is impossible not to identify in his personality strands of the stuff Tulia is made of. When, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last fall, rapper and record producer Kanye West accused Bush of not caring about black people, the President appeared genuinely shocked. I was reminded of his vehement denial when I read, in Blakeslee's book, the words of a Tulia store clerk: “I believe we're equal as far as we work together, but I don't believe in the interbreedin'.” I did sometimes wish, reading Tulia, that the author had leaned a little harder on this angle, had brought into sharper focus the case's relevance not only to America's troubles with race and criminal justice, but to the national malaise that our present rulers have led us into. Tulia was once a prosperous place, thanks to defense contracting, thanks to beef and wheat and natural gas. “Tulia loved itself,” Blakeslee writes. But the wells ran dry, and fuel prices went up, and what was left behind was bitterness and disappointment. It is this very boom-and-bust cycle of pride and dawning unhappiness that America seems in the latter stages of today, and this might have made an interesting topic for Tulia to address. Nevertheless, it's all there, for the enterprising reader to find, and there's only so much you can ask of a writer. In a little over 400 pages, Blakeslee gives us an even-handed telling of an endlessly nuanced, maddeningly untidy story, and it stands as a minor miracle that he does so with such clarity. Above all, he gives of a sense of the real people behind these dramatic events; he not only goes into great detail about the lives of Moore, Smith, Brookins, and other of Coleman's victims, but sketches out their family histories, explaining how they came to Tulia and what their roles are in this complex community. These characterizations, invariably, are deft as a novelist's, and they serve as more than just window dressing—they are necessary reminders that history hinges on the personal, on the idiosyncratic. Tulia wouldn't have gotten into this mess without Tom Coleman, and it wouldn't have gotten out of it without Jeff Blackburn, Vanita Gupta, and all the other concerned citizens who made the town's business their own. If reading this book makes you angry, as it did this reader, there are plenty more messes where this one came from. c2006 by J. Robert Lennon.