Correspondent: Texas Under Cover Tx Date: 2nd March 2003 This script was made from audio tape – any inaccuracies are due to voices being unclear or inaudible 00.00.00 Correspondent Theme Music 00.00.11 Music 00.00.22 Title Page TEXAS UNDERCOVER 00.00.38 Tom Mangold On the road to Tulia, Texas, a small town at the end of a flat and featureless highway. A small town famous for nothing until suddenly a few months ago notoriety blew in like a dust storm. 00.00.50 Music 00.00.58 Tom Mangold Tulia, bypassed by time. Population five thousand and falling. Some agriculture, some beef but feeling recession, drought and hard times. 00.01.08 Tom Mangold Only God prospers here; twenty-nine churches, one for every two hundred residents. 00.01.12 Music 00.01.13 Tom Mangold And the much loved and venerated high school football team. 00.01.16 Music 00.01.18 Tom Mangold And of course there’s Jack the Barber. Some things never change. 00.01.23 Tom Mangold Morning Jack, how are you? 00.01.25 Jack the Barber Well, it was just a regular little old town. Everybody knew everybody and everybody liked everybody. We didn’t have any problems. 00.01.36 Tom Mangold And there’s a sheriff who really does wear a ten- gallon hat and talk fluent Texan. 00.01.41 Sheriff My Dad and his parents moved to this county in 1923 and that side of the family has been here ever since. 00.01.51 Jack the Barber It was just a regular little old town until one morning early everything went haywire. 00.01.57 Music 00.02.00 Tom Mangold Just before sunrise on July the twenty-third 1999, police arrested forty-six men and women, thirty-nine of them black, a tenth of Tulia’s small black population. 00.02.11 Tom Mangold They were dragged from bed, half dressed with the press fully primed to see them taken into Tulia’s tiny jailhouse. There they were indicted with very serious drug dealing charges. 00.02.21 Tom Mangold Curiously no cash, drugs or firearms were ever found. Nineteen defendants were sentenced to a total of eight hundred years in prison. On the face of it a triumph of justice but the truth is, something bad happened in Tulia on that hot July morning. 00.02.36 Music 00.02.41 Tom Mangold The man with all the answers is former narcotics detective Tom Coleman who single-handedly ran the eighteen months undercover sting against Tulia’s black residents. 00.02.53 Tom Mangold Posing as a long-haired unemployed biker called TJ Dawson with a fondness for powdered cocaine, Coleman mixed socially with Tulia’s black people. He did not investigate Tulia’s whites. 00.03.07 Tom Mangold Strangely he worked without partner, without tape recorder, without notebook and without fingerprint evidence. In the end all the jury had to go on was his word and his honesty. 00.03.18 Tom Mangold You arrested nearly ten percent of the black population didn’t you? 00.03.21 Aston TOM COLEMAN Ten percent of that black population sold me drugs. Bottom line. 00.03.26 Tom Mangold Weren’t white people using cocaine in Tulia? 00.03.29 Tom Coleman Well, I tried to get out the circle of where I was at and tried to go into the white people’s section to start buying drugs like met-amphetamines and cocaine and every time I would approach somebody, just like one incident I was told by two cowboys, ‘you need to go back across the tracks, you nigger lover’. 00.03.49 Train 00.03.58 Tom Mangold On the other side of the tracks, yet another Tulia cliché, live the poor and the forgotten, mostly black people. Few have prospered here. Some are sod- busting labourers, many are unemployed and poorly educated, some are little more than dignified vagrants. 00.04.13 Music 00.04.25 Tom Mangold This is Leroy Barrow; he collects and crushes old coke cans for a living. Paradoxically he’s also said to be one of Tulia’s top drug dealers, a crime Godfather of such menace that his bail was set at a quarter of a million dollars. That’s a lot for a man who owns no more than a cat and leaky plywood caravan. 00.04.44 Music 00.04.47 Tom Mangold When Leroy, who has smoked marijuana, saw the stiff prison sentences being handed down in the Tulia drug cases, he pleaded guilty for a lighter sentence and got ten years probation. 00.04.58 Music 00.05.02 Tom Mangold None of this has helped Leroy’s fragile career in Tulia so the former drug Tsar is now trying to make his way further up in the scrap business. 00.05.10 Music 00.05.14 Tom Mangold Hello. 00.05.15 Leroy Barrow Hello. 00.05.16 Tom Mangold Is that Leroy? 00.05.17 Leroy Barrow Yeah. 00.05.17 Tom Mangold Hi Leroy, I’m Tom Mangold from the BBC in London. 00.05.21 Tom Mangold Deprived of everything by the conviction, Leroy has his own views about what really happened in Tulia on July the twenty-third. 00.05.29 Aston LEROY BARROW It was a modernised to me; it was a modernised lynching. In other words, somebody come and, and, and take, say that you have done something and you haven’t done anything, put you in jail, take everything you got. You didn’t have no win, it was a modernised lynching, man. 00.05.48 Tom Mangold But even vagrants have a living to earn and the question remains; could Leroy really be Tulia’s Mr Big? 00.05.54 Leroy Barrow Everybody in town know I pick up cans, that’s all I do. I go around pick up cans, mind my own business and try to stay free. And now, I got my place here, I think I come a long ways. I think I done come a long ways from losing everything I got. I ain’t got very much, no rights or nothing here but one thing about it, I’m free and I’ve got a chance. 00.06.11 Music 00.06.15 Tom Mangold Not a hundred yards away from Leroy’s home, a different kind of protest can be heard on Sundays. 00.06.20 Music 00.06.27 Tom Mangold The Pentecostal Church is the heart of Tulia’s black community. Here’s where they find the spiritual and musical muscle to fight back against the perceived injustice. 00.06.36 Music 00.06.39 Tom Mangold Talk to the worshippers here and they readily admit the community had no more and no less recreational drug use than anywhere else. But forty-six drug dealers, servicing a town of five thousand? Pretty unlikely. 00.06.53 Tom Mangold Pastor Henry Jackson. 00.06.54 Pastor Henry Jackson Now, to this ordeal about the drugs in this city, I want to say this; do you not know it takes a lot of money to entrap folks. I promise you that I could take a few dollars and I could have every kid in here doing something wrong before night. 00.07.19 Applause 00.07.24 Pastor Henry Jackson Tulia is a town that, we pray together and we stick together. And when one, when one is hurt, we all are hurt. 00.07.38 Applause 00.07.41 Tom Mangold And this one has been badly hurt. This is Mattie White, a prison officer, mother of six. Tom Coleman’s sting operation snared her two sons and two daughters. The family’s been devastated. 00.07.53 Aston MATTIE WHITE I’m wore out and I’m all stressed out and nerves bad and ...but like the pastor told me, he said oh you can handle it. He encouraged me a lot. 00.08.08 Tom Mangold Do you think they may have lied to you because you’re, you’re the mum? 00.08.11 Mattie White No, I don’t believe they would lie to me. 00.08.14 Tom Mangold Do you think… 00.08.15 Mattie White Because they even write letters to me and they tell me they don’t know why they’re locked up in there for something like that. 00.08.21 Tom Coleman What is now being questioned and investigated by State and Federal FBI officers is Tom Coleman’s relationship with the truth of what really happened during his eighteen months undercover operation. 00.08.34 Tom Mangold Do you think Tom Coleman definitely lied? 00.08.36 Mattie White Yes, he lied. I’m not even a policeman but, you know, I was taught when I went to school that if you go somewhere and you’re going to say something, you get that person’s name, you get the time, you get the date and you write it down. 00.08.50 Tom Mangold So, how did you write your notes out when you were an undercover officer? 00.08.55 Tom Coleman I would write them on my leg or the part of my arm where I kept my sleeve down… 00.09.00 Tom Mangold Yeah, show me. Show me. 00.09.03 Tom Coleman After the drug deal and after I got out of sight, after purchasing the drugs, I would write down the street and write down the time, the date, where it, what address I bought it from, put my pants back down because I can’t lose my leg like you can a little piece of paper inside the vehicle. 00.09.19 Tom Mangold But that was it. That was the evidence. 00.09.21 Tom Coleman Yes. 00.09.21 Tom Mangold That was your word against theirs. You’d bought the dope, you had the dope and you wrote the notes on your leg. 00.09.27 Tom Coleman Yes. 00.09.29 Tom Mangold So on the basis of no corroborating evidence at all, you put away a large number of people for hundreds of years in prison. 00.09.36 Tom Coleman Uh huh because they sold me narcotics. Period. 00.09.40 Music 00.09.54 Tom Mangold One young mother Coleman alleges sold him cocaine was Mattie White’s youngest daughter Kizzie; now serving time in a prison four hundred miles from Tulia, too far and too expensive for the family and her children to visit more than occasionally. 00.10.08 Music 00.10.15 Tom Mangold Hi, are you Kizzie White? Hi. 00.10.18 Music 00.10.23 Tom Mangold In order to avoid heavy punishment, Kizzie pleaded guilty on a plea bargain but still received a whopping twenty-five year prison sentence. 00.10.31 Tom Mangold She’s Mattie’s youngest daughter and has two young children of her own, aged three and six. She’s only twenty-one and won’t see the children grow up, indeed sees them only twice a year now. 00.10.43 Tom Mangold What do you miss most? 00.10.44 Kizzie White My kids. My family. I miss my family very much. 00.10.48 Tom Mangold What’s it like when the kids come? 00.10.50 Aston KIZZIE WHITE We have, we have a good time but when they leave, you know, that the sad part. 00.10.54 Tom Mangold But do they say Mummy, you’re a prisoner, why are you a prisoner? 00.10.59 Kizzie White Well my little girl asks me how come I was in prison and I told her that a guy lied on me. 00.11.07 Tom Mangold I want to talk to you about Tom Coleman. How did you meet him? 00.11.10 Kizzie White I met him at Allsup’s, which is a convenience store in Tulia, Texas and he asked me, you know, if I knew where he could get some drugs at. 00.11.19 Tom Mangold But he wouldn’t have used the word drugs would he? What, what, or did he, did he use another word? 00.11.22 Kizzie White Yeah. No he said drugs; did I know where he could get some drugs from? And I told him, I said no, I can’t help you with that 00.11.29 Tom Mangold Not very subtle is it? 00.11.31 Kizzie White No, but I, he was a fishy dude; he was a weird guy. 00.11.35 Music 00.11.41 Tom Mangold Coleman ingratiated himself with the black population of Tulia, going to parties, bringing drinks into the dry county, trying to win their trust, posing as the long-haired white trash drop-out TJ Dawson. 00.11.53 Music 00.11.55 Tom Mangold But now Coleman can discard the disguise, it’s hello to the real redneck ex-cop and goodbye to the alter ego TJ. 00.12.03 Tom Coleman I guess I need to get a haircut. 00.12.04 Barber Ok, well we’ll take care of that, if that’s what you want. 00.12.08 Tom Coleman TJ was a person who had nerve that could talk the street language. TJ kept Tom Coleman alive and I had to go to that persona of TJ to fit in with the crowd. But if I go and try to buy drugs from you like this, what are you gonna think? 00.12.28 Tom Mangold Sure. 00.12.29 Tom Coleman That’s the police right there. 00.12.30 Tom Mangold Because TJ had hair down to his neck. 00.12.32 Tom Coleman That’s right. I had hair all down to my back. 00.12.34 Tom Mangold This is the real you. 00.12.35 Music 00.12.40 Tom Mangold But even if TJ was a convincing druggie, the real cop underneath turned out to be a somewhat implausible investigator. For example, he didn’t even bother to use a tape recorder, a wire, to prove he was telling the truth about all the drugs he says he bought. So there never could be any corroboration. 00.12.57 Tom Coleman You have undercover and you have deep undercover. And I was deep undercover. When you work undercover you wear a wire and you have a guy down the street in a van or a car listening to you but when you work deep undercover you go into that situation as bare minimal as you can. 00.13.13 Tom Coleman If I would go inside an apartment and I get in an argument or get in a fight and I had a tape recorder on me or a wire on me, in a fight, you, you fight. You know, you, when you’re fighting somebody the, your clothes get torn and all that. If it would have fell out on the ground during that altercation that would be a death sentence to me. 00.13.39 Aston BARBARA MARKHAM Undercover Detective I wore wires. I wore wires in deep undercover roles. I knew when the dope deal was going to happen. It’s real easy to turn on a tape recorder. It’s real easy to hide a tape recorder and I’m not going to let anybody get to my tape recorder. 00.13.53 Music 00.13.57 Tom Mangold Former narcotics detective Barbara Markham, still a police officer today. She’s studied the Tulia Drugs Affair and is convinced that something is fundamentally wrong with the police side of the investigation. 00.14.09 Barbara Markham I’ve been in undercover narcotics since 1986 and I have never seen anybody work an undercover investigation like Tom Coleman did. 00.14.21 Tom Mangold I mean what you’re saying is wearing a wire comes with the job. 00.14.24 Barbara Markham Wearing a wire comes with the job. The Feds do it; many, many narcotic units do it. It’s part of gathering your evidence. 00.14.32 Tom Mangold So is getting fingerprints, standard operating procedure. 00.14.40 Tom Mangold Barbara Markham, seen here working undercover, always used them. Coleman didn’t bother when he bought the packets of cocaine known on the street as eight balls. 00.14.52 Tom Mangold Why was there no fingerprint evidence? 00.14.54 Tom Coleman Because if you’re a drug dealer and I’m buying a eight ball from you and you hand me the eight ball and I reached over there and picked that eight ball up and take it and stick it in my pocket, you’re going to know why did he pick it up like that. 00.15.05 Barbara Markham That makes no sense. His fingerprints, it’s going to be assumed they’re going to be on there but also you try to get fingerprint evidence off the baggie because it’s going to be there. Somebody packaged the dope, somebody wrapped it up in the baggie, somebody handed it to him and then his fingerprints. You at least try. Sometimes there’s going to be fingerprints, sometimes there may not. But you at least try. 00.15.29 Tom Coleman We didn’t need fingerprint evidence when I had you identified through a picture line-up. That’s the only, only time you take fingerprints and see that’s TV, ok? 00.15.40 Tom Mangold Just a minute, the picture, the picture line-up isn’t proof that the person sold you cocaine, the proof is in the fingerprints surely and presumably the notes written on the inside of your leg. 00.15.51 Tom Coleman Exactly. 00.15.52 Tom Mangold But there weren’t any fingerprints so we’re always back down to whatever you decided, whatever you wrote on your leg. 00.15.58 Tom Coleman That’s right. 00.16.00 Tom Mangold He says you sold him cocaine or you sold him cocaine on six occasions and marijuana on one. 00.16.08 Kizzie White That’s not true. No. I had one contact with him and that was at Allsup’s. 00.16.15 Tom Mangold Why would he want to lie about this? 00.16.18 Kizzie White I don’t, I really can’t figure that out yet. I don’t really still don’t understand that to this day, you know, how could he take my life away from me, you know, when what he said is not true. 00.16.31 Aston JEFF BLACKBURN Defence Lawyer Kizzie is a great example of the predicament that these folks find themselves in. No, she can’t produce positive evidence that, that will prove the negative. She can’t produce positive evidence that will show she only did meet Coleman once. She can’t produce that because she doesn’t have records or documents and so forth. Again it’s her word versus his. That’s where the issue of his honesty generally, his character and his trustworthiness become so important because we already know that Coleman was not a character to be trusted or his word was to be taken at face value. 00.17.07 Music 00.17.21 Tom Mangold Tom Coleman is the son of a Texas ranger, lawmen with semi-divine status in the state. He was the only applicant for the poorly paid job of undercover narcotics cop in Tulia. 00.17.32 Tom Mangold His work history was patchy and his previous job in law enforcement had ended unhappily when he walked off the job without warning owing some seven thousand dollars in unpaid bills. 00.17.43 Tom Mangold More seriously Coleman also faced possible criminal charges for stealing government petrol. 00.17.49 Music 00.17.53 Tom Mangold Did you steal the gasoline? 00.17.54 Tom Coleman No, I did not steal the gasoline. 00.17.56 Tom Mangold If you didn’t steal it, why did you eventually settle and repay the money? 00.18.00 Tom Coleman Ok. That was, that was brought up. The reason we went ahead and paid for it was because of the Tulia operation was so important that if we didn’t, it would expose me from being out from undercover to fight the sixty-five dollars worth of gas. 00.18.17 Tom Mangold But you have a great stain on your character now. 00.18.20 Tom Coleman Yes, I do. 00.18.21 Tom Mangold You were also accused of running up thousands of dollars of debt, that’s true isn’t it? 00.18.26 Tom Coleman That’s true, yes. 00.18.28 Tom Mangold Why did you do that? 00.18.30 Tom Coleman It was a small town and everybody, probably ninety percent of the people that live in that town got paid once a month. And when I would go into the feed store or go into the hardware store the patrons knew I worked for the Sheriff’s office and they would tell me; if you want to, you can just sign a ticket on it, we know you get paid once a month. And I would sign the ticket on it. 00.18.54 Tom Mangold Why didn’t you repay at the end of the month? 00.18.57 Tom Coleman Because I didn’t have seven, sixty-nine hundred dollars right then. 00.19.01 Music 00.19.04 Tom Mangold In fact Coleman’s career as a sheriff’s deputy in Cochran County ended abruptly when his boss wrote to the Texas Authorities formally warning them about Coleman’s record. 00.19.14 Tom Mangold Quote; “It’s my opinion that an officer should uphold the law. Mr Coleman should not be in law enforcement if he’s going to do people the way he did this town”. 00.19.24 Music 00.19.27 Jeff Blackburn There was a letter in his official state agency file from the employer that he’d worked for before, a sheriff, that said this man is dishonest, he shouldn’t be trusted and he shouldn’t be employed in law enforcement again. Now that’s a glaring difficult problem. 00.19.43 Tom Mangold Would it be fair to say that your law enforcement background is a bit spotty? 00.19.46 Tom Coleman In places, yes. 00.19.48 Music 00.19.52 Tom Mangold So Coleman became what’s called a gypsy cop; roaming around Texas looking for short contract employment with small impoverished local forces like Tulia, where he was unknown, could work undercover, had no community loyalty or involvement and could get out fast. 00.20.08 Jeff Blackburn He was in fact somebody that was travelling from agency to agency never sinking any roots, working for a few months here, a few months there and moving on. Bottom of the barrel as far as the, the police line of work is concerned. 00.20.22 Tom Mangold Here, he met Sheriff Larry Stewart who was so impressed with his father’s background and Coleman’s own demeanour that he hired him without bothering to ask too many questions. 00.20.32 Music 00.20.44 Sheriff Larry Stewart At the time I first met him he was very outgoing young man, very clean cut. I felt good about him. 00.20.51 Tom Mangold Did the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement tell you that his previous employer, a sheriff of Cochran County, had written an extremely derogatory letter about him suggesting that Coleman never be employed in law enforcement again? 00.21.08 Aston Sheriff LARRY STEWART No sir, they did not advise of that and I didn’t ask if there were any notes in his file. We felt like that we had done a competent investigation. 00.21.19 Tom Mangold But how could it be described as competent if his previous employer had written to the Texas Commission a letter which was on their file and which was written presumably for the specific purpose of warning people like you that in his opinion Coleman should not be hired as a law enforcement officer. How could that be missed? 00.21.41 Sheriff Larry Stewart In the resume, you know, like I said, I did not ask about any comments because I, that was just not a question that I asked and it was not volunteered by them. 00.21.55 Tom Mangold Do you think you should have asked? 00.21.58 Sheriff Larry Stewart Possibly it would have been a good question. 00.22.00 Music 00.22.06 Tom Mangold Sheriff Stewart gallantly carries the can but the truth is he only hired Coleman and gave him office space. The operation was actually funded and run by the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force, a semi- autonomous police unit in nearby Amarillo. 00.22.21 Music 00.22.26 Tom Mangold The Amarillo Regional Narcotics Task Force is a specialist drug-busting unit, one of several set up during the Reagan years to help poor communities combat drug dealing. 00.22.36 Tom Mangold Two thirds of their funding comes from Washington. Some of the Texas Regional Forces have achieved a dubious reputation for running poor, even corrupt criminal operations. 00.22.47 Tom Mangold So Coleman’s Tulia operation was technically a joint assignment between the Sheriff of Tulia and the Amarillo Task Force to whom Coleman was directly accountable at all times. But they in turn were accountable only to themselves. 00.23.02 Tom Mangold Who supervises the operations of the Task Force? 00.23.06 Aston SCOTT HENSON American Civil Liberties Union Well at the time of the Tulia arrests, essentially no one. The Task Force is an independent law enforcement agency that is made up of multiple jurisdictions that contribute resources and officers to it. But the taskforce itself is an independent agency that is not accountable to any elected official. 00.23.25 Tom Mangold So, nobody was guarding the guardians? 00.23.28 Scott Henson That’s right. 00.23.29 Music 00.23.31 Tom Mangold In their war on drugs the Texas Task Forces also had a tendency to arrest large numbers of poor black people, useful for upping statistics when grants are dependent on arrest figures. 00.23.43 Scott Henson The number of people they arrest is actually the outcome measure that they’re required to report to get their next year’s funds. That’s what they’re judged on when determining whether they’ve been successful or not. 00.23.55 Tom Mangold It is in their interest to arrest and prosecute as many people as they can. 00.24.00 Scott Henson That’s right and clearly the, that is, is rewarded in the law enforcement system and the best example I can give of that is when Tom Coleman made his forty-six arrests, he was named Law Enforcement Officer of the Year. 00.24.17 Tom Mangold That award has been the source of great pride to Coleman; official approval of his Tulia triumph. 00.24.25 Tom Mangold Now this is, what’s this? This is you receiving your Lawman of the Year award is it? 00.24.29 Tom Coleman Yes, yes. 00.24.30 Tom Mangold That must have been a grand moment for you. So how did you feel? 00.24.33 Tom Coleman Well it was surprising, I didn’t even think I was going to get it, you know. I mean it was a good moment; it was an honour to get it. 00.24.41 Tom Mangold It was the Regional Task Force that raised the money to pay him for the eighteen months sting. 00.24.46 Tom Mangold The Task Force has refused to answer any questions whatsoever regarding the controversial aspects of the Tulia operation. 00.24.57 Tom Mangold Nevertheless, the arrest of forty-six people, a hundred and twenty-one indictments, an apparent Aladdin’s cave of drugs, seemed to be great news for Tulia. 00.25.06 Tom Mangold When the Tulia trials opened, the pony-tailed Coleman, Texas Lawman of the Year, was the only prosecution witness who mattered. It was his word and his word only. Incredibly the jury was never informed about his unfortunate law enforcement background. 00.25.22 Tom Mangold Tulia hosted the trials, the jury was drawn from homeowners of the tiny local population of five thousand where everybody knows and has an opinion about everybody else. 00.25.34 Tom Mangold Coleman knew at once that he was among friends. 00.25.39 Tom Coleman As I would be standing in the courtroom and the jury was leaving the jury box, some of the women that were walking by would be facing me as they were walking out, would mouth the words ‘thank you’ to me, while I’m standing there. And it’s not proper to speak to the jury while you’re in court or during any kind of proceedings, even some of the men that were walking out, they would walk out with their hands down to their waist and as they would pass me, they would give me a thumbs up. 00.26.10 Music 00.26.18 Tom Mangold Billy Sue Gayler, one of the jurors; widow of a former sheriff, as Texan as a lasso, kind friendly and openly pro-black. 00.26.26 Tom Mangold She can’t now recall the name of the young man she found guilty nor what sentence she handed down – it was actually fifty-three years imprisonment – nor does it concern her now that she wasn’t informed about Coleman’s background. 00.26.39 Tom Mangold When it was all over and you began to read more about Tom Coleman’s background, did it begin to make you wonder if he had taken you in? If he deceived you at all? 00.26.50 Aston BILLY SUE GAYLER No, I never thought about that. I never did. 00.26.55 Tom Mangold Didn’t you at any stage say; gosh, I wish I’d known that before. 00.27.01 Billy Sue Gayler No because he was honest with us on the stand. That’s one of the first things he said, was; I am no angel. 00.27.10 Tom Mangold Shouldn’t law enforcement officers sort of be close to the angels? 00.27.14 Billy Sue Gayler Well, it’s according to the work they’re doing and he’s not doing a very, very nice job. This is not an easy job. This is something he has got to say and he did walk the walk and talk the talk and if you don’t, you could be dead. 00.27.35 Tom Mangold The jury was really on you side? 00.27.37 Tom Coleman Yes, the jury knew the problem that there was. The people of Tulia knew they had a drug problem. 00.27.44 Music 00.27.52 Tom Mangold And if they didn’t know before the arrests they certainly found out after. How was public opinion moulded? 00.27.57 Tom Mangold Part of the answer lies in a short walk to the local library in Tulia and a glance at the back numbers of the now defunct Tulia Sentinel. 00.28.05 Music 00.28.08 Tom Mangold Just twelve days after the arrest the Sentinel reports; ‘we don’t like these scumbags doing business in our town’. And called for very long prison sentences. 00.28.18 Tom Mangold A few weeks later a few less than impartial headlines 00.28.23 Jeff Blackburn There was such an extraordinary misconception about drugs, misconceptions that were created by the Sheriff’s office, by the District Attorney’s office and by the newspapers, all of whom went along for the ride there. That I think it would have been completely impossible for any of these defendants to have gotten a fair trial in Swisher County. 00.28.44 Tom Mangold In the end the defendants had little chance of impartial justice. Even if the jury ignored everything else they were nearly all white and the defendants were nearly all black and this is Texas. 00.28.57 Tom Mangold You pleaded not guilty. What happened at your trial? What went wrong? 00.29.03 Kizzie White Well for one reasons they had, only had white on my jury, they only had older white people on my jury, you know and they weren’t trying to hear, hear my lawyer out nor me out. So, I really didn’t have a chance when I first walked in there. 00.29.17 Tom Mangold Jason Williams had a similar problem. He was the defendant sent down for fifty-three years by Billy Sue Gayler and her fellow jurors. 00.29.26 Tom Mangold Why did you believe Tom Coleman but you didn’t believe the defendant? 00.29.29 Billy Sue Gayler Well I guess that’s just the way it is, the way they tell you, the way they sit there and say, he didn’t turn to us, he didn’t give us anything, he, I waited for him to turn to me and say, to all of us and say, I’m sorry that this has happened, or to say I want to go back and get some education, I want to stay here to do these things, I want to do better. I never heard one bit of encouragement from that young man and that young man was old enough to know that he should be wanting to do better. 00.30.09 Tom Mangold But he couldn’t say that if he said he was innocent? 00.30.13 Billy Sue Gayler Well, no, that doesn’t mean that. 00.30.15 Tom Mangold But it does… 00.30.16 Billy Sue Gayler No, it doesn’t mean that sir. 00.30.16 Tom Mangold If he says he’s innocent, he wouldn’t say, what would he apologise for? 00.30.20 Billy Sue Gayler Well he wouldn’t be apologising he would be saying I would like to do better. That’s all I would have liked to have heard. 00.30.29 Tom Mangold But how could he say that if he was speaking the truth when he was… 00.30.31 Billy Sue Gayler Well because he needs to be better. 00.30.34 Tom Mangold But how could he say that if he was speaking the truth and said he hadn’t done anything? 00.30.39 Billy Sue Gayler I, I don’t know but I have a feeling and I’m very intuitive and I did the best I could do and I know that he was guilty. 00.30.56 Tom Mangold Do you not think that under the circumstances where you had a huge preponderance of black defendants it might have been shrewder to take the trial out of Tulia and to ensure that there were black jurors? 00.31.09 Sheriff Larry Stewart Well there were, there were black jurors. 00.31.11 Tom Mangold How many? 00.31.12 Sheriff Larry Stewart I can’t tell you right off hand. 00.31.14 Tom Mangold One, two? 00.31.16 Sheriff Larry Stewart There were some. Probably so. 00.31.17 Tom Mangold One or two? 00.31.17 Sheriff Larry Stewart Probably so. 00.31.18 Tom Mangold That’s not very many. 00.31.19 Sheriff Larry Stewart That’s true but there were black jurors. And that is probably representative of this community as far as numbers. 00.31.27 Tom Mangold Well there would have to be ten percent to represent the numbers. If there were one or two that’s not representative of the… 00.31.35 Sheriff Larry Stewart Yeah, I guess, if that’s what the ratio profile is then that would be correct. 00.31.41 Tom Mangold With sixteen defendants still serving prison sentences, fifteen on probation and others fined, Tulia’s beginning to feel a little like Birmingham, Alabama in the sixties. 00.31.52 Tom Mangold The signs of bad justice are too powerful to ignore, the tiny Texas town is becoming famous for all the wrong reasons. 00.32.00 Female reporter There were forty-three different arrests and forty of those were black. 00.32.04 Man Do you think that Tom Coleman was the right man for this job? 00.32.07 Man 2 The government’s war isn’t on drugs; rather it’s a war on people. 00.32.11 Tom Mangold Under fire from civil rights groups are both the dismal record of the Regional Task Forces and the small town unpleasantness revealed by the Tulia drug busts. But the biggest assault remains the one on Tom Coleman’s integrity. 00.32.24 Aston SCOTT HENSON American Civil Liberties Union I think Coleman’s integrity has proven to be a disaster. Four of the cases that he built in Tulia have unravelled and we believe that, that many if not most of the others will before it’s all said and done. 00.32.36 Aston TOM COLEMAN I did what I was told, I did my job and I believe I did it very well. In fact with a few mistakes, but you’re going to have mistakes in everything that people do. 00.32.48 Jeff Blackburn You’ve been cleared honey. You’ve been totally cleared. 00.32.52 Tom Mangold Tania White, on of Coleman’s little unavoidable mistakes. She’s Kizzie’s sister. In court she faced a ninety-nine year prison sentence but there was a tiny problem. At the time Coleman swore that Tania was selling him the drugs she was also hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma depositing a cheque for eight dollars. 00.33.11 Tom Mangold Do you know which day, for sure, she did supply drugs to you? 00.33.16 Tom Coleman The day of my report. 00.33.17 Tom Mangold So your report is right and the evidence that she was cashing a cheque in Oklahoma is wrong. 00.33.23 Tom Coleman As far as I’m concerned yes. 00.33.26 Aston JEFF BLACKBURN Defence Lawyer I would invite him to travel to Oklahoma City and talk to the bank records examiners, the bank clerks, the custodian of those records in the same manner that we have and I expect his level of satisfaction might increase. 00.33.38 Tom Mangold And the documentary evidence that Coleman got it wrong was conclusive. 00.33.43 Jeff Blackburn Eight dollars that day saved this woman’s life. Eight dollars and signing this deposit slip. 00.33.51 Tom Coleman That case could have been a typo but Tania White did sell me drugs. 00.33.55 Tom Mangold What do you mean a typo? 00.33.57 Tom Coleman It could have been a typo with the date or the indictment or whatever can, can happen because I wrote, I handwrit my reports and I hand them to a secretary to be typed. 00.34.09 Jeff Blackburn That’s a complete lie and it’s typical of the sort of after- the-fact excuse that he makes up. 00.34.15 Tom Mangold But she’s off; she’s off the charge. 00.34.18 Tom Coleman Fine, she’s off the charge. She dodged a bullet. 00.34.22 Tom Mangold Ramona Strickland, another little Coleman slip-up. She was charged with supplying him with a hundred and eighty dollars worth of cocaine. 00.34.30 Tom Mangold But Coleman’s official report described her as being six months pregnant. Small problem, she wasn’t. 00.34.36 Tom Coleman I identified her as being pregnant. But when you walk up to her house and her house is dark and she opens the door, the front door that far to talk to you through that crack and all you can see is her face and her neck and part of her body, she looked pregnant to me. 00.34.54 Tom Mangold So you got it wrong? 00.34.55 Tom Coleman Yes I got it wrong. 00.34.58 Tom Mangold You saw this woman briefly. She opened the door that much, ok? 00.35.02 Tom Coleman No, no, no that’s wrong. I seen this woman every day, I mean I’ve seen her at the store, I seen at parties… 00.35.10 Tom Mangold Was she… Did she look pregnant in the store? 00.35.13 Tom Coleman I didn’t take it. I didn’t, I didn’t notice because I wasn’t dealing with her. 00.35.20 Tom Mangold But you said you saw her. 00.35.22 Tom Coleman Exactly, I seen her. 00.35.23 Tom Mangold Well, you’d know if she was pregnant, everybody knows if a woman is pregnant. 00.35.26 Tom Coleman Well, yeah. Can you tell if a woman’s pregnant? Some women you can’t tell is pregnant. 00.35.30 Tom Mangold But you could. You said she was six months pregnant. 00.35.32 Tom Coleman Well she looked, she looked six months pregnant. I called it like I seen it. 00.35.37 Tom Mangold Well not quite. 00.35.39 Tom Mangold When he learned she wasn’t pregnant he simply scratched his notes out on the official report. Unluckily for her she was sentenced before the deception emerged. What Coleman did was at worst criminal. 00.35.51 Jeff Blackburn It is against the law to take an original government document, that something so important as somebody’s liberty and freedom may be hinging on, a potential criminal conviction and simply mark parts of it out. That’s beyond belief to call that just a mistake or negligent or honest in any way shape or form. 00.36.11 Tom Mangold And it gets worse still. 00.36.13 Tom Mangold Yul Bryant; described by Coleman as a tall black male with bushy type hair is actually bald and short. Case dismissed. 00.36.20 Tom Mangold Billy Don Wafer was able to prove he was at work when Coleman alleged he was selling him cocaine. Case dismissed. 00.36.27 Tom Mangold Zuri Bossett, Coleman said she phoned from her apartment but she had neither a landline nor a mobile. Case dismissed. 00.36.35 Music 00.36.44 Tom Mangold When Tom Coleman first arrived in Tulia in the guise of TJ Dawson, he got a job working as a cowboy. This was also the scene of another of his investigative failures. 00.36.54 Music 00.36.56 Tom Mangold Although he’d been tipped off that the man who owned the Tulia cattle market might be a drug dealer, Coleman failed to spot the truth even though he was working for him. 00.37.05 Auctioneer 00.37.11 Tom Mangold For all his undercover skills Coleman never discovered that the owner possessed a substantial quantity of white powdered cocaine. 00.37.18 Tom Mangold The auction barn is one of the few businesses that makes good money in Tulia, enough for the then owner to afford the rare and expensive white powder. 00.37.27 Tom Mangold His disgrace came when he was arrested on paedophile charges and subsequently committed suicide, the cocaine was found in his car. 00.37.35 Tom Mangold But that was the only known source of powdered cocaine in Tulia. And what’s become very puzzling since Coleman’s sting operation, is how the poorer black communities suddenly acquired the wealth to develop this expensive drug habit. 00.37.48 Music 00.37.54 Tom Mangold Of a hundred and twenty-one indictments the vast majority were for dealing in powdered cocaine. But everyone on this side of the tracks has told me powdered cocaine is almost unheard of here. It’s far too expensive. 00.38.06 Music 00.38.09 Tom Mangold For the minority who seek escape or pleasure the drugs of choice are invariably cheap crack cocaine or marijuana. Nobody in this small tight community is aware of a sudden invasion of powdered cocaine. So where did it come from? 00.38.24 Tom Mangold For people like Leroy Barrow the very idea of all those black cocaine dealers in a town like Tulia is absurd. 00.38.31 Leroy Barrow The town is too small ain’t no way there’s that kind of drugs. Ain’t nobody got that kind of money, you know. How you going to be have forty-something people drug dealers in a little town right here? There’s not even that kind of money here. 00.38.43 Tom Mangold Coleman swears he bought powdered cocaine from the named suspects. Under Texas law the cocaine content of a bag is immaterial. If it contains any cocaine at all you’re guilty. 00.38.56 Tom Mangold All the bags he turned into his bosses at Amarillo had cocaine alright, but we’ve learned that some contained absurdly low percentages of cocaine ranging from eleven right down to three percent. 00.39.09 Tom Mangold Now that’s not enough to intoxicate a prairie rabbit let alone an addictive Texan. The usual cocaine percentage in street drug deals is between eighty and ninety percent. 00.39.20 Tom Mangold When it was tested for purity, the cocaine that you bought in was about one percent. 00.39.24 Tom Coleman Mmm. 00.39.25 Tom Mangold That’s very low, isn’t it? 00.39.26 Tom Coleman Yes. 00.39.27 Tom Mangold Why so low? 00.39.28 Tom Coleman I have no idea. 00.39.32 Tom Mangold Each time Coleman turned in a bag of cocaine to his bosses he was paid a hundred and eighty dollars to purchase some more and catch the dealers. 00.39.40 Tom Mangold However, one defence attorney has revealed that his client has admitted selling Coleman quantities of powdered cocaine but fifty miles away in Amarillo. This cocaine, he claims, has never been accounted for. 00.39.53 Tom Mangold If this unsubstantiated allegation is true, it could help explain how and where all that powdered cocaine suddenly turned up in Tulia. Anyway, Coleman’s now repaid the seven thousand dollars he owed from his last job. 00.40.07 Scott Henson Where does a man on his salary get the seven thousand dollars? Where does he get the powdered cocaine when the blacks in Tulia aren’t using it? Something doesn’t add up. 00.40.21 Tom Mangold It might, eventually, when a new judge hears the outstanding appeals. Meanwhile, small town, big issues. 00.40.29 Scott Henson Tulia has been a watershed. It has reinvigorated the civil rights movement. The vast majority of people in prison for drugs are black, there’s a reason for that. And Tulia has brought that into a clear crystal view for the whole country. And for tiny little Tulia, that’s pretty impressive. 00.40.52 Music 00.41.08 Tom Mangold Do you ever now lie in bed at night and stare at the ceiling and think about the kids without parents who’ve gone to prison, the broken families? Wives who can only visit their husbands twice a year? All the misery that has been caused by this. Do you ever think… 00.41.21 Tom Coleman Yes I’ve thought about it. 00.41.22 Tom Mangold Well what do you think? 00.41.23 Tom Coleman And they wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t sold me drugs. Period. 00.41.27 Music 00.41.28 Graphic The FBI is now investigating the Tulia drug busts 00.41.39 Leroy Barrow Yeah I’m angry because the man came and…my life and tried to take my life away from me. I think, to tell you the truth I think he fooled the whole town. I think he fooled the whole town. The way I’m looking at it I think the man came in here and put a mark on this town. 00.41.54 Music 00.41.54 Graphic Texas has since passed ‘The Tulia Law’ requiring corroboration in undercover investigations 00.42.09 Jack the Barber It just breaks my heart because I’ve lived here and my dad lived here and I can’t talk to, he can’t even hear me but dad and I have seen this town grow, we’ve seen the old courthouse go down. We’ve seen the trees go; now we’ve seen the people go. And it’s, it’s just not right. I have no idea how it’s going to heal. 00.42.35 Music 00.42.40 Graphic 16 defendants remain in jail 00.42.50 Tom Mangold Are you going back to Tulia? 00.42.52 Kizzie White No sir, maybe just to get my kids but that’s it. 00.42.56 Tom Mangold Why? 00.42.57 Kizzie White Because I don’t feel comfortable in that town you know, no more, just because it’s not, they’re not right. It’s not fair. 00.43.05 Music 00.43.09 Graphic Tom Coleman took another police job 00.43.13 Graphic Following allegations of sexual impropriety and lying, he was fired 00.43.19 Tom Coleman If I would do this again in the same situation in Tulia, if the operation started tomorrow, I would do the same, I would do it the same way I did it the first time. 00.43.30 End Music 00.43.31 Graphic He now works as a gas pipe inspector 00.43.38 Voice over You can comment on tonight’s programme by visiting our web site at: www.bbc.co.uk/correspondent Credits 00.43.39 Reporter TOM MANGOLD Camera STEVE ORGAN Dubbing Mixer PHITZ HEARNE VT Editor NICK KAMPA Graphic Design STEVE ENGLAND Production Team ALEXANDRA CAMERON SARAH EVA MARTHA O’SULLIVAN AGNES TEEK Production Manager JANE WILLEY Unit Manager SUSAN CRIGHTON Film Research NICK DODD Web Producer ANDREW JEFFREY Research ANDY BLACKMAN Picture Editor BERNARD LYALL Produced and Directed by EAMON HARDY Deputy Editor DAVID BELTON 00.43.50 Voice over Next on Correspondent – life in the city that the Guinness Book of Records calls the planet’s most polluted. That’s next Sunday at seven fifteen. 00.44.00 CORRESPONDENT 00.44.02 Editor KAREN O’CONNOR © BBC MMIII 00.44.04 End BBC Correspondent 1 1