Generally, I like cops and get along well with them, though I sometimes have problems with particulars of the policies they are entrusted to carry out (as do some cops, by the way, though you are unlikely to hear them express it publicly.)
Most people in law enforcement take their job seriously and conduct themselves with an adequate level of professionalism and respect. This varies in different jurisdictions depending on the competency of the training, quality of supervision, and the historical forces that have shaped the attitudes of a particular police force or prosecutorial agency.
Law enforcement can be a high intensity endeavor. Our culture tends to glorify the forces of law and order, so that some on the job crack under the scrutiny, or become drunk with the power and authority that has been bestowed upon them. In my time as a journalist, I’ve come across some who deviate from the norm of basic professionalism. They tend to fall into one of three categories:
1) The blowhard self-promoter, a cop or prosecutor who is driven by ego and self-aggrandizement. Public servants in disguise, this breed of lawmen are driven primarily by the desire to advance their profile in the media and the hope that, soon, they will land an agent and/or book deal. If it’s a detective or federal agent, they are angling for a cushy job as a consultant on a TV series or movie, or dreaming that one day they will meet Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. If it’s a prosecutor in the office of the U.S. attorney or district attorney, they are laying the groundwork for a career in politics that they hope will one day take them all the way to the White House (see: Rudy Giuliani).
Being based in New York, I have encountered many cops and prosecutors who fit this profile, and others who hope to one day fit this profile. They are sometimes entertaining or charismatic figures who are masters at manipulating the media and playing the system. They are also, quite often, a danger to the concept of fairness and justice. In some cases, they will trample on due process, withhold evidence, frame people, or engage in all manner of malfeasance if it is to the benefit of their careers.
2) The lazy bureaucrat. It is true that you may find this breed in almost any sector of government employment, but in law enforcement laziness and slovenly investigative work can lead to wrongful indictments and convictions, ruined lives, and an incalculable loss of faith in the American system. Not only that, but the lazy lawmen or prosecutors—like all lazy bureaucrats—spend more time trying to cover up for their shoddiness than they do on their actual jobs.
3) The outright corrupt agent of the law. Movies and TV shows have led the public to believe that for a cop to be corrupt, he or she must be blowing people away, working in consort with gangsters or drug lords, or absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, corruption in law enforcement is far more mundane. It starts with an attitude that the biggest threat to proper police work is “liberals” and that the “liberal media” is out to get cops. Cops and prosecutors in this camp are unable to separate their personal politics from their job, and it affects their relationship with the public. Everything comes down to us versus them. Racism, excessive use of force, bullying and rude behavior, disrespect for community members—these are the true hallmarks of corruption in law enforcement. With attitudes like these, it is a short distance to planting and falsifying evidence, lying on the witness stand, doing whatever it takes to make a case, even if it violates the law.
In the twenty-plus years that I have been writing about crime in America, I have seen the relationship between the public and law enforcement deteriorate. The irony is that during this time period, crime in most major cities in the United States has gone down dramatically. State and federal prison systems throughout the country are bursting at the seams. The United States locks up its citizens at a rate ten times higher than the next highest industrialized nation. The consequence of this spiraling process of incarceration, where people are locked up and put through the system as a form of social control, breeds distrust and hostility.
The primary reason for this bad blood between the police and the public is not hard to pinpoint—the U.S. war on drugs.
Of all the subjects I’ve written about, it is hardest to maintain objectivity when writing about U.S. narcotics policy, both at home and abroad. The narco war is such an unmitigated and costly failure, and has wreaked so much havoc on the criminal justice system, that what seems to be called for is not old-school, two-sides-to-every-story type journalism, but flat-out advocacy journalism from the point of view of decriminalization and reform.
I am not necessarily a legalization advocate, nor do I pretend to know of a magic solution that will stanch the flow of narcotics into the United States and/or alter the drug consumption habits of U.S. citizens. But I do know that the course the United States has been on for forty years, since the War on Drugs was first launched by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, has been a disaster. It has led to a system in which narcotics cops are rewarded for high numbers of arrests, and so they invariably go where those arrests are easiest to make—poor communities primarily populated by people of color. It is the main reason our prisons are disproportionately populated with black and brown-skinned people.
On an international level, the drug war has polluted our relationship with countries around the globe. Though everyone knows that the United States is overwhelmingly the primary marketplace for illegal narcotics from around the world, the U.S. government often bases its relationship with other nations—and its willingness to supply economic aid—based on whether or not they fall in line with U.S. drug policies. Successive U.S. administrations have demanded that countries like Colombia and others in South America engage in vigorous eradication programs, often causing a rift between the governments in those countries and their own people. In Mexico, the United States has sponsored and financed the militarization of the war on drugs, adding fuel to a fire that has raged for years and engulfed the lives of an entire generation.
The corrupting consequences of the War on Drugs have been almost beyond calculation. Over the last forty years, the number of people who have been killed, incarcerated, and had their lives shattered in the effort to keep people from selling and using a product they clearly want to use makes the thirteen years of alcohol prohibition, from 1919 to 1932, look like child’s play. Perhaps some day in the future, U.S. citizens will look back on this era of the narco war as a violent folly and have as difficult a time explaining it to their children and grandchildren as previous generations have had trying to explain the Roaring Twenties. Both of these eras of prohibition have succeeded in giving rise to an underworld criminal structure and framework for organized crime that has left a legacy of corruption and violence for the generations that followed.
And yet, politicians and civic leaders in the United States seem incapable of having a rational, mature conversation about national narcotics policy. It rarely comes up as a topic in presidential debates. Each year, Congress authorizes, on average, $40 million in expenditures on various anti-narco initiatives, the overwhelming majority of that spent on costly international and domestic investigations, special task forces, raids, seizures of drugs and property, arrests, prosecutions, and other law enforcement activities in the most expensive domestic “war” the United States has ever waged.
The decline in narcotics use in the last forty years has been negligible. Illegal drugs are now easier to get, and cheaper, than ever before. A failed policy is a failed policy. The inability of the United States to alter the direction of this ongoing fiasco has brought about an incalculable level of social devastation. As long as this continues to undermine the relationship between the people and the social system under which we live, it is a subject that, as a concerned citizen and as a storyteller, I plan on revisiting over and over again.
1.
DOPE
Playboy, December 2009
Lee Lucas rose through the ranks of the DEA the old-fashioned way—employing shoddy evidence, partnering with thugs, and abusing the authority of his position.
Geneva F
rance remembers vividly the day a task force of federal narcotics agents came pounding at her front door. It was 6:00 a.m. and she was about to get her kids ready for school. Her third child, twenty-one months old, was barely out of the crib. Once she woke the kids and sent them off, France would head to her part-time job at a nursing home, where she emptied bedpans and cleaned and fed old people for a living. Just twenty-two years old, an African-American single mother struggling to raise three children on a subsistence income, she had a difficult enough life without a swarm of lawmen arriving at her house.
“It’s the sheriff’s department. Open the door or we’ll kick it in.”
France opened the door. A stream of cops flooded through, in uniform and carrying guns. They fanned out around the house, opening drawers and turning everything upside down.
“They went rambling,” France recalls. “They weren’t searching for anything in particular, so I didn’t know why they were there until one of the officers asked me, ‘Where’s the drugs?’ ”
“Drugs?” she said. “What drugs?”
A female cop made her stand against the wall and spread her legs. France was searched, cuffed and told, “We’re taking you in.”
“One of those officers threw my baby on the sofa, and the baby started crying. The female officer said, ‘We’re taking your kids to child welfare.’ I said, ‘The hell you are.’ ”
Luckily for France, her sister Natasha was there. Natasha lived at the residence and was eighteen, old enough to serve as legal guardian. Natasha missed school that day to stay with the kids so they would not be seized by the government.
No one told Geneva what she being charged with. She was led out into the predawn darkness, loaded into a sheriff’s car, driven to a holding cell seventy miles away in Cleveland, booked, photographed, fingerprinted, and shuffled off to arraignment court. “I was more shocked than frightened,” she says. “I remember thinking, This will all be over soon. They made some kind of mistake. They gonna have to let me go.”
France had no way of knowing, but her long nightmare had only begun.
She had become a small fish caught in a big net. Her arrest on federal narcotics charges was part of a massive drug sweep in Mansfield, Ohio, an economically depressed industrial town of 50,000 inhabitants in the Northern District of Ohio. On the same morning France was arrested, nearly thirty drug busts took place in the area, the culmination of a six-month investigation known as Operation Turnaround.
The case was spearheaded by veteran DEA agent Lee Lucas. In Mansfield, Lucas was dependent on local informant Jerrell Bray, a thug, convicted criminal, and diagnosed schizophrenic. Together Lucas and Bray made street-level crack deals around town for two months, with Lucas often posing as a friend of Bray’s. Bray would make the overture by phone and in person, allegedly with someone interested in buying or selling crack or powder cocaine. A location would be set, and sometimes a surveillance team recorded the transaction. Then, one morning in November 2005, the arrests went down in dramatic fashion—doors busted open, drug-sniffing dogs let loose in people’s homes, occupants commanded to “get on the fuckin’ floor!”
The investigation netted few actual drugs. No narcotics were found at the home of France or most others arrested, but it didn’t matter. Informants Bray and Agent Lucas were prepared to identify each and every defendant in court if necessary.
The busts made headlines in Cleveland and the surrounding area; Operation Turnaround was touted as a major success. The star of the show was Special Agent Lucas, local boy made good. In his career, Lucas had handled major drug cases in Miami and South America; now he was back home serving as a white knight in the war on drugs.
Unfortunately, this scenario was seriously flawed and built on a tissue of lies. It will take years to calculate the collateral damage—the mess challenges not only a star DEA agent and those who supervised and prosecuted his cases but the entire criminal justice system in which he operated and the nature of the war in which he served.
Law enforcement personnel in the Northern District of Ohio will tell you it’s not difficult to make dope cases in the town of Mansfield. In 2008, Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire hour to Richland County’s drug problem, using a panel of local addicts, former dealers, and cops to illustrate her point. As one attorney remarked, “Making dope busts in Mansfield is like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The fruits of the Mansfield arrests were numbingly familiar—poor blacks (twenty-five of the twenty-six people arrested were African American), marginally educated, some with previous legal troubles, swept up in a collective show of force. Most quickly copped a plea. Some defendants had been out on parole and were now facing life sentences. Pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence was par for the course, part of the give-and-take that keeps our judicial system from collapsing under the weight of more drug cases than a city, district or state can handle.
There was one small glitch: A startling number of the people charged—including Geneva France—claimed they weren’t present during the drug transactions. They had been misidentified, and they could prove it.
Their protests were met with a collective ho hum by the authorities. Don’t criminals often plead innocence? Assistant U.S. Attorney Blas Serrano, lead prosecutor for Operation Turnaround, was surprised some defendants opted to go to trial. That was unusual, but if they wanted to go through the time and hardship of adjudication, facing ten years to life in prison, the government was ready to take them on.
One parolee defendant was wearing an ankle monitor when his drug transaction supposedly took place, and he could prove he wasn’t there. Another was on a plane to Chicago and had a boarding pass and flight records to back that up. The U.S. attorney’s response was “So what?” They had Bray and Lucas, who would swear the defendants engaged in drug transactions.
France said she was home braiding a friend’s hair at the time Bray and Lucas alleged she climbed into their 1997 Chevy Suburban and sold them more than fifty grams of crack. Who was going to believe a single mother and her friend in the face of a star DEA agent?
In February 2006, after a four-day trial, France was found guilty. Even though she was a first-time offender, mandatory sentencing dictated that she serve ten years behind bars. When she still maintained her innocence at the sentencing, U.S. District Judge Patricia Ann Gaughan berated her and called her a pathological liar.
All these plea bargains, claims of innocence, and guilty verdicts stemming from Operation Turnaround would normally have gone unnoticed. It is a truism of the drug war that arrests and indictments make headlines, but what follows unfolds in obscurity deep within the bowels of the criminal justice system. Unless it’s a celebrity or a wealthy white defendant, who gives a damn? No one beyond France’s lawyer and family would have lost a moment’s sleep over her conviction were it not for an unexpected bombshell delivered by Bray.
In May 2007, the rat who pointed his finger at so many fellow African-American citizens turned against his white overseer, Lucas. “Everything I tell you may spin your head but it’s true,” Bray told Carlos Warner, a criminal defense attorney with the federal defenders office in Ohio. Bray claimed he and Lucas had railroaded nearly thirty people on fraudulent drug charges.
Bray’s confession sent shockwaves that reverberated throughout the country—particularly in jurisdictions where Lucas had made cases and put people behind bars during his nineteen-year career.
In December 2007, then-U.S. Attorney Greg White announced that in light of Bray’s confession and after review of the evidence, many convictions could not stand. To date twenty-three people have had their convictions overturned and been released, including France, who served sixteen months in prison for a crime she didn’t commit.
In May 2009, Lucas was charged in an eighteen-count federal indictment with knowingly making false statements in DEA reports, obstruction of justice, perjury, and multiple civil rights violations.
The events playing out in Ohio are similar to those in Tulia, Texa
s, where many of the town’s African Americans had been rounded up and convicted on drug charges based on the uncorroborated testimony of Tom Coleman, a highly decorated undercover agent and son of a Texas Ranger. It took years to prove that Coleman was a liar. Eventually, in August 2003, thirty-five of the thirty-eight people convicted were pardoned by Governor Rick Perry, but only after an NAACP call for an inquiry exposed Coleman’s malfeasance.
In Mansfield, as in the Tulia scandal, there were early signs that many cases were rotten. Yet prosecutors still sought convictions based on weak evidence supplied by Lucas. They put the agent on the stand and let him use the full authority of his position to frame innocent people.
Working as a DEA agent must have felt perfect to Lee Michael Lucas. At Saint Edward High School the star wrestler often talked about becoming a cop. After graduating in 1986, he enrolled at Baldwin-Wallace College and worked part-time as a bouncer. While in college, Lucas interned with the DEA, the preeminent federal agency in the government’s war on drugs. Unlike the buttoned-down types at the FBI, DEA agents tend toward improvisation and daring undercover operations—men of action versus intellectuals or crime analysts.
Lucas graduated from college in 1990 with a degree in criminal justice; within months, he was accepted into the DEA and was trained at its academy in Quantico, Virginia. In early 1992, Lucas received his first assignment, to the hottest spot in the drug war: Miami, Florida.
With his stocky wrestler physique Lucas looked more like a biker than a federal agent. He exhibited an enthusiasm for undercover work—he wore his hair long, sometimes in a ponytail, and dressed like a man of the streets. Occasionally, he grew a goatee or Fu Manchu mustache. If he wanted, Lucas could look like one tough hombre. In the Miami DEA office, agents considered him to be a valuable asset.
“He was an excellent agent,” said Frank Tarallo, Lucas’s supervisor in Miami. “He worked really well undercover and did everything. Today no one wants to do undercover work, but he did. He did surveillance, handled seizures, and worked well with informants.”
American Gangsters Page 13