Shortly after taking office, Reagan ordered CIA director William Casey to do whatever was necessary to support a small band of anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as the Contras, most of whom were strays from Somoza’s feared and hated National Guard. Reagan followed up on November 23, 1981, with a directive to funnel $19.3 million through the CIA to the Contras. But that was not enough, argued Enrique Bermúdez, the founder of the guerrilla group. They needed much more.105 Then, in December 1981, “Reagan signed a secret order authorizing Contra aid for the purpose of deposing the Sandinistas.” The only question was where to get those funds; there was simply a limit to the depths that the CIA and National Security Council budgets could tap into to finance the Contras.106 Congress, meanwhile, already stung by the debacle in Vietnam, was not about to loosen the purse strings.107
And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.108 With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at Ilopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in check, the once formidable line of defense had dwindled to a porous nuisance. Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.
Initially, Nicaraguan exiles Oscar Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, whose nickname was El Rey de las Drogas (the King of Drugs), set up their wholesale operations in San Francisco. But although they had the product, they didn’t yet have the distribution network to move the initial shipment of cocaine into the retail markets. That came only when they managed to link up with Rick Ross, an illiterate yet entrepreneurial black man who became the conduit between the Contra drug runners and the Crips and Bloods gangs in L.A.109
The result was nothing less than explosive. From the Contra wholesalers, top-quality cocaine was then packaged and sold in little rocks of crack that reaped more than $230,000 per kilo in retail profit. Now, drug money, and all its attendant violence, pounded on a population with double-digit unemployment and declining real wages. The logistical strength of the Bloods and Crips, with an estimated fifty thousand gang members, spread the pain as they set up drug franchises throughout the United States to sell crack like it was on the dollar menu.110 Soon crack was everywhere, kicking the legs out from under black neighborhoods.111
While the new self-created drug crisis threatened the security of millions of African Americans, the administration focused its efforts on facilitating greater access to weapons for the rebels purchased with off-the-books money. In 1982, Vice President George H. W. Bush (the former director of the CIA) and his national security adviser, Donald Gregg (a former CIA agent), worked with William Casey to run a program named Black Eagle, which was designed to circumvent Congress and funnel weapons to the Contras. As the logistical pipelines solidified, it became clear that Manuel Noriega would be essential to this operation. Through a series of top-secret negotiations, U.S. officials worked out landing rights at Panamanian airfields for the Black Eagle planes to transport weapons to the Contras and the use of Panamanian companies to launder money.112
Noriega, who was already in a four-hundred-million-dollar partnership with the Medellín cartel, seized on the profitability of this deal with the White House and began to divert Black Eagle planes and pilots for drug-running flights to the southern United States. The Reagan administration’s response to what should have been seen as a diplomatic affront—especially since the president had tapped George H. W. Bush to lead the drug interdiction activities in South Florida—was telling and disturbing. The administration simply required the Panamanian president to use a percentage of his drug profits to buy additional weapons for the Contras.113
Thus, although Reagan bragged to the American public about using U.S. military resources “to cut off drugs before they left other countries’ borders,” his staff’s shielding of Noriega and the Colombian traffickers in fact actively allowed cocaine imports to the United States to skyrocket by 50 percent within three years. The Medellín cartel’s cut alone was ten billion dollars a year in sales.114 The Reagan administration’s protection of drug traffickers escalated further when the CIA received approval from the Department of Justice in 1982 to remain silent about any key agency “assets” that were involved in the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of narcotics.115
This network of White House protection for major drug traffickers swung into full gear once Congress, through a series of amendments in 1982 and 1984, shut off all funds to the Contras and banned U.S. material and financial support for the overthrow of the government in Nicaragua.116 Undeterred by the law, the Reagan administration simply ramped up the alternate and illegal streams of revenue it had already devised: drug profits and arms sales to Iran.117 At this point Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, deputy director of the National Security Council, stepped in to create the larger, more dynamic operation that would soon replace Bush’s Black Eagle.
North brought to the work both a military efficiency and a truly amoral focus. Years later, even when under congressional klieg lights, he seemed to imply that the breaking of laws was appropriate.118 “I remain convinced that what we tried to accomplish was worth the risk,” he said.119 North understood that his role, working with his CIA counterpart Duane Clarridge, was to ensure that the Contras had weapons. Congress had cut off all funding, so profits from cocaine would have to become an alternate source. That warped framing of the Contras’ needs led North to facilitate the trafficking of cocaine into the United States, which included working with the CIA to transport 1,500 kilos of Bolivian paste; diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in “humanitarian aid” to indicted narcotics traffickers; and refusing to pass the names of known drug runners on to the appropriate authorities.120 He also saw to it that the millions of dollars in profits from the sale of narcotics were then funneled safely out of the U.S. and that those funds went to arms dealers, especially in El Salvador and Honduras, who could equip the Contras with everything from boots to grenades.121 The FBI learned that North’s NSC, brandishing the pretext of “the interest of national security,” routinely intimidated Customs and DEA officials to back off from making good narcotics cases. Moreover, Blandón and Meneses, who trafficked at least five tons of cocaine, or the equivalent of 16.2 million rocks of crack, into California, “led a charmed life” as the NSC and CIA blocked police, sheriffs, and the DEA from stopping the flow of drugs and money.122 Similarly, in the summer of 1986 North was Manuel Noriega’s champion in the halls of power. The New York Times had run a series of articles citing well-placed sources and a Defense Intelligence Agency report that the Panamanian president had “tight control of drug and money-laundering activities” in and out of the country and, therefore, although making only $1,200 a month, had a personal fortune of several hundred million dollars. It was too much even for Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), an ultra-right-wing senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who then went on Meet the Press and branded Noriega “head of the biggest drug trafficking operation in the Western Hemisphere.” The barrage hit too close to the truth and North’s attempt at damage control swung into action. He confided to his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, “You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega in Panama and I have developed a fairly good relationship” and now, given the media onslaught, the dictator needed the Reagan administration’s help in cleaning up his image. North was eager but, h
e continued, it was going to cost. The dictator’s terms were simple. In exchange for one million dollars and a PR blitz from the White House, Noriega offered to destabilize the Sandinista government. At first, Poindexter wobbled. Was this a setup “so that he can blackmail us to lay off?” Reagan’s National Security Advisor, however, quickly set aside those initial qualms and authorized North to open negotiations with Noriega noting “I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities.” Secretary of State George P. Schultz was on board, as well. The CIA, this time, refused to play along. The agency “didn’t want to do it . . . just didn’t want to touch that one.” But North was adamant. Noriega, who was instrumental in flooding the United States with cocaine, was a valued asset. North even swooped in to rescue a major Contra ally who was arrested by the FBI with 345 kilos of cocaine. The lieutenant colonel, using the full authority and aura of the NSC, weighed in on the court and had the drug kingpin’s sentence reduced by 75 percent (down to five years) and the locale of incarceration changed from a maximum- to a minimum-security (“Club Fed”) facility.123
While there was inordinate concern about avoiding prison sentences and the legal consequences for those who poured tons of cocaine into the United States, there was an equal determination to lock up and imprison the communities bearing the brunt of the White House’s narco-funding scheme.124 Unlike in 1981, when Reagan had indicated that treatment for addicts was the route he would take, his speeches and policies now became focused on enforcement, criminals, and harsh, no-mercy punishment.125 With the onset of the epidemic of crack, a drug that had become thoroughly associated with African Americans, notions of treatment went out the window, despite numerous studies proving that treatment was not only more effective but also more fiscally sound and prudent. And, as one DEA agent remarked, “no one has yet demonstrated that enforcement will ever win the war on drugs.”126 Nonetheless, Reagan dragged America down the road of mass incarceration.
Each of the Reagan administration’s decisions undercut the supposed stated goals of protecting American families, preventing the flow of drugs from washing onto the nation’s shores, or bringing democracy to a war-torn society. The decision to fund the Contras with profits from the sale of cocaine, for example, came at a time when the economic downturn had created high unemployment, increasing homelessness, the depletion of savings, and other major stressors, which only heightened the possibility of creating a drug-addicted society at the very moment when narcotics use had actually stabilized or decreased.127
As the horrific toll crack cocaine caused in the inner city became more and more obvious, the administration’s response was not to fund a series of treatment facilities but to demonize and criminalize blacks and provide the federal resources to make incarceration, rather than education, normative. “Drugs are menacing our society,” the president told the nation in a September 1986 speech delivered from the White House. “They’re threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They’re killing our children.” The United States, he conveyed, was a nation under attack.128
“Despite our best efforts,” Reagan added with a hint of shock and dismay, “illegal cocaine is coming into our country at alarming levels.” At that point, in what looked like the nadir of surrender, Reagan identified public enemy number one: “crack.” And then, just to reaffirm the heroes and villains in this set piece, the president sent out a clarion call, proclaiming, “Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.” He positively vibrated with a sense of righteous, patriotic indignation. No one, he intoned, has the right to destroy the dreams and shatter the lives of the “freest society mankind has ever known.”129 In this important speech, the president not only laid out an epic tale of good, freedom-loving Americans locked in a mortal battle for the nation’s soul against crack addicts and drug dealers, but in doing so, he also defined the racial contours of this war.
Media fanned the flames, and then some. With little to no evidence, news outlets warned that crack, reputedly the most addictive drug known to mankind, was galloping out of the crime-filled inner cities and, as Newsweek claimed, “rapidly spreading into the suburbs.” The New York Times echoed the refrain identifying “epidemic” crack use from Long Island to “the wealthiest suburbs of Westchester County.”130 The media’s overwhelming tendency to blacken crack only added to this national panic. Between 1986 and 1987, 76 percent of the articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times dealing with crack referenced African Americans either directly or through code words—urban, inner city, etc. Whites were mentioned only one third of the time.131 The message was clear: the black “plague” was coming.132
The crack plague had already swept through African American neighborhoods around the country with absolutely no warning. There had been minor use of crack in the 1970s, but it began to visibly show up in 1984 and exploded in 1985 and 1986—just as Congress cut off funding to the Contras, leaving the administration desperate to finance the war against the Sandinistas.133 As battles over lucrative drug turf escalated, black communities were besieged with rampant gang violence. Most had no idea how this crack scourge had arisen or how those who had once toted simple handguns now carried AK-47s and other automatic, military-grade weapons. It was clear immediately that something had gone horribly wrong.134 A National Urban League report declared that the “gains made over the past 25 years, many the result of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, will … unravel unless steps are taken to arrest the pervasive problem of crime in the black community.”135
A research team from Harvard and the University of Chicago explained, “Between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate for Black males aged 14–17 more than doubled and homicide rates for Black males aged 18–24 increased almost as much.”136 The magnitude of the firepower and the sheer number of killings were, in fact, critical factors that led African American life expectancy rates to actually decline—something that not even slavery or Jim Crow had been able to accomplish.137 Moreover, many other sectors of the black community were also horribly affected by murders and crack—fetal death rates, low-birth-weight babies, and children now in foster care. The researchers concluded that the perilous decline of African Americans on so many quality-of-life indicators “represents a break from decades of convergence between Blacks and Whites on many of these measures.”138
The divergence, however, was about to get exponentially worse. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which stipulated mandatory sentencing, emphasized punishment over treatment, and created the 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing between crack and cocaine based on the myth that the cheap narcotic rock was more addictive than its powder form. As the NAACP explained the law’s 100-to-1 formulation, “a person must possess 500 grams of powder cocaine before they are subject to the same mandatory prison sentence (5 years) as an individual who is convicted of possessing just 5 grams of crack cocaine (despite the fact that pharmacologically, these two drugs are identical).”139 The National Urban League was convinced that tougher sentencing policies were not the answer. The incarceration rate would be so high, it warned, that society would not be able to bear the costs.140 Congress, nonetheless, followed up in 1988 with an even harsher version of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that instituted mandatory sentencing for even a first-time offense, added the death penalty for certain crimes where drugs were an aggravating factor, and denied housing and other human rights to those whose greatest crime was having a friend or a family member in the drug trade even visit.141
The Supreme Court had played a critical role in tightening the noose. A series of cases, beginning in 1968 but escalating dramatically in the Burger and Rehnquist eras, legalized racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.142 The Court
• affirmed that police, even though their overall racial bias is well documented, can stop anyone based on something far below the understood threshold of probable cause;143
• approved racial profiling;144
• upheld
harsh mandatory sentencing for drug offenses;145
• tossed out irrefutable evidence of racial bias in sentencing because of its implications for the entire criminal justice system and required, instead, proof of overt, visible discrimination against the individual defendant to support a claim of violation of equal protection under the law;146
• approved, as the justices openly admitted, “ridiculous” peremptory strikes to eliminate blacks from a jury so long as the prosecutor’s stated rationale was not based on race;147
• shielded district attorneys from disclosing the role the defendant’s race played in prosecutorial discretion;148
• ruled that police could use their discretion instead of probable cause to search motorists for drugs;149
• determined that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act cannot be used by private individuals to sue entities, such as prosecutors or police, in the criminal justice system on grounds of racial bias; and150
• found that pretext traffic stops—for example, having a busted taillight or not using a turn signal—are a legal and permissible ruse for police to hunt for drugs.151
Taken together, those rulings allowed, indeed encouraged, the criminal justice system to run racially amok. And that’s exactly what happened on July 23, 1999, in Tulia, Texas. In the dead of night, local police launched a massive raid and busted a major cocaine trafficking ring. At least that’s how it was billed by the local media, which, after having been tipped off, lined up to get the best, most humiliating photographs of forty-six of the town’s five thousand residents, handcuffed, in pajamas, underwear, and uncombed bed hair, being paraded into the jail for booking. The local newspaper, the Tulia Sentinel, ran the headline TULIA’S STREETS CLEARED OF GARBAGE. The editorial praised law enforcement for ridding Tulia of “drug-dealing scumbags.”152
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