Whitey's Payback (17 page)

Geneva France 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 parole 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, Texas, 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.”

Tarallo became a mentor to Lucas. A former Los Angeles police officer, Tarallo had been a member of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a precursor to the DEA. He was old school. Says Gary McDaniel, a Florida-based private investigator, “To understand Lucas, you have to start with Frank Tarallo. He comes from a law enforcement culture that believes the end justifies the means. Tarallo is partly responsible for having created Lucas.”

With Tarallo as second in command in Miami, Lucas received plum assignments. In his early twenties, Lucas became supervising agent in a major cocaine case right out of
Miami Vice
.

The coke deal in the case involved many moving parts. Two Cuban drug dealers were sprung from prison so they could circulate as CIs (confidential informants) in Miami’s cocaine underworld. The two were paid $20,000 each to relocate their families, then assigned to a joint task force that included Miami police officers; agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and young Lucas of the DEA.

Setting up a coke deal in Miami in the early 1990s was not difficult. The task force soon organized a major transaction: About 440 kilograms of Colombian coke, with a street value of more than $10 million, would be shipped via speedboat from the Bahamas to a place called Manny’s Marina. (Manny’s owner, a convicted dope dealer, was to receive $500,000 for cooperating.)

That many of the major players were convicted felons working for the government wasn’t unusual. But it was unusual to have a rookie agent, who spoke no Spanish at the time and was barely one year out of Quantico, acting as case supervisor. Clearly, Lucas was being groomed to be a frontline soldier in the war on drugs.

The cocaine arrived in U.S. waters on the night of September 4, 1992. After the bales were transferred to a boat manned by informants and undercover agents, the dope was then taken to a government warehouse.

The shipment was supposed to be delivered to a local smuggler named Gilberto Morales, but Morales was having trouble finding $600,000 to close the deal. The Colombians and the Bahamians grew concerned; they suspected Morales and his partners were planning to rip them off. Two contract killers from Colombia were dispatched to get to the bottom of things. Morales became terrified. And that’s when Peter Hidalgo got involved.

Hidalgo had sold Morales boat equipment. “I dealt with many shady characters,” says Hidalgo. “Sure, I knew people used powerboats to smuggle cocaine. I don’t get to choose my customers, but I was careful. There was a sign on the wall of my store that said
IN GOD WE TRUST. EVERYBODY ELSE PAYS CASH
. I was not in the cocaine business and made sure I could not be implicated in any way—or at least that’s what I thought.”

Morales knew that Hidalgo sold boat parts and equipment to the Bahamians who were now threatening to have him killed. The Bahamians trusted Hidalgo. Morales asked Hidalgo to call them and reassure them that he was not seeking to cheat them, that he was a man of his word. Says Hidalgo, “I knew the Bahamians from the boat business. If I didn’t do this for Morales, he might wind up dead with his body floating in the Miami River. I defused the entire situation.”

Today, speaking by phone from the Federal Correctional Institution in Coleman, Florida, Hidalgo realized that making the call was the biggest mistake of his life. It made it possible for various informants and Special Agent Lucas to set him up as a major player.

On the night of September 8, 1992, Hidalgo was arrested and charged with being the kingpin of the entire operation. Hidalgo was stunned: “I had heard of things like this from movies and TV shows; now I was living it.”