DIRTY OR DUPED? [continued from part 1]

"The name of the dope game is to get the big fish, and no one was
willing to swim upstream," says attorney Wright. "To my knowledge,
none of these people were questioned, none were interviewed."

Alonso claimed he had connections to high-level dealers in Mexico, but
his biggest strikes turned out to be day laborers, Mexican immigrants
who congregated at the intersection of Ross and Carroll looking for
work, say their attorneys.

On July 19, Emigdio Esparza stood at the intersection, just as he did
every day, hoping to find work as a painter.

According to his attorney Bill Stovall, at approximately 2 p.m. two
Hispanic men approached him, offering him $8 an hour to paint a room.
Esparza agreed and stepped into their vehicle, but after traveling a
few blocks, the men claimed they needed more painting supplies.

A second vehicle, a Ford Escort, was parked nearby and the men
wondered if Esparza would drive it to a 7-Eleven on East Grand. That's
where their boss would be waiting, and they could then caravan to the
job site.

When Esparza arrived at the convenience store, Alonso and DeLaPaz
pulled up in a white Lincoln Continental. Alonso approached Esparza
out of the earshot of DeLaPaz, who remained in the car. Esparza gave
the car keys to Alonso, who immediately opened the trunk of the
vehicle, according to Stovall, and looked inside.

As they both peered at four black trash bags inside the trunk, Esparza
grew suspicious. "Does this have anything to do with drugs?" he asked
Alonso, who brushed aside his fears and told him to follow them to the
job site. Using the pretext of a traffic violation, patrol officers
detained Esparza long enough for Herrera to obtain a search warrant.
Confiscated were 68 kilos of what police claimed to be cocaine, though
the arrest affidavit does not reflect whether any field tests were
performed.

On August 6, Stovall scheduled an examining trial, a proceeding used
by criminal lawyers to discover evidence.

Greg Long, the chief prosecutor of the District Attorney's Organized
Crime Division, called Officer Eddie Herrera to present his case.
Herrera testified he had set up visual surveillance at the convenience
store because a confidential informant (Alonso) had given them
information that a suspect was "bringing a large amount of cocaine to
Dallas" from Houston.

"But I mean, there is no way we could exactly be sure where it was
coming from," Herrera testified.

Since the informant wasn't wearing a wire and the police were in no
position to hear, Herrera was relying on the informant's word that
when Esparza was in the parking lot, he had told the informant, "It's
in the trunk [referring to the cocaine]." Herrera also testified that
the informant was being "fronted the 60 kilos," meaning no cash was
required for the $6 million worth of drugs, even though the informant
had never dealt with the suspect and had only made the deal that day.

"Is this one of the largest cocaine seizures you are aware of in the
history of the city of Dallas?" Long asked.

"It's one of the largest that I have been involved in in my nine years
as a police officer," Herrera said.

That is, until two weeks later.

On August 19, a light brown car followed by a Chevy Astro minivan
approached Denny Ramirez and Daniel Licea, also day laborers, also
standing at the intersection of Ross and Carroll. According to
Ramirez's attorney, Adrianna Martinez Goodland, each vehicle was
driven by a Hispanic man, one of whom said his name was Enrique and
asked Ramirez and Licea if they wanted a job building houses.

The pay would be $40 a day. The men said they had to buy more
construction supplies at Home Depot and asked them if Licea would
drive the van to a Jack in the Box restaurant on West Illinois Avenue
where they would meet and go to the house.

The two laborers agreed, arriving at the Jack in the Box first,
Goodland says, going inside to eat lunch and leaving the van
unattended with its windows down and doors unlocked.

The narcotics division treated this as a major buy-bust
operation.

Ten narcotics detectives, two narcotics sergeants and five patrol
officers staked out the Jack in the Box. DeLaPaz wore a wire; a police
helicopter flew overhead, and a surveillance team was set to capture
the transaction on videotape.

If DeLaPaz knew this was a bogus bust, his attempt to pull it off so
openly was either daring or foolish.

DeLaPaz denies knowing that Ramirez and Licea were day laborers who
had been duped into driving vehicles loaded with drugs, fake or
otherwise, according to sources close to DeLaPaz. He insists that both
suspects knew they were in the middle of a dope deal and claims he was
only acting on information supplied by Alonso, who said he was
expecting a large shipment of cocaine from one Jose Luis, someone he
claimed to be dealing with in Laredo. Alonso also claimed that he and
Luis once had a falling out but had now patched things up. DeLaPaz
spoke to a man on Alonso's cell phone; he said he was Jose Luis,
though the caller ID was blocked.

When DeLaPaz approached Denny Ramirez in the Jack in the Box parking
lot, according to the arrest report, Ramirez said that Luis had sent
them, although there is no audio recording of this part of the
conversation.

The videotape makes Ramirez and Licea seem unaware and unfocused, more
interested in finishing a soda than delivering 76 kilos of cocaine.

Even if these were mules, employees of Jose Luis hired to deliver his
dope, losing $7 million in drugs could cost them their lives.

Yet Licea handed the van's keys to Alonso, offering to let him
drive.

It seemed surprising that he would surrender control of the drugs
without word from Luis that he had money in hand. Unless, of course,
Luis was willing to deal on credit with Alonso, someone with whom he
Much of this would later be confirmed by Gonzalez's attorney Karl Rupp
in interviews he gave to WFAA and the Morning News in mid-April. Based
on his client's cooperation, the FBI had confiscated billiard chalk
cones from the home of Jose Ruiz--the man with speed tucked down his
pants who was arrested with Alonso. Investigators also discovered
invoices for large amounts of chalk from Billiards and Bar Stools, a
Lewisville billiards supply store.

The cones, used by players to dust their hands, contained gypsum, the
same substance found in the fake-drug cases.

The store's invoices reflected that someone who represented himself as
"Luis Alonso"--the name of Enrique's brother and a paid
informant--purchased 234 pounds of chalk on three different occasions
over the summer.

One purchase was the day before Ramirez and Licea were arrested at
Jack in the Box; another was the day before Emigdio Esparza was
arrested after meeting Enrique and DeLaPaz at 7-Eleven. Luis Alonso
would later deny he purchased the billiard chalk.

Rupp maintained that informants had also purchased at least two
vehicles at Silva's Auto Sales, a common meeting place for the
informants. The vehicles were then loaded with the fake drugs to set
up unsuspecting defendants. This, of course, was no news to Yvonne
Gwyn.

There are those who refuse to believe that any of this could have
occurred without dirty cops. "No way these cops were duped.

This was a money deal," claims attorney Barbare, who believes that
undercover officers were either splitting seizure payments with
informants or pocketing the payments themselves.

These were veteran narcotics officers, she adds, how could they not
know the difference between gypsum and cocaine?

Cocaine is flaky and has a crystal-like sheen; gypsum is dusty and
dull. And once you smell methamphetamine, you'll never forget it. Its
harsh odor leaps right out of its packaging.

Didn't anyone bother to cut open a kilo, hold it in his hand, take
photographs so he could brag about the bust of a lifetime?

"Even if you believe the cops were duped by their informants, you
can't get around the field tests," says Dallas attorney Don Tittle,
who represents several of the fake-drug defendants in their federal
civil rights action against the city and the officers. "That's the
biggest weakness in their story."

Turns out, however, field tests are far from infallible. The tests,
which contain packets of chemicals that change color to indicate the
presence of drugs, can register false positives, reacting to acetone,
alcohol and certain soaps and detergents, though there is no positive
response to gypsum. "If anything, the field tests are
super-sensitive," says Dr. James Woodford, a forensic chemist and
expert witness. "So if you salt or spike a larger sample with a tiny
amount, you can get a positive result." If the informants "salted the
mine" before they packaged the fake drugs, that might account for
positive field tests.

Arrest reports reflect that at least six different officers performed
the field tests in the 20 or so cases where the lab analysis found
large quantities of gypsum.

So if they lied about the field-test results or didn't perform the
tests, they, too, might be implicated in a broader conspiracy.

"Of all the cases we dismissed [69 cases on 46 defendants]," says
District Attorney Bill Hill, "only six or seven defendants had no
controlled substances whatsoever." The rest of the cases had trace or
small amounts of drugs--or were dismissed, Hill says, because they
were tainted by questions regarding the credibility of the officers
and their informants.

Following the money may be the only way to connect DeLaPaz and Herrera
to any wrongdoing. Enrique Martinez-Alonso and Jose Ruiz now claim the
police forged their signatures on informant pay vouchers, allegations
attorneys for DeLaPaz adamantly deny. Alonso says he received only
$50,000 of the $210,000 police records reflect he was paid. Ruiz's
attorney claims he was never a paid informant.

A handwriting expert could resolve the swearing match if and when the
FBI decides to take sides.

The same swearing match would occur if the feds went after the
officers for conspiring to deprive these former drug suspects of their
civil rights.

For the other informants, Alonso was the gatekeeper to the police,
jealously guarding his position with them, says one source close to
the investigation, because that was his connection to the money.

Ironically, if Alonso implicates the police, he will have to offer
more than just his uncorroborated testimony.

That corroboration might come from a money trail or the factual
coincidences among the fake-drug cases: no follow-up investigation to
get to the source of the drugs, no confiscated vehicles to expose
their true owner, no FBI or DEA involvement, which keeps DeLaPaz and
Herrera in control of the cases.

But if these officers were dirty, they were dirty and dumb. They would
have to know it was just a matter of time before they got caught.

Eventually an innocent defendant would insist his lawyer plead him not
guilty.

Eventually a prosecutor would make a plea offer so high that the case
was going to get tried. Eventually the drugs would be analyzed and the
scam exposed, which is exactly what happened.

But if an informant learns that the dope he helps seize isn't being
analyzed, and he gets paid anyway, he might try to play the cops,
plant some fake drugs in a small amount, see what he can get away
with. Since it worked the first time, he might do it again and again,
each time in larger quantities, each time earning more money--until he
gets caught. "That's how they become informants in the first place,"
says one former undercover officer. "They keep doing it until they get
caught."

It seems easier somehow, more comforting, to blame this scandal on
shoddy police work, on cranking out numbers, on willful blindness, on
a super-snitch who controlled a narc rather than a narc who controlled
his snitch. That way we can content ourselves by tightening a few
procedures, making certain that drugs are now analyzed before
indictment, that the rank and file is better trained in field testing,
that supervisors have more checks and balances over financial matters.

That way we don't have to look at how we encourage greedy informants
to lie for a living.

That way we don't have to look at the reasons why the drug war muddies
everything it touches. That way we can kid ourselves like Chief Bolton
did and proclaim the system works.