DIRTY OR DUPED?

Who's to Blame For the Fake-Drug Scandal Rocking Dallas
Police?

Virtually everyone.

Almost without warning, she bursts into a flash flood of
tears.

All it takes is for you to gently scratch the surface of her memory of
the time she spent behind bars for a crime she did not commit.

Her soft eyes redden easily; her high-pitched voice at times grows
incomprehensible, hindered by her thick Honduran accent and
uncontainable emotion. "I never sell drugs to nobody," she says. "I
swear I am innocent. I swear to God."

She riffles through some papers scattered on her desk until she finds
what she is looking for: a crumpled sheet of lined notebook paper.

On it is a green crayon drawing, a sad stick figure sitting behind
bars, and scribbled across the top are the words "My grandma is in
jail."

Yvonne Gwyn, grandmother, naturalized citizen, detail shop owner,
takes a deep breath, hoping to calm herself so she can tell her
story--an Orwellian nightmare if you believe her--whose particulars
hold some of the clues to the enigmatic "fake drug" busts that have
scandalized the city, undermined the integrity of the Dallas Police
Department and called into question the ethics of the Dallas County
District Attorney's Office.

On September 7, Gwyn had been in business for a few months and was
struggling to pay rent. To cut costs, she had moved into the back of
her detail shop on Fort Worth Avenue in Oak Cliff. She believed it was
just a matter of time before Gwyn's Auto Service Center would be
making money. "I love to work, and cleaning is my hobby," she says.

At around 11 a.m., a customer came into her office claiming he had
just purchased a car from Silva's Auto Sales, also on Fort Worth
Avenue. The Honda Civic was for his brother, who wanted it detailed
and tuned, or so she was told. Gwyn didn't know the customer, whom she
describes as a "clean-cut Spanish guy," but found it odd that someone
claiming to be his brother phoned her shop three times while the
customer was in her office. He filled out a work order, writing only
the initials "D.J." and an address and phone number that would prove
fictitious. The customer seemed nice enough; he said he would return
for the Honda in the afternoon.

But five uniformed Dallas police officers arrived first, guns drawn,
handcuffing Gwyn, planting her in a chair while they obtained a search
warrant.

"I kept saying, 'What's going on? What's going on? I'm a 52-year-old
woman. I've never been arrested before,'" she recalls. "One of the
officers, he said, 'You, Ms. Gwyn, you want to be rich too fast. You
are going to jail for the rest of your life.'"

She was at once terrified and outraged.

There had to be some mistake.

She had always respected authority; she had even cooperated with the
Dallas police. When her son was arrested on drug charges, she gave an
undercover officer information about her son's supplier, whatever it
took to help her family, she says. One former narcotics officer even
claims Gwyn had signed on as a confidential informant.

Strangely, the police never searched her business; the warrant was
issued solely for the 1984 Honda Civic parked beside her shop.
According to arrest reports, Officers Mark DeLaPaz and Eddie Herrera,
undercover officers within the Dallas narcotics unit known as the
"street squad," were working with an informant who claimed that he had
purchased a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine from Gwyn earlier that
same day. Although a kilo has a wholesale street value of about
$16,000, no money changed hands; the transaction between dope dealer
and customer apparently was done on credit.

To corroborate his informant, DeLaPaz claimed he had placed Gwyn under
surveillance. Through binoculars, he observed her remove a package
from the Honda--the same package the informant would later claim she
sold him. A third undercover officer field-tested the package for
cocaine with positive results. That was all the information Judge Jay
Robinson needed to sign a warrant, which when executed at 2 p.m.
uncovered a cache of 30 kilos of what appeared to be cocaine hidden
inside the backseat and speakers of the Honda. All but a small amount
of it would later turn out to be gypsum, commonly found in Sheetrock.

The case had uncanny similarities to a spate of unusually large busts
that had recently begun to wind their way through Dallas County
courts: same two undercover officers, same confidential informant,
multi-kilo dope deals conducted on credit, no guns, property or cash
confiscated, no audio or video surveillance, no FBI or Drug
Enforcement Administration involvement despite the mega-quantities of
drugs seized.

Most of those arrested were auto mechanics, day laborers and
construction workers who possessed none of the trappings of
high-rolling dope dealers.

Many of them were undocumented or recent Mexican immigrants who had no
criminal records, no money, no English proficiency, and whose fears of
deportation might make them less likely to protest too loudly.

Because the Dallas County District Attorney's Office had a policy that
no drugs would be analyzed by its forensic lab unless the case was
going to trial, any defendant unwilling to risk a jury verdict and
long sentence would never know if the drugs he had just pleaded guilty
to selling were, in fact, drugs.

The only forensic evidence that he possessed a controlled substance
would be a simple field test that was never intended by its
manufacturer to resolve the issue of guilt or innocence.

That no one had earlier snapped to this systemic problem either spoke
volumes about the purity of drugs that plague our city streets or the
number of people who have been wrongfully convicted because they chose
to settle for a lighter sentence.

But in August, when several Dallas defense attorneys--Cynthia Barbare
and C. Tony Wright the most vociferous among them--began comparing
players in the drug trade, midlevel wholesalers who can supply ounces,
a pound, maybe even a kilo of cocaine or speed. "If an officer is able
to buy a kilo by himself without an informant around, he is a good
officer," Markham says. "He has done some real infiltrating."

Those sorts of deals, however, take time to develop, particularly if
the undercover officer is making the buy. The higher up you go in the
drug world, the more businesslike the transaction. There are
negotiations, there are associates, there are guns. And often there is
lunch. "The first meet is just an introduction from your CI," says one
former Dallas narcotics officer. "The guy wants to meet on neutral
ground--a public place or restaurant--unless he is fixing to hijack
you." Maybe the CI makes a buy, but the officer doesn't act on it; and
maybe beeper, cell phone numbers and code words are exchanged. "You've
got to work your way into his trust."

For larger quantities of drugs, you need a well-connected informant,
someone who can introduce you to more than just your neighborhood
dealer. "Officers are taught they are only as good as their CIs,"
Markham says. "An informant will get you there a lot quicker and safer
because you don't have to spend as much time building trust."

Officers develop informants by arresting them and convincing them to
snitch on their sources.

Generally, if they do three deals bigger than their own, they can work
off their cases.

If they want to keep working, they do it for money. DeLaPaz couldn't
develop an informant with much horsepower by busting dime-rock
dealers, but over time the line between the targets of the street
squad and other narcotics units began to blur. "Spanish-speaking
officers were pushed to work Spanish-speaking informants into bigger
seizures," says one former narcotics officer.

DeLaPaz and his partner Herrera began working with a formidable
informant, a referral to the street squad by someone in the federal
task force, says another former narcotics officer.

On June 16, 1999, DeLaPaz and his informant negotiated the purchase of
a half-pound of cocaine from a man who went by the street name David.
The informant handed him $4,400; David handed the informant 252 grams
of cocaine. No arrest was made on this "buy-walk" because officers
anticipated a bigger kill. A month later, the informant and DeLaPaz
convinced David--Enrique Martinez-Alonso--to sell them 3 pounds of
methamphetamine for $19,500. Patrol officers stopped Alonso en route
to the deal; his passenger Jose Guadalupe Ruiz was carrying more than
1,100 grams of speed in his crotch.

Alonso was good for two charges, Ruiz for one, and both would later
agree to work off their cases and become confidential informants.

"One day you're buying dope from a guy and sticking a gun in his face,
and the next day he is working for you," says one former narcotics
officer. "Then the legal system gives them tremendous power.

It lets them walk into a courtroom and put other people
away."

Enrique Martinez-Alonso acted as though he knew every Hispanic in Oak
Cliff, East Dallas and Pleasant Grove. He had a large family himself,
and though he seldom held a job, he would buy and sell cars, according
to one acquaintance, attending car auctions with his friend Antonio
Silva, owner of Silva's Auto Sales. As far as DeLaPaz was concerned,
Alonso was just a street-smart hustler, a bit too grandiose, bragging
about how he would go into a bar and drop $2,000 in an evening.

He enjoyed flashy jewelry and cars, which only attracted people to
him--the wrong people.

That's what made him a good informant.

In July 2000, Dallas criminal defense attorney Eric Smenner
represented a man accused of delivering 3 kilos of cocaine to Alonso.
Alonso actually purchased 4 kilos and kept one for himself, Smenner
claims.

His client might have been guilty, but he was also angry, and he
demanded a jury trial just so his lawyer could ask the informant one
question: "What did you have down the front of your pants when you
left?" Without police surveillance to corroborate what took place
inside the client's condo, there was just the word of Alonso, who
denied he had stolen anything.

He did admit, however, that undercover officers hadn't searched him,
which directly violates police procedure.

"The correct way to do a controlled buy is to search the snitch before
and after he makes the buy," says Smenner, a former prosecutor and
Irving police officer. "If you don't, how can you be sure the
informant didn't take drugs inside someone's house just to set them
up?"

After his client received a 15-year sentence, Smenner approached
DeLaPaz and attempted to warn him. "I used to be a police officer, and
you have a dirty snitch," Smenner recalls telling him. "You better
watch him. He's going to get you into some serious trouble down the
road."

By February 21, 2001, Alonso had worked off his two cases, which were
dismissed by the district attorney's office at the request of the head
of narcotics. He then turned paid informant and received a commission
based on the value of the drugs, cash and property he helped
confiscate. Money was paid based on field tests, long before the drugs
were analyzed by the lab, if they ever were. The rule of thumb was 10
percent of the value of the booty: The more drugs seized, the more
money he made.

"If someone is working off their cases, you can still control them,
threaten to send them to the penitentiary," Barbara Markham says. "But
once they become a paid informant and get a slice of the pie, they are
motivated by nothing but greed."

Alonso was prolific, bringing in case after case, month after month--6
kilos, 12 kilos, 14 kilos, 24 kilos, one cocaine bust bigger than the
next, each one field-testing positive for cocaine.

DeLaPaz thought he was just a super-snitch, even though friends warned
the officer that no informant had that many sources or could be that
well-connected.

"When a person rolls and begins to work, you want to get the biggest
person he's got first," Markham explains. "Because once word gets out
on the street that everyone around this guy is getting busted, no one
is going to deal with him anymore."

But Alonso claimed to have numerous contacts in San Antonio, Houston
and Laredo, making things more difficult to verify.

Then again, the big drug cases he was making might have been
verification enough.

Alonso was making DeLaPaz shine, and the officer needed to treat him
with respect.

Good informants are gold; undercover officers build entire careers
around them. A "stout" CI who feels neglected or underpaid may latch
on to another undercover officer.

But Alonso appeared loyal to DeLaPaz. He even brought him other
informants: his brother Luis "Daniel" Alonso, who was interested in
making extra money. Another friend, Roberto Gonzalez, also wanted to
work, but DeLaPaz turned him down because he had some immigration problems.

He had also served a federal sentence for drug conspiracy. And Jose
Ruiz turned paid informant after his methamphetamine case was
dismissed, at times working with his former partner in crime Alonso as
a second CI, according to a source close to DeLaPaz.

Two informants working the same case seemed a recipe for disaster,
requiring twice the control, twice the surveillance, twice the trust.

The chance that informants who all know each other and work together
might try to scam the officers increases dramatically. "Informants
will turn on a narc in a heartbeat," Markham says. "After they start
producing, things start to get looser, get all buddy-buddy. That's
when they start to learn the work habits of the officer, the inside
tricks of the operation."

Enrique Martinez-Alonso acted as though he knew many dope-dealing auto
mechanics, which made perfect cop sense: Hispanic-owned auto shops
might be fronts for narcotics traffickers. Dope travels in cars up
from the border; mechanics have the tools to remove it from hidden
compartments. Both businesses are cash-and-carry.

Jesus Mejia owned a small auto repair shop on Singleton Boulevard in
Oak Cliff. Husband, father of three and legal U.S. resident, he lived
peacefully in this country for 11 years and had never been in trouble
with the police, his attorney claims.

On August 16, when nine officers converged on his shop and placed him
under arrest, he thought they were joking. "Why are you taking me?" he
asked in Spanish. But the police just told him, "You know."

The arrest warrant was a bit more detailed, charging that a
confidential informant (Alonso) met Mejia in his office and Mejia
handed the informant 2 kilos of cocaine saying, "Bring me back the
money for them, and I'll give you more." Mejia then stated he had more
cocaine in a red pickup truck parked outside.

As the informant was leaving to bring the 2 kilos to DeLaPaz a short
distance away, he claimed he "observed" several packages in a duffel
bag inside the pickup.

That information was used to obtain a warrant for the vehicle, which
when searched uncovered another 12 kilos inside the duffel bag.

"Just didn't happen," says Mejia's attorney C. Tony Wright. "There was
never a first delivery inside, and the informant or the cops could
have planted those drugs outside."

DeLaPaz had set up no surveillance of any sort, instead relying solely
on the uncorroborated word of his informant.

But Alonso's rendition of the facts strained credulity.

Drugs aren't sold on consignment; they're sold for cash. A dealer
might front drugs to someone in his organization, someone he trusted,
but rarely to someone with whom he had no prior relationship. A dealer
who voluntarily discloses where he keeps his stash--12 kilos in plain
view--is just asking to be ripped off. Instead, he would have had good
eyes watching his back, accomplices with guns, and plenty of cash from
other transactions.

Yet in case after case, the same scenario played itself out. Informant
goes inside an auto mechanic's shop, undercover cops set up outside,
informant brings them dope. One time DeLaPaz was late to the scene,
other times he was blocks away, unable to "observe the informant enter
the premises where the controlled purchase is made," which Dallas
narcotics procedure requires "whenever possible." The narcotics
standard operating procedures are more onerous for "buy-busts," in
which the arrest occurs when the buy is made, than "buy-walks," in
which the arrest occurs after the buy is made, but the distinction
seems artificial. Buy-busts require that a supervisor direct the
operation at the scene, though most of these auto shop cases had no
supervisor present; they require visual observation, a rudimentary
safeguard that might ensure the wrong person is not arrested.

When a suspect is arrested after the execution of a search warrant "a
sergeant will ensure that after suspects are secured, they will
be...interviewed/recorded as appropriate."

That just didn't happen.

[continued in Part 2 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n853/a06.html ]