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I went to see Roger Hale mainly because of my interest in the case that put him in jail. Hale, who is forty-seven years old, black, and a total stranger to all forms of American privilege, is serving twelve years in a federal prison in Louisiana after pleading guilty to distributing cocaine. I was spending a lot of time in San Augustine, and that was another reason I went to see him: he was related to a lot of people I got to know. His wife, for instance, a soft-voiced young woman known as Fanny, waitresses at the Hill Top Barbecue, a family-run joint where I often ate lunch. The case was known as Operation White Tornado. It had been a combined effort by federal, state, and local law-enforcement officers to shut down a cocaine-trafficking network based in San Augustine County. Some two hundred agents had descended on San Augustine on June 2, , and arrested dozens of residents, including Hale. A crowd gathered in the courthouse square in the town of San Augustine that night and cheered as handcuffed suspects were led into the squat old jail. This was startling news, if only because San Augustine is, even by East Texas standards, poor, isolated, and sparsely populated. The county, which is half the size of Rhode Island, has only eight thousand inhabitants, thirty-five per cent of whom live below the federal poverty line. Though it is on no interstate highway, and is about eighty miles from a town of any size, San Augustine had somehow become, according to the authorities, a major regional distribution center for cocaine. I wanted to know how that had happened, and also how such a small, close-knit community had absorbed the impact of an Operation White Tornado. Some people called it Operation Black Tornado, for of fifty-four people ultimately convicted on various charges fifty were black. San Augustine County is thirty per cent black. Roger Hale, according to the police, was actually a minor figure in the San Augustine drug trade. But when we met, in an empty prison visiting room, he came on like a tough guy. In a harsh, level voice, he told extravagant stories of wheeling and dealing in guns and jewelry—but not drugs—and made extravagant threats against people in San Augustine who he felt had sold him down the river. I mostly associated with up-to-date white people. Hale believed that he was in prison solely because of his association with Nathan Tindall, a not especially up-to-date white person who had been the sheriff of San Augustine County for the better part of forty years. Hale had worked, in various capacities, for Mr. Nathan, as he called him, his entire adult life. Nathan Tindall was, according to many accounts, the chief target of Operation White Tornado. This extraordinary sentence was one of the things that particularly interested me about Operation White Tornado. I also wondered, naturally, how it was that Tindall had escaped indictment. He could have tried to incriminate Tindall to curry favor with the feds, of course. He did know some explosive things, he insisted. Listening to Hale, trying to sort out the possibly true from the wildly improbable, I found myself wondering what kind of fella he in fact was. But his heart, I suspected, was in the office, the bank, the auto dealership. East Texas resembles the Deep South far more than it does the open prairies of the rest of Texas. Dense pine and hardwood forests shroud rolling terrain; lakes and bayous are fed by fifty inches of rain a year. San Augustine was first settled by white farmers and their black slaves migrating west at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Their cotton plantations thrived in the red lands that run in a wide, fertile band across the county. There were, in fact, more people living in the county in than there are today. As a result, San Augustine teems with ghosts, particularly in the woods, where innumerable small family graveyards lie overgrown. The slavery era left an indelible print on the county: surprising numbers of people, black and white, share the same few family names. These biracial clans were created when former slaves took the names of their owners after emancipation, causing those cruel original re-lationships to echo down through the ages. Sharecropping, which lasted nearly a century, perpetuated the old master-servant relations between certain black and white families, and Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan helped maintain social and economic distinctions between black and white small farmers. The great tide of American industrial prosperity bypassed the region as a whole. There are poorer counties in East Texas, but San Augustine is today a backwater even in a backward, isolated area. Most Texans simply disown the whole region. And much about San Augustine does feel frozen in time, preserved from another era. Not only the plantation houses—slave-built from virgin longleaf pine—but many of the older houses in town have the wide porches and twelve-light windows, the fluted Doric columns and classical pediments of the antebellum South. On the courthouse square, farmers sell watermelons, okra, potatoes, and yellow squash from pickups parked next to the jail. Bags of seed are piled on a canopied sidewalk in front of an old brick hardware store. The only stoplight in town—and San Augustine is the only real town in the county—blinks sleepily, often seeing no traffic, at one corner of the square. Across the railroad tracks, in a black neighborhood still known as the Quarters, unpainted shotgun shacks lean under tall pines and great, spreading maples. On the porches in the Quarters, old folks nod in weathered armchairs; in the back yards, roosters crow from woodpiles. The atmosphere of deep, premodern slumber is broken only by the passing of a glistening violet Nissan miniature pickup, its side windows smoked, its chassis lowered almost to the ground, with a gold-flaked stiff chain around the license plate, a young black man at the wheel, and percussive hip-hop pounding from the cab. They dream about him, turn to him in every sort of extremity, blame him for every sort of distress. More than once, I overheard residents in their cups declaring that their lives would be utterly different if only So-and-So were sheriff. He sets a tone, he defines an era. Presidents are marginal figures by comparison. Politically, the South became a one-party state after Reconstruction, and in the system of power and patronage that emerged in virtually all rural areas violence was never far from the surface. The first Populist sheriff of San Augustine was gunned down in the street in by a political rival. A few weeks later, his successor, who also happened to be his nephew, was shot, and two other nephews were killed, in a downtown shootout with leading Democrats. This particular political feud, which was also a clan feud, led to a number of other deaths. Soon, though, the Democrats were back in control of the county, and they have not been seriously challenged since. The saloons where much of this frontier-style violence found its spark were closed by Prohibition, which came to Texas in But the illegal-liquor business thrived in perennially depressed, lightly policed San Augustine, and this trade, too, gave rise to frequent violent disputes. Like most Bible Belt communities, the county stayed dry after the repeal of national Prohibition, and thus insured that moonshining and bootlegging would continue. The families who controlled the liquor trade began to terrorize their neighbors, going on a legendary binge of robbery, rape, assault, and murder, until finally, in , the Texas Rangers were sent in. The state officers took control of local law enforcement, forcing out the sheriff and bringing the outlaw clans to justice. Four thousand people gathered on the courthouse square to thank the Rangers. Still, moonshining and bootlegging remained important local industries in an economy that otherwise, during the Depression, virtually came to a halt. Nathan Tindall grew up in Depression San Augustine. His parents were poor tenant farmers on the Attoyac River, in the western part of the county. He went to school in a lumber-company settlement and rarely saw the town of San Augustine. His family belonged to either Pentecostal or Baptist country churches; they and their neighbors moved in a separate social universe from the Episcopalians and the Methodists who worshipped in the big white churches in town. As a teen-ager, Tindall became a mule skinner—an independent logger with a mule team—and earned a name for himself as a hard worker blessed with extraordinary strength. In , at the age of eighteen, Tindall joined the Navy. He served in the Pacific, as a military policeman, and was wounded near Kwajalein. When he came home to San Augustine after the war, one of the first things he did was run for sheriff. It was an unusual move for a twenty-one-year-old, but Tindall was an unusual twenty-one-year-old. Blount recalled. Greatly aided by the general popularity of returning soldiers, he was elected. A photograph of the young sheriff, taken in , shows a smooth-cheeked, round-faced, blue-eyed country boy in a tall white Stetson. He looks kindly and calm, almost shy. His new job paid only forty-five hundred dollars a year, but with it came a late-model, cream-colored Ford with a red light mounted in the center of the grille, and Tindall soon found that sheriffing suited him down to the ground. And I just grabbed onto her tail and followed her through the woods for about five miles. Finally, we came up to where the old boy had his rig, and he looked up, but he just saw the jenny, because I was down low right behind her. And when we got there and I popped up he went crazy. Wanted to kill hisself, wanted to kill that poor old jenny. Tindall, who never did win the support of most of the San Augustine Old Guard, had to work around them. Anything to avoid holding them for a week. Tindall even found a way to make money off his jailhouse—by taking overflow prisoners from crowded urban jails in Beaumont and Houston. One winter, the big-city inmates protested their primitive lodgings by tearing up their cells, and so Tindall housed them outdoors, cuffed to a flagpole on the courthouse square it was sleeting, he recalled , while the cells were slowly cleaned. Once, he tried to save the county money by not having an autopsy in a triple murder. But what if some kids come in later and say there was a shooter in a tree? One thing you have to say for Nathan: he is good at solving crimes. They were, you could say, uncannily canny. In a county where virtually everyone seems to carry a gun—where grandmothers pat their aprons significantly when the subject is small pistols and self-defense, where people still hunt deer and squirrel and possum for meat irrespective of the season, and where I was regarded with disbelief and disdain by local young women after admitting that I travelled unarmed—Tindall never carried a gun. Tindall even made murder arrests over the telephone—perhaps fifty of them, he reckons, through the years. But his best-known exploits tended to feature his strangely even temper. I talked to several survivors of a standoff with a local man who killed his girlfriend and then barricaded himself inside a house, from which he shot a sheriff, a deputy sheriff, an ambulance driver, and a highway patrolman—the sheriff and the deputy each lost an eye—before Tindall showed up and, unarmed, strode up to the house. Occasionally, some drunk or foolish miscreant did compel Tindall to use force. And, as far as I could see, he did it without any relish. Tindall never used more force than was necessary to take a suspect into custody, and he used to brag that he never charged anyone with resisting arrest. Tindall, being a politician, loved to get his picture in the paper. We went out there, and the band instruments were right where he said they would be. He went on and on about his own brilliance, as if he had just solved the crime of the century. Finally, I managed to ask how he had come to suspect the boy who did it. Or maybe run one guy out of the county. In the end, the rural sheriff, for all his autonomy and local power, is in a service profession, and the parameters of his job description have a tendency to expand indefinitely. His nights off were so short that he often slept in his office. He and Willie Earl were married in the jailhouse, with two deputies as witnesses and with Nathan wearing his uniform. Tindall had one major interest besides sheriffing, and that was making money. He started out by providing logging equipment to other men, and soon became what is called a pulpwood contractor. He bought and sold stands of timber, and acquired a fleet of logging trucks, a truck dealership, and, finally, a small sawmill. He also became a land trader. Many of his employees were ex-residents of his jailhouse. His recordkeeping was loose at best—he never employed a foreman, let alone a bookkeeper—and his lending policies were liberal, with the result that half of San Augustine eventually owed him money. The areas of overlap between his businesses and his work as sheriff, and the potential for conflicts of interest, were endless, and local muttering about corruption and the exploitation of public office grew louder with the years. Tindall, naturally, denies the charges that he grew light-fingered in office. His generosity helped. Some paid him back, but my impression was that most never did. An old black man named Willie Harp, who lives in a shack off a dirt road in the northwestern part of the county, said that the only reason one of his daughters was able to leave San Augustine, attend college, and climb out of poverty was that Mr. Nathan had paid for her education. The black vote, which routinely went more than eighty per cent for Tindall, became the key to his electoral lock, particularly after the civil-rights period and the increase it generated in black-voter registration. The civil-rights movement had relatively little impact on San Augustine, however. White resistance was deep: public schools were segregated until , and even then integration occurred only under federal court order. Hughes, who is black, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. The town is more than fifty per cent black—and the schools are nearly sixty per cent black—yet the leading local service organizations, the Lions and the Rotary Club, are still exclusively white. That the tightwad sheriff was also a one-man charitable foundation was a paradox lost on nobody in San Augustine, least of all Willie Earl Tindall. He just kept sheriffing night and day, and claimed not to miss the money. His self-confidence, they said, seemed entirely undiminished. And such unflappability was actually not hard to picture, I found, for by the time I met Tindall he was selling used cars on U. The peculiar authority that Sam Malone noted in Tindall does not arise from his physical presentation. One lens of his glasses, which were thick and steel-rimmed, was severely smudged—from a recent encounter with battery acid, he said. His speech was by turns fumbling, gusty, intense, distracted, and enthusiastic. It was frequently punctuated by laughter. When Tindall saw that some of his humor went right past me, he looked at me quizzically, then seemed to decide that it would all take too long to explain to a Yankee. And when a heavy-browed young black man in coveralls came in, saw that I was taking notes, and started questioning me, Tindall just grinned and let him interrupt. He said it was true, and went about his business. Over the weeks that followed, I often saw Tindall driving somewhere in the company of Frog and some of his equivalents—four or five of them crammed into the cab of a truck, off to cut some timber or pull another truck out of the mud. I once watched him and Frog having lunch together at the Hill Top Barbecue. They teased each other cursorily while they waited for their food; then both plunged into plates of barbecued ribs, eating silently, side by side, and hardly looking up except to nod to friends and neighbors as they came through the door. I mentioned to my own lunch companion—Ilester Porter, a furniture restorer, who owns the Hill Top—that Tindall certainly seemed to be a democratic sort. I later asked Porter what he meant. Porter, a middle-aged black man who was decidedly not a Tindall supporter, tried to explain. He let white trash like Dave Husband get rich. In a rare local civil-rights triumph, electoral district boundaries were redrawn in San Augustine in the nineteen-seventies to create a black-majority county precinct. This redistricting led to the repeal, in , of Prohibition in the new precinct. There were also white bootleggers, however, among whom Dave Husband was easily the best known. His father and his grandfather had been bootleggers before him, operating from their homestead, on the Attoyac River, so Husband had been in the business since he was a boy. By all accounts, he was a savvy trader. With legalization, he quickly opened a liquor store at the intersection of U. He became something of a community burgher, known for his generous disbursements to youth groups such as the 4-H Club. But he apparently never lost his outlaw predilections. A compulsive gambler, he took to wearing expensive jewelry and Rolex watches, and liked to brag about the time that Governor Edwin Edwards, of Louisiana, sent a helicopter to fetch him for a gambling date. He also dabbled in all sorts of low-level rackets. Although Tindall had arrested Husband for bootlegging any number of times, the two men were friends. And the two men were firmly paired, in the eyes of the Old Guard, as upstart poor boys from Pentecostal families down on the Attoyac. Husband was actually on unusually friendly terms with law enforcement in general. Tindall, a lifelong teetotaller and a non-hunter, may have been the only lawman in Deep East Texas who missed out on those stag weekends. But Tindall, who was never particular about appearances, shrugged it off. And for many years he could, it was clear, absorb the damage. He did lose one election in the nineteen-fifties, and he once resigned as sheriff for a term in the seventies. Fortunately, most of what he thought was fair was fair. According to Mark McDaniel, an itinerant lawman who joined the town police force in , nobody in San Augustine followed the rules. It was strange. They had never even run a search warrant. When I wanted to go to a J. It was everybody. And I got to be the same way, six months after I started. The town policemen all took their cues from Tindall, and sometimes they got them wrong. McDaniel once arrested for reckless driving one of the ruffians who hung around the jailhouse. But Tindall then held the suspect without bail for a week or two. McDaniel also heard the rumors about Tindall being corrupt. A lesser but similar awe surrounded other peace officers in San Augustine. Most places, nobody really notices who the cops are. And our biggest buddy—nobody likes to admit this now—was Dave Husband. But in virtually every case these people refused to be specific, at least with me, in their allegations. And an informal survey of some of those who worked with Tindall when he was sheriff—two county judges, the county treasurer, the district attorney, the county attorney, the town attorney, the town police chief, various deputies, the only two real newspapermen in town—yielded no one who credited the charges that he was corrupt. There was a crucial change in the mixture of law enforcement in San Augustine after bootlegging was rendered obsolete. Marijuana farmers, whose crop thrived in the fertile forests of East Texas, effectively replaced moonshiners in the local underground economy, and marijuana traffickers replaced bootleggers. And, while Nathan Tindall had little trouble keeping track of local people who got involved in marijuana—some were farmers who had fallen on hard times, and others were ex-bootleggers looking for a new trade, or underemployed loggers looking to turn a remote clear-cut into a gold mine—he sometimes found that he needed help when the scale of growing or dealing was larger, was regional rather than local. Though it was a point of pride with him to call for outside help as seldom as possible, he did occasionally call on the state police, with whom he had always been on good terms. The growers got spooked and escaped, but the state police tore out sixty thousand plants. I could drive through the county, not even stop for a cup of coffee, and when I got back to my office the phone would ring and it would be Tindall wanting to know what I was doing. The man had resources. Nathan wanted to just phone the old boy and tell him to get on down to the jailhouse with the dope. I wanted to go out there with a search warrant. Then Nathan told him to go back in and get all his dope and cash. And Bo did it. He brung out four or five pounds of pot and twenty-three hundred dollars. We arrested him, but Bo kept saying it was all a mistake. See, he had been dealing coke, and Nathan had told him to stop, so Bo figured that meant it was O. He had worked with the F. But his deep reluctance to invite them into San Augustine was well known, both locally and in the federal offices in Beaumont and elsewhere. Around the same time, cocaine began to replace marijuana as the main commodity in the East Texas drug trade. Cocaine moved much faster than pot, in every sense. It cost more, yielded a higher profit, involved much higher levels of the criminal world, was far harder to interdict, and, in the form of crack—the cheap, smokable version of the drug, which soon caught on locally—wreaked on its users a social and medical havoc unlike anything associated with marijuana. Tindall did have a notion, though, about who was bringing cocaine into San Augustine, and he mentioned his notion to McLeroy, of the state police, in The suspect was Lenard Jackson, a local black man who had lived for many years in Houston but still had family in San Augustine. Nathan only talked to people he liked. Lenard Jackson grew up in Greertown, a rural community in northern San Augustine County, at the eastern end of an old black district known as the Pre-Emption. No part of the county swarms with more ghosts than the Pre-Emption. After Emancipation, ex-slaves flocked to the area. It had been lightly settled by whites, for it was hilly and heavily wooded, roads were poor or nonexistent, and the soil was sandy. The black settlers logged and cleared their fields by hand. They grew corn, peas, cotton, watermelons, and peanuts. They raised hogs and cattle and farmed with mules. People worshipped at little clapboard Baptist churches in the woods and, in summer, gathered for baseball tournaments with black teams from all over East Texas and western Louisiana. Lenard Jackson, who was born in , grew up as the countryside was starting to empty. The Second World War had pulled large numbers of people off the land, and after the war many chose not to return to life behind a plow or on the end of a crosscut saw. Small-scale Southern farming was becoming, in any case, less viable—Lenard Jackson picked cotton in the red lands as a boy, but cotton was then leaving San Augustine for the flatlands of West Texas—and black farmers, unable to finance new equipment and expansion, were disappearing fastest. Between and , the rural black population in Texas fell fifty per cent; the number of black farmers fell seventy per cent. Today, there is no black commercial farming in Greertown or anywhere else in the Pre-Emption. Those black-owned fields still under cultivation are leased to white farmers, who use Mexican itinerant labor. Most of the old fields are now forest again—thickly overgrown with slash pine. Perhaps half the land in the Pre-Emption still belongs to blacks, and title to much of that is hopelessly mired among absentee heirs. He was a farmer and logger; he and his wife had fifteen children. Lenard, the eighth, was in the tenth grade at the segregated high school in San Augustine when Frank died, in Lenard left school and went to work hauling pulpwood. Like his older siblings, most of whom had already left for California or Houston, Lenard saw plainly that his chances of making a decent living in San Augustine were bleak. The only black people doing so were schoolteachers, the undertaker, the insurance agent, and a few enterprising souls who supplemented legal incomes with bootlegging. None of those avenues were open to Lenard, and in he ended up moving to Houston. There was plenty of work: Houston boomed throughout the nineteen-seventies. Jackson rose to labor foreman, concrete foreman, general foreman. He was, from all accounts, a ferociously hard worker. He took a second job at night, and with his savings he bought a garbage truck. He landed a contract to haul garbage from Burger Kings, and found a dump that stayed open until midnight. As a labor foreman, Jackson became a kind of one-man hiring hall for other young men from San Augustine. Thus, when he went out on his own as a construction contractor, in the mid-seventies, he had a pool of loyal, experienced workers to draw on. The work was good. By the early eighties, his company, LJ Construction, employed eighty people, including most of his eleven brothers, and had jobs going all over metropolitan Houston. To many people in black San Augustine, the Jacksons were, in fact, an exemplary family: hardworking and dutiful toward their elders. Lenard, now the prosperous contractor, bought a lot in Pearland, a flat, windy exurb south of Houston, and built a sprawling, one-story Spanish-style brick house with six arches across the front and tinted windows. The house acquired mythic proportions back in San Augustine: Roger Hale told me that it was worth three-quarters of a million dollars, though its real value was perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand. Jackson also bought another such symbol: a secondhand Rolls-Royce—not, he later said, because he particularly liked the car but because his wife liked it and because it would hold its resale value. He continued to drive a pickup truck. He raised rabbits in his back yard, and put in a modest basketball court, and on weekends he held barbecues at his house for the many young San Augustinians who worked for him. The fact that he was widely admired and considered a fair employer sometimes put Jackson in a difficult position. And that hurt me down the line. When the Texas economy crashed, in the nineteen-eighties, Houston construction went down with it. He lowered that to eighty, and then, when things got desperate, to sixty. At some point—exactly when is a matter of dispute—Jackson went into the illegal-drug trade. First marijuana, according to the state narcotics police, and then cocaine. Cocaine made its way into Deep East Texas by various routes. Typically, a gang member in trouble with the law in L. Most of the cocaine trade in East Texas, however, was carried on by local entrepreneurs. Being near Houston was convenient. California officials make the same claim for Los Angeles. Whatever its ranking, Houston has become the clearing house for a staggering amount of cocaine. American dealers buy from the Colombians at whatever level they can afford. The domestic dealerships are ethnically segmented—white and Latino traffickers sell powdered cocaine, mostly to white and Latino users, while African-Americans sell crack, mostly to black users—but are otherwise diffuse and loosely structured. For sophistication and corporate-style discipline, certainly no local drug organization can compete with the Colombian suppliers, who are regarded with awe by many of their retailers. The demand for cocaine exploded with the invention of crack. The Arthur Wattses and Blue Tick Edwardses were unlikely to be left alone in a business with such volume and positive cash flow, and in San Augustine they were soon joined by an older, far cannier, and more sober businessman—Lenard Jackson. According to the F. Crack caught on in San Augustine mainly in poor black neighborhoods—in the Quarters and, especially, in the Sunset Hills housing project. And everybody else was doing it. In fact, Michael Bell became one of the more successful local dealers. He had not had a job since high school—and had never left San Augustine—but he started driving a new car, bought a number of quarter horses including one that was reported to have cost nine thousand dollars , and, in early , vacationed in Acapulco with Daryl Hale and another friend. Sarah Oliphant, a Sunset Hills resident, got hooked on crack in November, She soon lost her job, and eventually her health. I got down to ninety-eight pounds. A few whites got into crack, but the illegal drugs of choice among whites remained marijuana and methamphetamine, or speed, both of which are produced locally, the East Texas woods being almost as convenient for meth labs, which give off a powerful telltale odor, as for pot growing. Some San Augustine dealers also went on the road: one would rent a motel room in, say, Center, the next town north, for a weekend and sell off a load of rocks to local users. Another kind of socioeconomic turnabout was occurring within San Augustine, as a growing number of young black men began to display unprecedented buying power at local car dealerships and at clothing and jewelry and furniture stores. In some cases, these were the same establishments that had once punished the ancestors of the prosperous new customers for nonpayment of their bills with whippings or forced land-title transfers. The drug dealers paid cash. But the most startling image of the new black prosperity, and surely the most difficult for many whites to accept, was Lenard Jackson, up from Houston, tooling around in his blue Rolls-Royce. More likely, Husband, who owned a tavern where a lot of small-scale drug dealing went on, just saw a business opportunity too tempting to pass up. How extensive did the San Augustine drug trade become? The F. These figures, if they were accurate, would have made San Augustine a major regional drug-distribution center. But other law-enforcement officials, such as Kenneth Kidwell, of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Tyler, questioned whether the drug problem in San Augustine was really any different from or bigger than the drug problem in other East Texas communities. People frightened by the rapid growth of the drug trade, or by the ravages of crack, began moving toward Bryan. He had suspected Lenard Jackson a year earlier, after all, and had reported him to the state narcotics police then. He ran regular stings on dealers and users, and harassed the more hapless mid-level dealers, like Blue Tick Edwards, mercilessly. Caught me once in the projects with some cocaine, and got me and my wife thrown out of Sunset Hills. Operation White Tornado began as two separate investigations—one local, the other external. The local effort was the initiative of Larry Saurage, the chief deputy sheriff, whom Charles Bryan hired when he took office. Saurage, a well-travelled lawman who was then working narcotics down in Chambers County, between Houston and Beaumont, fit the bill. McLeroy, without informing any local agency of his activities, used informants to buy cocaine from Arthur Watts and Daryl Hale, and invited federal authorities into the investigation. Stuart Platt, an assistant federal prosecutor, now took charge of the investigation, with field command going to F. Special Agent Zechariah Zack Shelton. According to Shelton, Saurage was angry to discover that outside agencies were working on his new turf. For Chief Deputy Saurage, actively running undercover agents and informants right under the nose of even an inexperienced sheriff soon proved to be more trouble than it was worth, and in April he and his colleagues let Charles Bryan in on the operation. Betty Donatto, who is a sleepy-eyed, soft-voiced, russet-haired woman in her early forties, remained the key agent of the combined operation. She had been doing police work for only a few years, having worked previously as a computer operator in California and as a journalist in Liberty County, but, once she started in law enforcement, she had risen quickly, becoming a small-town police chief and then discovering a talent for undercover work. Her partner in San Augustine, a local crack addict named Bo Garrett, had been dubious about her at first. Her skin was too light for her to pass unaccosted in the black drug world, he thought. But Donatto figured that the Louisiana cover story would help ease suspicion, since Louisiana was known for its mixed-race population; and, besides, her real upbringing in a black family in East Texas gave her the wherewithal to blend in socially. I started out buying twenty-dollar rocks, and moved on up to one-fifties. I was driving a white Corvette—a seized vehicle from Liberty County. That got their attention. Donatto laughed lightly. It was like they had no connection to the outside world. After a while, I started feeling like Santa Claus. The crooks were afraid of Tindall, and they told me to watch out for him, because he still ran the show, even if he was in the background. But San Augustine was pretty unusual—at least, when I was there. It was so open and free. If you had the right amount of money, it was like you could set up your own little world, and nobody could touch you. There were all these weak-minded people around who they could just control. Donatto befriended some of the local crackheads and dealers, including Sarah Oliphant and Michael Bell. She had no luck buying dope from Dave Husband, however. It was half a kilo on up, and you needed an introduction. We tried to make buys with a couple of different informants, but they both failed. I was there for the second one. Donatto knew that a major target of the federal investigation was Nathan Tindall. Working undercover for a long time gets weird. They say you should never do it for more than three months. You forget who you are. Other local informants were also used. One of them was a small-time dealer named Ricky Davis. But Davis had a credibility problem. When his controllers heard that he was still selling drugs, even while he was informing, they took him to a secluded park in San Augustine to discuss the matter with him. Davis denied the reports vehemently. Then Betty Donatto stepped out from behind a tree. Ricky about fainted. We worked together after that. But he was always a nervous wreck. One of these two informants was in the county jail in Houston, had been to San Augustine once, and had evidently never met Tindall, yet was able to assure Shelton that Tindall was corrupt. The additional wiretaps were authorized, and the investigators, listening in from their trailer in the pecan orchard, continued to gather information on the San Augustine drug trade. Some of the dealers, although they were usually infuriatingly vague and wary on the phone, made some reasonably incriminating remarks, but Nathan Tindall apparently never said anything of interest. In late May, the commanders of Operation White Tornado decided that it was time to pounce. Betty Donatto was astonished. We could have got more on the Houston connection, Louisiana, the Colombians. Zack Shelton knew I thought it was too soon. But he said Ricky Davis said the crooks were getting suspicious of me and were going to bump me off. Except everybody knew that Ricky was a nervous wreck. He just wanted the whole thing to end. And so, late on the rainy afternoon of June 2, , a vast paramilitary convoy, complete with newspaper reporters and TV camera crews, streamed into San Augustine, carrying more than two hundred heavily armed agents from the F. Houses, taverns, trailers, and liquor stores were raided on the strength of seventeen federal search warrants. Property was seized and suspects were arrested on the basis of three sealed federal indictments and sixteen criminal complaints. In the TV footage, burly agents swarm up U. Lenard Jackson, who, with his wife, had attended the high-school graduation of a niece and a nephew up in Shelby County that afternoon, was stopped on the highway by a patrol car backed up by a helicopter. He was made to stand spread-eagled, his hands on the hot hood of his Rolls-Royce, a gun at his head. Dave Husband was arrested at his store. Little or no resistance was offered. The only injury occurred when Blue Tick Edwards, surprised in his trailer, tried to flee, and dislocated his shoulder in the ensuing struggle. By nightfall, thirty-one suspects had been taken into custody. Tindall, who had not been named in either the indictments or the complaints, was not arrested. Betty Donatto was there for the raid, but did little. Machine guns, AKs. But I kept quiet. I just figured, This is really gonna make Larry and his sheriff look good. Why did the feds stage the raid when they did? According to Tindall, the answer was that they were nervous because he, Tindall, had just started work as an investigator for Charles Mitchell, the district attorney who knew nothing about Operation White Tornado , and they were afraid that he might break up the drug trade himself, stealing all their glory. As it happened, Mitchell let Tindall go immediately, reasoning that the former sheriff would not make an effective investigator while under a cloud of federal suspicion. That cloud only darkened in the days after the raid, as veiled and not so veiled charges began to rain down on Tindall. It seemed only a matter of time before he would be indicted, his disgrace complete. On the day after the drug raid, Tindall was served with a federal court order to turn over the bank records of seven of the White Tornado suspects, and a few weeks later he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Beaumont to answer allegations by one of the suspects that he had taken payoffs. On the second visit, they were accompanied by I. The marijuana was a prop that Tindall had been using for years in anti-drug lectures at schools, and the guns still had evidence tags on them—Tindall had left instructions that anybody who wanted to reclaim a weapon should get in touch with him—but the episode did little to improve his press. As a news story, Operation White Tornado worked. It also revealed a vivid new front in the war on drugs—a picturesque, one-stoplight Southern town, where American flags hung over canopied sidewalks on the courthouse square—and even some San Augustinians seemed pleased to see the raid in that quasi-national context. Two hundred agents making a lightning strike had turned up only five ounces of drugs. The White Tornado defendants, for their part, could not seem to win for losing. Barely a week after the raid, it emerged that Dave Husband was now suspected of having buried the bodies of an undetermined number of undocumented Mexican workers on his land. Government bulldozers began turning acres of rolling pastureland along the Attoyac River into a vast open-pit mine while the press corps camped out under the trees. Husband had employed illegal Mexican labor for many years, and five undocumented workers had, in fact, been found in a trailer behind his liquor store during the drug raid. But the workers found in the trailer later signed a joint statement asserting that, contrary to press reports, they had not been beaten by Husband. And no bodies were ever found. The number of defendants rose eventually to fifty-seven, and the guilty pleas began to flow in early August. Each time someone pleaded, the remaining defendants grew more nervous, for it meant another finger quite likely being pointed at them. Thus did the stampede build, to twenty and thirty and forty guilty pleas. By early , Dave Husband and Lenard Jackson and their immediate families and associates were the only significant defendants left. But the federal prosecutors still did not have the man they wanted: Nathan Tindall. Lenard Jackson and company probably knew nothing incriminating about Tindall, the prosecutors thought, and so the issue did not figure in the negotiations with them. Those negotiations finally resulted, in March, in guilty pleas that brought down sentences of fifteen years on Lenard his wife, the former Girtha Mae Polley, did not live to see him go to prison: she had committed suicide in December and ten years each on his brother Roy, his son Steven Kelly, and Harlon Kelly. Because these are federal sentences, they contain no possibility of parole. Dave Husband was another matter. Husband, convinced that the evidence against him was weak, turned it down. Hawthorn, of Beaumont, made a colossal mistake. In barely half an hour of conversation, Husband told the government the sum total of what he had on Tindall: nothing. And the government was no longer interested in any plea agreement with Husband. Six months later, on the day that his son was to enter a guilty plea, Husband, now frantic that his son, whom he had drafted into the drug business to begin with, might go to jail, made the government an extraordinary offer. The prosecutors agreed immediately. And Dave Husband, who was then forty-four years old, was subsequently sentenced, under the mandatory minimums that attach to all federal drug violations, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Except for its drastic incongruity among the punishments received by the other White Tornado defendants, Charles Mitchell has no problem with the sentence Dave Husband got. He has no problem, for that matter, with asking for the death sentence when a capital murder case comes his way. He does, however, have reservations about the way business is conducted in federal courts these days. Mitchell believes that in the Texas courts, which are where he does his prosecuting, most of the cases against the White Tornado defendants would have been much more difficult to win, for lack of evidence. Mitchell also had questions about the perennial federal investigation of Nathan Tindall. Buy him three or four quarts of beer, send him up here throwing bottles out the window. That would be pretty easy to clear up. The wave of publicity that accompanied Operation White Tornado left Mitchell unmoved, at best. Am I supposed to call a pep rally every time I go to try a murder case? Routine arrests would have sufficed for everyone else. Within the complex law-enforcement coalition that mounted Operation White Tornado, there were strains, inevitably, and after the drug raid they only got worse. The main point of contention was the division of spoils—who got what among the assets seized and ultimately forfeited. According to federal officials, these allotments were determined by the actual contribution of each agency to the operation. Sheriff Bryan, who had evidently come to believe his own claims, was furious, and let the world know it, even vowing publicly not to let the F. Eventually, the importance of the San Augustine drug trade was subtly downgraded by federal authorities. Post-raid squabbling also broke out in San Augustine itself. Sheriff Bryan, who believes he is officially responsible for the courthouse lawn, made his objections known to Goetz. Larry Saurage boycotted the celebration, though his name was on the program as a host. Final success in the war on drugs was the consensus prediction. Media coverage was enthusiastic. While the federal authorities were still pursuing him—indeed, they were about to subpoena the records of his myriad land trades—he had still not been charged. After all the bad press he had received, and all the federal investigative attention, the fact that he was alive at all as a public figure seemed remarkable. It even seemed to amaze the state police. More than a year after the anniversary celebration, I was talking to a group of state narcotics officers in Lufkin, and I mentioned that I had heard that Tindall was thinking about running for sheriff of San Augustine County again. There was a long, stunned silence. The possibility that Tindall might rise from his political grave—and the likelihood of his resurrection seemed to grow with each passing week—posed an interesting question: Were San Augustinians somehow unhappy with the results of Operation White Tornado? Certainly the San Augustine economy had been pretty well flattened by the drug raid. Stores that had been selling hundred-dollar hats, fifty-dollar shoes, their customers were just gone. They stopped doing crack, and started getting their hair done. Later on, though, the financial repercussions began to be felt. It increased our caseload directly. There was a more general chilling effect, according to many black residents. Street jams, he explained, were big parties, with music and dancing but no drugs that he ever saw. People used to come over from Lufkin and Nacogdoches. It was open seven nights a week. What happened? Had the former patrons all been drug dealers? Mostly, there was just a lot of money in circulation. Charles Bryan grew up in the southern part of the county. He came to town as a teen-ager, went to work in a grocery store owned by his father and his uncle, and spent many years in the family grocery business and then in the meat business. Not known as an especially sharp businessman, he was unsubtly snubbed by self-made peers like Nathan Tindall and Dave Husband. He and his wife belonged to the highly respectable First Baptist Church, whose members included some of the oldest families in San Augustine. When I dropped by his office in the jailhouse, he always seemed to have time to talk, and his mind was often on unofficial matters. One morning, I found him studying a jar of epoxy on his desk. Oliphant was now back in San Augustine, living with her mother and her two sons in the Sunset Hills project, and she had the local power situation dead right. Chief Deputy Sheriff Saurage got higher pay than Sheriff Bryan himself, he had the power to hire and fire, and he made all the law-enforcement decisions that counted. On the street and in the jailhouse, Saurage was the Man. He was in his late forties, and came originally from Beaumont, but had worked all over Texas and Louisiana as a lawman, a prison guard, and a telephone lineman. He was six feet tall and sandy-haired, with a wide, weather-lined face and an unusual, imposing build: barrel-chested and bullnecked but surprisingly light on his feet. His voice and his manner were rich with natural authority. Saurage had brought an aura of big-city police work to San Augustine. He might hang out in the jailhouse on a balmy evening with the other deputies, park rangers, and highway patrolmen, chewing tobacco and talking coon dogs and squirrel dogs and where the bass were biting on Sam Rayburn Reservoir. But Saurage had been a cop in Houston and in Orange and Chambers Counties, and he did not let people forget it. He also brought to San Augustine his wide experience as a narcotics officer. One afternoon, I accompanied Saurage and some of his fellow-officers on an anti-drug operation. They brought a young black man down from an upstairs cell in the jailhouse, taped a remote microphone to his belly, and drove him to a spot behind the junior high school. On the ride through town, the young man lay down on the seat of the cruiser—to avoid being seen—and explained to me from there that he had just returned from six months in the state penitentiary, which was why he had agreed to snitch today. He darted into the woods behind the school, then made his way into the Sunset Hills housing project. We drove around to a vantage on U. Saurage grimaced. The informer gained entrance to an apartment, and apparently found a group of people smoking crack there. He persisted, and eventually the woman who lived in the apartment went out, scored a rock, shaved off a piece for herself, and sold the remainder to the informer, for twenty dollars. We drove back around to the school, and soon the informer emerged from the woods, looking scared but triumphant. Half an hour later, armed with a search warrant, a patrolman kicked in the door of the apartment where the informer had bought the dope. Inside, four startled women, including Sarah Oliphant, silently raised their hands. There was no dope in sight. John Matthew Cartwright, now the chief of police, went to search the bedrooms. One of the women on the couch—heavyset, middle-aged, wearing a pink sweatshirt—curled her lip. Saurage, who had been detained by jailhouse business, soon showed up. The dealers—four young black men—were found hanging out at a car wash up on U. There were no drugs on them, either, but one of them, Rodriguez Hill, had thirty-four dollar bills in his pocket, along with a scribbled list of names and dollar amounts. Hill was arrested and booked for driving without a license and for driving without a seat belt. He was twenty-one, beefy, and mad as a snake, and was wearing a little denim fishing cap. At the jailhouse, he glared at me with narrowed eyes. After I told him I was a journalist, his attitude changed abruptly. He was actually from Louisiana, he said, but had been raised in San Augustine. They play for real. Rodriguez Hill was allowed a phone call, and he used it to try to raise his bond, set at two hundred and sixty-five dollars. He put a finger to his lips; he was taking notes. It seemed that Hill was calling someone in Center whom Saurage believed to be his drug connection. After the call, Hill was put in a ground-floor holding cell at the back of the jailhouse. He immediately started shouting up the stairs to the prisoners in the long-term cells on the second floor, accusing a man he assumed had led the police to him. The prisoners called back that he was mistaken. Larry Saurage eventually went back and interrupted this colloquy. He reminded Hill that he was out on bond on another charge, glared at him until he dropped his gaze to the floor, and then returned to his office, shaking his head. At an Exxon station on U. He hit her on the head with a rock, sending her to the hospital, and robbed her. When he fled, however, he was chased and caught by two local men; and three days later, after pleading guilty to aggravated robbery, he was sentenced in state district court to fifty years. An ominous escalation was also taking place in local law enforcement, and shortly before I arrived in town it had produced a tragedy. After the taverns closed, people lingered outside one of them, continuing the party. Richard Carl Davis, a black patrolman, arrived, and found himself in a confrontation with Varron Bo Lane, also black, and twenty-five and drunk and armed with a. Lane did so, and then, unarmed, he advanced on Davis. Davis pulled the trigger, killing him with a single blast to the chest. Though many black San Augustinians were outraged by the killing of Bo Lane, a local grand jury declined to indict Davis. It takes constant effort and time to keep this element down. Some time later, I happened to visit the grand juror shortly after seeing Richard Carl Davis brandish an assault rifle at a panic-stricken crowd during a high-school basketball game. I mentioned the incident. They like somebody to have more power. You have to do that with them. Richard Carl was the one killed that Lane nigger. And their weight in the electoral balance was unknown. Bryan himself had had various dealings with Husband, it seemed; he had, for instance, sold Husband the land where his liquor store stood. He had traded with other White Tornado defendants, too. Michael Bell—the young king of the Sunset Hills project, who had never held a job since high school—had bought a brace of expensive show horses from Bryan. Even before the drug raid, some of these transactions had raised eyebrows: people wondered where Bryan imagined that Bell had come by all his discretionary thousands. Outsiders often made more of these relationships than they merited. In the lexicon of many whites, it was code for lawless blacks, and evoked a great range of criminal stereotypes, from the hapless and desperate addict to the fiendish, nouveau-riche pusher. Paradoxically, White Tornado had seemed to connect little San Augustine with the modern world, the world that most of the people there saw only through their TV satellite dishes. Most of the voters in San Augustine County—at least two-thirds of them—were white. They behave better under Charles. Tindall supporters—who turned out, as the campaign neared its end, to include virtually everyone who held elected office around the courthouse, including the county judge, the county attorney, the town attorney, the district attorney, and the district clerk—generally believed that Saurage had done nothing but alienate black San Augustinians. Everyone, including Bryan, said so. What that would mean in the election, however, nobody knew. There were no official endorsements from the pulpit, no rock-solid white voting blocs, and no tracking polls; and most people, black and white, were wary of saying publicly whom they supported. But it was here that the race issue began to blur into the class issue. Election Day was cold and sunny, with a sharp breeze shaking the new leaves on the pin oaks. In the courthouse square, a huge chalkboard had been set up. The names of all the candidates, from the Democratic Presidential hopefuls to the would-be constables of the county precincts, had been carefully written in. After sundown, a shivering crowd began to gather, collecting ten deep before the brightly lit chalkboard. One of the women, heavyset and merry-faced—and the mother, I realized when we were introduced, of the hapless young man who had carried a hidden microphone into the Sunset Hills project on the day I accompanied Larry Saurage and his men on a drug raid—was amusing her companions with a raucous running commentary on the election. They talked instead about the Presidential primary, where Bill Clinton was cleaning up his competition. Our fearless commentator snorted. She pointed to the right-hand side of the chalkboard, where votes for sheriff were being tabulated. The results from the precincts began to arrive, and each was solemnly inscribed on the chalkboard. Though the black precincts had voted overwhelmingly for Tindall, it soon became apparent, as the results from the southern part of the county came in, that Bryan was going to win. He gonna whup us. Four more years! Laverne Clark, who was hiding her face inside a silvery flowered shawl, was laughing so hard she sounded half delirious. Voter turnout had been, for San Augustine, unusually low—only sixty per cent. He had received only forty-one per cent of the vote. His black supporters, in particular, had been quite unprepared for it, since virtually no one in the black community had had a good word to say about Charles Bryan. Used to be you had a skunk under your house, a fight with your wife—hell, if your house was on fire —you called the sheriff. Now various police agencies handle things. Some people still prefer the old-timey sheriff, though. I briefly saw Tindall himself late that afternoon, at the car lot on U. He was just pulling out of the lot, headed somewhere in a grubby Buick, and his eyes were red in the low sun. I just wanted to help people. Larry Saurage, surprisingly, said he was disappointed. As it happened, Saurage—and the world—saw what Betty Donatto had come into San Augustine and done quite differently from the way Donatto herself saw it. The longer she had spent in San Augustine, the more mystified she became about what, exactly, state and federal law enforcement was doing there. The problem was, the feds were trying to make it seem like more than it was. The quantities were all wrong. In fact, when they yanked the string I was upset, because I only needed a couple more months to really figure out what was going on. Donatto was silent for a minute or more. I knew that she had been working lately on international smuggling cases for the Houston narcotics squad. She knew the difference between large and small drug shipments. Liberty County loaned me out, and we made big bucks on my seizures. We got a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars just for my work. But what did we really do? I went back to San Augustine for that one-year celebration they had. I was kind of scared to go back. Then I just snuck off, and on the drive home I just cried, all the way back to Liberty County. It just seemed so, so. I mean, all these people got promotions and raises, and what had we done? I tell you, the more you get into narcotics on the law side, the more you see the politics. I had heard that Donatto, after her performance in Operation White Tornado, had been offered a job by the F. When I asked her about it, she said, after a moment, that she had decided not to pursue it. As a matter of fact, she said, she had pretty much decided to get out of law enforcement altogether. She was taking night courses, hoping to start a new career, as a drug-rehabilitation counsellor. Save this story Save this story. William Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since Annals of Zoology. How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong. Language is said to make us human. What if birds talk, too? By Rivka Galchen. By Adam Gopnik. Annals of Psychology. By Eren Orbey. Under Review. Our editors and critics review notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. By The New Yorker. A Reporter at Large. Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time. By Heidi Blake. The New Yorker Interview. Bon Iver Is Searching for the Truth. By Amanda Petrusich. Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Temptations of Narrative. By Parul Sehgal. Open Questions. By Joshua Rothman. Infinite Scroll. By Kyle Chayka. Personal History. By Alexei Navalny. The Theatre. By Helen Shaw. Mini Crossword. The Mini Crossword: Thursday, October 17, By Mollie Cowger.

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