A Knock at Midnight(47)
Mike listened to his mother and headed back to Dallas; he wasn’t going to take it much longer from any white man, police officer or not. He eventually became an apprentice mechanic at Petrick’s Automotive while attending Cedar Valley College. About a year into his apprenticeship, Bonnie came up to meet him for lunch. It turned out Dallas wasn’t immune to the race prejudice that lingered in Kilgore. The friendly shop banter cooled down considerably after Bonnie’s visit, and a few days later, Mike was fired. All he could do was shake his head and laugh. The only way to avoid these white folks, he thought, is to work for my damn self. The most lucrative business in South Dallas in 1989? Crack cocaine.
A friend of Mike’s from high school had been dealing for a while. “You better come on over here and see what’s going on,” he’d told Mike for years. Busy with school and work, Mike had resisted the call. But now he faced facts. Nobody in the hood living straight was bringing in much money, and they worked dawn to dusk for that. Mike didn’t want to be at the whim of some white boss who cared more about who he dated or what he said than the quality of his work. He wanted to be his own boss. In South Dallas, it was clear where the money was, and with that money came freedom.
He began as a courier, driving and picking up packages of cocaine, and just for that made five hundred dollars a week, much more than he’d ever made as a mechanic. Fairly quickly, he got deeper into the game, purchasing kilos of powder himself and cooking it into rock to distribute.
Young and fun-loving, with a passion for the lake life and a soft spot for helping out friends in distress, Mike spent the money as soon as it came in, and sometimes even before. By the end of the summer of 1991, he had a seventeen-footer out by the lake, Jet Skis, and enough income to put his cute new girlfriend with that sweet country drawl up in her own condo.
He was still generous to a fault. He’d always looked after his little cousin Terry, whose mother was struggling to make ends meet, buying him clothes for school and giving him money for food. When he caught wind that Terry was dealing drugs out of his mother’s house on one of Dallas’s roughest blocks, Mike went and got him. “I wish you weren’t doing this at all,” he said. “But if you gone do it, you better come over here and do it with me.” The same thing happened with his old school friend Donel.
For a while, business was going pretty well. But then somebody snitched, and the Dallas police rolled up on De-Ann’s condo. The game was up. Mike wasn’t shocked when he was picked up, though it was odd timing, with drug buys over the past few months so slow they’d considered scrapping the whole operation. But risk was par for the course, and none of them considered the bust that big a deal, at first. All the police had was a single kilo of cocaine in a cooler sitting in a breezeway outside De-Ann’s condo. There were no huge stacks of cash, no piles of drugs—they didn’t exist. The evidence was so weak that at the state level there was barely a case.
Then the feds took over.
“As soon as the feds came in, the whole thing changed,” De-Ann told me. “It was like they would do anything to make the story line up with the one they had in their heads—even when it clearly didn’t fit. They were gonna get their convictions no matter what. It wasn’t an investigation to them. It was a done deal!”
However nasty or unprofessional the agents on the case got behind closed doors, the feds moved forward with charges with marksman-like precision, using every prosecutorial weapon at their disposal. Again, stacking charges. Again, ghost dope. And again, the almost unbeatable count of conspiracy.
By early fall, they’d built their case. On September 22, 1992, a thirty-one-count superseding indictment was filed charging eight defendants with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, crack, and marijuana, the use of a communication device to commit a felony, and money laundering. Mike, Wayland, De-Ann, Donel, and Terry were all named in the indictment. So were Bonnie, Mike’s former girlfriend; Linda Lane, Wayland’s girlfriend; and Koda Cook, Jr., a crack user who occasionally acted as a courier for Mike. In a related indictment, Leslie Calvert, De-Ann’s best friend since elementary school, was also charged. With information gathered from confidential informants, agents alleged that Mike and Wayland headed a cocaine and marijuana distribution operation in Dallas.
Information from informants led to a three-week wiretap before the bust, and agents argued that conversations from the tap substantiated their informants’ findings. Mike purchased cocaine in large amounts, they said, which he converted to crack. The government further alleged that Wayland “handled marijuana distribution.” The legitimate car dealership owned by the brothers, Motor Market Unlimited, was portrayed by the feds to be a money-laundering front. The feds maintained that a single kilo of cocaine produced $48,600 for the “organization,” a figure that would have been a market miracle; most sources estimate the profit from a kilo at the time to be closer to $9,000. The government claimed that the organization was responsible for selling over fifty kilos of crack cocaine that yielded them more than $2 million, all over the course of a ten-month period.
Mike and the others found the allegations ludicrous. They were all guilty of selling drugs, sure, but not that many or for anywhere near that much money. How could the charges stick when there was no evidence? And how could there be evidence when there was no way in hell they’d been moving that amount of dope? Two million dollars? Where was the money?