A Knock at Midnight(48)
Working with the head FBI agent on the case, federal prosecutors dangled plea deals, urging them to snitch on each other or on “bigger fish” in exchange for reduced charges and time. “You better come down here and take this ten years before it’s off the table,” the agent would say to Mike, at least initially. The feds offered the others plea deals, too, each offer contingent on their rolling on one another or others, sometimes on people they’d never even heard of. Mike laughed in disbelief when his attorney, Robert Udashen, informed him of the government’s ten-year plea offer. “Ten years? For these lies? You’ve got to be kidding me. If it was a fair offer, I would take it. But come on, man, I ain’t moved that type of weight. Hell no.”
Unaware of the tremendous power and leeway federal agents and prosecutors wield in drug cases, everyone charged in the case assumed they were innocent unless proven guilty. And how could the prosecutors prove an amount of crack and cash that never existed? Convinced they were being railroaded and could beat the charges, Mike and the others made a joint decision. They would exercise their constitutional rights and go to trial.
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FROM THE BEGINNING, the case was tainted with good old-fashioned Texas racism. All the women in the indictment were white, all the men Black. The same prejudice that influenced Mike’s decision to leave college and led to the dissolution of De-Ann’s family in Campbell was fully present in their interrogations from the beginning. Bonnie, whose father’s friends had driven Mike out of Kilgore, and whom Mike had recently left for De-Ann, flipped for the prosecution, agreeing to testify to whatever they wanted.
From where she was sitting, De-Ann had a pretty decent understanding of the fed’s approach with Bonnie. “Brittany, they were mean,” she told me. “I’ve never been talked to that way in my life.” From the first interrogation, two of the agents on the case went at De-Ann on the question of race. “You gonna go down for a nigger?” they jeered at her. When De-Ann was locked in county jail, the feds called her parents, who had disowned her as a teenager for dating Black guys; the parents drove up to the jail and used the same racist language to try to persuade her to testify against Mike, Wayland, and the rest of the guys. De-Ann wouldn’t budge. But Bonnie, who was seven months pregnant at the time by her new boyfriend, did, as did Leslie and Linda, the other white women in the case. These three were richly rewarded for rolling on their friends and exes. All three pleaded guilty to the one charge of the indictment that didn’t carry with it a mandatory minimum sentence—use of a communication device—and received no prison time, only three years probation.
During the trial, the feds played phone call after phone call of wiretapped conversations between Mike, De-Ann, Donel, and Terry. Jurors—the ones who were awake; a few dozed off early and often—listened to hours of tapes. Mike would call De-Ann and ask her to check on the status of a single kilo. She’d call Donel and ask about the same kilo. Donel would call Terry. Terry would call De-Ann to report back to Mike. By the time the round of calls was over, the feds had turned a single kilo into five or six. They did this repeatedly. The number of kilos kept creeping up. De-Ann wanted to jump up in the middle of an agent’s testimony and shout “That’s a lie! We were talking about one kilo, the same single damn kilo, not five!” But the cruel paradox of the system was that no one on trial could say a thing without admitting culpability. They couldn’t challenge the amount because to do so would admit to having dealt some amount.
In one call, De-Ann said, she’d called Motor Market Unlimited from a burger joint. “What y’all want?” she asked, taking their orders. “A quarter pounder? Fries or onion rings?”
“They’re talking street code here,” the agents testified. “Burger is code for kilo. That’s a quarter kilo that Mr. Wilson just said he wanted.”
De-Ann remembered looking at Donel in disbelief. Surely the jury didn’t buy this shit? But it was 1993. This was no jury of their peers. Why wouldn’t this almost all-white jury from Dallas, Texas, one of the most segregated cities in the United States, believe federal officers from the United States government as they literally transformed beef patties into kilos of crack cocaine?
While I was researching the Wilson case, I came across an interesting story about Jennifer Bolen, one of the lead federal prosecutors in the case. Two years after the Wilson trial, in 1995, a federal court would sanction Bolen for gross prosecutorial misconduct in another drug case, concluding that “the record paints a picture of a prosecutor determined to obtain a guilty plea from the defendant, even if through improper means.” That reckless aggressiveness sounded very consistent with the Bolen I was learning about through the Wilson trial transcripts. Unable to persuade any of them to cooperate, Bolen seemed determined to seek the stiffest punishments possible. From the beginning, she wanted life sentences: for Mike and, when she refused time and time again to flip as the rest of the white women on the case had, for De-Ann.
In addition to the creative mathematics the feds played with the phone calls, the prosecution claimed that they’d found ledgers with drug amounts written on them in the possession of both De-Ann and Donel. De-Ann’s was a half-filled-in computer spreadsheet, listing “18 out” at the bottom. An agent testified that this was hard evidence that 18 kilos of crack had been moved by the conspiracy. The “ledger” they attributed to Donel was even more dubious. In a drawer in his kitchen they’d found a piece of paper with handwritten lines on it, much like a spades scorecard. Each line, they argued, was a kilo of cocaine. The eight rows meant that Donel was directing “eight to ten” street dealers to move the kilos indicated by his in-pencil line markings. At trial, an IRS special agent stated during cross-examination by Wayland’s defense attorney that these records were not sufficient to be used as a basis for making a correct computation of the drug quantity or dollar amount. But his expert testimony didn’t seem to matter to the judge. To determine the quantity of crack the members of the conspiracy would be held accountable of selling, the “expert” presented by the government—one of the agents originally assigned to the case—took the exaggerated numbers from the three weeks of intercepted phone calls, the numbers indicated on De-Ann’s spreadsheet, and Donel’s kitchen drawer “ledger” and added them up. They even multiplied some of the numbers by the number of weeks they alleged the conspiracy went on. Over a ten-month period, the prosecution argued, Mike, Donel, Terry, De-Ann, and Wayland had sold over fifty kilograms of crack cocaine. More than enough to trigger fundamental death sentences.