Tulia
Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town
PublicAffairs, February 2005
Early one morning in the summer of 1999, authorities in the tiny west Texas town of Tulia began a roundup of suspected drug dealers. By the time the sweep was done, over forty people had been arrested and one of every five black adults in the town was behind bars, all accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman. Coleman, the son of a well-known Texas Ranger, was named Officer of the Year in Texas. Not until after the trials–in which Coleman’s uncorroborated testimony secured sentences as long as 361 years–did it become apparent that Tom Coleman was not the man he claimed to be. By then two-dozen people were in prison, and the town of Tulia had become a battlefield in the national debate over the war on drugs.
Tulia is the story of this town, the bust, the trials, and the heroic legal battle to reverse the convictions that caught the attention of the nation in the spring of 2003. It is the story of Freddie Brookins, a young man with no prior record, whose father urged him to take his chances at trial, and who wound up in one of the state’s toughest prisons. Of Joe Moore, the beloved godfather of black Tulia, convicted of selling a few grams of cocaine and sent away for ninety years. Of Vanita Gupta, a young attorney just a year out of law school, at the helm of the biggest civil rights case in the country.
With a sure sense of history and of place, a great feel for the characters involved, and showdowns inside the courtroom and out, Blakeslee’s Tulia is contemporary journalism at its finest, and a thrilling read. The scandal changed the way narcotics enforcement is done in Texas, and has put the national drug war on trial at a time when incarceration rates have never been higher. But the story is much bigger than the tale of just one bust. As Tulia makes clear, these events are the latest chapter in a story with themes as old as the country itself. It is a marvelously well-told tale about injustice, race, poverty, hysteria, desperation, and doing the right thing in America.