Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Some of the best investigative journalism through the years has exposed graft and abuse by those who promise to serve and protect. Gary Cartwright’s 1972 Texas Monthly article, “Cops as Junkies,” is memorable not just for its deft writing but its perceptions of how the legal system, especially drug enforcement, offers ready opportunities for moral corruption.
Cartwright opens with detail and mystery:
On a winter day in 1972 a 23-year-old Department of Public Safety narcotics agent named Duane T. Osborne, a model cop with an IQ in excess of 160 and a record for bravery and obedience, shot his daily dose of two grams of heroin and started home. He drove his supervisor’s unmarked car out of Killeen in the direction of IH 35, and turned the wrong way. He knew what he was doing, but not why.
An hour later, when he should have been at home with his wife and three children in Waco, he was 100 miles away, in Austin—holding up the Dial Finance Company, an establishment where he was well known. He made no attempt to disguise himself or his car, even though he carried with him the standard assortment of narc covers including several sets of fake license plates. He was naturally arrested and convicted.
“I watched myself do it—like watching me in a movie—like it was me, but I wasn’t involved,” Osbome told an Austin jury.
To explain why Osborne engaged such a self-destructive act, Cartwright widens his lens to illuminate the shadowy world narcotics officers who, he reported, routinely broke a slew of laws to catch lawbreakers. This started with taking drugs themselves which, Cartwright reported, was necessary to earn the trust of drug users and dealers.
Duane and [an informer named] Rusty hadn’t hung around a derelict’s bar on Austin’s East Sixth Street more than an hour when they found a wasted old Mexican who wanted to score some reds—drug world code for seconal. Part of the ritual is that when you score from a cat you then turn him on; it’s an act of good faith. To refuse to turn on a client would be like blowing your nose on a customer’s necktie in the straight world. ... Immediately after the sale Rusty and the victim of their trap shot up, but Duane had a lifelong fear of needles and when it came his turn he swallowed the red. Swallowed it! The victim game him a long, funny, worried look; and Rusty’s eyes went moist like a dog anticipating his daily whipping.
Back at headquarters, Duane got a tongue-lashing from his supervisor, who then disappeared into a private room with Rusty. That night Rusty taught Duane how to use a needle. Next time out, Duane earned his wings, and also his appetite for barbiturates. A few weeks later, again in the line of duty, he shot heroin and really got off.
Cartwright also reported that even married undercover officers like Osborne, led double lives, “from his bare feet to his scraggly beard and drugged tongue, talking cool, moving dreamlike among those he was trapping, sharing their food, sometimes their beds.”
All of which made the letter of the law, especially concerning entrapment, a fiction. Cartwright argues that entrapment was inescapable in many undercover drug cases. So, too, was the practice of unmercifully squeezing low level offenders. One case included a young man caught with two diet pills. An attorney told Cartwright that police ...
“threw the fear of God into this kid. When they felt that they had him, they offered this deal: he could work it off by turning in five people. It wasn’t enough just to turn them in, five cases had to be made, cases they could take to court, with a reasonable assurance of conviction. The kid came to me and said he just couldn’t do it. We sued the DPS for violation of his rights, and in the course of trial both agents involved ... as well as their supervisor ... admitted, in writing, that this was the standard practice for recruiting informers.”
