Part 1 of this series can be found here.

By Alan Bean

Alvin Clay Part 2: “Everybody’s Got Standards”

Why did the federal government investigate Little Rock Attorney Alvin Clay when there was no evidence of wrongdoing? 

 Why has the FBI unleashed a campaign of dirty tricks against Clay? 

 Why is the Department of Justice trying to link the black attorney to illegal drugs? 

 Why have FBI agents and federal prosecutors repeatedly lied to magistrates, judges and grand juries in order to obtain search warrants and indictments?

Why did the government withhold evidence from Clay’s defense team?

Why have a federal prosecutor and an FBI agent committed perjury in this case; and why did a federal judge give them a pass?

 Why is Assistant US Attorney Bob Govar so desperate to distance himself from the Clay case?

 It all began with Operation Wholesale, a spectacularly corrupt undercover drug bust that should have become a national scandal, but didn’t.  I may appear off topic here, I admit.  But you can’t understand what’s happening to Alvin Clay in May of 2008 until you understand what happened to Roy Lee Russell in March of 1999.

Operation Wholesale got rolling when Russell, a black farm worker who had done time on drug charges, ran into a black Arkansas State Trooper named Lloyd Franklin at the Exxon station in Dumas, Arkansas.

 “Roy Lee, you remember how we kicked ass down in Pine Bluff?” Franklin asked.  “Well, we’re doing another undercover operation and we need a good informant.”  Franklin told Russell to drop by his office if he was interested.

 Russell was interested.  He had enjoyed the few months he had spent working under cover with Franklin ten years earlier.  “Lloyd Franklin is a straight up kind of guy that does everything by the book,” Russell told me when I spoke to him in Little Rock.  “He’d take forever writing out his police reports; he wanted to get every little detail right.” 

Franklin had been a stabilizing influence in Russell’s often chaotic life.  During the few months the men spent making cases together in Pine Bluff, Russell took pride in being part of a class act–something straight and good.

 Operation Wholesale didn’t work that way.  This time, Russell was paired with a black State Trooper named Clayton Richardson, Lloyd Franklin’s opposite number–a pathetic character driven by greed, fear and appetite.

 “After we made a few buys,” Russell told me, “the FBI come in and said they wanted to prosecute the cases.  The feds said they could get me $900 a month on top of the $250 per case the state was already paying me.”

 It is hardly surprising that the Arkansas State Police and the FBI used a black cop and a black confidential informant (CI) to run a drug sting–the operation was aimed at poor black males and nobody else.  Roy Lee Russell’s job was to introduce Clayton Richardson to the poor side of the hardscrabble Arkansas farming towns he knew so well.

 Operation Wholesale wasn’t racist in the overt sense.  Drug warriors, state and federal, are judged by the statistics they accumulate (and by little else).  You get one point for bringing down a major drug supplier.  You get one point for nailing a crack addict who sells for buy money.  Kingpins rarely touch the dope they sell, they are protected by a small army of underlings, and they can afford high dollar lawyers.  Crack addicts and mentally challenged street hustlers are easy to nail and even easier to prosecute.  As one narcotics agent put it to me, “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

 Young black males are disproportionately impacted by the drug war because they are disproportionately targeted.  As the prisons fill up with black guys, the public is taught to associate drug dealing with black skin. 

But that’s just the beginning.  Precisely because the targets of the typical drug bust fit the dealer profile (young, poor and black) and can’t afford good lawyers, it doesn’t take real evidence to secure a conviction.  Defendants frequently go down on the uncorroborated word of an undercover police officer or confidential informant.

 Narcotics operations, no matter how shoddy or corrupt, pass unnoticed by the public unless somebody raises a fuss.  The system is adept at rewarding those who embrace the status quo and punishing those who ask too many questions. 

The three most corrupt narcotics operations on record all happened in Texas.  In Tulia, it was a white undercover cop making uncorroborated cases on poor blacks.  In Hearne, it was a black informant making uncorroborated cases on his friends.  In Dallas, it was a couple of Hispanic cops teaming up with Hispanic informants to make cases on Mexican nationals. 

The Tulia drug sting, though the least egregious case, garnered by far the most publicity.  It was widely assumed that Tom Coleman, the white cop, faked cases on black defendants because he was a racist.  The Coleman operation came to grief because Tom Coleman was given the motive and the opportunity to line his own pockets by defrauding the government.

The Tulia sting unraveled because Friends of Justice stood up and said no.  The Hearne case fell apart because local residents, inspired by the stand we were making in Tulia, stood up to a corrupt prosecutor.  The Dallas scam was exposed because the Texas Legislature passed a Tulia-Hearne bill granting defense attorneys the right to ask for corroboration in drug cases made by confidential informants.

Operation Wholesale combined the worst elements of Tulia, Hearne, and Dallas.  A rookie cop with no experience in narcotics work was placed on the street with a convicted felon.   Had an advocacy group like Friends of Justice been paying attention, Operation Wholesale would have become another Tulia. 

When you give money to unsupervised individuals and ask for no corroboration you are courting disaster.    

Although Clayton Richardson was unfamiliar with narcotics work, he quickly learned that the more drugs you buy, the lower the price.  By breaking a large drug buy (purchased at wholesale prices) into several smaller units you could make a healthy profit every time you drove to Little Rock to turn in “evidence”.

“You could pay $450 for the drugs and tell the feds you paid $600 or even $650 and nobody asked any questions,” Russell told me.  “That’s $150 or $200 straight profit every time you make a case.”

As we drove through rural Arkansas, Roy Lee Russell pointed to a mileage sign.  “Things really started to come apart when we made a buy in McGehee,” he said.  “Some of my old friends figured Clayton for a cop and told me I shouldn’t be hanging with him.  When I told that to Richardson he completely freaked out, like somebody was gonna kill him or something.  From that day on, he wouldn’t stay at the apartment the state police rented for us in Monticello.  And he wouldn’t go out on the streets with me to make buys.”

 Instead, Russell claims, Trooper Richardson shacked up with a woman he met at Wal Mart and spent most of his weekends gambling in Greenville, Mississippi.  “Clayton was playing the slot machines and drinking, and he’d be giving the women a little money to gamble with.  He was married at the time-had a wife and kids back in Camden.”

 “When it came time to prosecute these cases Donnie Robinson and Stephen Pinkstone of the FBI started showing me pictures,” Roy Lee remembers.  “They’d be asking, ‘Who is this?’ and ‘Who is that?’  They never asked me specifically if me and Clayton Richardson made a buy from these people.  You see, I never looked at Clayton’s reports so I had no idea who he was making cases on.”

The first defendant, Steve Block, went to trial in January.  “They put me in a room with Clayton Richardson,” Russell says.  “Now, I been knowin’ Steve Block since I was a kid, so I told Clayton Richardson, ‘We didn’t make no case on Steve Block'”.

According to Russell, Richardson asked him why he was ****ing up the operation.  Unsure what to do, Russell perjured himself by claiming that Mr. Block sold them drugs.  When the case ended in a mistrial, Russell knew he couldn’t provide the government with a repeat performance. 

“I didn’t have no trouble putting dope dealers away,” Russell told me.  “We did that ten years earlier with Lloyd Franklin and I never lost a minute’s sleep over it.  And even in this deal here, we made some good cases now and then and, if a deal really happened, I had no problem getting up on that stand and telling the truth.  But to go along with Clayton Richardson’s lies was too much.  I couldn’t do it.  I ain’t no angel, but everybody’s got standards.”

Roy Lee Russell figured the feds would be relieved to learn that they were in the process of sending innocent people to prison.  Not so!

“Some of these cases they just wouldn’t drop,” Russell told me.  “Pinkstone kept coming to my house asking me to testify.  But I said, ‘I ain’t goin’ down there [to the federal courthouse in Little Rock].’  Pinkstone told me, ‘We can lock you up and hold you for contempt if we want to.’ And I told him, “You just do what you gotta do!”

In the end, Steven Block was convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of Clayton Richardson.  Cases dependent on Russell’s testimony were dropped, but if the field report had Richardson on the scene, the federal government, under the direction of Assistant US Attorney Bob Govar, continued to prosecute.

In March of 1999, a defendant named Johnny Patrick proved that he was locked up in the state prison in Dermott, Arkansas when Clayton Richardson said Patrick was selling drugs in the parking lot of Church’s Chicken in Eudora.

“Maybe if he were at a church meeting and had 50 nuns to verify his story it might be a better alibi,” Patrick’s lawyer told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  “But this is about as good as it gets.”

Defendants unable to prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt weren’t so lucky.

Michael James Evans was convicted even though Roy Lee Russell signed an affidavit stating that the narcotics transaction described in Clayton Richardson’s police report was pure fantasy.  In addition, Richardson’s report had the deal going down in front of a house trailer.  Sales receipts proved that the trailer wasn’t moved to that site until long after the alleged crime.  (In the photograph at the top of this post, Roy Lee Russell is standing in front of the trailer.)

Trooper Richardson’s uncorroborated testimony was enough to rob an innocent man of seven years of freedom.  When the trial was over, a confused juror asked the presiding judge to change her verdict to ‘not guilty’.  She had voted to convict, she said, because Evans didn’t have an airtight alibi and his attorney never produced any character witnesses. 

This is typical juror reasoning.  In narcotics cases the presumption of innocence is replaced by a presumption of guilt.  If the defendant fits the dealer profile (young, poor and black) innocence must be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.  Johnny Patrick could meet the standard; Michael Evans could not.

The US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict, reasoning that Richardson might have witnessed the buy in front of another house trailer.  The jurors’ recantation, the court ruled, came too late.

Roy Lee Russell was arrested in March of 1999 and charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.  By that time he had signed affidavits for a long list of defendants claiming that neither he nor Richardson had purchased drugs from them.  “I never said none of these cases didn’t happen-just that most of them didn’t,” Roy says.

Assistant US Attorney, Bob Govar, cooked up a bizarre explanation for Russell’s recantation.  The confidential informant, he said, was angered when his monthly stipend dropped from $900 to $700 a month.  According to Govar’s curious theory, Russell decided to supplement his flagging salary by writing affidavits in exchange for cash. 

The media gobbled up this story without asking a single defense attorney if it was true.  If they had asked the question, they would have learned that Russell wrote his affidavits without discussing remuneration with a single attorney. 

Not only did Roy Lee Russell have nothing to gain by testifying that Operation Wholesale was a fraud against the government, he had everything to lose.  From the moment he refused to sign off on Clayton Richardson’s narrative, Russell was threatened with prison time.   Instead of forfeiting $200 a month in salary, Russell surrendered every nickel of the $700 monthly stipend the feds were paying him to provide testimony in Little Rock.  The only upside for Mr. Russell was a clean conscience.

Clayton Richardson was rewarded handsomely for defrauding the American tax payer. 

The media swallowed the government’s suggestion that the State Trooper’s field reports were the gospel truth.  Bob Govar, the federal prosecutor, was a trusted source; Roy Lee Russell, the convicted felon, was not.  In the media, Russell was derided as a “turncoat”.

Government officials like Bob Govar and Steve Pinkstone lied to themselves, then they lied to one another, and finally they lied to the press.  How do we account for such unconscionable behavior? 

Once you understand the Alice in Wonderland world men like Govar and Pinkstone inhabit, their strange reasoning begins to make a weird sort of sense.  The government knew that Russell was telling the truth-it was as elementary and obvious as 1+1=2.  Unfortunately, if you couldn’t trust Operation Wholesale, you couldn’t trust any narcotics operation based on uncorroborated testimony.  Ergo, the public had to trust Operation Wholesale.

Roy Lee Russell was Toto pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.  He was the little boy declaiming that the Emperor has no clothes.

The best analogy I have come up with is from “The Third Man,” a 1948 movie based on a Graham Greene story.  The hero, a bumbling investigator named Holly Martins, learns that the villainous Harry Lime has stolen a vast supply of penicillin, drastically diluted it, then sold it back to medical practitioners.  As a result, dozens of innocent people have died.

In the climactic scene, Martins and Lime are at the apex of a giant Farris Wheel, looking down on the Vienna fairground below.  From that great height, people are reduced to the size of tiny ants.

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” Martins asked.

“You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things,” Lime answered with a sardonic shrug.  “Victims?  Don’t be melodramatic.  Look down there.  Tell me.  Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?  If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Holly Martins confronts Harry Lime

That’s the way men like Bob Govar and Steven Pinkstone have been forced to think.  From the lofty perch of a federal prosecutor or an FBI enclave, men like Steve Block, Michael Evans and Roy Lee Russell look more like tiny dots than real, flesh and blood people.  The only question is how many of these guys must be sacrificed to preserve the illusion.

The Third Man analogy isn’t a perfect fit, of course.  Maybe the testimony Bob Govar gets from narcotics cops and confidential informants is legitimate — there are officers out there like Lloyd Franklin, after all.  True, these guys have a motive and an opportunity to lie to the government, but that doesn’t mean they all take advantage.  And if some of them lie, a few dots like Michael Evans stop moving. 

But it’s not forever.  It’s only seven years, or perhaps twenty-five or thirty years, tops.  

Besides, most of them are guilty, right?  If they didn’t do this one, they probably did something just as bad, or worse.

So the rationalizing goes.

Into this sordid world stepped a young black attorney with shoulders so broad he couldn’t buy his suits off the rack.  His name was Alvin Clay and he had been tapped to defend Roy Lee Russell.  It was Clay’s first federal case.