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Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Nate Blakeslee (Author), James Boles (Reader)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Publication Date: June 29, 2007
A modern-day American classic, the non-fiction equivalent to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. A story about how easily good people are led astray; how carelessly injustice is rationalized, but finally, of due process and justice being served.


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 town was behind bars. All were accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman, the son of a well-known Texas Ranger who 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.


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. 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 listen. 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 in this country have never been higher. However, 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.


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2005 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for excellence in nonfiction and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, this 2007 audiobook recounts a racially charged undercover narcotics investigation in the small Texas panhandle town of Tulia. The fallout holds far-reaching implications for strategy and tactics in America's war against illegal drugs. Boles gives the proceedings a down-home flavor in his vocal renderings of Tulia locals without descending into a mocking or patronizing caricature of rural life. Boles's unflinching performance of the trial deliberations—especially the heated exchanges between the defense lawyers and rogue police officer Tom Coleman—creates a palpable air of courtroom drama. The sheer magnitude of the characters—including the three dozen defendants, scores of attorneys, law enforcement officials and community leaders—may at times leave listeners somewhat confounded. Yet the essential threads of the narrative weave a compelling account of the epic struggle for justice and fairness in the day-to-day trenches of an imperfect judicial system. Now a Public Affairs paperback (Reviews, Aug. 8, 2005). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

"No novelist could have made up such an account and been deemed credible," writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Yet every detail in Tulia is true. Expertly researched and written, Tulia offers a shocking portrait of racial profiling and bigotry in rural America. In writing this tale, Blakeslee never fails to put the defendants’ stories in the context of black-white race relations, drug-enforcement task forces, and corrupt police forces. Nor (to the chagrin of a few critics, who found the characters hard to follow) does he omit a single defendant or lawyer involved in the case. Coleman in particular comes off as an incompetent, despicable man unable to live up to his father’s reputation as a respected Texas Ranger. Though depressing, Tulia is ultimately a story of triumph. Read the book—or wait for the film.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Audio CD
  • Publisher: Gildan Media; Unabridged edition (June 29, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1596590955
  • ISBN-13: 978-1596590953
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.2 x 6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,722,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a superlative expose of what happened in Tulia, a small, dusty town in the Texas Panhandle. Beautifully written, it tells a compelling story of justice denied, thanks to a corrupt group of law enforcement officials and a rogue, undercover narcotics cop.

As a career prosecutor for over twenty years, I was appalled at the events that unfolded within the pages of this absorbing book. It is the role of a prosecutor to seek justice. It is not the role of a prosecutor to behave in the reprehensible and despicable fashion that Terry McEachern, the prosecutor in Tulia did. I only hope that he will eventually be disbarred, if he has not already been disbarred for his complicity in the travesty of justice that occurred in Tulia.

In 1999, about twenty percent of the adult Black population of Tulia found itself arrested. Pulled out of their homes in the wee hours of the morning in all stages of dishabille, all found themselves accused of selling cocaine to Tom Coleman, an undercover cop who would prove to be something other than what he seemed. His true colors, however, would not come to light publicly until after he was named Officer of the Year.

It would turn out that Coleman's only claim to fame was the fact that his father had been a member of that hardy breed of lauded officers known as the Texas Rangers. He was, evidently, nothing like his father, who was by all accounts a well-respected lawman. The only saving grace for his father is that he mercifully died before his son's infamy came to light. Of course, it should be noted that Tom Coleman was able to operate as he did, thanks to the Sheriff of Tulia, Larry Stewart, who supported Coleman until the bitter end. Sheriff Stewart was not worthy of the shield that he wore.

Coleman's undercover work was like no undercover work I have ever come across as a career prosecutor. The caliber of his work, which was highly suspect, was such that it would be totally laughable, were it not for the fact that most of the accused found themselves convicted on the word of this less than credible witness against them and sentenced to draconian sentences worthy of murderers. Ed Self, the judge who presided over the trials, did not seem to understand the applicable law and did not ensure that the defendants had a fair trial. He is certainly not worthy of the robe that he wears, and the prosecutor, as I said, should be disbarred for his complicity in this debacle.

Many of the defense attorneys were also appalling, providing, at best, ineffective assistance of counsel to their hapless clients. There were some defense attorneys, however, who tried to do the right thing by their clients. The problem, however, was that they did not have all the information at their disposal that the prosecution was ethically obligated to give them, so their efforts were handicapped.

Thanks, however, to the efforts of some outraged townspeople and local attorneys, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, and the pro bono efforts of a number of big firm attorneys, some measure of justice was eventually meted out. Unfortunately, by the time this finally happened some of the protagonists had spent years in some pretty tough prisons for crimes that they did not commit. Still, the concerted effort on behalf of these wrongfully convicted individuals was nothing short of heroic.

This is a highly detailed, meticulously written book that delivers a story so compelling and absorbing that it will keep the reader compulsively turning the pages until the very last. This book is an example of investigative reporting at its finest, taking the reader into the belly of the beast of corruption and comprehensively exposing its workings in the historical context out of which it arose. It is a stunning indictment of a system that allowed a rogue cop, such as Tom Coleman, to flourish at the expense of others. Bravo!
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A Nonfiction Legal Thriller November 5, 2005
Format:Hardcover
One morning in 1999, in the little cow town of Tulia in the Texas panhandle, before the sun came up, a force of state and local police burst into homes, arresting 47 men and women who had no way of anticipating what had hit them. News cameras were there to show the half-dressed suspects being led from their homes. A neighbor exclaimed, "They're arresting all the black folks!" and it must have seemed that way. Those arrested were mostly black, and they were twenty percent of the little town's black adult population. The _Tulia Sentinel_'s headline proclaimed, "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage." The big sting was for drug dealing, leaving some to wonder if there were all those drug dealers, how many drug users were left as their market in such a little place. It wasn't the first tinge of doubt about the arrests, and four years later after a bitter struggle, those found guilty were sprung from prison and the charges were annulled and restitution made. It's a sordid, fascinating study of justice misguided and justice eventually triumphant that casts light on race relations and the national war on drugs, and it is told excitingly in _Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town_ (PublicAffairs) by Nate Blakeslee. It is smoothly written and even though we know the outcome beforehand since it is not a novel, it has a great deal of suspense and plenty of memorable characters.

There are a surfeit of bad guys here, but they all depended on the fraudulent handiwork of Tom Coleman, a scruffy character ("a bad cop from central casting") whose strongest merit was that his father had been a superb Texas Ranger. Coleman's evidence always consisted of his word against that of the suspects; he never had another cop witness his buys and he never had audio or video of them. The sheriff who had hired him from the pool of narcs in the drug force in Amarillo, an upright deacon and leader of his church, was not troubled by such matters. The processes of the trials, and the scant evidence against the defendants, did not bother the judge, nor was he worried that the impoverished suspects were getting proper counsel. Indeed, Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a US Senator) presented the award of Officer of the Year to Tom Coleman after the Tulia arrests. The Texas ACLU became involved, and Blakeslee himself wrote newspaper exposés in 2000. After the national press started picking up on the story, a young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund began drafting habeas corpus petitions to get the prisoners free, and she got pro bono assistance from large out-of-state law firms. The effort didn't all come from outside Tulia, though. A big part of the story belongs to Gary Gardner, an obese bankrupt farmer good-old-boy and self-trained legal authority who realized that his fellow citizens were being railroaded, and started his own research. At one point he was examining a questionable correction on a document in the case with his microscope that he usually used to search for boll weevil eggs. To the embarrassment of the liberal heroes who were his allies in working for the prisoners, Gardner sprinkled his conversation with racial slurs, but he was a strong agent in defending those who had been wrongly convicted.

It was touch and go for the prisoners and other accused. There is a satisfying resolution for all involved (including various types of condemnation of the bad guys), but Blakeslee shows how the outcome was by no means assured. The narcotics task forces described here often consist of undercover agents who are loosely supervised. When Coleman's cases blew up, one former narc said, "Everybody's talking about Tom Coleman - well, there are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there." One of the many drug-war related problems here is that there may not be a comparable number of idealistic lawyers who will do the hard, frustrating, and unremunerative work to expose them. Besides being a devastating critique of current tactics of the war on drugs, and of Texas Justice, and of ingrained racism, this is above all a fine legal thriller.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Finally, Justice! November 25, 2005
Format:Hardcover
I first read about the travesty of justice in Tulia, Texas in columnist Bob Herbert's column in The New York Times that I get online. I immediately felt an outrage at this situation, so I was eager to read this book that details the whole thing. It is a fascinating look at what seemingly passes for justice, but is really a gross racial slam to about 40 people in this small town. I especially liked the last 2/3 of the book when the "good guys" got their day in court and exposed the only witness to this travesty as a lying, bigoted criminal. It was court room drama at its best. I recommend this book as a great piece of nonfiction.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.5 Stars
Long winded effort revealing a terrible injustice done in a small town in Texas, but is that really a surprise? Read more
Published 6 months ago by Eddie Wannabee
Crucial subject matter; rigorous investigation; overwritten in places...
Overall Assessment:

Nate Blakeselee put rigorous and heartfelt effort into this account of a disturbingly recent example of American justice gone bad. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Timothy Griffin
Getting that Pioneer spirit
This is the story of a miracle to correct a monstrous miscarriage of justice in the small town of Tulia, Texas. Read more
Published 17 months ago by The Great Gazoo
TULIA
Found out a lot about Texas Rangers, Sheriffs, Attorneys, and other supposedly "good guys," the ones wearing the white hats. To my dismay, I discovered how corrupt they were! Read more
Published 18 months ago by Cherri Giorjita Gae
Everyone in Texas should read this one
If you're poor and black in Texas, chances are good you might not get a fair trial.
Should be required reading in the schools.
Published on January 14, 2010 by Thomas Bonar
Great Investigative Reporting
Nate Blakeslee's "Tulia" tells the story of dozens of people, mostly black, who were arrested in 1999 for selling cocaine in Tulia, Texas. Read more
Published on August 4, 2008 by Eric Mayforth
Great and thought provoking read.
I don't usually read this kind of stuff but picked this up after talking with one of the characters in this book. Very readable and balanced. Read more
Published on December 25, 2007 by Artimus
Judicial Review of a small Texas town
I am still reading this book, which requires the reader to really digest what is being said. Take about a miscarriage of justice, and the time it took to get it right. Read more
Published on August 23, 2007 by Cheryl E. Haynes
Mixed Emotions
Coming from a small South Arkansas town, I had mixed emotions reading this book. As a licensed attorney, the obvious abuses of criminal and constitutional law are indeed... Read more
Published on July 21, 2007 by Steven M. Anthony
Separate and unequal justice under law
This is an excellent book. As the definitive treatment of the notorious cocaine stings in Tulia, Texas, it shocks our conscience by revealing how racism still plagues our society... Read more
Published on February 6, 2007 by Steve Chien
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
blank waiver, possible mental problems, exhibit binder, law enforcement colleagues, powder cocaine, deferred adjudication, indigent defense, drug task force, powdered cocaine, state jail, sale barn, four applicants, theft charge
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Swisher County, Cochran County, Tom Coleman, Sheriff Stewart, Joe Moore, Pecos County, New York, Gary Gardner, Billy Wafer, Donnie Smith, Freddie Brookins, Alan Bean, Jason Williams, Paul Holloway, Court of Criminal Appeals, Kareem White, Larry Stewart, Thelma Johnson, Ricky White, Texas Ranger, Cash Love, Carol Barnett, Des Hogan, Fort Stockton, Mattie White
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