The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Borderlands | 3. Just Say No

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Beloved local sheriff Rick  Thompson takes on a starring role as an anti-narcotics crusader in the Reagan Administration's War on Drugs. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Campsite Media There's a mythic quality to small-town America. When we say those words now, it calls to mind a particular moment in history, the 1950s and early 1960s. You know, at that point in time, Marfa, it was kind of innocent, I would think. And a particular look. Neat lawns, white picket fences, big oak trees. You went to school and you played with your friends and went to the football game every Friday night. You know, you knew you wanted to grow up and be in the band and those kind of things.

When Martha Stafford talks about her childhood in the town of Marfa in far west Texas, I can see it. No one really walked in Marfa. Everybody drove, I think. You know, and then kids on their bicycles. Usually, the youth of Marfa, you spent the majority of your free time riding around. There's a bustling Main Street, mom-and-pop stores, ice cream, soda fountains, barbershops, big fast luxurious cars parked out front, tail fins, bench seats, V8 engines. At the four-way stop in the center of town, you would turn right and go down to where Colomo's was. It was the only convenience store we had

for a long time. And turn around, turn left, drive up past the high school, then turn left again down by the swimming pool over the railroad tracks. When you drove through town, you knew who tended every shop. Every face passing by was familiar. It was safe, friendly, wholesome. And of course at Marfa, you knew everybody. If there was anybody in town that didn't live there, they just stood out like a sore thumb. You know, you knew every face in the community. Law and order mattered there. You respected it. And at its heart, in the center of town,

was an extravagant stone building. The Presidio County Courthouse. You dressed up if you had to go into the courthouse to do something. That was definitely comb your hair, put on lipstick, you didn't get to walk in there barefoot. You can see the courthouse from just about anywhere in Marfa, and from the stretches of grassland beyond. You know, really the courthouse, it was,

you know, this sounds so corny, but it was. It was the symbol of justice and right and wrong. And of course back then, you know, you really believed the police were the good guys. And if you were in jail, that meant you were a bad guy. You know, it was so black and white. But listen to Martha for a bit longer, and those black and white images start to look a bit gray. She's not describing a perfect place at all. Those images of the peaceful happy town, they're a facade. This was, after all, the far west Texas of the smuggler Robert Chambers. And what Martha Stafford started to catch glimpses of, even as a child,

was that harsher land and a truth much darker than the stories people told themselves. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob D'Amico. Chapter 3, Just Say No. Martha has been a teacher for most of her life. Her mom was a teacher. Her dad, he wasn't a teacher. But he made his living from writing and educating. He ran the local newspaper, the Big Ben Sentinel. He was hired to be the managing editor and publisher, but then he never really got paid.

Like a paycheck, it would be what was left after you paid the employees kind of deal. Her parents had a modest home on the south edge of town, surrounded mostly by fields and a small RV park, just a couple minutes drive from the courthouse. And we always had other people living with us for some reason, it seems like. You know, it was either exchange students or people that had broken down on the road and dad brought them home. It was a busy house. Martha's house was welcoming of people from different backgrounds and walks of life. But most of the Big Bend region wasn't like that at all.

And as she got older, Martha started to see the reality more clearly. The Big Bend region was really two places. One Anglo and relatively prosperous. And one Mexican-American and mostly poor and neglected. Up until the mid-60s, the schools in the area were segregated. You might hear that and think, no, that's wrong. Brown v. Board of Education was 1954. The Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional.

But what the Supreme Court said, and what happened on the ground in places like far west Texas was very different. Even after Brown, Mexican-American elementary kids in Marfa were taught in a separate schoolhouse. When Marfa was segregated, you had Marfa Elementary and then you had the Blackwell School. And then St. Mary's, there was actually the private Catholic school. But everybody came together for high school. And I guess it was probably even maybe late 60s before we had Hispanics, you know, from town. And when schools did finally integrate, it was done slowly. And so schools in Marfa were integrated one class year at a time. That's Enrique Madrid, a historian who's lived in the Big Bend region

his whole life. So it took, what, 16 years to integrate up to the high school. You know, it was just malignant dawdling. It was deliberate slowing of integration. The preservation of that power imbalance, it had deep roots. It wasn't going to go away with desegregation or even Mexican-Americans getting elected to political office. It hasn't really changed since the end of the war with Mexico. You know, it's always been a subjugated, subordinated land.

Our lives with Anglos is always separated. In our work lives, it's always a worker-employer relationship. In the Big Bend in the 1970s, this wasn't hard to see. And at the very top of the power hierarchy were the Anglo ranchers. They were white, non-Hispanic, and often the descendants of the men and women who had colonized that area in the 19th century, driving out the Native Americans and Mex women who had colonized that area in the 19th century, driving out the Native Americans and Mexicans who had long lived there. At that time, you know, the majority were, you know, fairly wealthy ranchers, Anglo ranchers that Mexican and Mexican-American workers depended on for work. Low-paid peasant workers.

The ranchers made sure they were indispensable. Every shopkeeper and bartender and mechanic in the area relied on their cash to make ends meet. And those ranchers kept a tight grip on the power their wealth gave them. Ranching isn't a meritocracy. It requires huge amounts of land, dozens of animals, workers, and those massive kingdoms of cattle are passed down in families for generations. Bright, ambitious kids from less affluent backgrounds, they can't really scrap and hustle their way into a cattle ranch. So the Anglo ranchers had an exclusive club, and they could set the rules for everyone else. Did they treat these Mexican-American workers well? No. No.

And there was even a class division among the Anglo-Americans. There was the one class, the ranchers. Of course, they were the upper class. And then the townspeople. Martha, whose parents were middle-class townspeople, not cattle barons, she understood the dominance of the Anglo ranchers, too. They were seen kind of as our aristocracy. You know, they were the ones that had new vehicles.

And they just wielded more power in the community. Every county commissioner or school board member, they were all ranchers. As I investigated the stories of Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson, this power imbalance across the Big Bend region was visible at the roots of so much of what would come later. The drug smuggler Robert Chambers, he came from an old Anglo ranching family. They weren't rich, but he had that same attitude. I make my own rules. But it was actually the story of Sheriff Thompson where you could see those Anglo power dynamics even more clearly.

Back in the early 70s, when Rick Thompson was just a young deputy, the sheriff from Presidio County was a guy named Hank Hamilton. He was old school, courtly, but in some ways a bit of a strange Texas sheriff because he didn't like carrying a gun. And his term came to a premature end on April 27th, 1973, when he went out to check on a car parked out in a pasture and was shot dead. When he was killed and a huge crowd gathered at the courthouse and I wanted to go and my mom wouldn't let me, she was convinced they were going to break the man out of jail and, you know,

lynch him or something on the courthouse square. So I was like, no, you stay away. The Presidio County commissioners had to appoint an interim sheriff to replace Hamilton. And they settled on a well-liked former Marine named Rick Thompson. At first, Rick was just the interim sheriff. And in 1976, he had to run in an election for the permanent position. And that election was a big deal, because a county sheriff in Texas, many of his powers are basically unchecked. The Anglo ranching families had a lot of influence over who became

Presidio County Sheriff, and it was important to them. They wanted someone who would be sympathetic to their interests. Someone who would doggedly chase down the low-wage workers stealing cars or equipment, but not bring down the hammer on a ranching kid who happened to make a mistake. Anglo Rick Thompson was their guy. He seemed to know what the real rules were. He respected the ranchers' power. But he had a formidable opponent, the Marfa police chief, a guy named Manny Rodriguez, who was backed by the growing political power of the Mexican-American community. The campaign was bitter, divisive, and very, very close. Rodriguez was up when the ballots were first tallied. The lead narrowed on a recount.

Then Thompson sued. It went to the courts. And Thompson was declared the winner by just four votes. That election, it didn't exactly give Thompson a sweeping mandate. In fact, he was considered illegitimate by plenty of Presidio County voters, distrusted by many in the Mexican-American community. But Thompson proved to be a skilled politician.

He made alliances, turned on the charm. And his subsequent elections, they weren't close at all. He did a good job of connecting with people. You know, I don't know if it was the good old boy part of him, you know, but when you sit down, you felt like he really was interested in what you had to say. As the years passed, townsfolk like Martha couldn't help noticing that Rick Thompson, the sheriff who had to sue to win his first election, he was growing in stature,

becoming a kind of ideal of the Texas lawman. Strict, but fair. You know, Rick would tip his hat. Hi, Martha. You just know that's the sheriff. You know, and you better behave or you'll be in trouble. And of course, you know, this was a time too, when if you were caught at a party or whatever, he just took you home or the deputy just took you home and knocked on the door and you knew you were going to die because your dad is now standing at the door and the sheriff is handing you off to him. You know, it was terrifying. And he looked the part too. You'd see him hanging out for coffee with the locals at church every Sunday, two-stepping at dances with his wife.

You know, he just seemed bigger than life, like he should be on TV. You know, big, tall, he was handsome and just, you know, wore the starched white shirt, you know, with his badge and just so Texas. So you just felt safer having somebody like that as your sheriff. And Rick Thompson seemed to have come along at exactly the right time because Marfa needed a hero. Its star was fading. By the mid-70s, Marfa was dying as a community. The ranchers, they didn't have the money they had had before, and so that impacted the entire community. You know, they weren't shopping in town, they weren't buying a new car every year, those kind of things.

I graduated from high school in 81. And at that time, you had to leave, Marfa. If you weren't inheriting your parents' business, you had to leave in order to get a degree or find work elsewhere. But then here was Rick Thompson, a Texas icon, 6'4", 210 pounds, a thick wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek. Maybe Marfa was drying up. Maybe the Big Bend region didn't look so prosperous anymore.

But here was a local son you could be proud of. Backed by the Big Bend's ranching community, he was going places. He was seen as an up-and-coming political representative who understood their culture and would do right by them. That's local journalist Jack McNamara. He was talked about among the political class as being a possible candidate for the state legislature. And that could have occurred. Rick Thompson was on his way to something even bigger than being the star cop in a rural county. He was ready for some wider attention. He just needed a big national issue to hitch his own personal brand of law and order to. That's coming up after the break.

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Shop all of Justin's exceptional wines at justinwine.com and be sure to use promo code JESSE20 to receive 20% off your order today. That's Just See 20 for 20% off. You got crack? Well, crack, yeah. All right, but I mean, you can get it? I can get the good crack. Look at me. Now, look, we've been driving around. Are you worried about the cops?

No. Should I be worried about the cops? Are you the cops? I am not the cops. You promise? Swear to God you're not the cops. I swear to God I worried about the cops? Are you the cops? I am not the cops. You promise? Swear to God you're not the cops. I swear to God I'm not the cops. Let's go get the good guy.

I know what the deal is on cocaine. This is from a two-hour CBS TV special from September 1986. It's called 48 Hours on Crack Street. And it was very much of its time. In the mid-1980s, as Rick Thompson continued tipping his hat at the local women in Marfa and burnishing his reputation as a tough but fair dad of Presidio County, America was in the midst of a full-on hysteria about cocaine, and even more so, about one particular variety of cocaine. This is the typical tiny bottle for the new illegal drug of choice in America, crack. Vials like this one are turning up empty and discarded in the streets,

in the parks, in the schoolyards around the nation. That's the host of 48 Hours on Crack Street, Dan Rather, a liberal-minded Texan who was, at the time, probably the most famous journalist in America. And he was throwing the weight of his reputation behind investigating what a lot of people then thought was the biggest challenge facing the country. Experts warned of an entire generation of brain-damaged babies born to crack-addicted mothers. Newspapers ran front-page articles on crack-fueled violence. The conclusion? Crack was everywhere, and no one was doing anything about it. Powder cocaine, which turned out to be just as addictive and just as

harmful as crack, was trendy, commonplace, widely accepted by large swaths of white America for more than a decade. But crack? Crack seemed somehow much worse. The perception was crack was a drug of the inner cities, was used by black and brown people in grimy, crime-ridden neighborhoods. And this racist narrative

was used to justify a national crusade. Not long ago in Oakland, California, I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, just say no. Soon after that, those children in Oakland formed a Just Say No Club. And now there are over 10,000 such clubs all over the country. First Lady Nancy Reagan's famous phrase, just say no, became the slogan of the drug war. It reduced a complex issue to a simple choice, ignoring policy decisions, economic inequalities, and geopolitical forces, and instead

focusing only on personal responsibility. It was also totally ineffective at stopping drug use, but highly effective at escalating the drug war. Soon the government was throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at agencies like the DEA and U.S. Customs, and a lot of that money ended up on the border, in poor, rural, out-of-the-way places like the Big Bend region. There were the Aristat blimps, and a fleet of radar planes, and even Black Hawk helicopters, the kind of combat aircraft that take Navy SEALs on covert raids. This was all supposed to defeat drug smugglers. And it didn't.

But what all this renewed attention from the federal government did do was give people like Rick Thompson a lot more power, willing crusaders on the ground, ready to take up the cause. And this new role, anti-drug warrior, it fit Thompson well. Martha Stafford was a teacher by then, and she remembers the sheriff coming into her school to bring the war on drugs into the classroom. He always did, oh, like an in-service for teachers at the beginning of the year. You know, these are the drugs that are on the street, so you're aware, like, you don't know what weed looks like, please, you know, those kind of things.

But Rick Thompson was going to spread the word even wider than that. Hello, folks. I'm Rick Thompson, sheriff of Presidio County. I'm working with the U.S. Customs Service to lock up drug smugglers. Y'all can help us ruin a drug smuggler's whole day. This public service announcement by the sheriff, it wasn't bluster. He really was working with the feds. He now had a seat at the table.

And he was going to do something with it. More after the break. When I first started looking into Sheriff Rick Thompson, I found a lot of my information in the local newspapers. There was the Big Bend Sentinel that Martha from Martha's dad used to run. There were a few stories about Rick Thompson's anti-drug activities, most of them rehashes of press briefings from the perspective of law enforcement.

Not much more. But there was another area of publication operating back then, something a little more underground. And its coverage of the sheriff was much more critical. This publication had started in the late 80s, wasn't published every day or even every week, and it was basically one guy, publisher, editor, lead reporter.

He was opinionated, cranky, and very good at finding dirt. Many of those in Alpine at the time knew me, knew me from high school, and they had a certain characterization. They knew and they characterized me as a troublemaker. The most unlikely thing they ever thought was that I would become a Marine. Having become a Marine, some of them tried to recruit me to their businesses. That's the newspaper founder, Jack McNamara. Jack was an artillery commander in Vietnam, saw lots of combat. And when he got home, he, I'll put it this way, he didn't give a shit about towing the line.

He wanted to stir up the hornet's nest. He called his paper the NIMBY News. NIMBY as in, not in my backyard. And that was how he did it. It was, in a classic term, for people who are struggling in their hometowns, wondering how to deal with problems. My answer was, publish. So my first edition, my first copy of the NIMBY News was the mimeograph on the kitchen table. And then we went to a copy machine and made copies. That paper, it featured a series of hard-hitting investigations into an anti-drug task force then operating in West Texas.

And Sheriff Rick Thompson was in the thick of it. The task force had lots of cash. There was always lots of money in the thick of it. The task force had lots of cash. There was always lots of money in the war on drugs. But its mission wasn't so clear. Something vague like, stop drugs from coming through West Texas. Find bad guys. Arrest them. And then after much planning and anticipation, on one night, early in 1987, the task force finally put that mission into action.

They launched their first big drug sting. A dozen or so sheriff's office cars, city cars, border patrol cars, all running around town in convoy serving warrants. And who were the high-profile targets of these warrants? The dangerous bad guys? College kids and drifters, you know, guys who came in and cooked at a restaurant or so forth.

This was one big dud. They weren't bringing down narcos. Their bad guys were the softest targets imaginable. They might have been hoping for newspaper clippings with accompanying photos of piles of drugs on the table. But what they actually got was little baggies of coke, LSD, speed, and meth. Most of those arrested never even served time. Where are the drugs? Well, there weren't many drugs. One of the federal law enforcement officers, who were not friendly to Thompson and were not friendly to the Narcotics

Task Force, one of them held out both hands, cupped, and said, that much. He said, that's how much they got. Jack was getting the distinct impression from all his reporting that this wasn't about stopping drug smuggling at all. It was an attempt to justify all the cash that had been blown. And it seemed to Jack that if people like Rick Thompson couldn't find a way to arrest their way to victory in the war on drugs, they'd just arrest someone anyway to keep their departments flush with money. I called Rick and got him on the phone. And he was very friendly, somewhat distant, but friendly. He had obviously, in West Texas terms, he had identified me as one of the enemy.

The question was how serious an enemy was I and how much of a threat was I? I told him I was going to file the open records request because the drug bust he had conducted was so bad that it was necessary for me to see the original records. My intention was to show that he's the most prestigious law enforcement officer in the area. And he made a mess. But the thing about Rick Thompson was, mess or no mess, when it came to Presidio County, he was the law. And he had almost limitless discretion. I've since heard that he did not treat everybody the same. You know, Martha Ryan would have been taken home,

but, you know, Jose Garcia, made-up name, would have gone to jail. Martha Stafford said she hadn't paid much attention to this stuff as a girl. But the older she got, the more she heard about a different Rick Thompson. One who played favorites. One who came down harder on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. You know, I heard that if you were on his wrong side, that he would make your life miserable. Not do anything, but like follow you and, you know, that kind of thing. Harassment.

But that apparent favoritism, that power in choosing who got taken home and who got thrown in jail, Thompson seemed to exercise it in lots of different settings. Families that everybody knew were, they were in the coke business. They never seemed to get caught. But yet Joe Blow from El Paso driving through Marfa would be caught. You know, and we would talk about it. This is weird. This is strange. You know, we know you can go right over there and buy Coke and nothing ever happens to this guy. And you think, you know, if the school teachers know it, the sheriff definitely knew it. I mean, it's Martha, for gosh sake. Martha wasn't sure exactly what was going on.

Were the local dealers just more careful? Did the sheriff bring down the hammer on outsiders, not wanting new problems around? It was impossible to really know. But Martha remembered an incident in her late teenage years that was a possible explanation. If you wanted to have a party, you would go to the cemetery, because, well, nobody's ever gone to the cemetery, right? And you could pull in behind, and then if there was any traffic, cars wouldn't see you. One of those evenings, she heard something. We were at a party on a Saturday afternoon in the cemetery, drinking beer. There was marijuana. And the person who had

the marijuana always seemed to have marijuana. So the question came up, you know, how do you have marijuana all the time? You know, and it was, you know, as he talked about it, he said, well, you have no idea how high up marijuana goes in this town. And he said, it goes up to the sheriff. But he said, no, that's why certain, certain amounts of marijuana come in and they catch the rest. And so by that, you know, I took it to mean, well, Rick turns a blind eye to it or maybe received something in return for turning a blind eye. You know, you always heard whispers in town, like how can he afford so much property?

How can he afford what he has and be buying the properties that he's buying with with his little sheriff's salary from the county that's cindy guevara a marfa native who served as justice of the Peace for 25 years. She's now Presidio County Judge. But more than anything, they used to bus the Redford students here to Marfa. And they came to school here for a time. And they used to tell us, hey, your sheriff is not a good sheriff. And, you know, some of us students from Martha would say, yes, our sheriff is a very good sheriff. You know, we like our sheriff.

Oh, no, we see him in the pastures over there meeting up with the mafiosos. You know, he's up to no good. Meeting mafiosos? Up to no good? What Cindy Guevara heard as a high schooler, it was beyond looking the other way when it came to local dealers. If it was true,

it meant Sheriff Rick Thompson was deep in the middle of something pretty serious and entirely illegal. They called him La Puerta. That was the nickname for him among the Mexican population on the border, which means the door, which means smuggling had to go through him or you got in trouble.

That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob D'Amico, and written by me, Eric Benson, and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. At Campside, the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Thank you. Fact-checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley Ann Krigbaum. Scoring and sound design by Ian Chambers, and Rod Sherwood is our engineer.

Original music by Julian Lynch. If you enjoyed Borderlands, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. And make sure to subscribe or follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.