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Gramm, R-Texas; and representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency. The federal response was up-the-sleeve snickers. Research done since the first Observer article indicates that the “terrorist training camps” story may have originated with none other than Pablo Acosta, the quondam drug lord of Ojinaga, assassinated in 1987 by Mexican Federal Police in an operation abetted by the American FBI. Acosta, who had an ironic sense about him, may have intended a joke on gullible gringo lawmen, or, more seriously, a ruse to bring pressure upon the Colombians with whom he’d once shared his smuggling routes, but with whom he had subsequently fallen out. Painter’s other international notoriety came out of the Fonseca affair, in which Howard and Tucker lured an “international arms dealer” to Midland to inspect a cache of “missile parts,” which were in fact, barrels of gravel. Despite dismissal of the case on grounds that buying gravel is not illegal unless it is illicit gravel, of course Painter played the incident for all the publicity he could garner, including an interview with Ted Koppel on ABC’s “Nightline.” Aside from the comic-opera aspects of the Fonseca case, noteworthy, too, are insinuations by the Midland Sheriff’s Department that Howard and Tucker were somehow working for “military intelligence” in connection with that operation. A subsequent investigation has yielded no evidence of such connections. So, it was against this backdrop and the passage in 1989 of a new forfeiture law, Article 59 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows law enforcement agencies under certain conditions to keep and use for “law enforcement purposes” any assets seized and awarded them by a court, that Painter and McKinney, in concert with a host of friendly D.A.s, other sheriff’s departments, informants, former drug dealers and mercenaries, pooled their talents in pursuit of the big reversal. McKinney has been quoted on numerous occasions in almost salacious praise of this type of operation, opining that in order to do it right, his office needs to keep upward of a million dollars in thd forfeiture account. This, according to the commissioners in their resolution policy and order, is “entrepreneurial law enforcement,” the public policy implications of which can only be bad. Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away? Carl Sandburg Since publication of “Have Badge Will Travel,” in October 1991, the following events and developments have transpired or come to light: Hal Upchurch, former Ward County district attorney and initial attorney of record in Sheriff Painter’s suit against the Commissioner’s Court, with whom the Midland County Sheriff’s office conducted several reversals, was indicted by a Ward County grand jury on January 16, 1992 for activities relating to those operations. The indictment charges Upchurch misapplied $68,750 of $275,000 seized in a 1989 marijuana reversal conducted in Ward and Grayson counties, and tampered with governmental records by reporting only $206,200 of the $275,000 seizure. According to court testimony by Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter in his suit against the Midland County Commissioners, which recently went to trial before visiting Judge Virgil Mulanax, Midland County deputies played a significant part in this operation: Captain Clayton McKinney flew the seized funds and Ronald Ray Tucker from Grayson County to Ward County in an aircraft rented by the Midland County Sheriff’s the same set of indictments for misapplication of fiduciary property and theft. Less than two weeks later, the same Ward County grand jury again indicted Tucker, this time for lying during testimony in a case against drug informant Billy Doyle. In the court record of that case, detailed in the Odessa American by reporter Mike Wheeler, Doyle, who was assessed a 50-yeat sentence for drug violations, agreed to cooperate with Upchurch’s narcotics officers Clay McKinney, son of MCSO Captain McKinney, and with Tucker, only after McKinney the younger threatened Doyle with bodily harm, according to allegations made by Doyle’s appeals attorney, John Osborne. In 1990, Midland County Sheriff’s deputies confiscated $449,950 in a marijuana reversal that took place at the La Quinta Motor Inn in Midland. According to his own testimony in the recent suit over the resolution policy and order, Sheriff Painter admitted that after seizing the money, deputies Jose Primera and Ed Krevitt took it to the sheriff’s office in the basement of the Midland County courthouse, where they counted and photographed it. Then the money went for a ride, when Sheriff Painter and Deputies Primera and Krevitt immediately loaded it into a car and transported it to Ward County District Attorney Hal Upchurch’s office, where Ronald Tucker attested in affidavit that he had seized the money in Ward County. Later, when defense attorneys began grousing about contesting this “illegal” forfeiture, the money was moved back to Midland, where another affidavit was sworn attesting that the seizure had indeed been made in Midland. In this particular case, the “local agreement” clause of Article 59 would seem to mandate the equal division of the funds between the Midland County D.A.’s and Sheriff’s forfeiture accounts; yet Midland County D.A. Al Schorre’s office received only $19,000. The remainder was divided between the forfeiture accounts of Sheriff Painter and Ward County D.A. Upchurch. In what would seem tope a curious variation on standard forfeiture procedure, on or about August 25, 1989, Clay Mckinney, acting as a peace officer with Hal Upchurch’s 143rd ??? District Attorney’s office, filed a notice of intention to forfeit $206,250 against Ronald Ray Tucker, who was requested to relinquish any claim that he or his office had to the money. After “respondent” Tucker failed to appear, the money was forfeited to the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office and Mr. Upchurch’s office. The final disposition of this money, the proceeds of a sting, was not challenged by the original owners of the $206,250. Despite claims by Tucker that he and Howard were at the time not peace officers, but merely informants, and therefore could not have violated fiduciary trusts, the Dallas Morning News cited at least three instances where the duo had requested “carriage of their commissions” that is, issuance of law enforcement credentials, from local law enforcement agencies. According to the Morning News, after being turned down on such a request by Midland District Attorney Al Schorre, Howard and Tucker approached Sheriff Painter, who swore them in as “special” deputies on or about Jan. 9,1985. Painter reportedly kept the record of their commissions in a desk drawer, thus depriving the county commissioners of the opportunity to lawfully approve or disapprove the appointments. In December of last year, Glyn Robert Chambers and Sheriff Rick Thompson of Presidio County were charged with and sub sequently pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to import for sale 2,400 pounds of uncut Colombian cocaine. The cocaine, with a potential street value estimated by some to be as much as $1 billion, is believed to have been jointly owned by several Latin American smuggling organizations, including the Medellin Cartel of Colombia, the Guadalajara and Chihuahua City cartels of Mexico, and the successor organization to Pablo Acosta’s Ojinaga Drug Plaza, now run from Juarez by former Acosta associates Amado Carillo Fuentes and Malaquias Flores. According to DEA and Customs intelligence reports, these organizations have been responsible for thousands of murders in their respective regions, including the machine-gunning of a 24-yearold woman and her 12-month-old baby on a Guadalajara sidewalk and the abduction and murder by torture of American DEA agent Enrique Camarena. According to the arrest summary in Sheriff Thompson’s detention hearing in Pecos on Jan. 12,1991, attested to by DEA agent Dale Stinson of El Paso, Chambers and Thompson were to deliver the cocaine to either Houston or San Antonio, for which they were to be paid a transshipment fee of half a million dollars apiece. According to articles in the NIMBY News little Alpine newspaper run by retired Marine Corps Colonel Jack MacNamara, Glyn Robert Chambers was a family friend, possibly even a godson, of drug lord Pablo Acosta. The NIMBY and other newspapers describe Chambers as somewhat of a wild boy, having been associated with border drug dealing and ancillary criminal activities for 16 years or longer. Chambers also had connections with certain law enforcement officers in the Big Bend area, and was apparently willing to do for them things which probity, propriety or the law might have prevented them from doing themselves. He reportedly made regular forays across 6 MAY 22, 1992