USERS AND THE LAW: DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE DRUG TRADE
As a teen-ager, Sandra
Harp said,
she and Baker's daughter moved freely through the sheriff's office and the
jail. In an interview this summer, she said Baker asked her not to talk about
the drugs she and Patricia used from his truck before their 1977 accident.
During a lawsuit filed by Baker and his daughter against the
driver of the other vehicle, Rodney Nelson,
Harp testified
that the sheriff's glove compartment contained marijuana, pills and white
powder she believed to be cocaine in bags marked "Property of Madison
County."
Although Baker's daughter denied it,
Harp said the
two girls and Judy Maggard,
Harp's sister,
had smoked two joints and got "higher than I usually get off just pot. I
mean just smoking a couple of joints."
In his own testimony, Baker acknowledged that his daughter
had lied during her deposition when she denied ever smoking marijuana.
A jury rejected claims Patricia Baker and Nelson each made
that the other had crossed the center line on
Arkansas 23
a mile north of Huntsville near Withrow Springs State Park.
Baker said in the June interview that he had probably put the
drugs into his truck to drive to the state Crime Laboratory in Little Rock
for testing. Of
Harp's insistence
that he admonished her to keep silent, he said: "That's bull****."
Harp's relationship
with the sheriff followed her into adulthood.
The convicted thief and drug dealer, now 34, said she refused
when Baker asked her to set up his former son-in-law in a drug deal during
a 1994 custody fight over Baker's granddaughter. Baker acknowledged that
his former son-in-law may have been on a list of suspects he sought
Harp's help
catching. But
Harp said she
then ran afoul of the sheriff when she stole $80,000 from a home in the community
of Hilltop.
She was already on probation for stolen-property and drug
convictions in Benton County when she, former husband Roger Dale
Harp and another
couple broke into John Trudot's house Oct. 1, 1995. Trudot was in the hospital
at the time.
Harp was sentenced
on May 14, 1996, to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to burglary,
theft of property and possession of drug paraphernalia.
She says the paraphernalia charge was incidental. The evidence
was discovered when deputies picked her up for the burglary.
"I was dealing drugs over there for years and years and years
... and was never busted for drugs in Madison County,"
Harp said during
a July interview at the
Arkansas Department
of Correction Tucker Unit, about a month before she was released on parole.
A young Huntsville man whose criminal record includes multiple
convictions for stealing shares
Harp's perception
of how things work.
He said he doesn't worry about the criminal consequences of
a crystal methamphetamine -- or "crank" -- habit that costs $4,800 to $6,000
a week. He usually makes the money back on drug sales, he said, and worries
more about being killed by a supplier than about getting arrested by the
sheriff.
He said that he once asked Baker to sell him drugs from the
evidence closet. Instead, he said, the sheriff recruited him as an informant
and handed him $50 from his wallet.
"Homebodies don't get in much trouble unless you're kicking
down doors," the man said. "Then Ralph will put his foot down."
During interviews, Baker said he aggressively investigates
allegations of drug dealing and denied that his county has a methamphetamine
problem.
"Since I've been sheriff, we hadn't hardly got any meth at
all," he said in June.
But Baker later solicited the Democrat-Gazette's
help.
In August, during a conversation on the courthouse steps that
included Madison County Treasurer Jerry Bolinger, Baker offered a reporter
and an editor money in exchange for information on Madison County methamphetamine
labs. "I don't know how much you boys make writing stories, but we pay pretty
well," Baker said. "That goes for both of you."
And in the Sept. 4 edition of The Madison County Record,
Baker posed with a gram-sized mound of sugar substitute and told the newspaper:
"There is a certain circle of people using the drug."
BARE KNUCKLES, A DEFERRED SENTENCE AND QUESTIONS ABOUT AN ELECTION
Ralph Francis Baker was born Sept. 1, 1938, near the town of
St. Paul, once a bustling banking, railroad and timber center in southern
Madison County. He was one of three children of William McKinley Baker, a
former vaudeville musician, and Evangeline Verruchi, the 1927 queen of the
Tontitown Grape Festival.
Bill Baker had traveled with the Weaver Brothers, making a
national name for himself on the steel guitar. Vaudeville's death sent him
back to
Arkansas in
1930, but not away from his music. He worked the regional circuit and opened
a store and cafe amid the rolling hills along
Arkansas 23.
There he sold ice cream, ammunition and bait, and served up cheeseburgers
and fries.
In 1977, he killed himself with a shotgun at the family store,
which burned down soon after his death. Fogley, the state police investigator
and a close friend, blames the Fourth of July fire on misdirected Roman
candles.
Bill Baker's legacy to his only son was 6.23 acres of mountains
and trees near the north end of the canopied highway that University of
Arkansas fans
know as the Pig Trail.
Ralph Baker would say little about his family or his early
days in St. Paul, but friends say he grew up with two passions -- hunting
and fighting. Baker's penchant for bare knuckles on the back roads won him
the title the "Bull of St. Paul."
He married Noreta Mae Burrell, a St. Paul girl, in March 1956.
He listed his age as 18, hers as 16.
The marriage apparently didn't settle him down. In fact, Baker
was an outlaw before he was a sheriff.
A 1958 envelope that once held the details of two felonies
still sits in the vault of the old courthouse in neighboring Washington County.
It is empty. But an enterprising deputy circuit clerk found a docket sheet
detailing the case of State of
Arkansas vs.
Ralph Baker and Eugene Masterson.
Baker pleaded no contest to burglary and grand larceny charges
on April 2,
1958, and drew two years in the
Arkansas
Penitentiary. The judge deferred the sentence pending good behavior, and
Baker never went to prison. Masterson, meanwhile, escaped from jail and was
later arrested in Oklahoma, according to Washington County officials.
Fort Smith lawyer Matthew Horan once investigated the case
in connection with a client he was defending. He tracked it back to a break-in
at a south Fayetteville auto shop.
Baker declined to discuss the case, referring all questions
to the empty court file.
"I confessed to nothing," he said.
Baker was driving a lumber truck and working as a bouncer at
the Red Fox Lounge in Springdale when former Sheriff Fred Crumbley made him
a deputy in 1971.
A year later, with Crumbley retiring, Baker won office as part
of a slate of political newcomers, defeating Republican Johnny Reed
2,844-2,681.
It was a curious election, with allegations of widespread voter
fraud. The ensuing court fight reached the
Arkansas Supreme
Court twice before Republicans accepted the ruling of Circuit Judge W.H.
Enfield that there were not enough illegal votes to change the results.
Enfield discarded 79 absentee votes that Democratic campaign
worker and then-state Rep. Steve Smith had gathered from the residents of
the Meadowview Nursing Home. But Enfield rejected claims by Republican
attorney Erwin L. Davis that Baker and first-term Treasurer Bolinger had
gotten votes from Oklahomans and the dead.
Enfield also rejected a five-page "friend of the court" brief
filed by William Jefferson Clinton, a young University of
Arkansas law
professor. Clinton argued that Smith was within the law when he circulated
absentee ballots around the nursing home and then mailed them back to the
courthouse.
Testimony showed that, in one precinct, 140 people signed in
to vote, and 155 cast ballots. As the votes were being counted, Republican
poll watcher Dorothy Hoskins swore in an affidavit, a Huntsville man conducted
a dollar-a-chance gun raffle and a drunk wandered in and out of the room.
Another poll watcher, Derice Davis, signed an affidavit saying
that Baker spent most of election day on the porch outside the Hilburn precinct.
There, Davis said, one man arrived drunk, signed his ballot, and handed it
to a Democratic judge to fill out.
In all, Enfield tossed out 150 votes, and Democrats admitted
to 19 defective ballots.
Enfield, now retired in Benton County, said the election challenge
was significant "only from the fact that Clinton ended up as governor and
as president. That's after the fact. At the time, it didn't seem all that
much of a case to me."
But Enfield did say the trial helped illustrate that Madison
County is a "different world."
He said the most memorable testimony came from a man who said
that Bolinger, who still serves as county treasurer, personally delivered
forms to voters allowing Bolinger to take their ballots back the
courthouse.
The man "had a brother out of his mind or a total drunk all
the time," Enfield said. "The lawyer asked about his brother and whether
he signed one too. He asked how come [his brother] couldn't go into town
to vote, and the man responded, `Well, I tell you, friend, he were loud and
drunker than hell.'"
TWO LAWSUITS, HINTS OF THE HIGH LIFE AND THE SHERIFF
Baker became sheriff Jan. 1,
1973. In the
12 elections since, he has been opposed only five times. He has won each
contested race by a 2-1 margin or better.
He has also been sued twice.
On June 13, 1987, Baker and former Huntsville Police Chief
Ed Sharp arrested a 19-year-old retarded Rogers man on allegations he had
stolen two baseball cards during the annual "Hawgfest" on the town square.
The man, Joey Bingham, began kicking the patrol car before
the two officers forced him into the car and drove him back to the sheriff's
office, Baker testified in a subsequent civil lawsuit. There, Baker handcuffed
Bingham to a prisoner's retaining ring in the lobby.
Bingham's attorneys alleged that Baker and Sharp then began
hitting and kicking Bingham, who the attorneys said had a speech impediment
and the mind of an 11-year-old.
The incident lasted 26 minutes.
With Bingham protesting that the baseball cards were his, Sharp
tore up the citation he had written. Bingham's parents picked him up and
drove him to the emergency room at St. Mary's Hospital in Rogers. There,
Dr. Tanya Claytor noted that Bingham's left ear was swollen, bruised and
scraped. The back of his head and his ribs were tender. The tops of both
his feet had red semicircular marks, which Claytor attributed to boot
heels.
Baker and Sharp adamantly denied the beating, and Baker told
jurors he was unaware that Bingham was retarded.
"I realized that Joey Bingham had a speech problem at the time,"
Baker testified. "That's all I realized, and that he was a very small man."
Jurors cleared Sharp but ordered Baker to pay Bingham $100,320.
The check was issued June 19, 1989, by a Michigan-based police insurance
risk pool. With interest, it came to $125,829.76.
With Bingham's lawyer, Jim Rose III of Fayetteville, pressing
hard, the two-day trial provided the first public glimpse of Baker's growing
financial holdings. Baker testified that he earned a little less than $20,000
as sheriff, and that he owned 648 acres of forest and farm land in Madison
and Franklin counties and a share of a lake lot in Missouri.
Baker now declines to discuss the Bingham case. But a friend
and fellow law enforcement officer said Baker lost the case because of his
choice of clothing. A Harley enthusiast given to wearing biker gear, Baker
wore tan pants, a black shirt and
gold chains
to the federal courthouse.
Sharp, who now works for the U.S. Marshals Service in Fayetteville,
also declined to talk about the case.
"I'm not going to give you the time of day," Sharp said. "I'm
retired, I'm alive, and I plan to stay that way."
A bachelor party for a federal drug agent led to another allegation
of brutality. Gary Wayne Johnson, a worker at a Wesley broom handle factory,
sued Baker, Chief Deputy Steve Treat and former Deputy Steve Corkern, who
is now Huntsville's police chief.
Johnson said they beat him up after he intervened in a squabble
between Baker and a female employee at Fayetteville's Bottoms Up Club on
March 4, 1993.
Johnson alleged that Baker, the two officers and an unidentified
woman in biker's leather entered the club with guns and a "party ball" --
a plastic sphere of beer in a box that serves as a portable keg.
Baker argued with a female employee on behalf of the unidentified
woman, Johnson said.
"Why don't you cool down? That's no way for a sheriff to be
acting," Johnson said he told Baker.
Johnson said Corkern invited him outside, then grabbed him
at the front door of the club. He said Baker hit him in the face, and that
he was then pushed back inside the club, where Treat hit him in the face.
Management broke up the fight. Johnson went to the hospital. No arrests were
made.
One of Baker's fellow party-goers said recently that Johnson
started the incident by attacking Corkern, and that Baker hadn't yet
arrived.
But, in pretrial testimony, club owner Jeannie Ward cited three
separate incidents involving Baker that night. She said Baker and other police
there to celebrate the marriage of Drug Enforcement Administration agent
Lance King got so rowdy she was forced to close the club.
Johnson dropped his lawsuit 12 days before it was to go to
trial, saying his family couldn't stand the stress.
Rose, who represented Johnson, told the court he was "personally
disappointed" with Johnson's decision. "We do not believe our case is less
viable than we thought all along," Rose wrote the court on Aug. 4, 1993.
"We are more convinced than ever that we have a lawsuit against all three
defendants."
DRUG PROSECUTIONS, COURTHOUSE DOINGS AND THE MADISON COUNTY RUMOR MILL
An analysis of the state's circuit court computer files shows
69 cases involving drug charges were filed in Madison County between 1993
and last May. Fifty-eight reached disposition, yielding 51 convictions --
an average of about 10 per year.
One of those involved Craig Minor. It wasn't his first
conviction.
On May 16, 1986, Baker and Treat arrested Minor and Jerry Samuelson
with 75 marijuana plants in the back of their pickup. That came soon after
Minor and Samuelson had taken one of Baker's informants into the woods and
pulled four of his teeth with pliers.
Covered with blood, Frank Eytchenson made his way to a local
veterinarian's house and then to the hospital. He moved to Florida shortly
after, according to law enforcement officials. They haven't seen him since.
Neither has Minor. "I don't know where that boy is," he said.
"But he ain't eating corn on the cob."
Minor and Samuelson got probation on the marijuana charge,
but were sentenced to five years in prison on a first-degree battery conviction.
As the case developed, Minor's father, Illinois oil well driller F.M. Minor,
says he twice left envelopes with money on Baker's desk.
"I was police commissioner here for four years," he said last
month in Olney, Ill. "I kind of found out how you do things."
He said one envelope contained $200, the other $1,000. Minor
said Baker took the cash without question but that the two never discussed
its purpose.
"I took all the serial numbers off 10 hundred-dollar bills,"
Minor said. "... But my lawyer told me I couldn't prove I'd given them to
him."
The stakes had escalated by 1994, when Craig Minor and his
wife, Dianne M. O'Delle, were arrested on charges of possessing marijuana
and drug paraphernalia on their Madison County farm.
F.M. Minor said he called Baker to negotiate and was told things
had changed, because Craig was classified as a habitual felon under
Arkansas law.
"He said, 'F.M., he's in serious trouble, and they're going
to try him as an habitual. And you'll never live long enough to see him out
of the pen again,'" Minor remembers. "He said, 'He'll get 20 years for
it.'"
Minor, who said he is speaking now because Craig, 44, is dying
of cancer and living away from Madison County, said he asked Baker to make
a deal.
"He said, 'Well, I really like your attorney. Any deals that's
made will have to be made through your attorney,'" Minor said.
Minor hadn't yet hired an attorney, but he knew whom Baker
meant. Fayetteville lawyer Terry Harper had handled some of his son's previous
run-ins with the law. He called Harper, and Harper called Baker.
Harper first told Minor that he would have to pay Baker and
the DEA $15,000 to keep his son out of prison. When Minor balked, the up-front
demand was reduced to $10,000. Craig and his wife could pay out the remaining
$5,000 at $200 a month.
Craig and his wife were sentenced to four years unsupervised
probation -- despite Craig's lengthy criminal record.
Madison County records show the money was paid to the county's
Drug Eradication Fund, $7,500 credited to Craig, $2,500 to his wife.
Harper told F.M. Minor that the payment distribution was intended
to divert attention from Craig's good fortune, according to Minor's tape
recordings of their conversations.
Harper told Minor that an important part of the deal was to
ensure Craig did not have to report to a probation officer and undergo periodic
drug testing. The two men agreed that could land him back in prison.
"The main worry about that is if they jerk him in there once
a month, and he takes a hot piss test, and comes up ... they can revoke him
and I don't want them to have to do that," Harper told Minor.
"What we're probably going to end up doing is allotting about
10 of it over on Craig and five on her just to make it look like we're doing
it for both of them instead of just trying to buy Craig out," Harper told
Minor.
"They're doing Craig and me and you and everybody one hell
of a favor here," Harper reminded Minor. "I hope he appreciates it and takes
advantage of it."
Harper says he doesn't remember the details of the case. But
he said such deals weren't unusual among attorneys, police and prosecutors
in Northwest
Arkansas. He
said that Baker had not contacted him until F.M. Minor asked him to get involved,
and that all of the dealings with Baker and deputy prosecutor Billy Allred
were aboveboard.
Nevertheless, F.M. Minor said, the case felt like a setup.
"I firmly believe that it was cut and dried, and they knew
what was going to happen before it ever happened," he said.
Dealings at the courthouse have always provided plentiful fuel
for Madison County's rumor mill, which went into overdrive when Diana Criss
quit her 12-year job as an
Arkansas Revenue
Department cashier Aug. 26, 1996. Revenue Commissioner Tim Leathers said
Criss submitted a "routine resignation" while she was under investigation
by Baker for issuing phony driver's licenses and license plate stickers.
It came as no surprise to local drug dealers or to the family
of Billie Jean Phillips.
"I sold to her. I never bought from her," said one convicted
drug dealer, adding that Criss provided a valuable service for the county's
outlaws, who didn't have insurance. "She'd get us stickers for your license
plates. She'd trade those for drugs. ... We'd put them on our tags, and we'd
just hope we wouldn't get stopped."
Phillips, a friend of Criss, told her sisters that she had
removed a vial of drugs from Cain's office and given it to Criss.
Criss has declined requests for interviews. Speaking through
a local drug user, she said Baker told her not to talk to the
Democrat-Gazette a few days after reporters first questioned him
about the investigation.
Baker said he doesn't know much about the case, because the
state was handling it. But Leathers said Baker was in charge.
"We know the sheriff was doing an investigation," Leathers
said. "It became a moot point when the employee resigned."
Allred, who replaced Cain as deputy prosecuting attorney, said
he was unaware of drug allegations in the Criss case until after she resigned.
Absent proof of the drug allegations, he said, there were insufficient grounds
to bring criminal charges.
But the dealer who claimed to have traded drugs for bogus documents
says the case typifies the way business is done in Booger County: "It's a
very crooked county, yeah. I've lived there all my life. It's kind of
scary."
FROM MOONSHINE TO CRANK, THE UNDERSIDE OF MADISON COUNTY
No one knows when Madison County got the dubious nickname Booger
County. Residents mostly blame the label on their snobbish neighbors in
Washington County to the west.
"I've never seen anything in writing. All I have is hearsay,"
said Joy Russell, the county's leading historian. "A lot of people call it
that, but I don't know the origin."
Despite his license plate, the sheriff doesn't know either.
"Whether it's what you pick from your nose or what your grandmother
told you came out of the woods," Baker said, "people don't seem to mind
it."
Historians put Madison County's official age at 161. It split
from Washington County and became a separate entity in 1836, the year
Arkansas attained
statehood and Huntsville became the county seat. Residents say it was a haven
for bank robbers and other outlaws in the 1920s.
Six of every 10 of its adults have graduated high school. About
8 percent have graduated from college. The average family earns $24,776 a
year, according to the 1990 Census.
One in every five Madison County residents lives below the
poverty level. But the statistics may deceive. Some of the county's income
always has come from illegal substances.
For much of the 20th century, the hill folk operated a thriving
moonshine trade. Washington County Sheriff Kenneth McKee, who once was the
area's only state trooper, said Madison County was a moonshine capital,
distributing its top-quality white lightning through the Ozarks and into
Oklahoma.
In the 1960s and 1970s, second-generation moonshiners switched
crops and blanketed the county's deep woods with a particularly hearty breed
of marijuana. By the late 1980s, they had turned toward the big money that
methamphetamine could bring.
Crystal meth, known as "crank," is imported from California
and Mexico. But it is also cooked around the knobby hills of Madison and
Newton counties, say the people who sell it. With a handful of household
chemicals and some ingredients used in hog feed, dealers can produce a drug
that sells for $1,600 to $2,000 an ounce.
For one drug dealer who operates within a mile of downtown
Huntsville, that means raising and spending as much as $6,000 a week. He
talked about how he does it one day last summer.
He is in his mid-20s. His hair is graying. It is late morning,
and he already has finished his seventh Budweiser while talking with reporters.
But crank is his intoxicant of choice. He knows he will sell enough this
week to support his habit and pick up a little sex with a neighbor woman
along the way.
He started smoking marijuana at 10 and moved to harder drugs
three years later. He dropped out of school after the ninth grade.
He isn't afraid of being arrested by the sheriff. He says Baker
has told him the rules. But he expects to die by September. He peeks out
the window at each passing car.
"You know you're talking to a dead man," he says. "One guy
held a shotgun in my face for over an hour last week. He said I f****** owed
him money, and I didn't. He thought I did. He said I'd be dead by September
anyway."
The drug dealer is still alive in October, and he says he has
no choice but to continue to deal crank from his family home. Although he
has been committed for drug and psychiatric treatment, he says there's no
way out from the crank.
"All I do all day is sit around this house and wait for them
to come," he says. "Any minute, somebody could pull up here and come for
me. I'm ready for them when they come, though. I've got a pistol back there,
and -- if somebody comes for me -- I'm ready."
He isn't married. But live-in girlfriends aren't hard to find.
They usually leave him when he uses their share of the crank. He just moves
on to the next woman willing to trade sex for drugs.
In Huntsville's drug community, sex is just another form of
currency.
He explains:
"This girl down the street here. If I got an ounce right now,
I'd probably do half of it right away and put the rest up until this afternoon.
Then I'd go on and after supper I'd probably halve it again and do a quarter.
With what's left, I'd cut off one little corner and save it and then do the
rest of that."
The remaining corner of the day's score buys sex -- with a
little return on the investment -- about 9 p.m.
"I'd go down and say, 'Hey, look at what I've got. But it's
going to cost you.' She'll say, 'OK.' What's left is about $10 worth, and
I'll give it to her. But she'll have to give me half of it back."
He smiles at a 1996 FBI map of drug labs seized in
Arkansas. It
shows two methcathinone lab busts in Benton County. The DEA has identified
one of them as the largest in U.S. history. It shows seven labs busted in
Washington County and one in Franklin, Crawford and Carroll Counties. There
are no busts in Madison County.
The drug dealer says the map doesn't surprise him.
"Ralph don't put up with any bull****. Ralph don't care if
you use drugs. He's told me, 'If you want to mess up your mind, that's your
fault.'
"But when you start breaking down doors, then Ralph gets mad,"
the dealer adds. "He doesn't like that."
Information for this article was contributed by staff writer
Jeffrey Wood.
This article was published on Sunday, October 19,
1997
Copyright © 2003,
Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
Arkansas-1973- Investigations
BACK
TO - DIRTY POLITICS
Phillips paid off the drug debts of her brother, Robert McKnight.
One man from whom McKnight bought, Steve Hathorn, beat him over a debt from
drugs and building materials a year after Phillips died. But McKnight told
investigators the incident had happened in the weeks before Phillips' death.
Everett and Knox asked that Hathorn be required to undergo DNA testing, a
request they say brought their feud with Baker to a head. Hathorn was finally
tested Sept. 22, more than six weeks after Everett and Knox were off the
case.