DALLAS -- A sheriff and a bail bondsman have been implicated by sworn documents, former officers and narcotics traffickers in a drug dealing operation that flourished in a rural North Texas county, a Dallas newspaper reported Sunday.
Wise County Sheriff Leroy Burch and his close associate, bondsman David Box, already were under investigation by state and federal grand juries in connection with an alleged bond scheme that resulted in hundreds of questionable arrests on sex charges at a roadside park, The Dallas Morning News reported in a copyright story.
In addition, the newspaper's investigation found evidence that unchecked narcotics operations had undermined Wise County's criminal justice system.
Sheriff Burch denied the allegations and said the charges come from narcotics traffickers who want him removed from office.
'If anybody thinks I'm crooked, why haven't they already went up and got a warrant and arrested me?. Because it's bull,' he told the Morning News.
'Why aren't all these ex-deputies not coming forth and saying and giving any proof to what they're saying? Because I'll tell you why, because it's not going on.'
Box declined comment through a spokesman.
In a segment of an ongoing statewide investigation into civil rights violations by Texas law officers, the Morning News also discovered that documents show Internal Revenue Service agents were examining financial records recently seized from the home of Box's mother as part of an 'income tax evasion, conspiracy and money laundering' investigation targeting David Box.
In addition to the bail bond records, agents seized a jar of marijuana seeds, drug paraphernalia, 'a cocaine kit...and a white powdery substane,' according to an inventory of items seized in the search.
Mary Box said she and her son have done nothing wrong, but she declined further comment.
A former Wise County deputy said he saw David Box give envelopes of cash toSheriff Burch on at least six occasions, the newspaper reported.
'He paid him 10 percent of everything he made (in the bond business),' the former deputy said.
Sheriff Burch appointed a convicted felon, who falsified his application for police certification, to head his department's property room. Confiscated evidence stored in that room, including chemicals used to make amphetamine, is missing, two former deputies said.
Earlier this year, state and federal narcotics officers found that $900,000 worth of amphetamine products that had been stored outside the evidence room in a refrigerator, the Morning News reported. The officers said the evidence had not been recorded in the sheriff's official inventories or evidence logs.
Fort Worth police officers, concerned about the influx of illicit drugs allegedly manufactured in Wise County, compiled a confidential investigative file of more than 100 pages, which Fort Worth police Chief Thomas Windham turned over to the FBI more than a year ago, the newspaper said.
Chief Windham declined to discuss specifics of the file.
Three narcotics manufacturers, or 'speed cooks,' said they were released from Wise County Jail to produce illicit drugs in labs they believed were 'protected' by the sheriff's department.
One of the manufacturers, Gary Lindley, said he routinely delivered drugs to David Box and said that during a trip with Box to a clandestine lab site, former Sheriff C.L. 'Ray' Aaron Jr. and Burch, who was chief deputy at the time, followed in a patrol car to ensure 'that no one was following us.'
Two former Wise County deputies, who requested anonymity, corroborated Lindley's story.
Aaron, who resigned as sheriff in 1986 because of 'politics,' said he does not know Lindley and has never been involved with drugs.
Another admitted drug trafficker, Glenn 'Toky' Cotton, who is serving a 99-year drug sentence in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said Box, Aaron and Burch told him they would 'let me out for $10,000 and they had a place where we could cook without getting into trouble.'
'The law is just as guilty as I am,' Cotton said. 'The bigger crooks are imprisoning the smaller crooks.'
