The following article alleges corruption but fails to supply the names of the officers identified in civil court documents as allegedly participating in a local drug ring. For those details, see the March 2001 CopWatch Botter, second item.

The following was excerpted from a January 29, 2001 article in the Austin American Statesman by Jonathon Osborne:

Austin police ignored drug problems, feds say
By Jonathan Osborne
American-Statesman Staff
Monday, January 29, 2001

A mid-1990s federal investigation of an Austin-based drug network turned up reports that 10 Austin police officers may have been working with the smugglers or using cocaine on duty, court records show.

The investigation crumbled in 1997, however, when police administrators transferred Austin officers from the federal task force, depriving it of personnel needed to pursue the leads, according to an Internal Revenue Service agent and an assistant U.S. attorney who ran the investigation, code named Mala Sangre -- Spanish for Bad Blood.

Police supervisors appeared uninterested in investigating their own officers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Marshall testified in a sworn deposition.

``It appeared to me that a lot of people just wanted to avoid that embarrassment,'' said Marshall, Mala Sangre's administrative supervisor. ``There were a number of things we could have done if we would have had the manpower."

Marshall, the assistant U.S. attorney, blamed the Austin Police Department for a lack of support.

The Police Department began pulling officers from the investigation about the time some officers were implicated in wrongdoing, Marshall said in a February 2000 deposition.

Marshall testified that a turning point came in the summer of 1996, after officer David Mattox was reported to be selling cocaine out of his patrol car and a civilian police photographer compromised a Mala Sangre investigation into a drug dealer.

``I sort of pin the lack of personnel and the lack of support to about the time that Mattox and those guys were having their difficulties,'' Marshall said in his deposition. ``I couldn't get officers to come in and review (surveillance) tapes. . . . Granted, it's boring as hell, and I wouldn't want to do it either, but my God, we do it. And it wasn't happening."

Of the 10 officers named in the summary as taking drugs, working with drug networks or tipping off drug dealers, eight remain on the force.

In a summary introduced into court, an informant listed nine officers known to frequent Angela's Furniture Store and Cocktails Nightclub, an eastside bar where now convicted drug dealer Roger Lopez was a regular. Another informant named six officers seen buying cocaine.

Other information in the summary includes:

o Two officers carried cocaine from South Texas to Austin for Lopez. They also supplied pagers, cell phones and information on investigations to the drug dealer's network, according to confidential informants identified only as CI-9 and CI-13.

o Seven confidential informants said on-duty and off-duty police officers regularly attended after-hours sex and drug parties at the former Cocktails Nightclub, 2003 E. Riverside Drive. Several officers also worked security at Cocktails -- off-duty jobs approved by the department -- and one informant was told not to worry about the security detail ``because those officers knew what was going on."

o Two Austin police officers accompanied Mr. Lopez on all-expenses-paid trips to the 1994 Super Bowl. The officers took separate trips to the 1995 Super Bowl and a prize fight in Oklahoma .