Houston Chronicle
August 18, 1988
Captain testifies Wade justified only part of $6,200 taken from drug fund
By Richard Stewart
Houston Chronicle
SHERMAN - Former Orange County Sheriff James Wade returned or justified less than half the $6,200 he withdrew from a special county fund for undercover drug buys, a sheriff's department captain testified Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors allege Wade used the missing money to fund a methamphetamine Manufacturing operation.
Capt. Thomas Hennigan was on the stand during the second day of testimony in Wade's trial, which was moved from Beaumont to Sherman because of pretrial publicity.
U. S. District Judge Howell Cobb and trial attorneys spent much of the day behind closed doors, at one point barring the public and the media from the Grayson County courtroom for 30 minutes as the jury heard testimony by Hardin County Sheriff H. R. "Mike" Holzapfel.
"No comment," Cobb said after reporters asked why he allowed the jury to hear testimony in a closed courtroom.
When a reporter threatened to file a formal objection to the closure, Cobb quipped, "Please do so."
Cobb ordered witnesses, lawyers and everyone else associated with the case not to talk to reporters about it.
"There goes your constitutional rights," said McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell, a Wade supporter who was acquitted of federal racketeering charges two years ago with the same team of defense lawyers representing Wade.
"I've never heard of anything like this," Feazell said.
Cobb cleared the courtroom after defense attorney Jeff Kearney asked Holzapfel if he brought a Texas prison inmate into Hardin County Jail to help gather evidence against a defendant in an unrelated murder case.
During testimony in open court, Holzapfel said he began an investigation of Wade after two men arrested in an October drug lab raid in Hardin County said they were working for Wade. Holzapfel said Wade asked him to release one of the men, Donnie Flowers, from jail so Flowers could help with Drug investigations in adjacent Orange County.
Hennigan testified that Flowers has been arrested 10 times in Orange County on charges ranging from public intoxication to felony possession of a controlled substance.
Wade got Flowers released almost immediately on four of the five times he was arrested during Wade's tenure as sheriff, Hennigan said.
He also testified that between April 1986 and September 1987, Wade made 15 withdrawals totaling $6,200 from a special fund used by undercover investigators to make drug buys.
Wade returned only $2,074, Hennigan testified. Wade also filed reports on the use of $265, plus $400 for the purchase of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He also turned in a plastic bag of substance that looked like cocaine.
Holzapfel earlier identified the same gun as being one he and his officers seized when Flowers was arrested in Hardin County in October.
Today, jurors are scheduled to view a videotape of lab at the home of Nyle Henry Baker. Baker was indicted along with Wade.
Prosecutors allege that much of the County officers was used in labs operated by Wade and later seized in Hardin County.
In other testimony Wednesday, two officials of a Beaumont telephone pager company testified that between June 1987 and January, Wade leased a pager separate from three others used by his department. Company officials also said they leased two pagers to a woman named Doris Richmond.
The jury was not told that Richmond is Flowers' mother or that Flowers told Holzapfel that Wade gave him a telephone beeper so flowers could be warned of impending drug raids.
In earlier hearings, Holzapfel has testified that when he confirmed the number on the beeper Flowers had issued to Wade, he started to investigate Flowers' allegations against the Orange County sheriff.
Wade, defeated in his first bid for re-election in a Democratic Party primary runoff in April, recently was removed from office by a state judge.
His defense attorneys said in opening statements Tuesday that they will prove that Wade was posing as a crooked sheriff to trap drug dealers.
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