Beaumont Enterprise
August 20, 1988
Investigator reveals drug fund query
by Margaret Toal
Staff Writer
SHERMAN - The Orange county attorney's office in 1985 investigated $12,000 in unaccounted money taken from the sheriff's department drug-buy fund, county investigator Noe Martinez testified Friday.
Martinez was one of six people, including three other law enforcement officers, who testified Friday in the federal drug trial of former Orange County Sheriff James Wade, who was removed from office by a state district judge's order in July.
Martinez said the Orange County auditor called his office to investigate the sheriff's drug-buy fund. The money is used by he sheriff's office to buy illegal drugs in undercover investigations and is annually budgeted at $15,000.
Martinez said the department had no accounting system for the fund and $12,000 was gone within three months after the department received it. Wade took office Jan. 1, 1985, but no date for the audit had been given in testimony.
"I never did determine how it was spent," Martinez testified.
Answering questions from defense attorney Gary Richardson, Martinez said he doesn't know whether any official in the county had instructed Wade about how to account for money taken from the drug-buy fund.
Martinez said after the 1985 investigation, he got account forms from the Orange Police Department, which used federal government forms as a model, and gave the documents to the sheriff's department to use.
His said his department had not investigated the drug-buy fund since that time.
One charge against Wade is alleged embezzlement from the drug-buy fund. Other charges include conspiracy to make and sell drugs, including the manufacture of methamphetamine, commonly called speed.
Assistant U. S. Attorney Paul Naman asked Martinez about other county attorney investigations of Wade's department, bringing objections from defense attorney Richardson.
U. S. District Judge Howell Cobb ordered the jury out of the courtroom to hear Martinez testify that the county attorney's office had investigated complaints about Wade's use of a county car while receiving a county car allowance to cover business use of his personal car.
Martinez testified that his department had a complaint that Wade was using county maintenance on his personal car and not reimbursing the county enough money for the gasoline he used from the county gas pump.
Martinez said there was another complaint that Wade's personal car "was on a car lot for sale" and Wade was using a county car while continuing to get the car allowance for his personal vehicle.
Wade was not indicted or subjected to legal action after the complaints, Martinez said.
Cobb said he would decide by Monday whether this testimony could be presented to the jury.
Other witnesses Friday included Port Arthur police officer Robert Cartwright, who identified a small bag. which once contained marijuana, as one he confiscated in 1984 while working undercover in orange. He testified he gave it to then sheriff's Capt. Bruce Simpson.
Simpson and his successor as captain of criminal investigations, Debbie West, testified that that bag and others had been locked in a file drawer in the criminal investigation captain's office as late as June 1986.
Martinez testified that Wade called him to his office after West left the department in June 1986 to show him small bags of marijuana found in West's former office. Martinez said he advised Wade to get a court order to destroy the marijuana.
The indictment alleges Wade later used that marijuana in his alleged drug operation.
Frances Bowsher of Vidor testified bout renting a mobile home in Vidor to Donnie Flowers, an unindicted co-conspirator with Wade, in April 1987. She said she had to evict Flowers and that the mobile home was filled with a bad odor.
"It mad me ill when I was cleaning," Bowsher said.
She said the bathroom was damaged and she had to replace fixtures and carpeting in the mobile home.
She identified the odor as the same as that detected on items confiscated in October 1987 in Hardin County in a raid on a methamphetamine laboratory. Others have testified the odor is similar to that from chemicals used in meth labs.
Official arrested Flowers during that raid and prosecutors have presented witnesses identifying lab equipment found in that Hardin County bust as coming from an earlier drug raid in Orange County in December 1985
Cobb dismissed the jury at noon Friday, telling them to return 1:30 p.m. Monday.
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