The Orange Leader
Wade: More Missing funds?
Questions revealed about narcotics fund
by Mike Wheeler
Staff Reporter
SHERMAN - Suspended Orange County Sheriff James Wade's federal drug trial recessed at noon Friday shortly after testimony from a county official who said $12,000 was found missing from a special narcotics fund five months after Wade took office.
Orange County attorney's office investigator Noe Martinez testified Friday that $12,000 of a $15,000 county narcotics fund was found missing after an audit of the account was made in May 1985.
Wade had taken office on Jan 1, 1985 for a four-year term.
"The $12,000 was unaccounted for in records of the account and justification for the money has never been found," Martinez told the Grayson County jury Friday shortly before U. S. District Judge Howell Cobb dismissed them until Monday Afternoon.
According to Martinez, money used from the fund had been accounted for in criminal case records prior to Wade taking office.
Martinez said that, after the audit, an immediate policy change was made in keeping records of the account to justify money withdrawn and show how and what the money was used for by undercover officers.
But Orange County Sheriff's department Capt. Thomas Hennigan said in testimony Thursday that Wade's rate of justification for money the sheriff withdrew from the fund remained much lower than that of officers using the money from the account, even after the implementation of a new record-keeping policy.
In the period of nearly a year, Hennigan said some officers had as high a justification rate as 93 percent, while ................
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