Howling at the Moon

The case against Ann Colomb and her three sons was rock solid. When police officers broke through the front door of the Colomb residence on October 22nd, 2001 they found four cookies of crack cocaine with a net weight of 72 grams in a bedroom dresser drawer. In the same dresser they found a handgun and $160 in cash. Clearer evidence of big-time narcotics trafficking is hard to imagine.

The Colomb residence was raided after a confidential informant named Stevie Charlot purchased three rocks of crack from Ann and Edward Colomb in Ann's bedroom. Two police officers heard Ann and Stevie discussing the transaction over a transmitter they had placed in the informant’s sock.

It got worse. During the March 2006 trial, a police officer testified that he had found crack cocaine in a car Sammy Davis and Edward Colomb were riding in back in 1993. Another officer reported that he had seen Danny Davis hand another drug dealer a rock of crack cocaine which was subsequently sold to a third party. That was in 1995. A third officer testified that he had purchased crack cocaine from Sammy Davis under the carport in front of the Colomb residence in 1999.

Then the coup de grace: thirty-one federal prison inmates prepared to testify that they sold members of the Colomb-Davis family over a ton of cocaine between 1993 and 1999. Defense counsel repeatedly emphasized that the prison snitches were cooperating with the government in exchange for time cuts. But there were so many snitches—could they all be lying? With so much smoke billowing from the Colomb’s little FHA residence there was bound to be some fire. If nothing else, the government had the cookies in the dresser drawer.

The three facets of the government’s case against the Colomb-Davis family were mutually reinforcing. Stevie Charlot was believable because two police officers corroborated his testimony. The police officers appeared credible because they were all singing the same tune. The jailhouse snitches were convincing because their testimony dovetailed perfectly with what the jury was hearing from the officers and the confidential informant.

To win this case defense counsel had to posit three overlapping conspiracies: a cop conspiracy, a conspiracy of snitches and a prosecutorial conspiracy perpetrated by a U.S. attorney using lying cops and lying snitches to win an easy conviction. Present one conspiracy theory and you look a bit sketchy; posit three overlapping conspiracies and the boys in the white uniforms come to take you away. You might as well be howling at the moon.

Why, jurors asked themselves, would so many people go to so much trouble to bring down a single family?