Cooperating with the Government

This is the sixth in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

Stevie Charlot sat in the U.S. Marshall’s holding cell in the federal courthouse in Lafayette. Tomorrow he would have to testify in front of a federal Grand Jury.

The day after the big bust at the Colomb’s place Stevie Charlot got a phone call telling him to come to the Parish Sheriff’s office in Crowley where he was told to stay away from the Colombs until further notice. That was it.

Three-and-a-half months later a Sheriff’s deputy delivered a federal Grand Jury summons and told Stevie that Brian Hundley wanted to talk to him. Stevie gradually figured out that he was expected to testify that he had purchased drugs from the Colombs the day of the raid. All the details were right there in Hundley’s police report.

Alarmed and infuriated, Stevie called up Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson and said he wouldn’t be testifying on February 19th. Grayson said that was fine—if Stevie didn’t show the authorities would have him arrested and revoke his parole. By a strange coincidence, Stevie’s parole was set to expire the very day he was being asked to testify before the Grand Jury.

On the advice of a friend, Charlot met with Ann Colomb. Ann told Stevie he had no choice but to testify, but he could protect himself. An hour later, Stevie was talking into attorney Daniel Stanford’s tape recorder.

Stevie told Stanford he and his mother had dropped by the Colomb place the day of the raid to tell “Miss Ann” that his father was being transferred to a hospital in Church Point. The visit lasted only a few seconds and no one got out of the car. Hospital records verify that Stevie’s father was transferred to the Church Point Hospital on October 22nd.

When Stevie Charlot was taken to the courtroom on March 12th, 2002 he was pretty sure what he was supposed to say and tried his best to say it. Unfortunately, Detective Brian Hundley had amended his police report so many times it was hard to know what the story was. Officer Troy Hebert was added to the story late in the game to corroborate Hundley’s account but doesn’t appear in earlier reports. In Stevie’s Grand Jury testimony Hebert doesn’t exist.

Having read Hundley’s report, Stevie knew he was supposed to have approached the Colomb residence on foot with a transmitter hidden inside his sock. He was supposed to have discussed a drug deal with Miss Ann and at some point she had searched him. Hundley’s report explained that transmission was poor so he only caught a few words of dialogue, but Ann distinctly said she would have to call her son Edward because she didn’t know where she kept her drugs.

Instead of asking Edward where he kept the drugs (this could have been done without risk using simple code language) she had her son drive all the way home. Edward then leads Miss Ann and Stevie down the hall to Ann’s bedroom where he locates a little medicine bottle stuffed with crack cocaine in Ann’s panty drawer. No one seems to have asked why Edward would choose such an unsettling hiding place for his drugs or why, if he did, his mother didn’t know about it. When the police raided the home hours later the medicine bottle had disappeared.

With Ann and Stevie at his side, Edward removed the bottle from his mother’s drawer, removed three rocks of crack cocaine, did the deal and returned the bottle to its hiding place. I have run this scenario past a few ex-drug dealers and the response is always the same: “that ain’t hapennin’.” You don’t show a crack addict where you keep your stash.

Stevie then left the Colomb home as quickly as possible, “Because, like I say, Mr. Brian was getting—he was getting worried, you know.”

Even Brett Grayson, the man asking the questions, was confused by this remark. “Yeah, but you wouldn’t know that,” he told Stevie, “You were inside the house.” Of course Stevie knew “Mr. Brian” was getting worried—it was right there in Hundley’s report.

When Brett Grayson asked Stevie if the Colombs suspected he had set them up, Stevie tried to be cooperative. He said that a few days after the raid he ran into Edward Colomb and Miss Ann at Jr.’s Food Mart. “And they was like, ‘Man, we know you set us up, brother. You was the last one who left from the house. Ain’t nobody else came after that. Right after you left, not even five or ten minutes, them people kicked down the door.”

The Colomb residence was raided a few minutes after Stevie and his mother dropped by. But Hundley’s reports clearly indicate that Stevie’s alleged buy occurred several hours before the raid. It’s hard to lie consistently.

Stevie’s parole was revoked even though he had cooperated with the government. Visited by a private investigator a few days after his Grand Jury adventure Stevie was back to his original story: he had never worn a wire and he certainly had never purchased drugs from the Colombs.

It isn’t hard to tell when Stevie Charlot is lying and when he is telling the truth. His truthful statements are consistent, corroborated by others and offered freely; his lies are bizarre, mutually contradictory, and uttered with a gun pressed firmly against his temple.

We are left with a disturbing question: If Stevie Charlot didn’t buy drugs from Ann and Edward Colomb on October 22nd, 2002, what are we to make of Detective Brian Hundley’s police report?