Keystone Kops

A Texas border feud

Billboards on the highways leading to town proclaim that Texarkana is TWICE AS NICE because it is two cities in one, but half as nice might be more accurate. An overgrown railroad junction and manufacturing town, it squats on the state line where the north Texas plains lap at the Arkansas hills. State Line Avenue, which divides the two Texarkanas, is a garish neon strip with honky-tonks and liquor outlets on the Arkansas side facing fast-food and, religious book stores on the dry Texas side. The region's wooded terrain makes it an appealing hiding place for the so-called Dixie Mafia, a loosely confederated band of car thieves, dope runners, hijackers and assorted thugs who prey on towns across the South.

The Texas town (with a population of 34,000, v. 21,000 on the Arkansas side) is also the scene of a Keystone Kops brawl between the county sheriff and the district attorney, supported by the entrenched establishment. It might be amusing if they were not playing with a hefty amount of U.S. taxpayers' money.

The beleaguered sheriff is Earl Sabo, 48, a onetime security guard and a relative newcomer to Texarkana. His troubles began in 1974 when one of the town's leading attorneys, Harry Friedman, staged a country-music concert in back of a nightclub he owned. Nervous state troopers moved in to make a number of drug and liquor collars; Friedman's son was nailed on a driver's license violation, and Friedman himself for interfering with a police officer. Some troublemakers were tossed into Sabo's jail, and the sheriff could not be located to approve bail for hours. In what Sabo claims was retaliation, Bowie County District Attorney Lynn Cooksey, a friend of Friedman's, ordered the arrest of a sheriffs deputy for carrying an unauthorized weapon Cooksey later insisted that he had been unaware of the gun toter's identity.

At about the same time, a joint Texas-Arkansas agency won a $77,000 grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to monitor the area's Dixie Mafia through an Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. Cooksey is one of the unit's directors. OCI's achievements have been modest, to say the least. Last year's major accomplishment, for example, was the confiscation of 225 lbs. of marijuana.

Shortly after Sabo won renomination in the May 1976 primary, he discovered a black box under the fender of his patrol car. It turned out to be a sophisticated $2,800 radio transmitter, a tracking device. That night, as Sabo kept watch, a shadowy figure crept up to the patrol car. When the interloper reached under the fender. Sabo jumped out and arrested one Gary Morgan, an OCI investigator and the man Cooksey had utilized for pre-election snooping into Sabo's background.

Morgan was promptly fired. OCI directors claimed he was acting "individually and without the authority or consent" of the intelligence unit when he planted the LEAA-funded device on Sabo. Morgan did not suffer: he quickly landed a job as investigator for Friedman's law firm and was subsequently appointed probation officer, another LEAA-created job. dispensed by local judges.

Nor has Cooksey suffered visibly from the trouble. In Texas, Cooksey is permitted to practice law on the side, and uses his county-paid secretarial help and office (in a building owned by Friedman). Last year, in a guardianship matter tossed his way by a friendly judge, Cooksey netted a $22,000 fee; that reflected, he said, 440 hours of work, equivalent to 3% months of full-time work. He continued to receive his full $26,100 annual district attorney's salary, of course, which helped pay for a $38,000 private airplane and a private deer-hunting lodge. Sabo, incidentally, once caught Cooksey using jail inmates to paint his house, but nothing came of it.

Nobody doubts Cooksey's abilities as a prosecutor: he claims a record of 3,500 criminal convictions, v. only five acquittals in nine years. "I've got the best prosecution record in the state of Texas," Cooksey modestly admits. But the taxpayers may be getting shortchanged overall. Since 1971, Cooksey's office has cadged five separate LEAA grants, totaling $245,801, to speed prosecutions and unclog court congestion. Result: while there were 799 case dispositions and a backlog of 1,149 cases in 1970, by 1976 there were only 587 dispositions and a whopping 2,400 cases pending. Overall, the LEAA cornucopia has pumped more than $2 million into the Texarkana, Texas, criminal justice system. Yet major crimes, numbered at 898 in 1971. jumped to 1,681 by 1975 and 2,576 in 1976.

In the internecine warfare, the only possible winners are local criminals, including the shadowy Dixie Mafia. Sheriff Sabo, for his part, admits to a mild case of paranoia. "I spend more time looking over my shoulder than I do peering in front of me," he says softly. "Maybe 1 should apply for an LEAA grant to buy a device that detects the devices they're buying with I.EAA grants." -

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