Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
43° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

METROPOLIS KEEPING UP WITH THE DEALERS

By LAURA MILLER |

It’s hard to have a Christmas when you’re broke,” says Brenda Hightower, who doesn’t need to persuade. She sits in the kitchen of her small brick house, just a few feet from the open door of her . . grease-stained oven-the only source of heat in a house where the heat doesn’t work. “The heater needs some part that costs $100, and I don’t have $100,” she says matter-of-factly.

Again, no need to convince. Sheets hang haphazardly around the house, covering walls and windows-homemade insulation against a I9-degree December day. Her car leaks water from its radiator, a problem she discovered driving home from work earlier that afternoon. The pint-sized Christmas tree, stuck in a corner of the living room next to the TV, has no tinsel, no brightly colored bulbs, Even Brenda Hightower, a pretty woman in her thirties blessed with flawless skin, looks neglected. She is missing virtually all her bottom front teeth.

“All I know is that my husband is a good man, and the judge gave him way too much time,” says the mother of three. “I pray every day that he will come home to me. If he doesn’t, I don’t know what will happen to us. I’m about to lose this house-I’m five months behind on the mortgage.”

The Hightowers live in Garland-the heartbeat of suburbia, the land of affordable Fox & Jacobs dream homes, the magnet for the mega-consumer in search of a bigger grocery store, a quicker drive-through, a shinier car wash. But in Brenda Hightower’s neighborhood, they clearly can’t keep up with the image. Just off Avenue D, immediately east of downtown, Parker Circle and its environs are suburbia gone sour. House after house is boarded up. windows are smashed, yards are filled with dead bushes and foreclosure signs.

H.L. Jackson, an area management broker for HUD, says the government has eight or nine of the damaged, foreclosed homes on the auction block-for the incredibly low price of $13,000 apiece. Even so, it’s a hard sell. The area is in constant flux, Jackson says, with 30 to 40 percent of the people who live there in “constant financial trouble.”

At least two of those people thought they had found a quick fix to their trouble: crack. One was Lee Hightower, Brenda’s 40-year-old husband. Another was Jim Dickson, age 53, whose wife and four children live just five blocks from the Hightowers on another HUD bargain street.

Hightower and Dickson were not drug addicts supporting habits. They were not drug traffickers in lieu of real work. They were not Mafia-connected or Jamaica-connected or even well-connected. They were just two lower-middle-class men trying to scrape by amid the riches and shine of the suburbs-family men with apparently little discipline and scanty scruples, willing to toss whatever values they had in their kids1 faces for a little more of the green stuff.

When Jim Dickson went to court last May 9 on three felony drug charges-possessing, delivering, and intending to deliver crack cocaine-he told a story that the judge had never heard in his many long days of hearing drug tales.

“Now, what on earth was it that got you involved in dealing this crack cocaine?” Dickson’s lawyer, Brook Busbee, asked her client on the stand that day.

“Okay,” Dickson responded. “I have this 14-year-old son, and I mean, he wanted-you know, like the guy that he was going to school with, I mean, had alligator and lizard boots. |and] he wanted some. And 1 told him, you know, I wasn’t able to buy him, you know, those kind of clothes, you know. So he told me he was going to sell dope. So I.. told him 1 didn’t want him to sell dope. He said, ’Well, I’ve got to have it some kind of way.’ So before him selling dope, I’d rather sell it myself, you know, that’s what-and that’s what I did.”

The boys at his son’s school with the fancy boots, Dickson explained, were drug dealers. They had other nice things, too: gold nugget jewelry, fancy jogging suits. His son just wanted what the other boys had.

“It was all expensive designer nonsense,” Dickson’s lawyer says. “But when you’re living over there, and there’s all this peer pressure-you know how that is with kids. He wanted his son to avoid selling. And I believed his story because he was working as a janitor all during this time.”

Dickson had no criminal record. He had never missed work or caused a problem for his employer, Hew’s Janitorial Services. Though he’d been separated from his wife and children for several years, he regularly gave them $300 a month in support, though it was not court-ordered. That ate up almost half his S800 monthly salary-the rest went toward his apartment, food, and bills.

Dickson asked a man in his apartment complex to get him into the drug business. And though he was almost immediately caught, standing in the kitchen of an apartment near LBJ and Abrams with a plastic bag filled with 120 cocaine rocks in his hand, he turned around three months later and broke the law again. Because at that point, he would later testify, he needed extra money to pay for a lawyer.



WHEN LEE HIGHTOWER STARTED SELLING crack out of his house, he was having trou-ble just making ends meet. His job as a car-penter and maintenance man was only part time. His previous job as a cabinet maker had ended because the work ran out. His wife, who worked at Sears, brought home twice as

much money as he did every month-but there were times when that $1,600 in family income just didn’t stretch to cover the mortgage, car payments, utilities, meals, and clothes for five.

“We got a little behind in the mortgage, and Lee didn’t know what to do, so he said he was going to sell some drugs just until we were caught up again,” says his wife. ’”But I sure didn’t like it. Whenever someone came to the house, I hid in the bedroom.”

Two of his three children didn’t like it either. On the same day Jim Dickson went to court last year, Lee Hightower appeared in the same court on the same type of charges-a coincidence since the two men did not know each other. Sitting on the witness stand, hoping the judge would give him probation, Hightower talked about what his moneymaking scheme had done to his children.

“Did Karen, your 19-year-old daughter, express to you how she felt about your dealing drugs?” Hightower’s lawyer, Tom Benson, asked him. Yes, Hightower replied: “She told me that she was embarrassed about what her school friends might say and that some of them probably already had found out about it. She said she felt ashamed. She was sad, angry.”

Hightower’s 18-year-old son Andre had been ashamed, too, but that had not prevented his father from continuing to sell drugs. Neither did an arrest. Caught selling drugs to two Garland undercover policemen in April 1988, he was awaiting a court date on that charge when he was busted a second time. “I guess the best way to sum it up is I was just out of control,” he testified. So out of control he even got his 22-year-old son, Lee Jr., involved in selling.

The testimony of these two men had a profound effect on State District Judge Ron Chapman. Here were two family men, he recalls thinking-unusual in a country where more than half of all black children are raised only by their mothers. They both worked. Neither had a criminal record or a history of drug or alcohol abuse. And yet they had purposely broken the law in front of their children and their wives, alt in the name of some quick, easy cash. Now both men were pleading guilty, throwing themselves on the mercy of the court.

Chapman had a wide range of alternatives. He could give them probation, He could give them five to 99 years, or life.

He chose punishment: Dickson got eight years in prison, 10 years probation, and a $5,480 fine. Hightower got 16 years in prison, 10 years probation, a $15,000 fine- and a message. “Our society is crying for what sociologists have termed ’black father figures,’” Chapman told him that day. “And for a period of your life you apparently served in such a role. But not for any physiological or psychological or addictive reason did you abandon that role, but simply because of one of the basest of human emotions, greed, [you] chose to become a crack dealer.”

Today, the Hightowers are about to lose their home of nine years. The Dicksons’ phone on Richard Drive is disconnected. And two fathers are in prison. All in the name of getting a little extra cash in a world where shiny cars and 14-year-olds in lizard boots are somehow something to be envied.

Related Articles

Image
Travel

Is Fort Worth Really ‘The New Austin’?

The Times of London tells us it's now the coolest city in Texas.
Image
Dallas 500

Meet the Dallas 500: Chakri Gottemukkala, o9 Solutions

The o9 solutions leader talks about garnering a $3.7 billion valuation, growing 10x over the next few years, and how the company is innovating.
Image
Local News

An Early Look at 2026 FIFA World Cup Logistics

The World Cup matches will be held in Arlington, but Dallas will be home to a great deal of team and fan experiences. We're getting an early look at what that will look like.
Advertisement