Trena Moser broke bad.
Moser moved to Guymon from Texas when she was 25 years old to work at Seaboard Foods, the controversial hog-slaughtering plant on the edge of town that by some accounts rebuilt the panhandle economy. She didn’t last long.
“I couldn’t handle the pigs everywhere,” Moser said.
She went on to work serially at a doctor’s office, the telephone company, a local attorney’s office, as a roll-off truck dispatcher for the Seward County landfill, and finally for a property management firm. Interspersed with all that, she got married and became the spitting image of an Oklahoman suburban mom with four children.
“They’re all really good kids, despite their mother,” Moser said.
What she meant was that after a pair of traumas, she turned to selling methamphetamine.
“I’d gone through a divorce, I’d lost my job,” Moser said. “I shouldn’t have messed with drugs. It was a fast, easy way to make money.”
She wasn’t any kind of kingpin, and like the pigs, it didn’t last. Moser was arrested after making several sales to undercover law enforcement officers. She got a lawyer, copped to the crime, and accepted a plea deal to accept her fate.
Then it got weird.
In the months to come, Moser would be arrested twice more for embezzlement, a crime she denies; her prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Taos Smith, threatened to revoke her plea deal on the trafficking charge if she didn’t also plead guilty on the embezzlement charges.
“I can be a lot of things, but I didn’t take that money,” Moser said.
Moser acknowledged that prosecutors frequently revoke plea deals, but that didn’t make it right.
“It may be common, but is it legal?” she asked.
Common but possibly illegal is perhaps the best way to summarize the execution of justice in remote Oklahoma, and what Moser would learn is that in a corrupt system, you might wind up having to fight to defend yourself.
The Only Bondsman in Texas County
Moser had minor difficulties with the law in the past — debt issues and bounced checks — but she also had a do-gooder streak, as evidenced by a still-pending whistleblower case in which she unveiled wrongdoing in her job as a landfill dispatcher and by once taking in an aging woman who was suffering abuse at the hands of her family, Moser said.
The latter episode resulted in Moser inheriting a modest bit of farmland on the edge of Guymon. It was a mixed blessing because there were expenses and work required to clear the land, and that work was what resulted in Moser falling into the orbit of a drug dealer.
Subsequently, Moser explained, it was the granddaughter of the aging woman she’d cared for who set her up to sell drugs to undercover agents of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. Moser never actually possessed the drugs she sold, she said, but remotely arranged sales and pickup.
“It was my first offense,” Moser said. “I didn’t even know how much the drugs should weigh.”
The first evidence of peculiarity in Moser’s story was a $75,000 bond for a first-time trafficking charge of small amounts of meth. Even the bondsman, Tina Smith of A-1 Tony’s Bail Bonds in Guymon, the only bondsman in Texas County, said the bond seemed high for the crime, Moser said.
The website of A-1 Tony’s Bail Bonds claims the organization was founded in 1998 by Tina Smith’s husband, Tony Smith, who in 2017 self-published a book reflecting on his earlier career as a bounty hunter entitled “Kickin’ Doors and Slappin’ Whores: Tales of a Cowboy Bounty Hunter.”
That’s not the strange part.
What was odd was that Moser’s prosecutor, Taos Smith, was the son of Tina and Tony Smith.
Awkward conflicts of interest are common in small towns. The first judge assigned to Moser’s case was forced to recuse because he’d been the attorney Moser worked for before he was elected to the bench.
Frequency does not make conflicts of interest legal.
When it comes to bondsmen, Oklahoma law is not much help.
Title 59 specifies that marriage or cohabitation of a bondsman to individuals prohibited from becoming bondsmen — judges, police officers and others — does not by itself indicate a conflict of interest.
The law is silent on other family relations.
What is statutorily enshrined is the ability of the Oklahoma Insurance Department commissioner to exercise discretion in determining when an actionable conflict of interest exists.
Current Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready refused to comment on whether the department had received complaints about high bond amounts in District One and the parent-child relationship between the lone bondsman in Texas County and the ADA. Oklahoma Watch then formally requested those records, but has not received them.
By way of contrast, the Justice Department offers clear guidelines that forbid government employees from participating in matters that might impute to them financial gain.
Participating in a prosecution is prohibited when the employee “has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome.”
Or, as Trena Moser put it when she eventually filed a motion in her own defense, “The prosecutor’s family benefits financially from Ms. Moser’s ongoing prosecution.”
It’s All About That Money
Money may be the motive behind every aspect of Moser’s prosecution — and, for that matter, behind every drug prosecution in the panhandle.
After she agreed to a plea deal, embezzlement charges were brought when Moser turned over a file from her then-current job containing several thousand dollars. The file remained in police possession, untracked for days, Moser said.
Moser suspected that the money had little to do with what the police really wanted.
A common theme in the tips that Oklahoma Watch received in response to its Justice in No Man’s Land series is accounts of clumsy efforts on the part of law enforcement to recruit confidential informants; that is, to coerce panhandle residents to turn on each other.
Billy Green, featured in the second story of the Justice in No Man’s Land series, recalled having his home raided for incriminating items such as a dart board, a Wile E. Coyote mirror and a ceramic cow skull, only to have police attempt to compel him to make undercover drug purchases.
Problem: 19-year-old Green didn’t know any drug dealers. He was hit with a $45,000 bond for a first-time charge of knowingly concealing stolen property.
More troublingly, Brittany Sanchez, whose harrowing narrative will be featured in a future installment in the Justice in No Man’s Land series, recalled an arrest she described as bogus for fraudulent check-writing when she was nine months pregnant with her first child. The true goal of the arrest, Sanchez said, was to track down the man whom police believed to be the father of her baby.
Problem: the father was another man entirely, and Sanchez wound up delivering her baby while she was shackled to a hospital bed.
Tomas Toca, who was a drug dealer in the panhandle for a time, recounted numerous experiences with a complex system of recruiting informants in Texas County; Toca’s own friends had been coerced into turning on him.
Even a judge once expected him to provide evidence to police, Toca said. In court, his judge told him, “We’re just waiting on you to do your part.”
Toca’s story, too, will be recounted in a future article; after multiple prison stints, he is now years removed from his time on probation, but continues to suffer harassment at the hands of local police, he said.
“The fact that I didn’t turn informant could explain why I am treated the way I am treated,” Toca said.
Toca is a quiet, charismatic, and thoughtful man who likened the system of informant recruitment in the panhandle to a kind of speed trap. Local law enforcement doesn’t want you in prison, he said, because if you’re in prison, you’re not paying the kinds of fees and fines that are now being reexamined in Oklahoma. Prosecutors aim for plea bargains with long periods of probation, Toca said.
“It’s all about money,” Toca said. “It’s all about getting money to the municipality. It’s revenue for the county.”
Snitch and Forfeiture Mills
What the police really wanted from Moser was for her to make drug purchases undercover, she said.
She tried. She tried again and again, but Guymon is a small town, and no one trusted her.
Her plea deal was withdrawn, and she was hit with embezzlement charges because she couldn’t give police what they wanted, Moser said.
Moser went into debt to her boyfriend and his mother to cover additional bonds on the embezzlement charges; she was left unable to pay the attorney she’d hired for the trafficking charge to represent her on the new charges.
She was forced to turn to Vonda Wilkins of the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System for representation, but once again, the claustrophobic nature of justice in the panhandle appeared to interfere with the impartial administration of justice.
An email from ADA Smith to Wilkins disparaged Moser’s version of events on the embezzlement charges and exhibited a surprising chumminess between the prosecutor and the public defender.
“I’m tired of [Moser] screwing both you and me around on this,” Smith wrote.
Wilkins refused to comment on Moser’s case, but former statewide OIDS Executive Director Tim Laughlin largely agreed with Toca’s characterization of how informants are employed, particularly by drug task forces.
"In my experience over the last 28 years, that’s the whole model of task forces going back thirty years,” Laughlin said. “Drug task forces have operated on a horizontal model, recruiting low-level informants on other low-level offenders, rather than working up the chain of command, functioning effectively as snitch mills and forfeiture mills.”
A History and a Culture of Impunity
What Moser wanted was to plead guilty to the crime she had committed, and innocent to the crime she denied having committed; in the panhandle, that appeared to be impossible.
No one was on her side, Moser said.
On July 17, Moser visited A-1 Tony’s Bail Bonds, after Tina Smith requested that Moser appear to arrange additional bond payments. The real purpose of the meeting was confrontation, Moser said.
Smith challenged Moser for having spoken with Oklahoma Watch, and for having expressed concern that Smith’s son was Moser’s prosecutor. Smith threatened Moser with immediate jailing, Moser said.
The argument in A-1 Tony’s offices nearly turned physical, Moser said in a detailed narrative produced immediately following the incident.
Tina and Taos Smith refused to comment for this story.
After the confrontation, Moser resolved to take matters into her own hands. On July 24, she submitted a 19-page motion to suppress evidence, a sober and respectful filing documenting numerous irregularities in her case that included a range of supporting evidence and requested relief.
The following day, Taos Smith filed a haphazard and meandering response that labeled Moser a drug-dealing thief while she still enjoyed a presumption of innocence, and described her carefully crafted motion as the ramblings of a meth-addicted mind.
“These remarks are inappropriate, unprofessional, and beneath the dignity of this court,” Moser wrote in her response.
The final resolution in Moser’s case is outstanding. She’s ready to pay for the crime she committed, she said, but will continue to fight the charges she denies.
Moser doubts whether any particle notion of justice will determine her fate. She fears that she will be persecuted for exercising her right to defend herself by persons who enjoy a long history and a culture of impunity.
“I just feel like it has a lot to do with their power,” Moser said. “They just think they can do whatever they want.”
Editor’s Note: After Oklahoma Watch published an exposé about a multi-million-dollar DA-run ticketing scheme in Texas County, we were flooded with tips from the panhandle. This story is the fourth in a series derived from those tips. The third story can be found here.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
