Black Pastor Says White Cop Targeted Him in Revenge Plot

MOORE COUNTY, North Carolina—Lee Marvin Harris Sr. was stepping into the shower on Feb. 20, 2018, when he heard shouting voices outside of his home. Then came a loud banging on his door.

He peered out the window and saw cops sprawled across his yard.

“Do not bust open my door!” Harris Sr. yelled, pulling on pajama pants. He says he opened the front door to an assault rifle pointed at his head.

Police from the small town of Southern Pines found 88 grams of powder cocaine and 13 grams of crack inside a broken-down Cadillac in Harris’ backyard. A magistrate slapped Harris Sr. with a $5 million bond, and he spent the next five months in the Moore County jail.

Harris Sr.—one of eight people arrested following a year-long investigation called Operation Leader—made for an unlikely cocaine trafficker.

A then-58-year-old disabled Army veteran, former corrections officer, community advocate, and ordained minister, Harris Sr. had no criminal history and was known as a teetotaler. In 2007, he’d written a book called General Crack Cocaine: Satan’s Top Man.

The case didn’t stick. In December 2018, a few months after federal prosecutors claimed jurisdiction, they dismissed Harris Sr.’s charges.

The feds never gave a formal explanation. But they noted in a court filing that police surveillance had twice witnessed Harris’ son, Lee Marvin Harris Jr.—the target of Operation Leader—go “over to a Cadillac covered with a gray car cover for a few minutes, consistent with placing an item in or retrieving an item from the vehicle,” during brief visits to his parents’ house in the weeks before they searched Harris Sr.’s property.

“[The police] did not present any of that information to the state court, to the district attorney, to my attorney, or anybody else, until we were indicted into federal court,” Harris Sr. told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “They could have cleared me.”

Last December, Harris Sr. filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Southern Pines cops “fabricated evidence against him as retaliation” for internal affairs complaints he previously lodged against them—including one in which he accused Jason Perry, one of the drug investigation’s lead detectives, of “hating Black people”—and to coerce him into ratting out his son.

A federal judge will soon decide whether Harris’ lawsuit can proceed to trial—or whether the legal doctrine of qualified immunity shields Southern Pines and its cops from litigation.

The decision looms weeks after gunmen knocked out two Moore County substations, leaving 40,000 residents without power. The attack coincided with a Southern Pines drag show that had been the subject of right-wing protests, though authorities haven’t linked the two events or identified any suspects (or motive) in the sabotage.

It will also follow news that neo-Nazis hung antisemitic signs on Moore County bridges on the first day of Hanukkah and Christmas Day.

Moore County has long been plagued by KKK-related militarism and racial segregation, according to Al McSurely, a local civil rights advocate and attorney. In Southern Pines and other townships, overlooked, low-income Black communities contrast with quaint, thriving downtowns that feed off of the region’s burgeoning golf industry.

These divides carry over into law enforcement. As of 2020, Southern Pines had no Black police officers, though 17 percent of the town’s 16,000 residents are Black.

Perry and Captain Kyle Marsh, who was then Perry’s supervisor, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for interviews. Scott MacLatchie, an attorney for Southern Pines and four current and former officers named in Harris Sr.’s lawsuit, declined to comment on their behalf.

“My clients acted appropriately and lawfully with regard to the investigation leading to Harris’ arrest and charges,” MacLatchie said in an email.

He also directed a reporter to the town’s legal arguments. In court filings, the town rejected claims of retaliation and coercion, and argued that police had legitimate reasons to charge Harris Sr.

A review of depositions in the lawsuit, an extensive canvass of court records and police recordings, and interviews with town residents suggest that whatever the cops’ motives, they had scant evidence connecting Harris Sr. to his son’s drug operation.

They also reveal that Perry had a long history with both Harris Sr. and his son.

In 2009, Harris Sr. filed his first internal affairs complaint against Perry after the officer allegedly pulled over his son for speeding based on the volume of his truck’s muffler.

In November 2013, he filed another—the only complaint fully reproduced in court records. (In North Carolina, internal affairs records are confidential.) Harris Sr. wrote in his complaint that he saw a crowd that appeared to be “in a rage” outside of a house that Southern Pines police were raiding for marijuana.

He said Perry came outside, spotted him, and, “with this great big Kool-Aid smile on his face,” yelled for everyone to leave.

“Well, if there wasn’t any drugs inside the house before [Perry] got here,” Harris wrote that he retorted, “there will be before he leaves.”

Perry got in his face and screamed at him to leave “right now,” Harris claimed, adding that “he was trying to provoke me.”

“Perry is a dirty police officer [who] makes his name and career by hating Black people as a whole,” Harris continued in his complaint. “He creates false [confidential informants] to illegally obtain search warrants as he lies to the magistrates on applications for search warrants to get to bust into the homes of Black people.​​”

The police department deemed both complaints unfounded.

Strictly speaking, Harris Sr.’s lawsuit doesn’t allege that Perry charged the minister because he’s racist. Rather, it argues that he targeted Harris Sr. in part because Harris Sr. had previously accused him of being racist.

“The way [Perry] focused and concentrated on the [predominantly Black] west side of town all the time and was always sitting back and harassing Black people—I felt like it was racist,” Harris Sr. said, explaining his 2013 internal affairs complaint. “I felt like it was then. I still feel like it is. Am I right or wrong? I don’t know. But that’s the feeling I got. That’s the feeling that everybody over there got.”

According to data submitted to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Black drivers accounted for 38 percent of the Southern Pines Police Department’s 5,223 traffic stops between December 2017 and October 2022. Seventy percent of the people searched during those traffic stops were Black.

Harris Sr. says he’s advocated for Black Southern Pines residents since 2007, when he accompanied a young man to the police station to complain about alleged excessive force. He filed his first complaint against Perry two years later.

But tensions between the minister and the cop seemed to peak in 2013.

Earlier that year, Perry had arrested Harris Jr. for selling cocaine. Affidavits included in the ongoing lawsuit indicate that Perry tried to recruit at least two people who were struggling with addiction to buy drugs from Harris Jr.

One, Tracy Williams, said in her affidavit that Perry told her, “If I didn’t do this, that he would make sure that I would spend a lot of time in prison.” Another, Arthur Darby, said in his affidavit that Perry “made numerous attempts to coerce me into falsifying evidence.”

Darby did not respond to requests for an interview. Williams, who is incarcerated, could not be reached for comment. In his deposition, Perry said that he did not remember asking Darby to be an informant nor recall “what led me to have discussions” with Williams.

When Harris Jr.’s 2013 case went to trial, the jury deadlocked. In a recent deposition in the ongoing lawsuit, Perry testified that the outcome didn’t bother him. Harris Sr., who attended the trial, claims that’s not true: When the jury hung, Perry picked up a box of evidence and slammed it to the ground, Harris Sr. told The Daily Beast.

“Perry had this thing—it was like a desire to arrest my son,” Harris Sr. said, indicating that his son and the detective went to high school together (The Daily Beast could not independently confirm this). “I’m not saying that my kid was no angel, because he was not. But Perry was after him.”

Perry also went after Harris Sr.’s mother-in-law, Martha Dickerson, that year, after finding cocaine in the home she owned, though Harris Sr. says she didn’t live there at the time.

Her son (and Harris Sr.’s brother-in-law), Edwin Dickerson, the house’s resident, was the target of Perry’s search warrant, according to Perry’s deposition.

While the search was underway, Martha Dickerson showed up to see what was happening, according to Harris Sr. and Martha’s other son, Anthony Dickerson. Perry arrested her.

“Nobody claimed the six ounces of cocaine that was located in her living room,” Perry explained in his deposition. “Everybody that had access to those drugs was charged.”

That included Anthony, who says he lived about a hundred yards away at his grandmother’s house and was at work when Martha’s home was searched. Anthony had previously been convicted of selling cocaine, state records show, but he says he had been out of the game and sober since 2010.

Anthony Dickerson told The Daily Beast that he took a plea bargain out of fear that prosecutors would throw the book at him if he didn’t. He was sentenced to probation.

“Perry was very upset at my nephew,” Anthony Dickerson said, referring to Harris Jr. “Perry was trying to get all of us... Like, if I ain’t committed a crime, why are you bothering me?”

Perry admitted in his deposition that there was no evidence that Martha Dickerson dealt drugs. He wasn’t asked about Anthony Dickerson.

Martha Dickerson claimed in a recent affidavit that Perry told her, “We are working on you to get your son.” In his deposition, Perry denied making that statement. Martha Dickerson’s charges were eventually dropped.

Harris Sr. says that while his house was being searched, he, too, was told that he’d be charged unless he provided information about his son’s crimes. He says Perry had Carl Colasacco, the chief of police in Aberdeen, a town adjacent to Southern Pines, convey that message to him.

Colasacco told The Daily Beast, “That would be something that we would say: ‘If you help us, we’ll help you.’” But Colasacco said he couldn’t recall his conversation with Harris Sr., nor whether he spoke to him at Perry’s direction.

In his deposition, Perry said that he doesn’t threaten innocent people. “If this person is innocent,” he said, “I have no opportunity to even explain to them what potential they have of being charged with something if they’ve done nothing wrong.”

Perry’s Feb. 20, 2018, search-warrant application in the case that ensnared Harris Sr. only mentions the minister’s house in the context of his son’s occasional visits. (Harris Jr. also shared a Charlotte apartment with his girlfriend, though after his arrest, he gave law enforcement his parents’ address as his residence.) In fact, Perry told Harris Sr., “This is not about you,” according to a recording of their interview from the day of the search obtained by The Daily Beast.

“Come straight with me,” Harris Sr. asked Perry during that interview. “Come eye-to-eye with me on this. If this ain’t about me, and this is about my son, then why am I catching hell?”

“Cuz your son is staying here. When he’s in town, this is where he lays his head, and things have happened that have come directly from this house,” Perry told him.

“He hadn’t brought nothin’ here,” Harris Sr. said, exasperated. “Don’t nobody even come to my house.”

“That you know of,” Perry said.

Minutes later—after Harris Sr. invoked his right to remain silent and Perry continued questioning him—Harris Sr. said, “If you know for a fact, man, that I’m no drug dealer, I just can’t get past the point of being treated like no criminal.”

Perry struck a conciliatory note, telling Harris Sr., “We have crossed paths so many times. You mentioned earlier that sometimes your mouth gets the better of you. And sometimes, I have the same problem. We talk with our hearts sometimes. Sometimes we talk with our brain. We say what we want to say.

“Either way,” he added, “this is not about you. This is about your son and his involvement. We gotta do what we gotta do.”

But the police charged Harris Sr. for the drugs found in the Cadillac not because they had evidence that he dealt drugs, but because they said he had access to and control of the vehicle.

Harris Sr. argues that the case against him was built on a contradiction: His son lived there enough to justify the search, but not enough to be responsible for the drugs it produced.

Complicating matters, a federal grand jury indicted Harris Jr. for illegally possessing a handgun they found in Harris’ house. The handgun—stored in the back of a closet in a bedroom where Harris Jr. occasionally slept—was legal for Harris Sr. to possess, but not for his son, who had prior felony convictions for drug possession. (Federal prosecutors dropped the gun charge as part of Harris Jr.’s plea bargain.)

In depositions, the police offered a few justifications for their decision to charge Harris Sr. Perry and others suggested that, though police had twice seen Harris Jr. “placing or retrieving something from underneath a tarped item located to the right of the enclosed trailer” on his father’s property shortly before the raid, the “tarped item” wasn’t necessarily the Cadillac.

That seems unlikely. Police photographs appear to show that the Cadillac was the only covered vehicle on the property, and Harris Sr. claims it had sat idle for years to the right of a silver trailer.

Regardless, the police had no obligation to divulge evidence that Harris Jr. put the drugs in the Cadillac when they arrested Harris Sr. or presented their case to the magistrate, who jailed the elder Harris on an impossibly high bond, according to Brandon Garrett, the director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University.

Defendants aren’t entitled to evidence that might exonerate them until they are preparing for trial. “Falsifying information in support of a warrant or bond could be actionable, but waiting to disclose exculpatory information may not be,” Garrett said in an email.

The Southern Pines police also claimed that Harris Sr. gave them keys that unlocked the Cadillac’s doors and turned its ignition. But that’s disputed.

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Video of a test conducted by Harris’ legal team shows that none of the five keys the police said they took from Harris’ house could unlock the car’s doors. One appeared to turn the ignition switch, though the car didn’t have a battery.

Harris Sr. told Perry the night of the search that he didn’t know where the Cadillac’s keys were. He told The Daily Beast he found them later in a junk drawer. He says the keys the police grabbed during the search belonged to an old Cadillac he’d long since sold.

This wasn’t an inconsequential matter. Then-District Attorney Warren McSweeney—now a judge—said in a deposition that the keys were part of the reason he prosecuted Harris.

That wasn’t the only questionable information McSweeney appears to have received. The former DA said in his deposition that the police didn’t tell him about the surveillance of Harris Jr. appearing to place things in the covered car. (McSweeney did not respond to an email seeking an interview, and a voicemail left for him at the Moore County Courthouse was not returned.)

Perry said in his deposition that it wouldn’t have changed anything.

“What if Junior did put the drugs in the Cadillac? How do we know he wasn’t putting them there for his dad to sell when he’s out of town?” Perry asked. (Harris Sr., who attended the deposition, jumped up in anger and was asked to step outside, according to the transcript.)

As a defense in Harris’ lawsuit, the town has seized upon surveillance video that it says made Harris Sr. a legitimate suspect—though, curiously, Perry never mentioned it in his application to search Harris Sr.’s house for drugs. A still frame included in court records shows Harris Sr. handing cash to a man Perry described in his deposition as a “known drug dealer” at a “known drug distribution place.”

Harris Sr. says the “known drug distribution place” was the front yard of a vacant house where Harris Jr. and people from the neighborhood congregated. It was also next door to the home of the minister’s mother-in-law. Meanwhile, the “known drug dealer” owned a mobile car-washing business—which Perry admitted that he knew—and surveillance footage reviewed by The Daily Beast appears to be consistent with Harris purchasing a car wash.

But in his deposition, Southern Pines Police Captain Kyle Marsh said it didn’t matter why Harris Sr. was there.

“No one had any business being at [the vacant house]. It was an abandoned property that was solely used for selling drugs,” Marsh said. “Mr. Harris had no business being there.”

The Southern Pines police celebrated the 2018 arrests with a press release heralding the “disrupt[ion] of an extensive drug trafficking syndicate.” The headlines and mug shots the announcement generated will forever haunt Harris Sr.

But there were no headlines when prosecutors dropped his charges, and his lawsuit garnered little coverage beyond brief stories in small, local papers.

Less than five years later, the members of what the police called a “gang-related criminal enterprise” are out of prison. Harris Jr. will end his home confinement in February.

But Harris Sr. says he still carries the financial and psychological scars of his experience. While he was jailed, he had to declare bankruptcy to keep his house. Though he lives just outside of the town’s limits, Harris Sr. says he only comes to Southern Pines when he has to, and when he does, his anxiety spikes.

“I lost about 30 pounds,” Harris Sr. said. “When I finally got out of there, I couldn’t eat. It was terrible, man.”

More importantly, Harris Sr. says his reputation as a man of God might never recover.

“I think I’ve preached about three services since then,” Harris Sr. said. “I used to get called to South Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, Baltimore, Memphis, Chicago—I used to get all kinds of calls. I would take my own money and I would buy my own hotel rooms. I never, ever charged any church or anybody like that.

“I’ve always been blessed that way. They took all that away.”