Entrapped

The appellate court's finding in Curry's case is yet another setback for the Hollywood Police Department, the third-largest law enforcement agency in Broward County and among the most brutal in the nation, according to the Tallahassee-based Police Complaint Center. For the past decade, the department has been dogged by brutality and civil rights complaints. The last two Officers of the Year, Joe Pendergrast and Pete Salvo, have been sued for, respectively, breaking a captive's ankle and being involved in a drug addict's death. In November, an expert testified that officers had doctored a videotape to convict ex-con Donald Baker. And last week, former Police Chief Richard Witt won $201,100 after proving he was fired in 1996 for exposing corruption.

A deeper look at the Curry case, which was headed by narcotics Detective John Murray, shows that shoddy police work led to the entrapment. It further shows how misconduct masquerading as aggressive investigation pervades the department's culture. Murray declined to comment for this article. Mackey, currently in federal custody awaiting deportation after admitting to beating a girlfriend and stealing $3,000, could not be reached.

"I know why Mackey did what he did," Curry says. "It has to be scorn. I rejected him."

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The ninth of ten children, Curry was born Valarie Brown in Hollywood to a Bahamian mother, Emerald Roberts, and an American father, Wilson Brown. Unlike many of her siblings, she was from the start an American citizen. She lived a reasonably common childhood, attending elementary school in Hollywood and then South Broward High.

After high school, she worked a series of odd jobs, mostly entry-level clerical jobs at area hospitals. She fell in love with her high school sweetheart, Alfonso McGee, and the two had a daughter, Alquavia, in 1986, when Brown was 19 years old. McGee and Brown never married; Curry raised her daughter alone. "She is a good parent to her child, or children, as far as I know," says John Hardwick, a Hallandale Beach barber and Curry acquaintance.

Curry admits that she had one prior brush with the law when she was 22 years old. In 1988, she says, Bahamian police arrested her after they found her sister trying to board a plane with cocaine. She spent five years in prison in the Bahamas. But according to attorneys who worked on her case in Broward, the conviction was later overturned and the records expunged.

Cocaine trafficking from the Bahamas across the roughly 50 miles of sea to Florida is a decades-old enterprise. The year Curry was arrested in the Bahamas, the island chain thrived as a major transfer point for Caribbean and South American cocaine smugglers. The U.S. Coast Guard seized 11,800 pounds of cocaine in 1988, stopping only 5 to 7 percent of the total amount believed to be shipped into the country, according to Coast Guard estimates at the time. The porous border between the Bahamas and the United States made people like Curry and her sister potential targets for authorities, who were cracking down with unusual zeal in the late '80s.

After serving time in the Bahamas, Valarie met Whitney Curry, and the couple married in January 1995. One year later, Laquitney was born. In 1997, the couple purchased a 1,453-square-foot home in Hallandale Beach, near Dixie Highway, for $44,000. Behind it was a small in-law's quarters the couple rented out to help pay the mortgage. The next year, Curry landed a job at Pearle Vision and enrolled in McFatter Technical Center in Davie to earn an optician's certificate.

Although no records indicate that Curry was involved in drug trafficking, several people surrounding her have been implicated in such activity. James Williams, a 46-year-old family friend, was caught with cocaine in Tennessee, New Jersey, and Florida in the mid-'80s. He's now a pastor in South Carolina. McGee, the father of Curry's first child, is serving 28 years in state prison for four 1999 felony cocaine charges. Those weren't isolated incidents. Hollywood police first nabbed McGee for cocaine possession in 1988. And Curry's brother, John Bousfield, was a crack dealer in South Broward whose first bust was in March 2000.

Whether Leon Mackey, the Bahamian Casanova who claimed to be a pilot, knew of Curry's family history is unclear. But it is clear that after she rejected Mackey, he continued to pursue her.

"He wanted a relationship," Curry says. "I was not ready for it. I was dealing with my mortgage and trying to get over my husband."

On July 4, roughly six weeks after the two met, Mackey called Curry's cell phone. He explained that he had a way to help her out financially. "He said he came across some cocaine that he brought over on the plane that he rides and he needed me to help him get rid of it and that would be my money for the mortgage and to help me out," Curry recalls. "At first, I said no."