Ranger Finds Niche in Texas Lore : Law Enforcement: Lee Roy Young has helped integrate the historically white ranks of the nation’s oldest state policing agency.

At high noon, as Texas Ranger Lee Roy Young considers the Case of the Trash Can Bandit, he frowns down Farm Road 688 at the herd of Black Angus cattle grazing in a grove of mesquite and scrub oak.

That’s where the outlaw buried his loot. The Ranger says the bandit broke into a bank one night and lugged away $1,000 in quarters. And now the cops can’t prove he did it.

“The guy says the money is his life’s savings,” Young says. “Life savings, my foot.”

Young, his Size 7 white Stetson tugged tight over his eyes, cruises Kaufman County in a lime-green Chevrolet Caprice, past Adams Drug Store, past Forney Auto Supply, past Grandma’s Fried Chicken where gizzards sizzle on the grill.

“One riot, one Ranger,” they used to say about the outfit that was as much a part of the Old West as six-guns and sagebrush.

But life today on the trail in Texas isn’t what it used to be on the frontier, when Rangers fought bloody feuds and battled barbed-wire fence cutters, lynch mobs, cattle rustlers and killers.

These days, a Texas Ranger is more of a backwoods investigator, helping police and sheriffs in little places like Forney, population 4,200, tracking scoundrels like the Trash Can Bandit.

“This guy breaks into the bank over here one night last August and steals all those quarters,” Young says. “Coins were all he could get into. He puts the money in a trash can and carries it across the field and buries it out there in the brush. Then he goes back to Dallas and leaves it out there for over three months.”

The Texas Ranger’s silver badge, a five-pointed lone star inside a circle, shines on his shirt over his heart.

“He comes back in December and gets the money. He puts it in two tote bags, and I mean two heavy tote bags. You ever tried to carry $1,000 in quarters? He tries to steal a car up here off the Interstate to carry his loot back into Dallas, and that’s when he got caught.”

The Texas Ranger’s handcuffs hang from the hood latch down by his elephant-skin cowboy boots as his car crosses the east fork of the Trinity River, 21 miles southeast of Dallas.

“The guy’s street-smart. He said, ‘Prove it. Prove I stole that money.’ A murderer will admit he’s guilty quicker than a common old thief. We all know those coins came from that bank, but we never could take the case to a judge and a jury and say this guy did that crime. He wears gloves, see, so there’s no fingerprints. We could never get any physical evidence to prove he did it. We had a lot of circumstantial evidence--coin wrappers and all those quarters, about the same amount of money that had been stolen from the bank. But that’s no good in court.”

The Texas Ranger’s silver Colt .45 is holstered in leather on his left hip. A beeper rides his belt on the right.

“The guy’s been to the state prison three times. We know that he knows that we know that he stole that money. We just can’t prove it. So we’ve got to assume, on his word, that it’s actually his life’s savings.”

The Texas Ranger rolls his eyes in disbelief up toward the top of the town water tower, where someone has painted, “I Love Louise.”

Today’s 95 Texas Rangers, members of the nation’s oldest state law-enforcement organization, are known worldwide as tough, elite peacekeepers.

The Rangers are often compared to other famed forces--Scotland Yard, the FBI, Interpol and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A Ranger used to shoot first and ask questions later, but no more.

“In the old days, they wouldn’t fool with this guy,” Young says, laughing about the Trash Can Bandit. “Even 50 years ago, any policeman would have put him under a hot lamp, questioned him continuously for three days until he broke down and told the truth. They’d break out the rubber hoses. Under those conditions, you probably would have confessed to anything. I know I would have.”

Young has been a law-enforcement officer for almost 15 years--14 as a state trooper, and the past year as the first black officer in the 166-year history of the Texas Rangers.

He’s stationed at Ranger Company B headquarters in Garland, a suburb north of Dallas, and he’s on the trail of a thief who stole 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, another who got away with 50 TV sets, another who sold a couple of bales of marijuana, and another who stole $18,500 worth of tractors from a farm.

Texas Rangers are charged with four duties:

Protecting life and property by enforcing state criminal statutes;

Suppressing riots and insurrections;

Investigating major crimes;

Apprehending fugitives.

A modern Ranger doesn’t often run into a riot, however. More often than not, a typical duty is the Case of the Trash Can Bandit, and being a Ranger has its frustrations, as Young knows and can recount.

“You go out and beat your head against the wall, trying to do a good job, then you face all these obstacles--courts and attorneys and such. We can’t go back to the days of the rubber hose, but here’s a guy we know broke into a bank and stole that money. We had to give all those quarters back to him. And you know what? He’s free.”

Young was born 42 years ago, and grew up near the Texas-Mexico border playing cowboys and Indians. He was a Boy Scout. He was raised a Baptist, but now he’s a Catholic. He’s left-handed. He speaks fluent Spanish. He joined the Navy and saw the world. He went to a segregated school in Brackettville and grew up to graduate from the University of Texas. He’s married and has two children and a basset hound named Barney and a cat named Gizmo. And the first black Texas Ranger is a George Bush man.

Political controversy has trailed the Texas Rangers for a long time. They’ve been praised as freedom-fighters and heroes by some, while being criticized as bully boys by others. The NAACP has threatened to sue the Rangers for racial discrimination and some say the Rangers, part of the Texas Department of Public Safety, appointed Young in response to that threat.

State public-safety officials say 22% of 2,500 commissioned officers are black, and two blacks have been promoted in recent years to the rank of captain. A statewide campaign has been launched to attract minority applicants, department officials say.

The Texas Rangers not long ago named another black, Earl Ray Pearson, 34. The first Latino Ranger was appointed 20 years ago; now there are six. The Latino Rangers include Ray Martinez, who as an Austin policeman shot and killed University of Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman in 1966. A prospective Ranger must have eight years of law-enforcement experience. All current Rangers are men.

Gary Bledsoe, president of the NAACP chapter in Austin, the state capital, says he’s pleased that after 166 years, the Rangers finally appointed two blacks within six months, but he says racial discrimination still exists. Young applied 10 times for promotion during his 14 years as a DPS state trooper, Bledsoe says, but was turned down every time.

“It’s clear Lee Roy Young has been the subject of discrimination,” Bledsoe says. “Somehow, he wasn’t qualified for sergeant in the DPS, and then all of a sudden he qualifies as a Ranger. It just doesn’t add up.”

Michael Scott, a state trooper from Houston, should have been the first black Texas Ranger, Bledsoe says. Twice Scott ranked first on the written Ranger exam, but finished far down after an oral interview. The NAACP official claims Scott was kept out of the Rangers because he has been outspoken about discrimination.

“It appears,” Bledsoe says, “there’s a policy in the department saying, ‘we’re going to start promoting a few people because we have to, but we’re going to promote people who don’t complain or stand up for their rights, people who play by the rules of the game.’ If it was not for Michael Scott, there never would have been a position created for Lee Roy Young.”

Back in Garland, Young drives his unmarked Chevy into the parking lot at Soulman’s Barbecue for lunch. While eating a Bellybuster, a $3.69 beef, ham and sausage sandwich, Young says that, although he went to segregated schools in South Texas until he got to high school, his heroes were mostly white--Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Mickey Mantle and Elvis Presley.

“It never occurred to me that they were white and I was black,” he says. “That’s part of the marvel of being young, I guess. You don’t become aware of discrimination until you get older, then you see that whites live over there and we live over here.”

An armadillo painted on the wall peers down on Young and his Bellybuster.

“It’s evident that discrimination is part of our society. It bothers me, as it bothers most black people, but I’m not going to let it stop me. When you get knocked flat on your behind, you get right up and keep on fighting. At some point, I’d like to be judged as a Texas Ranger, not as a black Texas Ranger. But the fact that I’m the first black Ranger shows how much progress we still have to make as a people. We’ve got a long way to go.”

The Rangers were formed in 1823 by Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas,” who hired 10 men to range across the territory to protect the first white settlers.

Since then, they’ve survived arrows, guns and knives. Texas Rangers live on in song and story, cinema and television as strong, silent loners who all look like Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Lyndon B. Johnson.

Young, 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, is strong and silent--he talks a lot in yups and nopes --and, like most Rangers today, he works alone. “We depend on ourselves,” he says.

Young grew up shooting cap pistols and riding horses in cowboy and cactus country, but he hasn’t sat in a saddle in five years. A Ranger doesn’t wear a uniform, but he’s easily recognized. “There’s a saying that when a Ranger goes someplace, he stands out. You know he’s a Ranger. It’s the boots, the hat, the gun, the gun belt. We don’t need a uniform. Most people in Texas recognize a Ranger.”

It’s been said that next to the Alamo, the Texas Rangers are the state’s best-known heritage. That may be true, but the facts suggest that Rangers didn’t always keep their honor high or go by the law book.

Capt. Leander H. McNelly, generally acknowledged as the greatest Ranger of them all, mounted across-the-border raids against Mexicans more than a century ago. Gaines de Graffenried, curator of the Texas Ranger Museum and Hall of Fame in Waco, 100 miles south of Dallas, says McNelly’s Rangers capped their campaign with perhaps the most famous action in the history of the corps, the Las Cuevas War.

“They cleaned up South Texas and they cleaned it up fast,” says de Graffenried, 80, sitting in the shade of a water elm tree outside the museum on the banks of the Brazos River. “The first thing they did, they killed a bunch of Mexicans, didn’t ask any questions, just stacked them up like cordwood. That put the fear of the Lord in all them bandits.”

Modern critics include Mexican-American field workers, who accused Rangers of brutality on the side of farm management during labor disputes in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1960s. Not a year goes by without someone, often a politician, urging that the Rangers be disbanded.

Criticism doesn’t bother most of the Rangers. “For everyone who don’t like me,” one old captain said before he died, “I got a lot more who do.”

Young and other Texas Rangers earn a base salary of $29,102 a year.

“That’s not a lot of money,” says Young’s boss, Company B Capt. James A. Wright, who makes a base salary of $34,985.

“In comparison with other police agencies, we’re awful low. We’re trying to get more money from the Legislature. We’ve had people quit or retire early in order to take another job to make more money. You can’t blame them. A few years back, you would never have heard of a Texas Ranger quitting for anything.”

Modern Ranger crime-fighting tools include forensic labs, helicopters, airplanes and state-of-the-art surveillance systems.

In the old days, a Ranger’s main tools were a horse and a saddle and a six-gun. For almost a century, they asked a prospective Ranger three questions: Can you ride? Can you shoot? Can you cook? Today, only one of those questions applies. Modern Rangers must qualify every six months on the firing range with a pistol, a rifle and a shotgun.

Young, like many Rangers, has never been in a gunfight. The closest he came was when he was a state trooper and he stopped a speeding car carrying three suspicious-looking men and a woman.

“I said to myself, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ I got them all out of the car, handcuffed them and took them back to jail. I found out the next day they’d killed a boy, cut him up with a knife and buried him under a culvert. There’s no doubt in my mind that if they’d seen their way clear, they’d have ganged up on me. I didn’t let that happen.”

During all the commotion about Young being the first black Texas Ranger, a friend reminded him, “Hell, you aren’t the first black. You’re the first Indian Texas Ranger.”

Young’s great-grandfather was a black Seminole Indian, a frontier scout in the cavalry.