PAGE C1 - Houston Chronicle

Transcription

TEXANS:
1
What Houston’s team needs to
happen to make the NFL playoffs.
chron.com: Where Houston lives
2
TEXANS MUST WIN
Texans (8-7) vs.
Patriots (10-5)

Noon, CBS
2 OF THE FOLLOWING 8-7 TEAMS MUST LOSE OR TIE
Broncos (8-7) vs. Chiefs (3-12), 3:15 p.m.
Ravens (8-7) at Raiders (5-10), 3:15 p.m., CBS
Jets (8-7) vs. Bengals (10-5), 7:20 p.m., NBC
MOSTLY CLOUDY, HIGH 55, LOW 39 / PAGE B14 HORNETS GET BY ROCKETS 99-95 / PAGE C1
SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2010
Ballot
box to 2010 FASHION
reshape
Texas
Monday is
TRENDS
STAR
deadline to file
in offices holding
balance of power
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A U S T I N — The candidate
filing deadline is Monday
for the first elections of the
new decade — elections that
likely will set the political
tone in Texas for the next 10
years.
These elections will help
determine the partisanship
of Texas government and will
impact the balance of power
in Congress. Policies promoted to voters this year will
decide how state government
addresses challenges such as
population growth, transportation and increased needs
for public schools.
Ten million more people
likely will become Texans in
the next decade, according to
the state demographer’s office, with Hispanics passing
Anglos as the largest ethnic
group around 2014.
But Hispanics have
yet to demonstrate
strength at the ballot
box that matches the
size of their population.
More than 700,000
additional students will
join the 4.7 million already attending Texas public schools, increasing the
need for new classrooms,
more teachers and tax revenue to pay for it all. Economically disadvantaged children
make up the fastest-growing
student population, according to the Texas Education
Agency.
And based on past trends,
the state’s two-year budget
can be projected to grow
from the current $182 billion
to $241 billion by 2020. And
in the short run, state of-
R
ONALD Reagan
was in the White
House. Eye of the
Tiger was on the
radio.
Cocaine
cowboys roamed Miami.
And the seeds for what
would become perhaps the
largest and most powerful
crime syndicate in the hemisphere were quietly being
sowed in Houston.
It was 1982, and William
Hoffman, an American drug
runner later tucked into the
witness-protection program,
was busy using rental cars to
ferry 25-pound loads of Mexican marijuana from Brownsville to Houston.
Hoffman, according to records, would drive to a house
on Houston’s Wallisville Road,
where guys he knew only as
“Guero” and “Gringo” would
unload the pot.
But small-time was about
to become big-time.
Through interviews, documents, and court testimony,
the Houston Chronicle has
reconstructed the origins of
a tenacious syndicate which
over 25 years rose from a borderland gang of pot smugglers
In
2010, more
people will be
putting their own
spin on emerging
fashions rather
than copying
others.
PAGE G1
LINDSEY LOVE’S
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545 to 707
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$18 billion
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OSIEL CARDENAS
GUILLEN
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CAUGHT IN MEXICO
Mexican police say they have
alleged drug lord Carlos Beltran
Leyva in custody. PAGE A3
230
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how — as Colombia’s mighty
cocaine cartels had to abandon Miami and find a way
to do business elsewhere in
the United States — the stage
was set for explosive growth
among Mexico’s drug gangsters who made Houston a
national hub as they sought to
infiltrate the United States.
Sources: The National Drug
Intelligence Center; U.S. Department
of Justice
and car thieves to a multibillion-dollar criminal empire
known as the Gulf Cartel.
Hoffman’s own words, offered in testimony, provide
a vivid street-level look at
Please see CARTEL, Page A8
BURLAP-WRAPPED BONANZA:
IC
: CHRON
Packages like these, confiscated in
Houston in 1989, were typical of the cocaine smuggled into the U.S. by
the Gulf Cartel during a 16-year period that began in the 1980s.
LE
SOCIETY
JAN. 14: An Evening
with Lucy Liu benefiting
UNICEF.
JAN. 21: Social diary
maestro Scott Evans will
gather the party elite at
Discovery Green.
Horoscope. G4
Lottery . . . A2
Movies. . ZEST
Obituaries . B6
Outlook . . .B10
Sports . . . . C1
World . . . A21
220,000
CHRONICLE FILE
CAN’T 1.
MISS 2.
EVENTS:
Business . . D1
Books . . ZEST
Crossword . G4
Dear Abby . G2
Directory . . A2
Editorial . .B13
Hoffman ZEST
RAW NUMBERS
TELL THE STORY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
LT RÁ N
M A YR A BE
INSIDE
INSIDIOUS RISE
OF GULF CARTEL
By DANE SCHILLER
Please see POLITICS, Page A8
7
trace a syndicate’s
growth from small-time pot smuggling to a
mega-empire of drug crime with a hub in Houston
INTERVIEWS, FILES AND COURT RECORDS
L A FAY E T T E 1 4 8
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
LEB$'&/DE$.(($&&
¬¬¬
3.
JAN. 22:
Glasstire’s
rescheduled
Caddyshack-themed
fundraiser on the
Hermann Park Golf
Course.
PAGE G3
GO TAOS
4.
5.
FEB. 13: The annual Heart
Ball benefiting the American
Heart Association at the
Hilton Americas.
FEB. 19: “The Debutantes
Run Wild” gala,
DiverseWorks’ biggest
fundraiser.
6.
7.
FEB. 20: “Surreal
Movement” will be surging
through the Wortham Center
during the annual Ballet Ball.
MARCH 31: Fashion icon
Oscar de la Renta will
showcase his Fall 2010
Collection at the Westin Galleria.
TRAVEL
Snowboarders have given New Mexico’s venerable
winter resort a shot of youthful energy, with only minor
grumbling from longtime skiers. PAGE J1
3
$ 97
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
CARTEL:
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Dealt with Colombians, then took over
CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1
“As the heat came on in
Miami in the early 1980s,
they started to switch their
routes,” recalled Peter Hanna, a senior FBI agent who
made a career chasing the
cartel.
“The Mexicans said, ‘Hey,
no problem, we have been
smuggling stuff into the
United States for years.’ ”
Keeping a lower profile on
U.S. soil than Colombians,
who were as bold as they were
extravagant, the Mexicans
made money hand over fist.
Despite a quarter century
of indictments and arrests
of its leaders, and seizures
of its drugs, cash and guns,
the cartel has repeatedly
reinvented itself to thrive at
unprecedented levels.
As one federal intelligence
agent put it, the Gulf Cartel
has grown so quickly that
it stands apart from other
Mexican gangs and has clearly
graduated from door-greeter
to superstore-owner, with its
territory the swath of Texas
border stretching from the
Gulf of Mexico westward to
Big Bend.
The cartel pumps dope
through pipelines connecting
Latin America to Houston,
and on to Atlanta, Chicago,
Miami, New York and
elsewhere. And when drugs
are being smoked, snorted
or swallowed here, the Drug
Enforcement Administration
contends they have been
sifted through the cartel’s
fingers.
“I don’t care where cocaine
is in Houston, the Gulf Cartel
owned it, touched it or got
a cut from it — without
question,” said Wendell
Campbell, spokesman for the
DEA’s Houston Field Division.
“Without question.”
While Hoffman, one of
the few Americans in the
organization, smuggled
marijuana in the early 1980s,
more than 1,000 miles
away U.S. authorities used
planes and boats to blitz
the Caribbean Sea and deny
Colombian cartels a primary
route for pumping cocaine
northward.
Washington was at the
same time going after nowlegendary Pablo Escobar and
other Colombian drug lords
by seeking to have them sent
to the U.S. to face justice.
First kilos, then tons
Desperate to deliver their
product, Colombian capos
cut deals with longtime
Mexican smugglers to move
bricks of cocaine, worth more
than their weight in gold,
along routes Mexicans used
to sneak bale-size loads of
marijuana, authorities say.
By 1986, Hoffman, who
couldn’t speak Spanish but
used his Mexican wife as a
translator, was smuggling
Cali-Cartel brand cocaine for
the boys from south of the
border. Kilos became tons,
and thousands of dollars
became millions in profits.
“The money got to be too
good,” Hoffman testified.
The cartel’s first known
Fort Knox on U.S. soil was
found in 1989 at a Rio Grande
Valley home complete with an
orchard and an underground
vault buried beneath a few
inches of dirt, topped by a
chicken coop.
Authorities found a
staggering 9 tons of cocaine
“I don’t care where
cocaine is in
Houston, the Gulf
Cartel owned it,
touched it or got a
cut from it — without
question.”
WENDELL CAMPBELL, DEA’s
Houston Field Division
THE EVOLUTION OF THE GULF CARTEL
1984: Juan Garcia Abrego takes
command after his rival is killed in a
Mexico hospital.
2001: Cartel branches out; $41 million
found at stash house in Atlanta; $2.3
million in Houston.
1986: Cartel attempts to bribe an FBI
agent with $100,000.
2003: Cardenas is imprisoned after
a gunbattle with the Mexican army; he
continues to run the cartel from behind bars.
1989: Stash house hiding 9 tons of
cocaine is discovered in Harlingen.
1994: Two American Express bankers
worth at least $200 million
in South Texas at the time,
and 10 times that on the East
Coast.
That same year Hoffman
parked a Chevrolet Suburban
at William P. Hobby Airport,
keys hidden in the gas cap,
and $10 million stuffed in
a secret compartment to be
driven to the border, records
show.
Besides transporting
cocaine across Mexico for
the Colombians, Mexican
syndicates took over
smuggling and U.S. streetlevel distribution.
According to a 2009
Justice Department report,
“National Drug Threat
Assessment,” Mexico’s major
cartels now have a presence in
at least 230 U.S. cities, from
Kalamazoo, Mich., to Dodge
City, Kan.
Billions in proceeds
While there are four or
five major Mexican cartels,
the Gulf Cartel is consistently
considered at the top of the
industry. The National Drug
Intelligence Center estimates
Mexican and Colombian
cartels “generate, remove and
launder” between $18 billion
and $39 billion in wholesale
proceeds each year.
Two generations of Gulf
Cartel crime bosses — as
well as their henchmen,
accountants, confidants,
wannabes, snitches and
soldiers — have been brought
to justice in Houston. Others
are fugitives facing U.S.
indictments.
Houston offers the cartel
everything it needs: a major
highway system, proximity to
Mexico, a massive population
with accomplices primed to
pump drugs farther into the
United States.
Law enforcement
authorities say the city is
home to hundreds of stash
houses for weapons, money
and drugs.
The cartel has brought
with it murders, kidnapping
and other crimes, as well as
the collateral damage caused
by drug use.
“The Mexican cartels
are the most significant
organized crime threat to
the Western Hemisphere,
without question,” said Texas
Department of Public Safety
director Steve McCraw, who
was raised on the border.
A Gulf Cartel boss’s
nephew was shot in the head
and left along a Houston
street. A husband and wife
related to another drug boss
were tortured and killed by
home invaders who missed
220 pounds of cocaine in the
attic.
Eleven people were
charged in October for their
connections with a house
in far northwest Houston
that functioned as a covert
operations center for a cartel
cell, according the Bureau of
are convicted of laundering $30 million in
cartel money.
2007: Cardenas is extradited to Houston.
1996:
Juan Garcia
Abrego — on
the FBI’s
Most Wanted
list — is
captured and
deported to
Houston for
trial.
1998: New
boss Osiel
Cardenas
Guillen turns
to a friend
B R ET T C OOM ER : C H R O N I C L E in Mexico’s
special
forces to launch Zetas, a private army.
1999: Cardenas threatens to kill two
U.S. agents in Matamoros.
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives.
Agents found drugpackaging equipment, bulk
cash, and thousands of
rounds of ammunition, as
well as night-vision goggles;
“a submachine gun with a
suspected silencer” and three
pistols with laser sights.
The find underscored how
the cartel has been able to do
its business while blending
into the city.
While locked up at in
Harris County Jail, a streethardened 22-year-old
described cutting his teeth to
break into the cartel’s lowest
ranks.
He told of a journey
through a world where
machismo flowed thicker than
the guns, weapons and dope.
“Inside the family, people
will be killed by their own,
everyone who has balls and
greed wants to be the boss,”
said Carlos, who asked that
his last name not be used.
He said he started out
ferrying bundles across
the Rio Grande as a human
mule, then moved up to
POLITICS:
HANDOUT PHOTO
2009: U.S. government offers a $5 million
reward for the capture of cartel’s new bosses,
including Cardenas’ brother.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
extorting border businesses
to pay protection money,
and continued looking for
opportunities.
Hoffman, who was
smuggling long before Carlos
was born, ended up telling
his story on the witness stand
in Houston after the Gulf
Cartel’s top boss, Juan Garcia
Abrego, was captured and
shipped here for trial in 1996.
Lessons from a legend
Garcia, who had been
arrested in the United States
12 years earlier on aging auto
smuggling charges that were
later dropped, was the first
Mexican trafficker to make
the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
A report by the U.S.
Attorney’s Office for the
Southern District of Texas
contends that over a 16-year
period, Garcia brought in
well over 220,000 pounds
of nearly pure cocaine. That
equates to enough of the
narcotic to get 250 million
people high.
It was under Garcia’s rule
that the cartel grew far and
wide as he capitalized on the
lessons said to have been
taught to him by his uncle,
Juan N. Guerra, a bootlegger
who later owned a trucking
company and remains a
Godfather-like legend in
Matamoros, Mexico.
After Garcia went to
prison, Osiel Cardenas
Guillen, a street-smart, hottempered capo who started
out washing cars for wise
guys, took the cartel to a
bigger stage, and drew U.S. ire
like never before, according to
reports and records.
Cardenas gained a
reputation for being hands on,
in your face, and not afraid to
unleash brute force.
Having already corrupted
members of the very armed
forces sent to catch him,
Cardenas used a confidant
in Mexico’s Special Forces to
help launch the Zetas, a band
of brutal enforcers, according
to an unclassified DEA report.
This private army known
for military precision and
terror, at least in Mexico, was
to serve as a hit squad to kill
rivals.
Cardenas went too far in
STEVE McCRAW, Texas Department
of Public Safety director
1999 when he and a gang
of henchmen caught an
FBI agent and a DEA agent
driving through Matamoros
with an informant in their
car. An armed standoff ended
with the agents and their
snitch fleeing back to the
United States.
Cardenas, who quickly
landed on the FBI’s most
wanted list, was arrested in
2003 by the Mexican military
after a shootout. But even
from inside a Mexican prison,
Cardenas ran the cartel
and directed a turf war that
tore apart Nuevo Laredo,
authorities say.
It wasn’t until 2007, when
he was extradited to Houston,
that he lost power.
Under heavy guard, his
location being kept secret for
his own safety, Cardenas is
believed to be cooperating
with prosecutors in exchange
for leniency and other
considerations.
‘A shell of its former self’
Stratfor, an Austin-based
global intelligence company,
contends the cartel can hardly
survive the pounding it has
taken on all fronts, and that
the feared Zetas have founded
their own crime syndicate
that works with the Gulf
Cartel when it is convenient.
“After nearly three years of
bearing the brunt of Mexican
military and law enforcement
efforts, the Gulf Cartel is now
a shell of its former self,”
contends a 16-page report by
Stratfor.
But some federal agents
have said that while the Zetas
have emerged and are a great
threat, the dope will continue
to flow and the cartels will
fight to persevere.
“They are not going to
go away quietly into the
night,” the DEA’s Campbell
said. “They are going to try
and establish themselves as
permanent fixtures.”
[email protected]
Political road map at stake
ficials are faced with a builtin shortfall of as much as
$16 billion that the Legislature will have to resolve in
the 2011 session.
The next legislative session also will deal with redrawing legislative and congressional district boundaries.
Texas is expected to pick
up as many as four seats in
Congress, taking them from
Democratic-leaning
states
that are losing population.
Democratic power in the
U.S. House could be enhanced or diminished by the
outcome.
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2005: Nuevo Laredo is plunged into a
major cartel turf war; a new police chief is
gunned down within hours of taking office.
“The Mexican
cartels are the
most significant
organized crime
threat to the Western
Hemisphere without
question.”
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With Republicans holding a two-vote majority in
the Texas House and all the
statewide offices that control
the Legislative Redistricting
Board, individual elections
may determine the direction
of statewide redistricting.
And the race for attorney
general, a post currently held
by Republican Greg Abbott,
will determine whether a
Republican or Democratic
lawyer represents Texas in
redistricting cases in the federal courts.
“The 2010 election will
impact Texans’ lives for years
to come, because the legislators and the governor who
shape the 2011 redistricting
map will also be drawing a
road map for 10 years of public policy,” said Democratic
Chairman Boyd Richie.
Richie said that because
Republicans won the last redistricting battle, Texas has
had some of the highest insurance rates in the nation
and the state has not expanded health care for middleincome children under the
Children’s Health Insurance
Program.
Republican
Chairman
Cathie Adams said redistricting will “impact every political race for the next decade.”
Adams said Texas voters also
will be able to affect federal
policies in this election.
“Democratic big-government, big-spending policies
have failed,” Adams said.
“The federal government
‘stimulus’ was supposed to
keep unemployment below 8
percent but it hovers around
10 percent nationwide. The
health
care
experiment
would cost another 15,000
Texas jobs, and the ‘cap and
trade’ proposal would devastate our economy.”
The major candidates for
governor were asked to describe why they view this
election as important for the
future.
Republicans
Incumbent Gov. Rick Perry said the state has made
“responsible use of taxpayer
dollars” to create a business
climate that attracts jobs and
build an education system
that prepares children for a
competitive economy.
“Voters in the 2010 election have the opportunity to
uphold the conservative policies that have made the Texas
economy one of the strongest
in the country, or choose a
course that will give way to
an increasingly intrusive federal government that could
undo effective state-based
solutions we have worked
hard to achieve,” Perry said.
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchison said the state
must “plan for the future and
not rely on the past.” She
said the emphasis should be
on having an educated work
force.
“This means college readiness for all and a minimum
goal of higher high school
graduation rates with a skill
set that allows for a good
job to support a family. We
must fix (Texas Department
of Transportation) leadership, protect private property rights and secure our
borders,” Hutchison said.
“And we must have ethics reform to end the cronyism and
mismanagement that have
plagued our state government under Rick Perry.”
Candidate Debra Medina
said Texas voters can set
themselves apart from the
federal government in this
election, especially if they
elect an average citizen running for office.
“With more than 10 states
rejecting ‘Obamacare’ and
more than 14 states declaring sovereignty against un-
constitutional mandates, this
governor’s election is going
to give us a clear direction
for the next decade,” Medina
said. “If we elect another
career politician, we’ll get
more of the same abuse of
our liberty and economic instability.”
Democrats
Houston Mayor Bill White
said the two most important things for Texas’ future
are improving public education to compete in a global economy and creating a
20-year transportation plan
for the state’s future. White
said dropout rates in public
education need to be reduced
and barriers to a higher education removed.
“This will be the fundamental issue in this election
and in the elections of Texas’
future because the basic business of state government is
public education and higher
education,” White said. “Under Governor Perry, we are
50th in 50 states in the percentage of adults who have
high school diplomas.”
Houston hair-care millionaire Farouk Shami said
the changing demographics
of Texas make it crucial for
minorities to take a more
important role in state leadership.
“This election is really
a great proof that we are a
democratic country, a democratic state, that people can
make a difference,” Shami
said. “Minorities are becoming a majority, and now they
really step to the plate and
participate in government.
This is the beginning of an
honest government that represents each and everybody,
all citizens in the state of
Texas.”
[email protected]
SPORTS
UH CRASHES NCAA PARTY
SAM HOUSTON STATE ALSO IN THE FIELD
C-USA: Cougars are
dancing for the first
time since 1992
Southland: Bearkats
earn second bid in
school history
SWAC: TSU falls
short of bid, losing
to Arkansas-P. Bluff
Big 12: Kansas
men claim title;
A&M women in final
SUNNY, HIGH 77, LOW 51 / PAGE B14 ROCKETS FINALLY WIN BACK-TO-BACK GAMES / PAGE C1
¬¬¬
SU N DAY, M A RC H 1 4 , 2 0 1 0
THE GOOD LIFE
A HOUSTON CHRONICLE EXCLUSIVE
RIVIERA MAYA CALLS
‘I KNEW WHAT
THEY’D DO TO ME’
Mexico isn’t just for spring break.
Riviera Maya is a slice of grown-up
paradise just two hours away by plane. PAGE J1
Did you
remember?
LEB$'&/DE$'+(($&&
For 11 years,
DEA agent
JOE DUBOIS has
kept quiet about
his terrifying
brush with death
at the hands of
one of Mexico’s
most ruthless
drug kingpins.
No more.
HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL
THAT’S DOUBLY SWEET
SPRING
FORWARD
By DANE SCHILLER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
STAR
HUNGRY
TREE
How did the Tallow
tree, which devours
everything in sight,
get here? PAGE G1
MICHAEL PAULSEN : C H R O N I C L E
B
RANDON Peters (23) and his Yates teammates celebrated Saturday’s uplifting win — and
second straight state championship — after they beat Lancaster in the Class 4A final in
Austin. Yates’ 58th straight win capped a perfect season at 34-0. Later Saturday, Bush
wrapped up the Class 5A crown by beating Garland Lakeview Centennial. STORIES ON PAGE C1
Sheriff’s logs show why no one came to help
Records in slaying of four conflict
with claim that deputies were too busy
By CINDY HORSWELL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
INSIDE
Business . . D1
Crossword . G4
Dear Abby . G6
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Hot House
Tomatoes
Four months ago, San
Jacinto Sheriff’s Capt. Carl
Jones offered a simple reason
why his deputies couldn’t respond to a mother’s plea for
help with her mentally ill son
who was having bizarre hallucinations. His deputies
were too busy with highpriority calls.
“We were busier than a
cat covered in Meow Mix,”
Jones stated then.
Gloria Bills, a 71-yearold widow, would be among
those killed by the time
a deputy was finally dispatched to the family’s home
near Coldspring on Nov. 7,
seven hours after her first
desperate phone call to the
sheriff’s department.
Oliver “Bubba” Bills Jr.
shot and killed his mother,
his girlfriend, Shara Torres,
27, and her 4-year-old child
before shooting and killing
himself.
But dispatch records and
audio recordings recently released to the Houston Chronicle conflict with how the
sheriff’s department initially
portrayed its handling of the
incident. The records disclose
that Jones prohibited his deputies from making a welfare
check at the home.
The logs also raise ques-
PARADE
BASS
FISHING’S PRO
tions as to whether the four
deputies on duty that Saturday were as busy as Jones had
contended.
Records show Gloria Bills
called for help at 1:45 p.m.
— four hours before a wreck
that deputies worked on U.S.
59. The logs do not list deputies being dispatched to any
Please see CALL, Page A6
They were outnumbered
and outgunned behind enemy
lines, but the two U.S. federal
agents cornered in a Mexican
border city decided to die on
their own terms.
No surrender.
The choice facing Drug
Enforcement Administration
agent Joe DuBois and FBI
agent Daniel Fuentes was
simple: Hold their ground to
be riddled with machine-gun
fire, or be captured by drugcartel henchmen who would
diabolically interrogate them
using pliers, blowtorches or
worse.
“I knew what they’d do
to me,” recalled DuBois. “I’d
seen many pictures of the
bodies they leave behind.
“Dan and I decided, if we
are going to die, we are going
to die here.”
In an exclusive interview
with the Houston Chronicle,
DuBois publicly discussed
for the first time the nowinfamous 1999 standoff that
put one of the most powerful
cartel leaders in history on
America’s most-wanted list.
That life-or-death episode
on the streets of Matamoros,
across the Rio Grande from
Brownsville, made the fight
personal for DuBois and others in the U.S. Department
of Justice — and ultimately
brought about the capture
and prosecution of Gulf Cartel kingpin Osiel Cardenas.
Known as the “Friend Killer” and “El Loco,” Cardenas
was sentenced to prison last
month in Houston after secretly pleading guilty to his
Please see STANDOFF, Page A10
THE GOOD LIFE
A SOOTHING PALETTE
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with a pop of color.
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
STANDOFF:
THE NATION
¬¬¬
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Gulf Cartel boss blinked first
role in the standoff, as well
as drug smuggling and money
laundering.
For nearly 11 years,
DuBois has remained silent.
Not anymore.
DuBois, then stationed at
the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, and FBI agent Fuentes, based in Houston, were
assigned to gather routine
intelligence on leaders of the
Gulf Cartel on their home
turf in Mexico.
But the afternoon of Nov.
9, 1999, spun instantaneously
into a cataclysmic encounter.
Agents knew the streets
DuBois and Fuentes were
riding through the city of
Matamoros in a white Ford
Bronco with diplomatic license plates.
They’d
both
worked
against the cartel for years
and knew how the streets
worked south of the border.
Slouching in the back seat
was a secret informant, a
Mexican reporter for a tiny
local newspaper that specialized in crime coverage, who
was giving a guided tour of
cartel members’ homes as
well as stash houses used to
sneak drugs into the United
States.
They cruised past Cardenas’ home, a big pink house
with high walls and security
cameras.
Within moments, a Lincoln Continental was on their
tail, then a stolen pickup
with Texas plates.
A game of cat and mouse
ensued. The federal agents
were cut off and surrounded
by at least three vehicles,
including one driven by a
former state police officer
turned cartel operative.
What unfolded next was
as chilling as it was bizarre.
Just yards away from city
police headquarters, their
Bronco was corralled and
trapped by a convoy and
more than a dozen gunmen
armed with assault rifles.
Some wore police uniforms. Nearby, other men,
also in police uniforms, directed traffic, DuBois said.
Facing heavy firepower,
the agents’ handguns were
all but useless.
“The only way we were
getting out was to talk our
way out,” DuBois recalled.
One
gunmen
looked
“coked out of his mind” and
was screaming, “Kill them!”
Cardenas jumped from a
white Jeep Cherokee and approached the agents with the
swagger of a man in charge. In
his waistband, he wore a Colt
pistol with a gold grip; in his
hands, a gold-plated AK-47.
DuBois recalled thinking,
“Here is the (expletive) that is
going to kill me today.”
Cardenas pounded on
the Bronco and demanded
the agents get out and hand
over the informant. Fuentes
flashed his FBI badge.
Cardenas smiled wryly. In
an ongoing hail of profanity,
he told them they would be
shot if they didn’t surrender.
At one point, he pointed his
AK-47 at Fuentes’ head.
The agents refused to
budge, saying they were dead
either way.
He gave another choice:
Just hand over the informant.
Again, they refused.
“He kept saying, ‘I don’t
give a damn who you are,’ ”
recalled DuBois, who grew up
in Mexico and was formerly a
police officer in neighboring
Brownsville. “I replied, ‘You
don’t care now, but tomorrow
and the next day and the rest
of your life, you’ll regret anything stupid that you might
do right now. You are fixing to
make 300,000 enemies.’”
“I told him, ‘Think it over,
man. There is no way that you
will be able to hide anywhere.
They are going to come get
you.’”
As DuBois frantically
crafted words to stare down
DETAILS: Read excerpts from
the interview with DEA agent
Joe DuBois. chron.com
guns, pumping through his
veins was the memory of
fellow DEA agent Enrique
“Kiki” Camarena.
Back in 1985, Camarena
was kidnapped and murdered
in Mexico, savagely tortured
and interrogated, his body
found a month after his disappearance, bound, gagged
and stuffed into plastic bags.
“Most of us know the
torture he endured,” DuBois
told the Chronicle. “We had
made a decision we were
dead. If I gave you a choice —
listen, you are dead. Would
you rather 15 guys riddle you
full of bullet holes or cart you
off and take a blow torch to
you? That is the decision we
faced.”
DuBois said he reminded Cardenas that the DEA
launched a massive manhunt
and slammed down a fist
like never before after Camarena’s murder. U.S. officials
hunted down the killers as
well as their accomplices.
And then, taking in
DuBois’ words, Cardenas appeared to pause.
It was a Hail Mary strategy: Hang tough, but still
give Cardenas a way to save
face in front of his crew.
“If we had shown weakness, they would surely have
busted the windows and overwhelmed us,” DuBois said.
‘This is my town’
There was also Plan B:
a gun hidden by the FBI
agent’s thigh.
“Danny had his gun in his
hand,” DuBois said of the excellent marksman and former
member of the Houston FBI
SWAT team. “Unless they got
Danny in a head shot, Osiel
was coming with us.”
DuBois said they acted
clearly in the face of overwhelming odds because they
thought they had no chance
of survival. Their hands did
not shake. Their voices did
not crack.
“These guys were the
most bloodthirsty killers in
the Western Hemisphere. I
was positive I wasn’t going to
make it,” DuBois said. “The
immorality of killing someone doesn’t go through their
heads. It is the business of it,
(as) ‘Is this going to wreck my
business?’”
Cardenas’ gunmen raised
their guns, waiting for the
command to open fire.
Instead, he called off the
gunmen and told the agents
to leave.
“You (expletive) gringos.
This is my town, so get the
(expletive) out of here before
I kill all of you,” Cardenas
said.
“Don’t ever come back.”
As quickly as they’d been
surrounded,
the
convoy
pulled out. The agents and
their informant headed for
the border.
“Many drug traffickers are
fully aware that if they kidnap, torture or kill an agent,
the full brunt of the U.S.
government will be brought
to bear,” said Mike Vigil, the
DEA’s retired chief of international operations, who was
in Colombia as part of the
Camarena dragnet.
Today, it is Cardenas who
is the informer.
AMBUSH IN MATAMOROS
Two U.S. federal agents and an informant were driving
through Matamoros, Mexico, on Nov. 9, 1999, when they were
surrounded by a convoy of vehicles, a dozen drug-cartel
gunmen and their leader, Osiel Cardenas. They were stopped
less than half a block from the city police station.
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in league with the
gangsters directed
city traffic around
the standoff.
Brownsville
MEXICO
Matamoros
200 miles
Gulf of
Mexico
Car with
agents
Kingpin Cardenas
Gangsters, including
former Mexican
police officers, used
three cars and their
radios to trap and
corral the agents on
Sixth Street.
pointed an AK-47 at one
of the agents’ heads. As
he went back and forth
from the driver to
passenger side of their
car, he told the men that
if they didn’t step out
they would be executed.
More than a dozen gunmen
surrounded the agents and aimed
assault rifles at them as they
awaited orders to open fire.
ALBERTO CUADRA : C H R O N I C L E
Source: DEA
The once-mighty drug
lord is imprisoned as part
of a plea bargain in which
he has agreed to provide information about his former
narcotics-trafficking empire
in exchange for leniency.
The two agents have been
recognized by the U.S. attorney general for “exceptional
heroism” and are both still on
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“Like Danny said, this is
probably the first time anybody had said ‘No’ to Osiel
and lived to talk about it,”
DuBois said.
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TUESDAY, APRIL 13, 2010
HPD officer’s
killer receives
death sentence
JULIO CORTEZ : C H R O N I C L E
¬¬¬
LEB$'&/DE$'.('$&&
A C O S T LY WO N D E R
YEAR CONSTRUCTED:
1965
ORIGINAL COST: $35.5 MILLION
ORIGINAL BONDS: Paid
off in 2001. IMPROVEMENTS: Commissioners in 1987 approve issuing $60 MILLION
in bonds to add seats, install luxury boxes and remove the scoreboard as Oilers
owner Bud Adams threatened to take the team to Nashville. GONE: Oilers move to
Tennessee for 1997 season. CURRENT DEBT: $19 MILLION to $32 MILLION , depending on
differing estimates by county finance officials. YEARLY COST TO LOCAL GOVERNMENT:
Approximately $2 MILLION in operations costs for the Harris County Sports &
Convention Corp., $2.4 MILLION in debt and interest payments by Harris County.
A LOAD OF DEBT
ON AN EMPTY DOME
SILENT: Mabry Joseph Landor III listens in court Monday after
being sentenced for the murder of officer Timothy Abernethy.
Policeman’s
widow, son offer
forgiveness but
agree with the
jury’s decision
By SHAMINDER DULAI
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The declining use of the
death penalty across the
country and even in Harris
County — the onetime capital of capital punishment —
meant nothing in the case of
convicted killer Mabry Joseph
Landor III. There are murders and there are murders,
Triangle
of death
forms at
border
Dozens killed
in recent gang
battles to control
Mexican towns
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
L O S A L DA M A S , M E X I C O — The killers came for po-
lice chief Oliver Garcia as he
was readying for bed in this
quiet village an hour’s drive
from the south Texas border,
dragging him into the night in
his red boxer shorts.
His assassins had already
snatched two of Garcia’s officers; they drove the three 10
miles away to a dirt road near
a natural gas well and shot
them down.
“He was never involved in
things, so we never thought
this could happen,” Alberto
Lopez, the mayor of this village of just 2,500, said of the
62-year-old Garcia’s killing
last week. “We don’t have
gangsters in these towns, we
don’t have people involved
in drugs. So people are very
afraid.”
After four years of relative calm, Mexico’s gang-
and when the victim is a police officer, trends often have
little significance.
A jury took about three
hours Monday to decide
Landor should be put to death
for the 2008 shooting of
Houston police officer Timothy Abernethy.
The officer’s widow and
son offered forgiveness to
Landor, making for a noteworthy coda to the capital
murder trial, but they still
agreed with the jurors’ sense
of appropriate punishment.
“Today the jury sent out a
message,” prosecutor Denise
Bradley said. “If you kill a
police officer, you will have to
pay the price.”
University of Houston law
professor Adam Gershowitz,
a death penalty opponent,
agreed that the sort of reservations which may weigh on
prosecutors or jurors in other capital cases rarely apply
when a peace officer is killed
in the line of duty, even if a
life sentence means without
the chance of parole.
“As long as you have cases
of cops getting shot, you will
have prosecutors seeking the
death penalty,” Gershowitz
said. “Those seem like the
classic cases where they are
going to pursue it. There are
Please see LANDOR, Page A4
LARGER THAN LIFE: The Astrodome’s debt and interest payments, which will total more than
$2.4 million this year, would have to be considered in any redevelopment deal, one official said.
Astrodome carrying as much as $32 million, an
amount likely to haunt county for years to come
By CHRIS MORAN
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
More than a decade after its professional football and baseball teams moved
out, the Astrodome carries as much as
$32 million in debt — nearly as much as
the original cost of construction.
Harris County, which owns the stadium, projects that it will take another
When the Apollo 13 moon mission went awry,
fateful phrase opened a new chapter in history
5 WORDS THAT STUCK
By MAGGIE GALEHOUSE
Please see MEXICO, Page A4
INSIDE
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NASA FILE PHOTO
OFFICIAL CREW PORTRAIT: Apollo 13’s James A. Lovell Jr.,
WE RECYCLE
generation to complete the $48 million
in debt and interest payments to get it
off the books.
The debt is so complex and has been
refinanced enough times that county
financial managers disagree as to how
much the county owes. A second estimate put the debt at $19 million.
Either way, local government is on
the hook for millions of dollars a year in
commander, left; John L. Swigert Jr., command module pilot; and
Fred W. Haise Jr., lunar module pilot, before the 1970 mission.
DON’T
FORGET
TO VOTE
debt payments and operating costs for
a stadium the city has deemed unfit for
occupancy.
Debt and interest payments will
amount to more than $2.4 million this
year, according to a payment schedule
for the higher debt estimate. The Astrodome’s manager estimates it also will
cost $2 million for insurance, maintenance, utilities and security.
The debt likely would have to be
reckoned with in any deal to redevelop
the Astrodome, said Willie Loston, exPlease see DOME, Page A4
What you need
to know about
today’s runoff
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
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OMENTS after
Apollo 13 crew
members heard
a sharp bang, the
phrase that Space City can’t
seem to shake entered the atmosphere: “Houston, we’ve
had a problem.”
Forty years ago today,
a loud bang and vibration
transformed a smooth
flight to the moon into one
of NASA’s most successful
failures. We remember the
sentence that captured that
catastrophe as “Houston,
we have a problem,” but the
correct version uses the past
tense.
Presumably, some people
knew and even used the
phrase in the years after the
Apollo 13 crew members
miraculously — and
heroically — made their way
back to Earth.
But it was Ron Howard’s
1995 film, Apollo 13, that
cemented the misquoted
version in our minds.
“The movie simplified
the sentence for dramatic
Please see APOLLO, Page A5
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
First death sentence given DOME: County
by Houston jury in three years redevelopment
zone weighed
LANDOR:
not a lot of them, and they
resonate with the public.”
Landor’s death sentence
was the first one given out by
a Houston jury since 2007.
In May 2008, Juan Quintero
received a life sentence for
killing Houston police officer Rodney Johnson, the last
murder trial involving a slain
officer. That outcome may fit
in with a growing national
reluctance to impose death,
but it remains the exception
when an officer is killed, Gershowitz said.
“For the defense attorney,
it’s very hard to portray your
client in a sympathetic light so
that you can get a life sentence,”
Gershowitz said. “It’s such a
terrible aggravating factor.”
Landor was convicted last
week of murdering Abernethy
during a December 2008 foot
chase though a north Houston
apartment complex.
Landor told jurors he ran
because was on parole and
did not have a driver’s licence
when Abernethy pulled him
over on a traffic stop. He denied killing the 11-year veteran
officer.
Witnesses testified Landor
hid behind a wall and shot
Abernethy as he ran by, then
walked up to him and shot
him though the back of the
head at close range.
After the sentencing Monday, Timothy Abernethy Jr.
stood before the court and
forgave the man responsible
for it. “From the bottom of
my heart, and with all sincerity, I do forgive you,” Abernethy said.
With his voice at times
shaking, the 21-year-old also said he was praying for
Landor’s family and children.
His mother, Stephanie Abernethy, said the jury’s decision was correct.
“City of Houston, you’ve
gotten a killer off the street,”
she said outside the courtroom. “You have a very mean
J U LIO C OR T EZ : C H R O N I C L E
FORGIVENESS: Stephanie Abernethy, widow of HPD officer Timothy Abernethy, said she forgave her
husband’s killer, although she agreed with the jury’s decision to impose the death penalty.
and cold-blooded person who
will not be on the streets.”
Landor keeps silent
Abernethy’s family members gasped as state District
Judge Michael McSpadden
delivered the death sentence
to the packed courtroom.
Landor declined to make a
statement to the court and
slumped forward and hung
his head as he sat down.
As jurors stood up one by
one to confirm their decision,
Landor looked over at Abernethy’s widow, and she said
she saw him show emotion.
Landor had remained quite
and stone-faced through the
majority of the trial.
“Mabry was responsive,
I didn’t expect anything,”
Stephanie Abernethy said.
“You could see a little bit of
something.”
She then took the stand to
address him and to offer sympathy for his family.
“I’m sorry, I’m really really
sorry, Mabry,” she said. “Like
TJ said, we forgive you. So
you don’t take
that to prison
with you.”
L a n d o r
looked to his
family
and
ABERNETHY
waved twice
before leaving
the courtroom.
Outside the courthouse,
friends of Landor said the
jury’s decision was unfair.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like
what happened either to the
officer,” friend Qwanna Singleton said. “But two wrongs
don’t make a right.”
He said he does not believe
Landor is guilty and took issue with how his friend was
portrayed during the trial. “If
it was the truth, I wouldn’t be
over here supporting him.”
Juror responds
A juror who did not want
to identify himself said jurors
could not find any mitigating circumstances to prevent
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Chronicle reporters Mike Tolson and
Lindsay Wise contributed to report.
[email protected]
MEXICO:
No plans yet
There are no specific plans
on what to do with redevelopment money in the Astrodome
district or even an indication
that any of it will be spent on
the old stadium. County officials say it is not likely that
redevelopment money would
be used for Astrodome debt
payments.
Astrodome expenses are
covered by a combination of
hotel and car rental taxes,
parking fees and concessions.
Sports economics Professor Craig Depken of the
University of North Carolina
Charlotte said using tourist
taxes to pay the debt protects
the general fund that pays
sheriff’s deputies and repairs
roads.
But without the Astrodome debt, he said, “Either
the taxes would be lower on
the hotels, which would encourage more people to come
to Houston,” or the tourist
tax money could be directed
toward other projects.
Harris County is unusual
but not unique in being saddled with debt for an unused
stadium. Olympic Stadium
in Montreal was not paid
off until two years after the
Expos left for Washington,
D.C. Three Rivers Stadium in
Pittsburgh still was carrying
$45 million in debt at the time
of its demolition in 2001.
Seattle’s Kingdome was
razed in 2000, and King
County is scheduled to finish paying off its debt in five
years.
22 years of payments
Public money will be required to cover Astrodome
debt payments for 22 more
years, according to county
financial projections.
The Astrodome’s debt
stems from the $60 million
cost in the late 1980s of adding 10,000 seats, removing
the scoreboard and installing
72 luxury boxes. County commissioners approved the project in an effort to persuade
Oilers’ owner Bud Adams to
keep the team in Houston.
The team left town after the
1996 season.
When asked if the expansion looked like a bad investment in retrospect, Precinct
4 Commissioner Jerry Eversole replied, “Hell, yeah!” But
Eversole, who was not yet on
the Court when the spending was approved, also said
it has to be looked at in the
context of the times, when
two teams were threatening
to leave town.
“We couldn’t not try
to keep the Oilers and we
couldn’t not try to keep the
Astros,” Eversole said.
‘It’s an obstacle’
Even Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack, who has
criticized publicly funded stadiums as “playpens for millionaires,” agreed that it was
a good decision to try to keep
the Oilers in Houston.
Radack, who joined the
Court shortly after it approved the Astrodome expansion, pointed out that the
Astrodome was used by other
tenants for years after the
teams departed.
“It’s not like all of a sudden the Oilers left and somebody turned out the lights,”
Radack said.
The Astrodome debt is
part of the picture whether it
is razed, redeveloped or sold.
“It’s an obstacle,” Eversole said, “but that’s what
plans do, plans overcome obstacles.”
[email protected]
Citizens rely on Web
land battles have exploded
anew in the industrial cities
and ranch lands along the
lower Rio Grande. Dozens
have been killed in the past
seven weeks throughout the
triangle defined by the river’s
mouth, the cities of Laredo
and metropolitan Monterrey.
The skirmishes here reflect a
bitter and presumably lasting
split between the so-called
Gulf Cartel drug smuggling
organization and its vicious
former enforcers, known as
the Zetas.
Dispute over towns
Much of Monterrey and
the towns between it and the
border at Laredo and Reynosa
have long been considered
Zeta land. Mexican officials
say the Gulf Cartel’s bosses,
now allied with the La Familia criminal organization from
central Michoacan state, are
taking that territory back.
“A large number of La
Familia members are deployed in towns controlled
by the Gulf Cartel,” Ramon
Pequeno, head of the federal
police’s anti-narcotics units,
told reporters Monday. “The
same towns that are being
disputed with the Zetas.”
An official with the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration said the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful
drug trafficking organization,
has also joined the alliance
against the Zetas, whose rise
to power has come to threaten
all three of the cartels.
“It’s an issue of a common
enemy,” said Will Glaspy, head
of the DEA’s office in the border town of McAllen.
Rival
gangsters
have
TEXAS
Rio Gra
35
San
Antonio 10
e
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60.7777 .6 0>6&
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;% .>+;6B 0B Landor from getting the death
penalty. “The state’s evidence
was overwhelming,” said the
juror.
Landor’s attorneys declined to comment on the case.
During the punishment phase
they pointed to Landor’s disciplinary jail records to say
he was a controllable inmate
who would not be a continuing threat behind bars.
“He will never, ever, live
as a free man again. He will
never be able to be a father
to his three children, he will
die in prison,” said Hattie
Shannon, Landor’s attorney.
“This 29-year-old will never
breathe free air again, that
means Mabry Landor for the
rest of his natural life will
think about (this). ... That is
extreme punishment.”
Prosecutors displayed a
picture of Abernethy on a
courtroom TV and used their
closing argument to tell jurors that Landor’s criminal
record was proof that he was
beyond reform.
“We ask you to finish the
job that Timothy Abernethy
started,” prosecutor Maria
McAnulty told jurors. “Timothy Abernethy told Mabry
Landor III to stop and Timothy Abernethy lost his life. ...
Only by your verdict will we
know that Mabry Landor will
not be able to hurt another.”
Landor’s family could not
be reached for comment immediately after the punishment was read.
ecutive director of the Harris
County Sports & Convention
Corp., which the county created to run the Reliant Park
complex.
But no deal to restore
what once was known as
the “Eighth Wonder of the
World” is likely to be affected
by $32 million, Loston said.
“Practically anything that
would be done with the building would be some multiple
of that,” Loston said. “It’s not
enough to make or break a
development proposal.”
The rehabilitation of the
Astrodome could get a little
push today as part of a deal for
Houston’s next stadium. The
Commissioners Court agenda
includes a deal that would not
only have the city and county
contribute $10 million each
in infrastructure for a $60
million stadium financed by
the Dynamo but also draw a
redevelopment zone around
the Astrodome.
Fixing the Astrodome is
not the purpose of the district, but a surge of development in the area could
make the Astrodome more
attractive as an investment
and destination, according to
development officials.
MEXICO
Los Aldamas
Laredo
45
Houston
Gulf of
Mexico
Brownsville
Monterrey
Dozens killed
in recent weeks
100 mi.
CHRONICLE
clashed frequently with each
other and police and federal
troops in Reynosa across from
McAllen, in upriver towns,
and in villages along and between the expressways leading from the border to Monterrey.
Eight suspected gangsters
were killed early Sunday
when one band attacked another at a bar in Los Guerra,
a Rio Grande village about
50 miles upriver from McAllen. Killers massacred seven
other people Easter weekend
in another bar in Tampico,
the Gulf port city 200 miles
south of Brownsville.
“They are on top of us and
while they are fighting, a stray
bullet can catch some innocents,” said a Roman Catholic
priest in one of the besieged
towns. “You are entering the
wolf’s mouth.”
Thousands have died
Local media have been
terrorized into near silence
about the killings. So citizens and local officials alike
find themselves largely clueless observers, and sometime
hapless victims, in the latest
front of many-sided warfare
that has killed 18,000 people
in scarcely three years.
“They kill a person faster
than killing a cockroach,”
Juan Triana, a senior city
official in Reynosa, said of
the dangers. “Because killing a cockroach dirties their
boots.”
The fighting started in late
February, about the time former Gulf Cartel boss and
Zeta patron Osiel Cardenas
was sentenced to 25 years in
prison by a Houston federal
court.
The light sentence was
presumably in exchange for
Cardenas’ cooperation with
prosecutors and U.S. law enforcement.
With the traditional media
gagged by gangster threats
and officials’ desire to downplay events, common citizens
have largely taken to reporting on the violence on their
own though YouTube, Twitter
and blog postings.
State and local officials
first blamed such “social networks” for fueling unfounded
fear.
But Reynosa officials started tweeting in late February
about gunbattles and other
“risky situations.” And the
official Web site of Tamaulipas state, of which Reynosa
is the largest city, has begun
carrying news about such
clashes.
“It could be a gunshot, it
could be a grenade, it could be
a threat,” Triana, who directs
Reynosa’s Twitter efforts,
said of what merits a tweeted
alarm. “We are just trying to
advise people so they don’t
run risks.”
The Associated Press contributed to
this report.
[email protected]
ZEST
SPORTS
COMING UP ROSES
NEWTV GRID TODAY
Jockey Calvin Borel wins his third
Kentucky Derby in four years, guiding
Super Saver through the mud. PAGE C1
See what’s on prime-time
television tonight, plus check out
the week’s best picks. PAGE 15, ZEST
STORMS, HIGH 84, LOW 63 / PAGE B14 REELING ASTROS DROP FIFTH STRAIGHT / PAGE C1
¬ ¬ ¬*
SU N DAY, M AY 2 , 2 0 1 0
LEB$'&/DE$(&'($&&
RACE AGAINST CLOCK
NO LONGER ABLE
TO LOOK OTHER WAY AS OIL STILL GUSHES
VIOLENCE IN MEXICO
For years, the
Some experts
RALLIES AROUND THE NATION
city of Monterrey
accepted its drug
bosses — but then
killings started
estimate the spill
has tripled in size;
Obama to visit
By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
M
O N T E R R E Y,
MEXICO —
More than
any other city,
Monterrey
pulled Mexico into the industrial age a century
ago, its moguls
cornering the national markets for
steel and cement, Exclusively
beer and banking. in your print
A business
edition
powerhouse even
now, this city of 4 million
boasts universities that stand
among the best in Mexico, at
least one of them the finest
in the world. Recent studies
placed the city at the head of
the safest in Latin America,
the friendliest for business,
and the most pleasing in
which to live.
And while much of
Mexico until recent decades
remained insular and
lethargic, many in Monterrey
embraced the outside world,
finding more in common
with people in San Antonio
or Houston than those in
Mexico City or Guadalajara.
But as proud and
productive as it is,
Monterrey’s millions now
find their city immersed in
the sort of criminal slaughter
many of them long thought
beneath it.
This spring’s war between
the drug-trafficking Gulf
BRETT COOMER : C H R O N I C L E
HOUSTON: The Spanish spelling of “illegal” adorns a sign carried by a protester at Burnett Bayland Park, where 7,000 gathered.
Please see SPILL, Page A8
Taking a stand
on immigration
UPDATES:JkXpè]fid\[n`k_
k_\cXk\jke\njXe[g_fkfj
f]k_\f`cjg`ccXkchron.com/
oilspill
T
EXANS from Houston, above, and Dallas,
right, joined protesters across the country
Saturday in rallies against a controversial
Arizona law requiring officials to question people
about their immigration status. STORIES ON PAGE A4
L M O T E R O : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
GALLERY: See protest images at chron.com
ZEST
SUMMER MOVIES
BLOWOUT
Action and drama explode on
the big screen this summer.
Find out which films are
must-sees. PAGE 8, ZEST
DALLAS: An estimated 20,000 people rally in downtown.
While touted as 2012 contender, does
he risk becoming a cowboy caricature?
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
A U S T I N — He has the
“Come and Take It” cannon
carved into his boots. He
stuffs a laser-sighted pistol
into his jogging pants. He
shoots coyote in the morning.
He is Gov. Rick Perry.
Perry is the iconic rugged Westerner who has been
touted as a possible presidential candidate by Texas
Monthly, appeared on the
cover of Newsweek and labeled a “Tea Party idol” by a
Denver television station.
But in his campaign for
an unprecedented third full
term as governor, Perry also
is in danger of becoming a
Horoscopes G5
Lottery . . . A2
Movies. . ZEST
Obituaries . B6
Outlook . . .B10
Sports . . . . C1
Star . . . . . . G1
Loren Steffy
As Perry’s star rises,
so do image worries
AU S T I N B U R E AU
INSIDE
Business . . D1
Crossword . G4
Dear Abby . G7
Directory . . A3
Earthweek A25
Editorials. .B13
Hale . . . . . G1
One of history’s biggest
oil spills showed no signs of
abating Saturday as a miledeep well kept pouring tens
of thousands of gallons into
the Gulf of Mexico and coastal communities braced for
crushing environmental and
economic damage.
Some experts estimated
the spill had tripled in size
in just a day or so, suggesting that the oil is gushing out
faster than officials initially
estimated.
An apparent blowout April
20 caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to burn and
later sink. Eleven workers
are missing and presumed
dead.
Although some reports
have said an oily sheen already has reached shore,
Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast
Guard commandant who is
cowboy parody of himself
much as Republican Clayton
Williams did in losing the
1990 governor’s race to underdog Democrat Ann Richards.
“It’s a very
fine line between
John Wayne and
Elmer
Fudd,”
Exclusively said Democratic
in your print consultant Glenn
Smith,
who
edition
worked in Richards’ campaign. “It’s very
easy to overplay your hand as
the rough and tough cowboy
and become a caricature of
yourself.”
Perry is facing off against
Democrat Bill White, the
popular former mayor of
Please see PERRY, Page A21
How could
it happen
to BP again?
W
ILL the
Deepwater
Horizon become
Tony Hayward’s
Texas City?
That’s the
question that now
hangs over the
BP CEO, whose
Exclusively
company owned
in your print
the Gulf of Mexico
edition
lease on which the
platform was drilling when
it exploded and sank almost
two weeks ago. Eleven people
died, and the wellhead a mile
below the surface is oozing
5,000 barrels of oil a day — or
perhaps much more by some
estimates — feeding a growing
Please see STEFFY, Page A9
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THE JUMP PAGE
Sunday, May 2, 2010
PERRY:
¬¬¬
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A21
Mentioned for Oval Office
Houston. White is running
as an effective administrator
who can lead the state into
the future on issues such as
public education.
He still is trying to break
into the statewide voter consciousness, though.
At the same time, Perry
has cracked the national consciousness with rhetoric on
state’s rights and the evils
of the federal government.
He has also demonstrated a
MEXICO:
fondness for guns that has
included a campaign event
at a shooting range and bragging about killing a coyote
that threatened his daughter’s dog during a February
jog.
Perry also discharged an
Old West-style Colt revolver
during an April 15 NASCAR
promotion in Fort Worth,
described by a local political
reporter as “fitting a certain
image of the governor — virile or half-cocked, depending
on your point of view.”
Denies interest in 2012
Perry burst again into the
national media last month
by upstaging former Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin in a redmeat conservative speech
to the Southern Republican
Leadership Conference in
New Orleans.
A week later, a Kansas
Republican running for Congress announced he had received an endorsement from
130 killed in city in 2010
Things ‘turned crazy’
The gangsters have gone
at one another with assault
weapons in neighborhoods
and kidnapped people from
downtown hotels favored by
business travelers. Troops
have killed squads of gunmen
in the suburbs and along the
toll roads many people here
travel for shopping trips to
Laredo and McAllen.
Many shake their heads
over the state and federal governments’ recent disbanding
of police forces in a handful of
suburbs, after indications the
local officers were working
for the criminals.
And still more were outraged six weeks ago when
soldiers killed two graduate
students at the gates of the
Tecnologico de Monterrey,
the city’s pride, considered by
many the best university.
“This was a peaceful, hardworking city,” said tour guide
Jose Gonzalez. “Things have
turned crazy.”
But while both the viciousness and the reach of the violence is unnerving, the gangsters’ presence is no surprise.
The same advantages that
have fueled Monterrey’s fortunes — its people’s ambition,
TEXAS
Rio Gra
35
San
Antonio 10
e
nd
Cartel and the Zetas, the gunmen who once worked for
it, has spread into Monterrey from the cities bordering South Texas. Gangs from
Michoacan, Sinaloa and elsewhere pour in to aid one side
or the other.
Gunmen skirmish daily
with each other and army
troops. They assassinate police officers and kidnap citizens; blockade streets and
highways; hang banners or
circulate e-mails threatening
enemies and innocents alike.
More than 130 people have
been killed in and near the
city since New Year’s Day,
already surpassing the toll of
2009. That figures pales compared to the more than 800
killed in four months in Ciudad Juarez, less than a third
the size of Monterrey. But for
many, it’s not so much the
number of bodies as where
they are falling.
MEXICO
Laredo
45
Houston
Gulf of
Mexico
Brownsville
Monterrey
100 mi.
CHRONICLE
its hub position on the roads
and railways leading from
Mexico’s heartland into the
United States — now feed its
travails.
Drug traffickers have favored the city for the same
export routes and myriad
consumers as do the city’s
legal enterprises. Poor but
ambitious men and women
see the available vice as a way
to get ahead. Newly wealthy
crime bosses appreciate fine
restaurants, luxury stores
and palatial homes as much
as anyone does.
“The narcos arrived, and
they were accepted because
they brought with them all the
benefits of an economic windfall,” said Jesus Cantu, the former editor of the Monterrey
newspaper El Porvenir who
now teaches politics to graduate students at the Tecnologico
de Monterrey. “There was a
great shortsightedness on the
part of everyone.”
Deals with traffickers
Gang chiefs usually behaved here, preferring peace
for their families. They curried favor with local business
by spending money.
Like elsewhere in Mexico,
Cantu and other analysts say,
politicians and police chiefs
in metropolitan Monterrey
made deals with the traffickers. Business and civic leaders averted their eyes.
“Monterrey was always
controlled by the Gulf Cartel.
It was easier to hide in a city
of 4 million than it was in a
border town,” said Ramon
Alberto Garza, publisher of
the muckraking website Reporte Indigo. “There is an
enormous complicity of the
authorities and a great negligence on the part of the eco-
nomic leaders of the city.”
What was the harm, many
wondered. The drugs were
heading north of the Rio
Grande. And the smugglers
weren’t robbing local stores,
burglarizing houses, raping
or killing innocents.
The mayor of San Pedro
Garza Garcia, the wealthiest
community in Monterrey, and
Mexico, raised eyebrows and
hackles during his election
campaign last year when he
told supporters their town
remained safe largely because
gang chiefs who lived there
wanted it so.
The mayor, Mauricio Fernandez, was only acknowledging reality, perhaps. But
now a rattled public has begun to realize the barbarians
have breached the walls.
Demands to Calderon
“When are you going to
investigate the politicians?”
community activist Ervey
Cuellar demanded of Mexican
President Felipe Calderon on
Thursday during the leader’s
visit to the city. “It’s not possible to have police without
uniforms and mayors running because they also collaborate or were participants
in organized crime.”
Calderon had told Cuellar
and scores of civic and business leaders that “there was a
belief among politicians that
explicit deals could be made
with the criminals.
“Now that they plan to
dominate society,” the president said, “such ... arrangements don’t work.”
Monterrey hardly has been
unique in cutting such deals.
But neither is it exempt from
their consequences.
“It’s not just Monterrey,
it’s the whole country,” said
Arturo Arango, a Mexico City
security expert who recently
started consulting here. “As
a society, we closed our eyes
to what was going on and now
it’s caught up with us.”
“The violence caught up
with us, the future caught up
with us,” he said. “It’s not
stopping, and it’s not going
to stop.”
[email protected]
Perry, “who has emerged as a
leading conservative voice in
the Republican Party.”
When Perry endorsed
a Republican candidate for
Colorado governor in March,
a Denver television station
described him as a “Tea Party idol.”
And, despite all his protests, the national news
media continue to speak of
Perry as a potential 2012
presidential contender.
“I don’t have any interest
in going to D.C. as a president, vice president, member of Congress, car guard
— none of the above,” Perry
told The Hill last month.
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato
said Perry makes the long
list of potential Republican
presidential candidates because there is no short list of
dominant contenders.
“(Former Massachusetts
Gov. Mitt) Romney is a seriously weak front-runner.
Palin is highly controversial. (Former House Speaker
Newt) Gingrich is yesterday’s
man,” Sabato said. “So, a lot
of Republicans are casting
about looking for a savior.
Perry is just one of many.”
Crushed primary foes
Sabato said the national
presidential talk could backfire on Perry during his reelection campaign.
“There’s a lot of Perry fatigue,” Sabato said. “If people
think we’re not only giving
him another term for governor, he also could be running
for president, it might be too
much. That may be the boost
that Bill White needs.”
A recent poll by Rasmussen Reports found Perry
leading White by 48 percent
to 44 percent.
The governor began his reelection campaign last year
down almost 20 percentage
points to U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchison. But talk of states
rights and secession boosted
Perry’s base, enabling him to
M I KE F U E N T E S : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
DENIES D.C. PLANS: Rick Perry, shown on April 24 at a Glenn
Beck tea party rally in Tyler, insists he has only one goal — returning
for another term as governor of Texas.
crush Hutchison and Debra
Medina in the GOP primary
without a runoff.
Hutchison
represented
the Republican moderate
wing, and there remains a
question of whether those
voters will turn out for Perry
in the fall.
Republican political consultant Jim McGrath of Houston, who is close to former
President George H.W. Bush,
said many moderates have
been embarrassed by some of
Perry’s rhetoric, particularly
his statement that Texas can
secede from the union if it
wants.
“That was not a moment
of pride to be a Texas Republican if you are a moderate,”
McGrath said.
Another Texas president?
Moderate Republicans are
unlikely to vote for White,
the GOP consultant said, but
they may skip the governor’s
race. McGrath said much of
Perry’s rhetoric appears directed at a presidential run.
“I would think of getting
past Bill White before you
start to have dreams of the
White House,” he said.
Sabato said it is unlikely
that the nation is ready for
another Texas president after
the two Bushes.
Citing U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchison’s contention that
Perry promised he would not
seek re-election this year,
Sabato also said he doubts
that Perry is telling the truth
when he says he does not
want to run.
Perry said he has been
insistent since 2008 that he
does not want to run for
president and that nothing
has changed. He also said
he never promised not to
seek re-election: “Total urban myth.”
Perry said all he wants to
do on a national stage is convince people that the states
are better places to develop
solutions to problems than
the federal government.
“It kind of gets back to
that old 10th amendment
thing,” he said. “The states
should be competing with
each other instead of the
federal government setting
one-size-fits-all policy.”
[email protected]
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Happy Fourth of July!
CHANCE OF STORMS, HIGH 91, LOW 79 / PAGE B12 ALL-GREATER HOUSTON BASEBALL / PAGES C8-9
¬¬¬
SU N DAY, J U LY 4 , 2 0 1 0
CITY & STATE
HELPING HANDS
LEB$'&/DE$(,*($&&
DISASTERS THEN AND NOW
THROW OUT
BP PLEA DEAL,
PATRIOTISM
OF THE GULF IN PAINT VICTIMS SAY
VOICES
This flag is best seen
from the air. PAGE B1
RICK
CASEY
LISA
FALKENBERG
LISA
GRAY
RICHARD
JUSTICE
JEROME
SOLOMON
LOREN
STEFFY
SHANNON
TOMPKINS
About this series
From South Padre Island to the Florida Keys, the
Chronicle columnists blanket the Gulf Coast to detail
the toll on lives and livelihoods from one of the worst
environmental disasters in our nation’s history. In today’s
installment, KEN HOFFMAN looks at what’s being done to
save the brown pelican from the effects of the BP oil spill.
Narco sub
no rumor,
WIMBLEDON authorities
discover
SPORTS
CHAMP
In straight sets,
Find in jungle
Serena captures her of Ecuador called
fourth title. PAGE C1 a game-changer in
GOOD LIFE
BEST
DINERS
THE
Food
D[jmeha GOODLIFE
star inspires
a yummy road trip.
PAGE J1
ZEST
SMILEY N. POOL : C H R O N I C L E
CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH:
David Lane, of Baton Rouge, La., cradles a
pelican after its bath at the Fort Jackson Bird Rehabilitation Center.
Chapter Three
After all they do for man,
this is how we repay birds?
The creatures that fuel ecology — even freedom —
get slow death by oil. A plucky few get a chance.
F
O RT JAC K S O N,
L a . — Whether
you believe the
Bible … on the
fifth day of creation, God said, “The water shall teem with swarms
of living creatures. Flying
creatures shall fly over the
land, on the face of the
heavenly sky.” He created
man on the sixth day.
Or whether you believe
science … paleontologists
estimate that birds took
flight on Earth about
150 million years ago.
Relatively speaking, man
just got here, only 2.5
million years ago.
Either way, birds were
here first.
And since the
beginning, birds have been
an important part of our
delicate ecology. They’ve
done their job. They’ve
kept up their end of the
bargain.
Birds eat insects during
breeding season. Birds
spread seeds of wetland
EUROPEAN
plants with
their feet and
waste. They
help trees
Exclusively
grow by eating in your print
parasites.
edition
They pollinate
flowers and vegetables.
They control the rats and
other vermin.
Seriously, birds helped
keep the world free in
World War I and World
War II when radio signals
were too risky. Allied forces
JIMMIE
VAUGHAN
The guitar
virtuoso rocks it
old school. ZEST
$$
>EKIJED9>HED?9B;
It has long been the stuff
of drug-trafficking legend,
but federal authorities announced Saturday that they
have helped seize the first
ademdWdZ\kbboef[hWj_edWb
submarine built by drug traffickers to smuggle tons of
cocaine from South America
jemWhZj^[Kd_j[ZIjWj[i$
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Ocean, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration.
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100 feet long and equipped
m_j^Wf[h_iYef["mWii[_p[Z
before its maiden voyage by
Ecuadorian authorities armed
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The discovery is seen by
authorities as a game-changer in terms of the challenge
it poses not only to fighting
drugs but to national secuh_joWim[bb$
“The submarine’s nautical range, payload capacity,
and quantum leap in stealth
have raised the stakes
for the counter-drug
forces and the national
security
community
alike,” said DEA Andean
Regional Director Jay Bergman.
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camouflage-painted submarine could have traveled, but
it is believed to be sophisticated enough to cover thousands of miles — and cerjW_dbojecWa[_jjej^[Dehj^
American coast.
“There is a sense of urgency for naval engineers
and submariners to take a
look at this thing and dissect
it and take it apart and figure
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police have seized this structure, but the people that
need to get on there are naval
Please see SUB, Page A21
By TOM FOWLER
and LISE OLSEN
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Dave Leining had worked
at BP’s Texas City refinery
for 36 years when a fatal
blast in 2005 took his hearing, broke his ankles and left
him trapped in the ruins of a
double-wide office trailer as
a ball of explosive fire passed
over his head.
At least he survived. Fifteen others did not.
Now, the toll of
the dead in BP-related accidents includes at least 14
more — 11 of those Exclusively
lives snuffed out in your print
edition
in the April 20
Deepwater Horizon disaster and three others
in subsequent incidents at the
Texas City refinery.
Leining and various victims’ attorneys have asked
the U.S. Department of Justice to revoke the terms of a
2007 plea deal the company
reached as part of a criminal prosecution of the deadly
Texas City accident. Ample
evidence that BP never fixed
the refinery as promised —
including the three additional
fatalities in other accidents —
provides proof the company
can’t be trusted, they say.
In a vocabulary fueled by
the anger of survivors, Leining
and others call BP a corporate
villain who views blue-collar
workers as “consumable” and
“disposable”
commodities.
They want someone, preferably a high-ranking executive,
to go to jail.
Leining was pulled from
the wreckage of the Texas
City blast by Ralph Dean, who
had been operating a forklift
not far from the trailer. The
explosion spewed fire and
showered debris over Dean’s
wife and killed his father-inlaw and the 14 others working
at the plant.
“It sounds harsh, but it is
literally true that BP is a serial killer — and the federal law
enforcement agencies need to
be very active in bringing that
conduct to a stop,” said David
Perry, a Corpus Christi lawyer
who represents Dean. “That
would include prosecution of
the parent company and prosPlease see BP, Page A8
INSIDE
SEMIFINALS
TUESDAY: Uruguay
vs. Netherlands

1:30 p.m., ESPN, Univision
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1:30 p.m., ESPN, Univision
ONLINE: Photo gallery,
=[hcWdo"IfW_dfeij_cfh[ii_l[m_dije
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+%#! .()
By DANE SCHILLER
SPORTS
DOMINATION
SEBASTIAN WILLNOW : A P
() +
the war on drugs
Recent events
prove firm can’t
be trusted, say
survivors of the
Texas City blast
videos, blogs and more
at chron.com/wc
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THE JUMP PAGE
Sunday, July 4, 2010
¬¬¬
Conservatives press Steele to resign
GOP chairman draws more heat
for calling Afghan war a ‘lost cause’
By RICHARD A. SERRANO
M c C L AT C H Y N E W S PA P E R S
WA S H I N G T O N — Several
prominent conservatives on
Saturday intensified pressure
on Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S.
Steele to resign following his
comments that the war in
Afghanistan was of President
Barack Obama’s choosing and
has probably turned into “a
lost cause” for the U.S.
“It is time for Chairman
Steele to step down,” said Liz
Cheney, chairwoman of Keep
America Safe and daughter
of former Vice President Dick
Cheney.
“You are, I know, a patriot,” Bill Kristol, editor of
the Weekly Standard and a
top aide in the Ronald Reagan
and George H.W. Bush ad-
ministrations, wrote to Steele
in an open letter. “So I ask
you to consider, over this July
4 weekend, doing an act of
service for the country you
love: Resign as chairman of
the Republican Party.”
Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former chairman of
the National Republican Congressional Committee, said
Steele “should apologize and
resign.” He called the remarks
made Thursday by Steele at a
Connecticut fundraiser “totally unacceptable.”
In a statement to Politico.
com, Cole added: “He undercut American forces fighting in the field, politicized
further a war that two presidents of different parties have
deemed in the national interest and embarrassed the party
he purports to lead. It is time
for him to go — quickly.”
Steele, whose term ends
in January, has not directly
responded to the criticism,
but he sent a statement to the
voting members of the RNC
that also was posted on the
committee’s website.
“The stakes are too high
for us to accept anything but
success in Afghanistan,” he
said in the statement.
Turbulent tenure
Steele, whose leadership
of the GOP committee repeatedly has been marred by
gaffes, was caught on video
footage that surfaced Friday
on YouTube. His comments
were taped the day before
while he spoke to a Republican Party fundraising event
in Connecticut.
He called the nine-year
conflict in Afghanistan “a war
of Obama’s choosing” and described as “comical” the events
surrounding the dismissal of
Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal as top commander.
Referring to Obama, Steele
said, “If he’s such a student of
history, has he not understood
that, you know, that’s the one
thing you don’t do, is engage
in a land war in Afghanistan?
Everyone who has tried, over
1,000 years, has failed.”
Harsh words from Rove
Kristol, among others,
noted that the war began
under Obama’s predecessor,
George W. Bush, and that
although some critics may
want the U.S. to withdraw,
“one of them shouldn’t be the
chairman of the Republican
Party.”
Karl Rove, a former top
political aide to Bush and a
Fox News consultant, said the
Steele statement didn’t go far
enough. “He’s going to have
to take the public stage and
take his licking there and say
he misspoke,” Rove said.
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
$42 $4/ t $4/ 0-
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SUB:
Find came before maiden voyage
engineers.”
Bergman noted that traffickers have used speed boats,
sail boats, fishing boats and
specialized craft that float
low in the water, but this is
the first true submarine discovered.
“Now that the Loch Ness
Monster has been found, the
interdiction community is
going to retool their search
patterns and how they conduct business,” he said.
Back in 2000 in a Bogota, Colombia, warehouse
authorities thought they’d
found the first ever narco
submarine, but it turned out
to be an enclosed boat that
floated low in the water,
rather than completely under the surface.
The final frontier
The submarine seized in
Ecuador was built in what
was described as a clandestine dry dock of industrial
proportions and even had
housing for dozens of workers.
It marks what could be argued as the final frontier for
traffickers who have squared
off against law enforcement
on the land, in the air and on
the sea, and now look to go
beneath the waves to reach
lucrative drug markets.
“There is no place else
DEA
COVERT OPERATION: The sub was built in a clandestine dry dock
in Ecuador’s jungle along a waterway leading to the Pacific Ocean.
they can go in terms of
maritime,” Bergman said.
“The traffickers have now
exhausted every possibility.”
Among the questions is
who could have designed
such a sophisticated machine, as well as piloted it.
But the biggest issue
haunting federal agents is
this: How many more might
be out there?
“The DEA is very good,”
Bergman said, “but what are
the odds of us detecting the
first one ever built before it
got underway? I’d say this is
the first one we caught.”
Larry Karson, a retired
Customs Service agent who
is a criminal justice lecturer
at the University of Houston Downtown, said the DEA
very well could have found
the only real narco sub.
Hard to hide
He noted that it isn’t easy
to keep a dry dock covert, let
alone all the people involved.
“It is feasible,” said Karson, who noted that for years
authorities have heard rumors
of drug traffickers getting a
submarine. But most figured
traffickers would most likely
buy a used one, not make their
own.
“I think everybody has
been looking for it, it has
been a matter of time,” he
said. “There was a rumor
somebody would find a used
one on the market. We’ve
been using them since the
Civil War.”
He noted that the former
Navy P-3s that now are used
by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to search for
sea and airborne traffickers
sneaking loads toward the
United States might have to
revert to their old submarine
hunting mission.
Finding the sub comes as
part of a long-term cat and
mouse game in which authorities have combed jungles and
flown over thousands of miles
of open ocean each week in
an attempt to deny traffickers easy access to their U.S.
markets.
As Bergman put it: “This
is the final frontier for the
maritime drug traffickers. We
remained completely incredulous until the last minute,” he
said. “Good cops never underestimate their enemy or the
ingenuity of the adversary, but
seeing is believing and that is
what this day is.”
A21
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CHANCE OF STORMS, HIGH 92, LOW 78 / PAGE B10 CASTRO HOMERS AS ASTROS WIN / PAGE C1
F R I DAY, J U N E 2 5, 2 0 1 0
¬¬¬
LEB$'&/DE$(++'$&&
SPORTS
ENRON CASE APPEAL
GO FORWARD
PARTIAL VICTORY FOR SKILLING
ROCKETS
The
team is
‘ecstatic’
after
drafting
Kentucky forward
Patrick Patterson in
the first round.
STORY ON PAGE C1
GAME(S),
SET, MATCH
John Isner,
below, wins longest
tennis match ever.
STORY ON PAGE C9
Supreme Court limits scope of federal law, but long battle looms from prison
The key issue
The ruling
A federal fraud
statute that made
it a crime “to
deprive another of
intangible right of
honest services.”
Skilling’s lawyers
argued the statute
was too vague.
The court was unanimous in reversing
the portion of Skilling’s conviction for
honest services and asked a circuit
court to decide if those charges should
be dismissed or retried. Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg said the law must be
limited to the core offenses of bribes
and kickbacks, which would exclude
the charges against Skilling.
What next?
The high court left it up to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
to determine whether use of the honest services law was a
harmless error since Skilling was simultaneously accused under
other laws. That means some, but likely not all, of the charges
could be retried or dismissed. It could be six months or more before
that New Orleans-based court decides. Skilling was convicted on
unrelated charges as well and is expected to stay in prison.
BRETT COOMER :
CHRONICLE FILE
MORE ENRON INSIDE
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HOUSTON BELIEF
ULTIMATE
By MARY FLOOD
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The U.S. Supreme Court’s
order Thursday that a lower
court review key elements
of former Enron CEO Jeff
Skilling’s convictions sets up
months or years of further
litigation in a case that already
has spanned almost a decade.
In ruling on Skilling and
other cases, the high court
restricted prosecutors’ use of
an anti-fraud law making it a
crime to “deprive another of
the intangible right of honest
services.” And it told the 5th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
to decide whether parts of the
case should be dismissed or
retried in Houston.
Skilling had argued that
the honest services theory, as
applied by prosecutors in his
case, was unconstitutionally
vague.
Because at least one of
Skilling’s convictions isn’t
covered by the ruling, he is
likely to stay in prison over
the months it will take the
5th Circuit to decide whether
T E C H N O L O G Y ’ S L AT E S T M U S T - H AV E
FIGHTER On hold for the iPhone 4
STORY ON PAGE F6
Push to add
Green Party
to ballot
ruled illegal
inquiry panel has
no oil experts,
only drilling foes
By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY
WA S H I N G T O N B U R E AU
being linked to
a drive Dems say
diverts their votes
By GARY SCHARRER
A
PPLE’S newest sensation, the iPhone 4, drew quite the crowd Thursday at Memorial City
Mall, where hundreds waited in line for a chance to score the smartphone at the Apple Store.
Some of those on hand had even camped out as early as 6 p.m. Wednesday to purchase one
of the 800 reserved phones at the store. Long lines also formed at The Woodlands Mall and the
Galleria, where customers who were waiting were served pastries and chicken biscuits.
EXTRAS ONLINE: See a video of the crowds lining up at Memorial City Mall and
get the latest about reports of broken iPhones at chron.com/iphone4
Mine turned into bottomless pit of death
Mexican drug-war victims thrown
into 600-foot shaft alive, police say
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Please see PARTY, Page A13
Business . . D1
Comics . . .E10
Crossword . .E9
Directory . A10
Editorials. . B8
Lottery . . .
Markets . . .
Movies. . . .
Obituaries
TV . . . . . . .
DISASTER
IN THE GULF
Critics contend
Perry ex-aide
INSIDE
Please see SKILLING, Page A16
GOP:
Obama’s
panel is
biased
Former Power
Ranger brings
Christian values to
mixed martial arts.
A U S T I N — Gov. Rick Perry’s close friend and former
chief of staff is being linked to
an effort to help Green Party
candidates get on the general
election ballot with signatures
a state district judge on Thursday said were improperly obtained.
District Judge John Dietz,
declaring the money used to
collect signatures “an unauthorized, illegal contribution,”
granted the Democratic Party
a temporary restraining order
to block Green Party candidates from being certified for
the November ballot.
Democrats contended that
a petition drive to put Green
candidates on the ballot was
actually an effort to help Perry, a Republican, by diverting votes from his Democratic
challenger, Bill White.
The Green Party, represented by former Republican
the honest services error is
serious enough to require a
new trial or dismissal of those
charges.
In its ruling Thursday,
the Supreme Court rejected
Skilling’s argument that he
couldn’t get a fair trial in
Houston because of massive
publicity and the economic
A2
D2
.E4
B5
.E8
KEITH DANNEMILLER : F O R T H E C H R O N I C L E
DUMP SITE: Hundreds of feet deep, this ventilation shaft at a
mine outside of Taxco, about 100 miles southwest of Mexico City in
Guerrero state, was the last thing many drug gang victims ever saw.
TA XC O, M e x i c o —
One
of the nastier chapters of
Mexico’s gangster wars now
haunts this beguiling colonial
city long known for its silversmiths and tourist throngs.
Investigators have pulled
56 corpses and four heads
from the 600-foot-deep mine
shaft on the edge of this
town, nestled in the verdant
mountains 110 miles south of
Mexico City.
Many of the victims were
dumped into the slanted chute
while still alive and aware.
“The rocks in the shaft
are sharp-edged and tore at
the bodies,” Luis Rivera, 23,
Guerrero state’s senior criminologist in Taxco, said in explaining the feet, hands and
legs torn from some victims.
“There were some who arrived alive at the bottom.”
Only eight of the badly
decomposed bodies have been
identified so far, including
Please see TAXCO, Page A13
WA S H I N G T O N —
The
presidential commission investigating offshore drilling
safety and the Gulf of Mexico
oil spill came under fresh fire
Thursday with Republicans
accusing President Barack
Obama of stacking it with environmental activists.
Sen. John Barrasso, RWyo., charged the Obama administration with keeping oil
and gas drilling experts off
its seven-member commission
in favor of people who philosophically oppose offshore exploration.
And Sen. Robert Bennett,
R-Utah, said there was a huge
conflict of interest in putting
environmental advocates on
a panel responsible for investigating the spill and recom-
DESPAIR, TECHNOLOGY
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A13
Signatures
were struggle to get
PARTY:
state Supreme Court Justice
Stephen Smith, plans to appeal on Monday.
It had struggled earlier to
get the required 43,991 petition signatures for its candidates to make the ballot.
At a hearing Thursday, Green
Party member Garrett Mize
testified that Perry’s former
chief of staff, Mike Toomey,
paid him about $12,000 to
persuade his party to use outof-state contributions to help
the petition drive.
The Dallas Morning News
reported this month that an
out-of-state corporation with
GOP ties paid $532,000 for
the petition drive.
“Mike Toomey’s involvement in this deal is a watershed today,” said Chad Dunn,
a lawyer for the Texas Democratic Party. “Rick Perry needs
to answer questions about
what he knew and when he
knew it.”
Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner said, “Our
campaign had nothing to do
with the Green Party.”
Friends in Legislature
Toomey and Perry were
close friends during their days
in the state Legislature a quarter century ago. Toomey later
postponed his lobbying career to lead Perry’s gubernatorial staff from 2002 to 2004.
Toomey also served as Gov.
Bill Clements’ chief of staff in
the late 1980s.
Toomey did not return a
message left on his cell phone.
Dietz said political parties
can use corporate money to
help cover normal operating
expenses, such as telephone
and Internet service, utilities, office supplies, clerical
expenses, and legal and accounting fees, but spending
hundreds of thousands of corporate dollars to finance a
petition campaign is “not my
definition of normal.”
Dietz said he could not
stop the Green Party’s ballot
petition because it has already
been delivered to the Secretary of State’s Office.
“The cow’s already out of
the barn,” he said.
But he prohibited the Green
Party from certifying its list of
candidates, which would bar
them from the ballot if the
Supreme Court agrees with
Dietz’s order.
Smith said the Green Party’s appeal will hover around
an interpretation of state law
and previous court rulings
that “you can’t take somebody
off the ballot without a full
OIL SPILL
DEVELOPMENTS
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Lawsuit continues
Texas Democratic Party
Chairman Boyd Richie said the
party will continue the lawsuit
to discover the source of the
Green Party funding. He said
Travis County prosecutors
will decide whether a criminal
investigation is needed.
“Some of (Perry’s) closest and most trusted political
advisers have now been implicated in this illegal ballot
scheme,” Richie said. “It is
incumbent on Rick Perry and
his campaign to come clean.”
Richie said Mize was originally approached about promoting the Green Party ballot
effort by family friend Stewart
Moss. Moss is a former employee of former high-ranking
Perry aide Eric Bearse.
The Dallas Morning News
reported earlier that the Green
Party intends to report the signatures as an in-kind contribution from a Missouri company,
Take Initiative America, which
is headed by Charles Hurth
III, a Republican lawyer.
But there is disagreement
within the Green Party about
the ethical soundness of having a petition drive orchestrated by Republicans. Texas
Green Party chair Christine
Morshedi of Tomball said she
was not particularly bothered
by the GOP help because the
93,000 petition signatures
indicated Texas voters want
more choices.
She said the revelation
about help from one of Perry’s
strongest allies surprised her.
“I think it was a strange
step for them to take,” Morshedi said.
Houston Chronicle reporter R.G.
Ratcliffe contributed to this report
from Corpus Christi.
[email protected]
KE I T H D AN N E M I L L E R : F O R T H E C H R O N I C L E
ROUTINE STREET SCENE: A firefight with Mexican soldiers in Taxco left 15 inhabitants of this drug gang safe house dead on June 15,
but even that toll was dwarfed by the discovery of a mass grave in a mine ventilation shaft used by drug traffickers to dump their victims.
TAXCO:
Some ID’d only by tattoos
that of a prison warden kidnapped in late May. But police say all the victims were
killed by the henchmen of a
Texas-born gangster, Edgar
Valdez, who is warring for
control of one of Mexico’s
largest drug-trafficking organizations.
Not long ago, such a gruesome discovery would have
been headline news for weeks
in Mexico. But the atrocities
linked to the country’s gangland wars come too fast these
days for any to draw notice
for long.
Shootouts no longer shock.
Beheadings have become boring and massacres mundane.
Unearthed narco-graves —
the clandestine mass tombs
where many drug war victims
Salazar says
foes playing politics
SPILL:
mending new safety mandates
for offshore drilling.
Obama launched the commission last month and tasked
it with conducting a six-month
probe of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and a rigorous
review of drilling safety. Its
findings could dictate the future of offshore drilling and
lead to major changes in the
way the government polices
oil and gas production along
the nation’s coasts.
Scientists, engineers
Promises fairness
[email protected]
Houston
MEXICO
criminologist in Taxco
lie — now serve merely as
mileposts.
More than 400 people this
year have been killed gangland
style in Guerrero state, which
includes Taxco, as Valdez’s
group fights with his rivals
for smuggling routes and local
markets. Amid that fighting,
men have been disappearing
by the dozens in Taxco and
surrounding towns.
‘Count the heads’
There were rumors that
some of those who vanished
had been dumped down the
ventilation tunnel of the
mine, which like most others
nearby has been closed for
three years by a labor strike.
The vent sits alongside a
badly rutted road that overlooks a valley of grazing livestock and farm fields a few
miles from town. A 465-yearold hacienda, which was the
first silver processing plant in
Mexico and now hosts a New
Age wellness retreat, sits half
a mile away.
Precisely to keep people
from falling into the shaft, the
mining company years ago
had it enclosed by tall cinderblock walls topped with closely spaced iron beams. But
someone had removed some
of the blocks, leaving a small
breach in one wall.
People used to throw trash
and sometimes dead animals
into the pit through that gap,
one local resident said. Gangsters dispatched their victims
the same way.
Investigators had responded to past rumors by searching the upper reaches of the
vent, finding nothing. They
were sent in again on May 29
after captured gangsters told
army interrogators that they
recently had dumped three
men into the hole.
Rivera, the state criminologist, got the call before
Taxco
Gulf of
Mexico
Mexico
City
Pacific
Ocean
200 mi.
CHRONICLE
dawn that Saturday morning.
He sent an underling into
the mine, who called by late
morning to report there were
“many bodies” in a large pit
at the foot of the shaft.
The number of victims
wasn’t easy to calculate, the
man told Rivera, because
there also were many unattached limbs.
“I told him to count the
heads,” Rivera said in a
hushed voice. “I knew I would
have a lot of work.”
Rivera informed his superiors of the discovery and was
told to retrieve the mangled
remains by any means necessary, despite a lack of proper
rescue equipment. Rounding up local firefighters and
police officers for the task,
Rivera reluctantly decided he
had to go down into the mine
himself.
Climbing into his office’s
single disposable biohazard
suit, Rivera descended on a
rusted ladder for the first 11
yards or so, then rappelled
the rest of the way down.
Once on the bottom,
Rivera said, he stumbled over
something and stepped into
a tangled heap of decaying
flesh. It felt like quicksand,
he said, the dead floating in a
thickened broth of water and
the fluids from their decomposing remains.
Bodies stacked deep
Rivera had assumed the
pit was no more than a foot
or two deep. But when he
tried to gauge it with a 5-foot
board, he couldn’t touch bottom. The team then realized that the floating bodies
were stacked several deep. As
one was pulled out, another
would surface.
Working in the dank, dark
cavern, Rivera and the other men began pulling bodies from the pit. They lifted
the victims in their arms,
wrapped them in burlap sacks
and looped ropes around
them. Others at the surface
pulled the bodies up by hand.
The crews managed to retrieve only four victims in the
first 24 hours. It took six days
to remove them all.
Rivera said that scabs on
some of the bodies suggested
their hearts were still beating
when they were plunged into
the mine’s maw, the rocks and
jutting metal bars biting into
them like fangs.
“Many were thrown in
alive,” the criminologist said.
People have been coming to Rivera’s office and to
morgues all month, searching
for family members who have
gone missing. They bring
face shots, descriptions of
tattoos and birthmarks, lists
of clothes the missing were
wearing when last seen.
Many to remain nameless
Investigators
positively
identified one of the men by
a leg that bore a tattoo of the
Virgin of Guadalupe and another proclaiming “Made in
Mexico.” Another reclaimed
his name because “Rosa” was
inked into his chest.
But most of the bodies
are decayed almost beyond
recognition as human. A few
had become mummified, Rivera said. The cold and humid
conditions of the mine — and
its lack of insects and foraging wild animals — make
establishing any time of death
difficult, he said.
So Rivera can offer little
hope to most of the searching relatives. But he’ll keep
trying.
“These might have been
bad people,” Rivera said of
the victims. “But their families are not at fault. They need
to know.”
[email protected]
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Salazar dismissed the senators’ criticism.
“What is wrong is the playing of politics with this issue,”
Salazar said. “This is an issue
of a national crisis.”
Salazar likened the group
to the commissions that have
investigated other disasters,
including the explosion of
the Challenger space shuttle
and the partial meltdown of
the Three Mile Island nuclear
power plant.
The panel members are elder statesmen and stateswomen, Salazar said, adding that
he was confident the commission would be thorough and
even-handed. When studying
areas where it doesn’t have
expertise, he said, the panel
will interview professionals
who do.
U.S.
LUIS RIVERA, Guerrero state’s senior
The roster of members includes science and engineering experts, as well as a renewable energy advocate who has
complained about America’s
oil addiction and a marine science professor who recently
appeared to endorse a delay
of planned drilling along the
East Coast.
There are no representatives with deep ties to the
oil and gas industry, although
one of the co-chairmen, William Reilly, was administrator
of the EPA under President
George H.W. Bush and a director of ConocoPhillips before
temporarily stepping down to
serve on the commission.
The other co-chairman is
Bob Graham, a Democratic
former Florida governor and
U.S. senator who has opposed
offshore drilling near the Sunshine State.
The panel’s just-appointed
executive director, Richard
Lazarus, is a legal expert at
Georgetown University who
has represented environmental groups in arguments before
the Supreme Court.
The commission’s makeup
already has drawn criticism
from oil and gas industry
boosters and in some newspaper editorials.
In a Senate Energy and
Natural Resources Committee hearing Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
defended the commission’s
members, saying they were
“very distinguished people ...
who will transcend partisan
politics and ideology” in investigating what caused the
Deepwater Horizon rig to explode April 20.
Barrasso and Bennett targeted Frances Beinecke, presi-
dent of the Natural Resources
Defense Council, one of several environmental groups that
unsuccessfully defended the
Obama administration’s deepwater drilling ban against a
legal challenge in a court hearing Monday.
Bennett called Beinecke’s
appointment troubling because she “has an ideological position with respect to
drilling and, indeed, heads an
organization that’s filed a lawsuit on this area.”
In a blog entry on NRDC’s
website Thursday, the group’s
New York City-based litigation director, Mitch Bernard,
defended Beinecke as an independent and said she had been
excluded from all decision
making and communications
about the council’s legal work
since her appointment.
Barrasso said the panel’s
makeup defied Obama’s assertion that he wants an independent review of the oil spill.
“The commission’s background and expertise doesn’t
really include an oil or drilling
expert, so … people across
the country are wondering
about the administration’s
goals,” Barrasso said. “Is it
really about making offshore
energy exploration safer? Or
is it about shutting down our
offshore and American oil and
gas?”
“Many were thrown
in alive.”
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trial.”
A trial on the Green Party
case is not scheduled to start
until January — two months
after the election.
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CA M PA I G N 2 0 1 0
Two men share same passion for leading Texas
Republican champions
his team of fervent conservatives
PERRY:
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
— Whether Gov.
Rick Perry was an Aggie Yell
Leader in college, an agriculture commissioner fighting
“food terrorists” or a governor challenging the federal
government, he has been a
AUST I N
Democratic challenger mixes
energy and environmental interests
WHITE:
LOOK
FOR THE
CHRONICLE’S
COMPLETE
LIST OF
ENDORSEMENTS
IN TODAY’S
OUTLOOK
SECTION
champion for his “team.”
And if you’re not on his
team and lose, no apologies.
Perry, 60, is seeking reelection. He already is Texas’
longest-serving
governor,
with almost a decade in office.
Perry’s “team” this year is
Please see PERRY, Page A10
By JOE HOLLEY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
On a sunny weekday
morning in far north Houston recently, Bill White, looking dapper in a charcoal-gray
pin-striped suit and lavender
shirt, is sitting at the head of a
dining room table on a black,
¬¬¬
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POLICE: TWO
CONFESS TO
CAB KILLINGS
A STRUGGLE FOR LAW AND ORDER
Mexico’s plague
of police corruption
Despite millions in U.S. aid, forces continue to be outgunned,
overwhelmed — and often purchased outright — by gangsters
L Couple held in
deaths of drivers,
who were known
as hardworking
family men
By SAFIYA RAVAT
and PAIGE HEWITT
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
E D U A R D O V E R D U G O : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S F I L E
Two 21-year-olds were
charged Saturday with capital
murder in the brutal shootings of two Houston cab drivers, killings that sent shock
waves through the community and brought calls for
extra protective measures for
taxi drivers.
Danielle Rene Hudson and
Chaz Omar Blackshear were
arrested late Friday and admitted to the robberies and
shootings, Houston Police
Department spokesman John
Cannon said.
The Houston couple is
scheduled to appear in court
Monday.
HIDDEN THINGS: Federal police officers stand in formation in June while drug-dealing suspects are
presented to the media in Mexico City. The officers’ faces are covered to protect their identities.
M
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
EXICO CITY
— City cops
killing their
own mayors;
state jailers helping inmates escape;
federal agents mutinying
against corrupt commanders;
outgunned officers cut down
in ambushes or assassinated
because they work for gangster rivals.
Always precariously
frayed, Mexico’s thin blue
line seems ready to snap.
Six prison guards
were killed Wednesday as
they left their night shift
in Chihuahua City, 200
miles south of El Paso. On
Tuesday, the head of a police
INSIDE
Business . . D1
Crossword . G5
Directory . . A2
Earthweek A33
Editorials. .B11
Horoscopes G4
Lottery . . . A2
Movies. . ZEST
Obituaries . B4
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Sports . . . . C1
Travel . . . . . J1
TV . . . . . ZEST
World . . . A21
commander supposedly
investigating the death of
an American on the Texas
border was packed into a
suitcase and sent to a local
army base.
Mexicans justifiably have
long considered their police
suspect. But today many
of those wearing the badge
are even more
brazenly bad:
either unwilling
or unable to
Exclusively squelch the
in your print lawless terror
that’s claimed
edition
nearly 30,000
lives in less than four years.
State and local forces,
which employ 90 percent of
Mexico’s 430,000 officers,
find themselves outgunned,
overwhelmed and often
purchased outright by
gangsters.
Despite some dramatic
improvements — aided by
U.S. dollars and training
under the $1.6 billion
What it
costs us:
A police commander’s
decapitated head sent
as a warning to an
army base.
DO YOU
KNOWYOUR
BAYOUS?
UNDERDOGS
HAVE DAY
Already spent
$669
MILLION
Rice thwarts a UH
rally, wins Bayou
Bucket. PAGE C1
Committed to
be spent
$1.3 BILLION
Six prison
guards shot
down as they
left their shift.
water. PAGE G1
FASHION
HORNS HEX HUSKERS:
Texas stuffs No. 5
Nebraska in
Lincoln. PAGE C1
Anticipated total
for Mexico
WEDNESDAY
All you
need to
know
about
the
everpresent
bodies of
SMILEY N. POOL:
CHRONICLE
MILLION
MISSTINA
SAYS …
TEXANS VS. CHIEFS
FRIDAY
State governor
orders purge
of city cops in
Tampico.
QB Matt
Schaub
will be key
against K.C.
PAGE C1
“There is no reason
not to be cute right
now.” Her new line at
Walmart proves it. PAGE G6
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Please see ARRESTS, Page A13
STAR
The $1.6 billion Merida
Initiative is meant to quell
drug-trafficking crime and
violence in Mexico and
Central America. This is
America’s share to Mexico:
$121.2
Grieving relatives described the victims — 32-yearold Mohammed Nabiil Elsayed and 50-year-old Blaise
Uzoma Nwokenaka — as devoted family men with strong
work ethics.
Nwokenaka’s family members called the killings “beyond belief.”
“It’s amazing two people
so young could be motivated
by money and greed to not
only rob him and kill him,
but set him on fire. This is
not just what they did to a
cabdriver. This is what he did
to our family. We will never,
ever, ever forget what they
did,” said his niece Charlene
Nwoke.
Both victims were independent contractors for Yellow Cab, killed within two
days of each other after picking up late-night fares at the
same southwest Houston gas
station.
Elsayed, an American by
birth and of Egyptian heritage, was a nighttime cabbie
ONLINE: QOM JSU RGJUKJ INVGJUK
OP JSU WGKUH TO JO chron.com
SPORTS
Just last week:
TUESDAY
Please see WHITE, Page A12
SUNNY, HIGH 85, LOW 60 / PAGE B12 RANGERS EVEN ALCS WITH 7-2 WIN / PAGE C16
SU NDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
café-style banquette. He’s in
a recently constructed home
in a small subdivision so new
that the requisite two frontyard trees are still spindly. At
the other end of the table sits
the owner, Lori Scheffler, a
single mother of two young
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WHITE:
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Pushes for more energy-efficient state
Two hovering reporters
covering the gubernatorial
race are eager to ask the Democratic candidate about the
latest installment in the campaign horse race: a report that
Republican opponent Rick
Perry has reaped millions in
campaign donations from his
political appointees. White,
though, is more interested in
talking about how Scheffler’s
monthly energy bill on her
1,800-square-foot, two-story
house is usually less than $40
a month.
“This house is part of the
extensive clean-energy plan
that I’m announcing for the
state of Texas,” he says, more
animated than usual. “We set
a goal in 2005 to be a leader
in clean energy in this community as we were a world
leader in traditional energy.
And part of that is renewables, such as wind and solar
resources. Part of that is energy efficiency.”
He goes on — and on —
and it’s obvious that he’s immersed in an issue that engages him. As longtime friends
and associates recount, he’s
been thinking seriously about
energy and its efficient use
his whole adult life. It’s key to
who he is, and if he manages
to prevail in his increasingly
uphill race for governor, energy policy will be an integral
part of his administration.
At the same time, White
is a businessman who has
made a lot of money in energy-related industries, including ferreting out fossil
MEXICO:
WILLIAM HOWARD
“BILL” WHITE
4 Age:
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4 Married: )8H5F,
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4 Three adult children:
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4 Key line from stump
speech:
“We need our state
government to be run as
an efficient organization
using customer-service
principles.”
JOHNNY HANSON : C H R O N I C L E
fuels worldwide. “He was the
first free-market liberal I ever
met,” said Garry Mauro, the
former Texas land commissioner who has known White
since the 1970s.
Early interest in energy
White, 56, once told former U.S. Rep. Bob Krueger,
D-New Braunfels, that strategic nuclear policy had been
an avocation of his since he
was 12 years old; he got his
first opportunity to actually
be involved in energy issues
of the more mundane sort
eight years later. The year
IN GOP STRONGHOLD: Nelda Hammett, left, Bill White, Jack Hammett and Guy Whitaker chat
during a July campaign stop in Henderson. Rusk County is overwhelmingly Republican territory.
was 1974, and Krueger, newly
elected as part of the post-Watergate wave of Democrats,
was attending a reception at
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
“So, this 19-year-old kid
whose hair was already thinning comes up to me and
says” — Krueger’s voice shifts
to a lower register to imitate
White’s droning Texas drawl
— “ ‘Congressman, my name
is Bill White, and I come from
San Antonio, Texas, and I did
some work with state Sen. Joe
Bernal in the state Legislature,’ and he says something
about how he’s doing his undergraduate thesis on natural
gas policy and he expects to
graduate magna cum laude,
and then he talks about some
other things in his political background, and he says,
‘Congressman, I’d kinda like
to go to work for you.’ ”
At the time, Krueger didn’t
remember actually offering
the young man a job; nev-
ertheless, White (who was
actually 20 at the time) took
a leave of absence from Harvard and traveled to Washington anyway. He installed
himself at a desk in Krueger’s office and within a few
days was providing the rookie
congressman sophisticated
analyses of proposed oil and
natural gas legislation.
Challenged the EPA
“He is a serious, serious, serious scholar,” said
Police forces are purged repeatedly
Intelligence gathering and
sharing has been enhanced and
computer systems upgraded. U.S.
and other foreign experts have given
extensive training to a third of the
federal force, officials say, with
another 10,000 Mexican officers
attending workshops.
“Beyond the money, the Merida
plan put information and technology
at the disposal of the Mexican
government,” said Manlio Fabio
Beltrones, president of Mexico’s
senate, whose Institutional
Revolutionary Party is widely
favored to reclaim the presidency in
2012.
Its critics argue that the U.S. aid
has failed to curtail the violence,
leaving communities and local police
forces at the mercy of gangsters.
Javier Aguayo y Camargo, a
retired army general who was
replaced as Chihuahua City’s police
chief this month, said no one has
“figured out how to make the
reforms work.”
“The resources of Merida remain
at the federal level,” Aguayo y
Carmargo said. “We haven’t felt any
of it. They need to support the states
and municipalities.”
Merida Initiative — Mexico’s 32,000
federal police remain spread thin
and hobbled by graft. And many
in Mexico consider the American
investment little help so far against
the bloody tide wrought by drug
gangs.
Grasping for a cure, President
Felipe Calderon and other officials
are pushing to unify Mexico’s nearly
2,000 municipal police under 32
state agencies that they insist can
better withstand the criminals’
volleys of bullets and cash.
“The tentacles of organized
crime have touched everyone,” said
Ignacio Manjarrez, who oversees
public security issues for a powerful
business association in Chihuahua,
the state bordering West Texas that
has become Mexico’s most violent.
“There are some who are loyal
to their uniform and others who
will take money from anyone and
everyone.
“We let it into our society. Now we
are paying the consequences.”
Many actions, few results
Across Mexico, local, state
and federal police forces have
been purged, then purged again.
Veteran officers and recruits alike
undergo polygraphs, drug tests
and background checks. A national
database has been set up to ensure
that those flushed from one force
don’t resurface in another.
Still the plague persists.
One of the surest signals that
rivals are going to war over a
community or smuggling routes are
the dumped corpses of cops who
start turning up dead. Many, if not
most, of the officers are targeted
because they work for one gang or
the other.
Scores of federal officers rebelled
this summer, accusing their
commanders of extortion in Ciudad
Juarez, the murderous border city
that Calderon pledged to pacify. As
a result, Mexican officials fired a
tenth of the federal police force.
The warden and some guards at a
Durango state prison were arrested
in July after a policeman confessed
in a taped gangland interrogation
that they aided an imprisoned crime
boss’s nightly release so he could kill
his enemies.
Another prison warden and
scores of guards were detained in
August following the breakout of
85 gangsters in Reynosa, on the Rio
Grande near McAllen.
On Friday, the governor of
Tamaulipas state, which borders
South Texas, ordered the purging
of the police force in the important
port city of Tampico. Gov. Eugenio
Hernandez said he took the action
following officers’ apparent
participation in this week’s brief
abduction of five university students
in the city.
$100 million a month
Mexico’s top federal policeman,
Genaro Garcia Luna, has estimated
gangsters pass out some $100
million each month to local and state
cops on the take.
“There really is no internal
capacity or appetite to try to get
MARCO UGARTE : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City earlier this month. Some complain
that resources needed by city and state agencies remain at the federal level.
their arms around corruption,” said
a former U.S. official with intimate
knowledge of Mexico’s security
forces. “Anyone who sticks their
head up, wanting to make a change,
is eliminated.”
Edelmiro Cavazos, mayor of
Santiago, a picturesque Monterrey
suburb, had vowed after taking
office to clean up its police force,
which many believe is controlled
by the gangster band known as the
Zetas.
He barely got the chance to try.
Killers came for him in August,
arriving at his home on five trucks,
a surveillance tape showing their
headlights slicing the night like
knives as his own police bodyguard
waved them in.
A workman found Cavazos’
blindfolded and bound body a few
days later, tortured, shot three times
and dumped like rubbish along a
highway outside Santiago.
The bodyguard and six other
officers from Santiago’s police force
are among those accused in the
killing.
“They considered him an
obstacle,” the Nuevo Leon state
attorney general said.
Following Cavazos’ slaying and
that of 600 others in the Monterrey
area this year, Nuevo Leon Gov.
Rodrigo Medina proposed bringing
municipal police forces under unified
state command.
“We have to act as a common
front,” Medina told reporters. “If we
are divided in isolated forces and we
have a united organized crime against
us and society, we aren’t going to
be able to articulate the forceful
response we need.”
New command structure
The tiny western state of
Aguascalientes created a unified
police command this week. And
Calderon won support for the plan
Tuesday from 10 newly elected
governors.
“Having institutions that enjoy
the full confidence of the public
can’t be put off,” Calderon told the
new governors. “The single police
command is a crucial element in
achieving the peace and tranquility
that Mexicans deserve.”
Although small training programs
for state and local forces exist,
American dollars by way of the $1.6
billion Merida Initiative until now
have been aimed mostly at Mexico’s
federal police.
Oil, gas and freedom
Chihuahua City, capital of
the state bordering West Texas,
underscores just how quickly the
drug wars have overpowered even
the best attempts to strengthen local
police.
Under a succession of mayors
since the late 1990s, the city’s police
steadily improved. Hiring standards
were raised, record keeping
improved, arrest and booking
processes overhauled. A citizen’s
oversight committee was set up with
significant influence within the
department.
Three years ago, the 1,100-officer
force became the first in Mexico to
be accredited by CALEA, a U.S.based law enforcement association
that rigorously evaluates police
administrative standards. Only a
handful of other Mexican cities have
since won accreditation.
Then Mexico’s gangland wars
arrived in 2008.
The city of 800,000 has been
racked this year by an average of
four killings daily, according to a
recent study by El Heraldo, the
leading local newspaper, about 30
times more than a few years ago. It
now ranks as Mexico’s third most
murderous city, behind Ciudad
Juarez and Culiacan, capital of the
gangster-infested state of Sinaloa,
federal officials say.
Scores of city police officers have
been fired for suspected corruption.
More than two dozen others have
been killed, either gunned down
in street battles or assassinated by
gangsters.
“If with all this equipment and
training they are overwhelmed by
the criminals, what happens in
other places?” said Manjarrez, the
businessman who monitors public
security matters in Chihuahua. “As
prepared as we were, we never saw
this tsunami coming.”
His commitment to clean
air and water and his years
of experience in the oil business are complementary, not
contradictory, he contends.
“Oil and gas is important
to human freedom in the
last 100 years,” he said. “I
believe in freedom as a value.
Anybody who gets the keys
to their first car knows one
aspect of freedom, and that is
dependent on energy. ... Refined petroleum is the most
efficient way to store mobile
energy, and this is why ships
and planes 50 years from
now will likely be fueled by
refined petroleum.”
As governor, White said,
he would push development
of the state’s wind, solar
and natural gas resources. “I
want to make Texas the leader in energy efficiency,” he
said, “and in an obscure but
critically important feature
of energy called the conservation of waste heat.”
White said he also would
work to preserve the state’s
advantage in finding petroleum worldwide. “That
means having Texans with
more strength in science and
engineering and math. And
it means on the environmental side having people who
are environmental regulators
base their decisions on science and the public interest
and not special interests,”
he said.
White’s friends and supporters realize that he may
not prevail Nov. 2, but they
also expect he’ll still be
working on energy and environmental issues regardless
of what happens. Mauro, for
example, who lost a governor’s race to a man named
George W. Bush, continues
to insist that his old friend
will be victorious.
And if he isn’t?
“The day he goes to the
Senate — and I believe he’ll
be in the Senate — we will
have a national energy policy
for the first time,” Mauro
said.
[email protected]
[email protected]
Gangs reverse gains
TRICKLING DOWN: Police exit a helicopter during a ceremony attended by
George Shipley, an Austinbased consultant who also
has known White since the
1970s.
The young White recognized that energy, particularly natural gas, offered him
a laboratory to explore his
scholarly interests in markets and competition.
“I believed strongly in the
laws of supply and demand,
I enjoyed studying economics and, at the time, natural
gas was about the only commodity that had been subject
to price controls for a long
time,” White said one morning last week, recalling his
early work in Washington.
White, Mauro observed,
sees no contradiction between his conservative businessman’s belief in the free
market and his commitment
to the environment. “He believes that doing the right
thing for the environment
makes you more efficient,
and being more efficient
makes you more money,” he
said.
As Houston’s mayor,
White brought the power of
the city to bear against refining and petrochemical companies along the Houston
Ship Channel that were emitting pollutants. He also challenged the Environmental
Protection Agency’s methods
of estimating levels of pollutants. The agency ultimately
conceded that he was right
and agreed to restructure
the way it calculates cancercausing emissions from refineries and other plants.
Although White has been
criticized, on environmental
as well as ethical grounds,
for post-Energy Department
oil and gas investments he
made as a businessman in the
Black Sea region, he considers himself an environmentalist who long has enjoyed
the outdoors.
“I’m most at home and
peace in the desert or the
mountains or backpacking in
the wilderness,” he said. “My
idea of a great vacation was to
spend five days in Big Bend
or, when I was able to get a
little bit more money, at the
mountain lakes of the San
Juan Mountains or just going
down the San Marcos River
in a canoe. I was so excited
to come to Houston; I was
looking forward to the Sam
Houston Trail.”
His faith, he said, also
compels him to exercise stewardship over the Earth.
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WED NESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2010
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STORY ON PAGE E1
= Harris County says Bloods, Crips
47
STORY ON PAGE C1
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Go gazing
for stars as the
Cinema Arts
Festival opens.
8>>
John McClain rates
Matt Schaub & Co.
at midseason.
ROOTINGFORTHEROOT
Learning to love the unsightly
celery root. STORY ON PAGE F1
Will
Mexico
regret
killing
capo?
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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
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Harris County plans to
unleash a new weapon today against members of the
Bloods and Crips gangs who
have menaced a northeast
B O U N D F O R A WA R Z O N E
Stealing some last-minute smiles
= It isn’t likely,
but viciousness
may rise if the
Zetas take over
Cardenas’ turf
Please see GANGS, Page A9
By DANE SCHILLER
and DUDLEY ALTHAUS
DISASTER
IN THE GULF
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The Mexican military took
the life of “Tony Tormenta,”
the gangster who ran the
Gulf Cartel drug-trafficking
syndicate, but the deceased
capo’s rivals — already known
for beheadings and public displays of murdered corpses
— are poised to take the
territory that borders South
Texas.
The prospects already are
chilling the hardened streets
of Matamoros, the border city
where most schoolchildren
stayed home earlier this week
over reported bomb threats
following the death of the
Zetas’ archenemy, Antonio
Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta”
Cardenas Guillen.
“The panic from Friday remains very fresh,” said Perla
Covas, a teacher at La Salle
College, where all but a few
dozen of 1,300 students left
early Monday.
Banners carrying slangy
messages apparently from the
Zetas are leaving little doubt
of what’s at stake in the city
that has long been the Gulf
Cartel’s home turf.
“To the general population
and orphaned criminals!!! The
Please see ZETAS, Page A9
A TIMELINE OF TERROR
The recent trail of mayhem
caused by the Zetas. PAGE A9
Business . .
Comics . . .
Crossword .
Directory . .
Editorials. .
INSIDE
D1
.E6
.E5
A2
B8
Lottery . . .
Markets . . .
Movies. . . .
Obituaries .
TV . . . . . . .
A2
D4
.E4
B5
.E7
M
ARINE Gunnery Sgt. Ronald Laxton passes the time by playing with his 8-month-old
daughter on Tuesday at Ellington Field as he waits for a bus bound for California’s Camp
Pendleton, where the 800 Marines and Navy corpsmen of what’s known as “The Lone
Star Battalion” will prepare for a seven-month combat tour in Afghanistan. STORY ON PAGE B1
A BIG BOLT OF LIGHTNIN’
A fan’s passion for the blues of the legendary Sam Hopkins
leads to a state marker honoring the icon and his music
By ANDREW DANSBY
E
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
RIC Davis was unpacking
a large state historical
marker when he noticed
the misspelled name
scrawled on the packaging: “Sam (Lighting)
Hopkins.”
Cast aluminum doesn’t lend itself
to corrections. Davis anxiously
removed the rest of the packing
material from the sign, which was
delivered to his home pre-mounted on
a 10-foot pole. He was relieved to find
the blues legend’s nickname correctly
imprinted into the metal.
After a year of petitioning, writing,
editing, rewriting, fundraising and one
brief typographical scare, the marker
ERIC KAYNE : F O R T H E C H R O N I C L E
honoring Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins
will go up at property owned by Project DEVOTED: Eric Davis, inspired by Lightnin’ Hopkins’ simple grave site, launched a drive
Please see LIGHTNIN’, Page A4
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. #88) "/'(!3 5! 4*-3/-
Houston apartment complex,
helping label it the region’s
most dangerous.
The county is expected
to file its first anti-gang civil injunction, a lawsuit that
will target 33 documented
gang members who are suspected of selling drugs in
the 700-unit Haverstock Hills
complex and the surrounding
community in the northwest
corner of Aldine Bender and
the Eastex Freeway.
“The Haverstock Hills
neighborhood is a low-income
community that has been terrorized by gang members,
dope dealers and pimps,”
Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos said Tuesday.
“We are sending a message to
all criminal gangs to get out
of Harris County — we are
after you.”
In addition to the civil
injunctions and several expected drug trafficking criminal warrants, more than two
dozen residents suspected of
violating federal Housing and
Urban Development regulations also will be cited.
Some cities nationally
have been hesitant to file the
civil injunctions because they
could be viewed as violations
for a state historical marker for Hopkins, which will be dedicated Saturday in Houston.
Speed
was top
priority
at well
= Spill panel
told rush to cap
Macondo led to
safety problems
WA S H I N G T O N — Oil industry overconfidence and
a culture that emphasized
speed formed the backdrop
for decisions on how to seal
BP’s Macondo well in the
hours before a deadly blowout, investigators and drilling
experts said Tuesday in testimony before a presidential
panel probing the Deepwater
Horizon disaster.
“The problem here is that
there was a culture that did
not promote safety, and that
culture failed,” said Bob Graham, co-chairman of the National Oil Spill Commission.
“Leaders did not take serious
risks seriously enough (and)
did not identify risks that
proved to be fatal.”
The commission zeroed in
on BP’s shifting plans for
sealing and temporarily abandoning the Macondo well for
production later. The blowout
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
ZETAS:
¬¬¬*
THE JUMP PAGE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A9
Mexican navy shares info
U.S.
group Loz Zetaz is informing
you and giving you the opportunity to join with no hard
feelings,” reads one, written
in Spanish with Z’s replacing
S’s. “Those who join will be
welcomed to the Firm. Those
who don’t, lose their head and
their descendants!!!”
Falcon Lake
reservoir
MEXICO
Area in dispute
between Zetas
and Gulf cartels
Pacific
Ocean
TRAIL OF
TERROR
Beginning of the end?
Cardenas was killed in
a wild nearly-three-hour
shootout Friday in Matamoros, which is across the Rio
Grande from Brownsville and
was his hometown.
Underscoring fears that
significant drug cartel violence could spread into Texas,
the shootout forced the temporary closure of the international bridges and the cancellation of events at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
“It opens it up to whoever
wants to take power,” said
Gary Hale, the recently retired
chief of intelligence for the
Drug Enforcement Administration’s Houston Division. “If
the Zetas keep going strong,
relentlessly like they have,
this could be the beginning of
the end for the Gulf Cartel.”
Cardenas inherited the Gulf
Cartel throne from his brother,
Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who
was extradited to the United
States and is in federal prison.
He is to be released 14 years
from now as part of an agreement to cooperate with the
U.S. government, a relationship that has angered the Zetas
and fueled fears of retaliation.
Los Ramones
State of
Tamaulipas
Recent examples of
mayhem believed to be
the work of the Zetas:
200 mi.
“If the Zetas keep
going strong,
relentlessly like they
have, this could be the
beginning of the end
for the Gulf Cartel.”
Houston
Brownsville
Matamoros
Gulf of
Mexico
GARY HALE, the recently retired
chief of intelligence for the DEA’s
Houston Division
Mexico
City
OCTOBER 2010
! Entire police force of the small town of Los Ramones quits after
the police station and vehicles are thoroughly ravaged by
grenades and hundreds of rounds of gunfire.
! U.S. citizen David Hartley, along with his wife, was riding a jet ski
on Falcon Lake reservoir, on the U.S.-Mexico border. His wife says
he was shot in the head as they fled attackers. His body has not
been found.
! Rodolfo Torre Cantu, front-runner for governor of the Mexican
state of Tamaulipas, and his entourage are gunned down on their
way to campaign event.
MAY 2010
U.S. and Mexican authorities foil an alleged plot to blow up
Falcon Dam and use billions of gallons of water to block rival
drug-smuggling routes by unleashing a massive flood in the lower
Rio Grande Valley.
!
AUGUST 2006
! At least 72 undocumented immigrants tied up, blind folded and
massacred in a Tamaulipas, Mexico, warehouse after allegedly
refusing to work for the gang.
CHRONICLE
Sources: www.stratfor.com; news reports
style tactics.
Violence already has raged
across the cities and towns
bordering South Texas and
rattled Monterrey, Mexico’s
industrial powerhouse and
third-largest city.
Metropolitan Monterrey
alone has tallied more than
700 gangland-style deaths,
including 40 police, since
January, state officials said.
Hale, now owner of the
consulting firm Grupo Savant, said the Mexican navy’s
killing Cardenas was a victory
for President Felipe Calderon
but “bodes an ominous future
for the war-weary civilians.”
Offshoot of cartel
Antonio Cardenas, who
lived in Houston for some of
the ’90s, was known for keeping the ship steady and building alliances, unlike the notorious Zetas, whose trademark
is brutal narco terrorism.
Police and military bases
have been attacked, cops decapitated and stores, homes
and churches set ablaze. Adding to the Zetas’ legend, the
group was originally founded
by the Gulf Cartel as an enforcement arm and is seen
as the first group of Mexican
gangsters to use military-
A bloody legacy
The Zetas are believed to
be behind the murders of at
least 72 undocumented Latin
American immigrants who
were bound, blindfolded and
collectively shot in a warehouse.
The group also is thought
be responsible for the assassination of a leading candidate
for governor, who along with
his entourage was killed along
a roadside while on the way to
a campaign event.
More than 650 marines
were deployed Friday as
Cardenas and his bodyguards
were trapped and surrounded
in an office building a few
blocks from city hall.
Cartel reinforcements arrived in pickups and sport
utility vehicles to try to rescue their boss. Gangster snipers were perched on roofs.
How many cartel members
were killed remains unclear,
Haverstock Hills Apartments in the 5600 block of Aldine Bender.
Civil suits give
prosecutors latitude
GANGS:
but unofficial estimates put
the number at dozens.
A huge hole was blasted
into the side of the building
where Cardenas was killed.
The exposed interior is filled
with debris.
American assistance
Problems since 1970s
Peter Hanna, a retired senior FBI agent who specialized in the Gulf Cartel, said it
appears the U.S. government
has forged a new partnership
with Mexico’s navy to share
information.
“The navy appears to be
their go-to people right now,”
Hanna said. “The navy, for
whatever reason, appears to
be able to mount a large-scale
operation without being compromised.”
Bruce Bagley, a drug-trafficking expert at the University of Miami, added, “I do think
the gringos were instrumental
in all this” — at least in providing equipment and training.
“These recent successes
seem to be a product of U.S.
cooperation and technical assistance,” he said.
Another person with
knowledge of the situation,
who requested anonymity, said the two governments
“shared and collaborated” to
corner Cardenas.
Hanna, the former FBI
agent, said that even with
Cardenas’ death he doesn’t
believe the Gulf Cartel is going out of business.
“These people are still able
to deliver the dope,” he said.
“There is going to be some
turbulence down there. It is a
trying time in Mexico.”
JUNE 2010
JOHNNY HANSON : C H R O N I C L E F I L E
TARGET AREA: Police and prosecutors are focusing on the
[email protected]
[email protected]
of gang members’ constitutional rights of free expression and association.
But so far, appellate courts
in California and Texas have
upheld the injunctions.
More than 2,400 people
live at the complex, 800 of
whom are children, but the
number of people milling
about in Haverstock can grow
to nearly 4,000 at night, police said.
In August, prosecutors
said they were trying to set up
a 3-square-mile “gang safety
zone” targeting gang members who have habitually engaged in at least five instances
of organized criminal activity
in a year’s span, but would
not identify the area.
Suing gang members in
civil court means prosecutors
can bar suspects from associating with each other.
Similar lawsuits in other
Texas cities have prohibited
gang members from going out
in public after 9 p.m. or possessing a cell phone in a car.
Prosecutors also can prohibit gang clothing, gang hand
signs and possession of spray
paint, for up to 10 years.
It is not clear what stipulations Haverstock will have.
If caught violating the
injunction, suspects can be
charged with a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a year
in jail and a $4,000 fine.
U.S. Rep. Gene Green,
D-Houston, said Haverstock
has been a problem since the
1970s, primarily because of
its size.
“The more people you put
together, the more the out-
laws come to take advantage
of the people who live there,”
Green said. “It’s one of the
problems we keep having to
solve.”
In 2009, police responded
to more than 3,000 calls at
the complex.
San Antonio was the first
Texas city to implement an
injunction against gangs, in
1999, after the state passed a
law permitting it. Fort Worth
and El Paso also have created
gang safety zones.
Law enforcement officials
in San Antonio analyzed the
effectiveness of an injunction filed against Stixx gang
members in 2005. In the
22 months after the injunction, crime among Stixx gang
members decreased by 70 percent in the gang safety zone
compared with the 22 months
before the injunction.
Official notice today
Officials also reported that
crime committed by those
gang members decreased 48
percent citywide in the same
time frame.
The city of Bryan also
used a civil injunction to
force identified gang members to abide by strict rules
within its 3-square-mile
safety zone.
The injunction, which can
last up to 10 years, was implemented after a gang-related
killing there on Mother’s
Day.
Lykos scheduled a news
conference today regarding
the litigation.
Chronicle reporter Cindy Horswell
contributed to this report.
[email protected]
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STORMY, HIGH 92, LOW 78 / PAGE B10 PHILLIES’ BID FOR OSWALT MAY STALL / PAGE C1
T H U R S DAY, JULY 22 , 2010
PREVIEW
WHYGAGA
MATTERS
CORPSE FLOWER FINALE
Love her or hate
her, Lady Gaga is
vitally important to
pop. STORY ON PAGE F8
¬ ¬ ¬*
djla m`g e kja ihi e cma``
DISASTER IN THE GULF
$1 BILLION
FOR NEXT
OIL SPILL
G Industry giants pledge funds for
rapid response to future blowouts
NATION
AVOIDINGA
C-SECTION
By MONICA HATCHER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
New guidelines
say women don’t
have to keep getting
cesareans. STORY ON
PAGE A3
Where
do drug
dealers
turn for
justice?
G Feds say they
hire Houston
crew that will kill,
torture and steal
By DANE SCHILLER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
When drug dealers get
ripped off, they can’t call
police — but they can hire
a Houston crew of thugs to
even the score.
That’s the contention of
federal agents, who Tuesday
night arrested a four-person
team whose leader supposedly said they were willing
to kill, torture or pistol-whip
guards at a rival dealer’s house
to steal a load of cocaine.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives charges in an affidavit filed in federal court
that the crew was led by Chris
Montelongo, a hefty repeat
felon who describes himself
as an experienced home invader with plenty of jobs
under his belt.
The team was caught on
the way to what the ATF says
was a faux attack in Houston
set up by agents.
They were charged not
with plotting an assault but
conspiracy to possess cocaine,
about $90,000 worth, to pay
for the job of getting back a
load worth about $500,000.
Their tools weren’t batter-
KAREN WARREN: C H R O N I C L E
HOLD YOUR NOSES: Mallory Holmes, 5, and her cousin, Kettler Westfall, 6,
visit the stinky flower on Wednesday at the Museum of Natural Science.
ON QUEUE,
ALL SAY ‘EW’
Visitors line up round the
clock for a long-awaited whiff
of Lois, who’s finally blooming
By MATT WOOLBRIGHT
A
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Please see REVENGE, Page A6
Business . .
Comics . . .
Crossword .
Directory . .
Editorials. .
INSIDE
D1
.E6
.E5
A2
B8
Lottery . . . A2
Markets . . . D2
Movies. . . . F17
Obituaries . B5
TV . . . . . . . .E4
BILLY SMITH II : C H R O N I C L E
LOIS: She took her time, but
the corpse flower is showing
her true odors. She is expected
to be fully bloomed today.
ONLINE:
See video
and a
photo
gallery of Lois the corpse
flower at chron.com
FTER weeks
of playing
hard to get,
Lois, the
corpse flower,
has finally
started blooming for a city of
suitors eager to see her true
colors — and get a whiff of
her not-so-sweet scent.
The 5-foot-tall Lois has
courted thousands of visitors
this month at the Houston
Museum of Natural Science,
romancing the public with her
mysterious story as a special
flower with a knockout smell
of rotting flesh.
The museum’s Cockrell
Butterfly Center has
sometimes stayed open
round the clock for curious
onlookers teased by one of
the largest flowers in the
world, one whose bloom
is so rare that only 28
other bloomings have been
observed in the U.S.
Thanks to Facebook,
Twitter updates and a viral
webcam, the spectacle
over Lois has been so
huge it’s accomplished
the unthinkable: making
a museum horticulturist a
celebrity.
With the corpse
flower making her longawaited coming out party
Wednesday, museum visitors
were able to see the deep
purple of Lois’ petals. A few
Please see CORPSE, Page A6
Four of the nation’s largest
oil companies said Wednesday
they immediately will commit
$1 billion to set up a rapid oil
spill response system to deal
with deep-water blowouts in
the Gulf of Mexico.
Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips and
Shell said the system of underwater capture devices and
surface containment vessels,
similar to what BP is using
now to control its Macondo
well spill, will be designed to
capture up to 100,000 barrels
of oil a day before it spills into
the sea from wells sitting in
water as deep as 10,000 feet.
Unlike BP’s system, much
of which was designed and
built on the fly to handle
the unfolding Gulf disaster,
the new equipment will be
pre-engineered, constructed,
tested and on standby for immediate deployment in case
of an emergency. As part of
the initiative, the four firms
will form a nonprofit company called the Marine Well
Containment Co. to operate
and maintain the system.
Other oil companies will
Please see RESPONSE, Page A6
Tropical
trouble?
A tropical wave
heading for the
Gulf could force
BP to suspend its
spill response.
STORY ON PAGE D1
ONLINE: KJLLJC
FHJIMNDL DNFMEMFB
DF blogs.chron.
com/sciguy
Tea party now has
voice in Congress
G 7 Texans join
new all-GOP
caucus in House
By ALAN BLINDER
WA S H I N G T O N — The
anti-establishment tea party
movement, which has worked
to topple those it deems outof-touch incumbents, now
has a voice in the U.S. House:
a fully sanctioned congressional caucus with seven Texas
Republicans among its members.
The 28-member House
Tea Party Caucus includes no
Democrats from Texas, or any
other state for that matter.
In its inaugural meeting
Wednesday, the group hurled
a volley of criticism at Democrats. Texans are its largest
contingent, with John Culberson, John Carter, Pete
Sessions, Lamar Smith, Joe
Barton, Michael Burgess and
Louie Gohmert signed up so
far.
Culberson said at a news
conference after the group’s
first meeting that he was encouraged by people who have
independently formed tea party groups around the U.S.
“It gives me great hope to
see the spontaneous creation
of the tea parties all across the
Please see PARTY, Page A6
How a smear spun out of control
G Misleading
video leads to
apology, job offer
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG,
SHAILA DEWAN
and BRIAN STELTER
N E W YO R K T I M E S
A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
INSTANT FAME: At the center
of a racially tinged firestorm
involving conservative bloggers,
Fox News, the NAACP and the
White House, Shirley Sherrod
has emerged as a heroine.
WA S H I N G T O N — The
White House and Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely and repeatedly Wednesday to a black
midlevel official for the way
she had been humiliated and
*$'% "() !)+$&,"'$%# '$- 7))!4#-9 3)
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$!/2"9: %2623 ($;;-&+*$+02+7:"),
be asked to participate in the
organization — including BP,
as soon as it gets the Macondo
well under control.
The nonprofit will be patterned after the Marine Spill
Response Corp. formed to
help clean up oil spills after
the Exxon Valdez accident in
1989.
Work on the initiative will
begin immediately, with Ir-
forced to resign her Agriculture Department job after a
conservative blogger put out
a misleading video clip that
seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white
farmer.
By the end of the day,
the official, Shirley Sherrod,
had gained instant fame and
emerged as the heroine of a
compelling story about race
and redemption.
Pretty much everyone else
had egg on his face — from
the conservative bloggers and
Please see SHERROD, Page A15
A6
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬*
Proposal
could backfire,
experts say
REVENGE:
RESPONSE:
Attack
squads
go after
goods,
money
ving-based Exxon Mobil taking the lead, the companies
said in a joint statement. The
system should be fully operable in about 18 months.
Cathy Cram, a spokeswoman for Houston-based
ConocoPhillips, said company officials began meeting
with lawmakers Wednesday
to brief them on the plan.
“As we watched the events
unfold in the Gulf it certainly
became clear that we needed
to have a better response system in place, so I think that
all of the companies started
thinking about it fairly quickly, and we all came together
as a group a number of weeks
ago,” Cram said.
ing rams and machine guns,
but handguns, ski masks,
gloves and zip ties, according
to the ATF affidavit, filed by
agent Tommy Doyle.
The scheme seemed typical of attack squads in which
victims are criminals and
hesitant to call law enforcement. Doors are kicked in
and homes are torn apart as
invaders search for drugs,
bulk cash or other hidden
wealth, said Don Clark, a retired FBI agent who headed
the agency’s Houston and San
Antonio offices and is now a
consultant.
“It is all about them getting the goods and stealing,”
he said.
Torture and murder is not
unusual, according to past
cases.
“It is not uncommon, even
with the organized crime
mob,” Clark said. “If a particular mobster has done something that has ticked the rest
of the mob off, they are going
to go after him.”
2006 incident
In Houston, there have
been numerous attacks linked
to gangs and drug cartels.
One of the more infamous
incidents came in 2006, when
four gunmen attacked a Houston home.
The resident, who had a
long criminal history, shot
one, injured another and sent
the survivors scurrying.
He was not charged with a
crime, as authorities ruled he
acted in self defense.
The others arrested Tuesday along with Montelongo
were Johnny Hernandez,
Mark Diaz and Alfredo Garcia
Jr., according to the ATF.
Ages and hometowns were
not immediately available.
To snare them, an ATF
undercover agent posed as
a disgruntled drug courier
who was part of an organized
crime network. He wanted to
hire the team to steal a load.
Undercover agent
They first met at a Houston restaurant and used faceto-face talks, cell phone conversations and text messages
to seal the deal, according to
the affidavit.
Stealing drugs from drug
traffickers required planning
and expertise the revenge
squad told an undercover
agent, according to the ATF.
They needed a diagram
of the stash house as well as
to know about any counter
surveillance there and how
many guards would be in
place, according to the affidavit.
A member assured the
undercover agent posing as
the courier that he’d be safe
during the rip-off because
harming him would hurt their
reputation, the document
continues.
[email protected]
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Motivations behind plan
KAREN WARREN PHOTOS: C H R O N I C L E
THEY LOVE LOIS: Jack Harty, 14, a Moran Ecoteen volunteer, sells corpse flower paraphernalia
Wednesday at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where Lois could be smelled from the hallway.
Museum got
flower back on track
CORPSE:
even caught whiffs of the
grave aroma.
“I was almost knocked out
by the smell when I put my
nose to it a minute ago,”
said Zac Stayton, the museum
horticulturist turned media
darling.
Lois opened herself about
a third of the way Wednesday
and is expected to be fully
bloomed by today. The museum planned to stay open
all night to accommodate the
new burst of attention.
21 visits
Cordelia Price, 54, likely
will be camped out in the butterfly center. Price is one of
Lois’ most faithful fans, having
visited the flower 21 times.
“There were times when
I said, ‘Come on, bloom already!’ ” Price said. “I thought
it was going to be over and
done with in a day, but once I
got into it, I was fascinated.”
Amber
Schreiner,
a
21-year-old senior at the University of Houston, could
barely contain her excitement
about seeing Lois bloom.
“I really want to smell that
flower, and I’m going to stay
as long as it takes to catch the
smell,” she said.
The days leading up to the
big bloom produced at least
one false alarm.
One recent night, a staunch
aroma alerted Angela Swain’s
nose that Lois might be starting to bloom.
Swain, a Houston resident
who has spent hours watching Lois, and several oth-
%!$#*+)
ers began to deeply inhale
what they thought were the
flower’s first rotting flesh
smells. Much to their dismay,
it wasn’t Lois.
It was a child who gave off
his own rather gaseous smell.
Nevertheless, Swain and
her flower-watching cohorts
were determined to wait.
“I like plants,” Swain said,
“and this is just that rare of an
opportunity I want to be here.
It’s really special.”
Rattling nerves
The museum first obtained
Lois, an Amorphophallus titanum from Western Sumatra in Indonesia, as a stem
six years ago, and it is only
the second location in Texas
where a corpse flower has
bloomed.
For a while, museum officials were a little nervous
Lois would not bloom, but
they made adjustments that
got her back on track. Rotten
bananas were used to emit
a bloom-inducing chemical
through a hole cut in the back
of Lois. The museum worked
to ensure the room temperature was always above 82
degrees.
Stayton said he knew the
bloom was coming the whole
time — even though he did
sweat a few times.
“A lot of people doubted for a while in there,”
Stayton said, “but we did
everything we could to encourage her to open. I
never really doubted her.”
[email protected]
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IN SPOTLIGHT: Museum
horticulturist Zac Stayton
became a celebrity in his own
right as he cared for Lois and
chronicled her progress.
The proposal comes as the
oil industry attempts to stave
off laws aimed at overhauling offshore drilling in the
wake of the BP disaster. The
Macondo well blowout April
20 destroyed the Deepwater
Horizon drilling rig, killed 11
workers and unleashed the
worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Matthew Beeby, an energy
analyst with Global Hunter
Securities in Fort Worth, said
the initiative is clearly a bid
by industry to mend fences
with the government and an
American public angered over
BP’s spill but also concerned
about the potential loss of
jobs from a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium.
The Obama administration imposed the moratorium
while it probes the causes of
the Macondo blowout and
devises new safety rules. The
BP disaster and ensuing investigations revealed serious
weaknesses in deep-water oil
and gas operators’ capabilities for handling a blowout
and spill.
It was only after a string
of failures over nearly three
months that BP finally was
able to stop the Macondo well
a week ago after installing
new capping equipment. Until then, the well was spewing
up to 60,000 barrels of oil a
day into the Gulf, according
to government estimates.
The initiative is the industry’s signal that it’s serious
about remedying the problem and protecting the Gulf,
Beeby said. “A billion dollars
is a pretty significant investment.”
Not everyone is buying
into the message.
“The industry is doing everything they can to reassure
the public that they can continue drilling safely, but the
truth is, they can’t,” said Kristina Johnson, a spokeswoman
for the Sierra Club. “Everywhere they drill, they’re putting communities at risk for
another disaster.”
‘Must do better’
The effort could backfire,
too, depending on how Congress receives the plan, said
Kevin Book, a research analyst with ClearView Energy
Partners in Washington.
“If a little is good, Congress could decide that more
is better, so it may not be the
end point of regulation, but
the starting line, which would
not be the goal of the industry,” Book said.
The U.S. Interior Department could interpret the proposal as acknowledgement
that for the next 18 months,
industry will be unable to
respond to a deep-water spill,
giving the government more
justification for the moratorium, Book said.
Rep. Edward Markey, DMass., who chairs an energy
and environment subcommittee, said Wednesday the proposed response system was
only one possible tool in what
must be a more robust kit.
“The proposal these companies are submitting is essentially the current BP cap
system and plan for 100 percent collection of oil,” Markey
said. “While this could be a
rapidly deployed system, the
oil companies must do better
than BP’s current apparatus
with a fresh coat of paint. The
oil companies must also invest more in technologies that
will prevent fatal blowouts in
the first place.”
The oil companies’ announcement comes as Congress queues up bills laying
out stiffer offshore regulations and as lawmakers prepare for mid-term elections.
“In August, the well will
be killed and members will
be campaigning, and it’s
very likely they will be going
around campaigning about all
the things that are wrong
with the oil industry they are
going to fix when they get
back to Washington,” Book
said. “It seems a prudent and
reasonable effort to try to
stop that.”
[email protected]
‘Congress is not
listening,’ says organizer
PARTY:
country,” he said.
He said he thought the
Democraticagendahadstirred
some previously uninvolved
conservatives to action.
“Nancy Pelosi and Barack
Obama have awakened the
sleeping giant,” he said.
Gohmert said the tea party
was an attempt to change the
policies of both political parties: “This is an important
movement to try to get both
parties back on track,” he
said.
Concerns ignored?
Rep. Michele Bachmann,
R-Minn., said she organized
the group because she thinks
Congress is ignoring the concerns of tea party members,
such as their view that the
national legislature has overstepped its constitutional
boundaries.
“Congress is not listening
to those people,” she said.
The role of the caucus, Bachmann said, is “to listen to the
concerns of those people.”
The broader tea party
movement was originally
fueled by anger during the
long national debate about
health care reform. Tea partysupported candidates have
toppled longtime incumbents
in primary elections earlier
this year, including Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah.
Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron
Paul, R-Lake Jackson, won
the Republican senatorial
nomination in Kentucky earlier this year with the support
of the tea party movement.
Ron Paul, an early icon of the
ALEX WONG: G E T T Y I M AG E S
FIRST MEETING: U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, talks with
tea party member Danielle Hollars of Woodbridge, Va., with her
9-month-old son, Damian, during a news conference after the first
meeting of the newly formed House Tea Party Caucus.
movement, hasn’t enlisted in
the new House Tea Party Caucus. Rachel Mills, his spokeswoman, declined to comment
when asked if he eventually
will join.
Bachmann, who received
permission from Pelosi and
other Democratic members of
the House leadership to form
the caucus, said she has invited Pelosi to join the group. A
spokesman for Pelosi, Brendan Daly, later declined to
comment.
3 GOP leaders join
Three members of the
Republican leadership have
joined the House caucus. Sessions, of Dallas, chairs the
National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, and Carter, of central
Texas, is the secretary of
the House Republican Conference.
The chairman of that body,
Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., also
agreed to participate.
However, House Republican Leader John Boehner,
R-Ohio, said he will not join
because he does not join any
groups besides the House Republican Conference.
A tea party activist, Army veteran Danielle Hollars,
joined the rollout news conference of the House caucus
and told reporters that the tea
party isn’t racist.
“We’re not terrorists. We’re
not racists,” said Hollars, who
is black. “We are Americans
who care about the future of
our country.”
[email protected]
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COMING
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THE COMING BOOM
Despite worries after the spill, deep waters beckon drillers
EXCLUSIVELY IN THE PRINT EDITION OF SUNDAY’S CHRONICLE
SUNNY, HIGH 79, LOW 50 / PAGE B8 ROCKETS ROLL OVER GRIZZLIES / PAGE C1
SAT U R DAY, DECEMBER 4 , 2010
Mexico claims American boy’s
drug gang job was beheadings
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STUDY: LOSS
OF MEDICAID
TOO COSTLY
A Report says opting out would hurt
Texas, urges Congress to fix program
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
A N T O N I O S I E R R A : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
Edgar Jimenez, 14, under guard Friday after his arrest near Cuernavaca, is suspected
of being an infamous killer known as “The Stoner.” Two cell phones allegedly held victims’ photos.
‘EL PONCHIS’:
A Arrested near Mexico City before
flying back to his native California,
he admits killing at least 4 for cartel
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
M E X I C O C I T Y — Mexican
troops captured a 14-year-old
U.S. citizen said to have specialized in beheadings as an
assassin for one of Mexico’s
most vicious drug gangs. His
pay: $2,500 a killing.
Soldiers detained Edgar
Jimenez late Thursday night
at an airport outside Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of
Mexico City, as he prepared to
board a flight to Tijuana. Officials said he was accompanied
by a sister and was heading to
his native San Diego, where
his mother lives.
Presented to the news media Friday morning, Jimenez
said he had beheaded at least
four adversaries of the socalled South Pacific Cartel, a
remnant of the Beltran Leyva
crime syndicate. The small,
mop-haired boy known as
El Ponchis, or “The Stoner,”
said he committed the killings while stoned on marijuana and at the orders of the
gang boss in command of the
Cuernavaca area. Authorities
said he was caught with two
cell phones that held photographs of tortured victims.
“I didn’t know what I was
doing,” Jimenez said, according to media accounts, but
added that he was paid $2,500
per killing.
Army officials accused
Jimenez’s sister, identified as
19-year-old Elizabeth, of also
working for the gang. Neither
has been formally charged.
Jimenez said he was sorry
to have gotten involved both
with Mexican gangsters and
with killing people. If he
beats the charges, he said,
he’ll change his ways.
SPORTS
A U S T I N — Medicaid and
the Children’s Health Insurance Program are breaking
the state’s budget, but opting
out of the federal programs
would have a devastating effect on health care delivery
in Texas, according to a state
report issued Friday.
The report said most of
the methods for fixing Medicaid spending in Texas will
require acts of Congress, not
the Legislature, to give the
state greater flexibility in how
the programs are run and a
greater share of the national
Medicaid financing.
The report also said the
federal government should
take over 100 percent financing of health care for noncitizens in Texas, which it
said is costing the state program more than $500 million
a year.
Gov. Rick Perry and some
lawmakers have been saying
Texas, in the face of an $18
billion-plus budget shortfall,
should consider opting out of
the voluntary federal medical
care program for the poor.
Perry reacted to the new
report by backing away from
his call to leave the federal
system. He issued a statement
urging the federal government to overhaul Medicaid
to give the states more control over their own programs,
especially with expectations
that the new federal health
care law also will increase
state government spending
for health care.
The state estimates the
new health care law will cost
Texas government an additional $27 billion in the 10
Please see MEDICAID, Page A19
FEAR IN ARIZONA
Medicaid budget cuts called
a death sentence for some
transplant patients. PAGE A8
City asks
Retired Navy doctor’s nonprofit helps troops workers
upgrade helmets for better comfort, safety
to donate
SERVING TO PROTECT a day off
‘A L A B O R O F L O V E ’
A Parker says
By LINDSAY WISE
furloughs could
save $1 million
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
W
HEN Bob Meaders
found out in 2004 that
his grandson’s Marine rifle
team had been issued helmets without shock-absorbent pads, the retired Navy
doctor was appalled.
“I was in Vietnam in ’68
and saw enough brain injuries there to last me a lifetime, and to see them starting up again, especially when
something can be done about
it, is something I just can’t
live with,” said “Doc” Meaders, 76, of Montgomery.
Meaders and his wife,
LaVera, started Operation
Helmet, a nonprofit that has
donated more than 53,000
helmet upgrade kits free of
charge to troops serving in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s a labor of love I wish
I didn’t have to do,” Meaders
said.
Although padding now is
standard issue in all helmets,
Meaders said the military’s
choice to switch to cheaper
By BRADLEY OLSON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
USING HIS HEAD: Bob Meaders started Operation Helmet,
a nonprofit that provides free helmet upgrades to troops, after
learning that his grandson’s unit had deficient helmets in 2004.
but harder pads several years
ago had unintended consequences for troops, many of
whom tell him they loosen
the straps or even remove
their helmets whenever possible because of headaches,
sores and discomfort.
“They’re saving maybe 10
or 15 bucks per helmet, but
the cost of one brain-injured
service member is $2.7 million, plus the loss to family
it billions of dollars in federal
fines for the offshore spill.
The London-based oil giant, contending that the
government’s numbers are
“highly unreliable,” is poised
to argue that as little as half
that amount ultimately flowed
into the Gulf.
The government estimates
“rely on incomplete or inaccurate information, rest in
large part on assumptions
that have not been validated
and are subject to far greater
uncertainties than have been
acknowledged,” BP said in
a white paper delivered to
the presidential commission
investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “BP is
confident that a complete,
comprehensive and rigorous
analysis of the flow issue will
show that less — and possibly
far less — oil was discharged
from the Macondo well.”
Priya Aiyar, a deputy chief
counsel for the commission,
Mayor Annise Parker announced a voluntary furlough
program for civilian employees in December, the first
in what may be a series of
difficult steps the city must
take to close a $30 million
budget deficit in the next six
months.
Parker said she will take a
furlough — a day off without
pay — and five City Council
members standing with her
agreed to do likewise, including Sue Lovell, Al Hoang,
Jolanda Jones, Wanda Adams
and Brenda Stardig. At best,
the city could reap $1 million
in savings from the program,
although Parker said it is too
soon to know how many employees will participate.
“The budget is tightening
up,” she said. “Some of the
INTHEEND, FINALLY,
THEYMEET THEYMEET
AGAIN
AGAIN
Stakes in billions as BP disputes size of spill
Oklahoma and
Nebraska play for
the last time as
members of same
conference in Big 12
title game. PAGE C1
Area high school
powerhouses Katy A Government’s
and Pearland
figures determine
square off today for amount of fines
the first time since
1959. PAGE C1
INSIDE
WE RECYCLE
Business. . . . D1
Comics . . . . . .E8
Crossword . . .E7
Directory. . . A23
Editorials . . . B6
Lottery . . . . . A2
Movies . . . . . .E4
Obituaries. . . B5
WA S H I N G T O N — BP is
challenging the government’s
estimate that its damaged Macondo well gushed 4.9 million
barrels of oil into the Gulf of
Mexico last summer, adopting a strategy that could save
Please see HELMETS, Page A19
Please see PARKER, Page A19
MARATHON MOVES
TO END RIG DEAL
Marathon Oil Corp. wants
to cancel a contract to lease
a rig amid a slowdown in
Gulf drilling. PAGE D1
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THE JUMP PAGE
Saturday, December 4, 2010
¬¬¬
PARKER:
Waiting
list for
upgrades
is 400
‘A huge success’
Sgt. Dan Smith, 25, of
Austin contacted Meaders in
June to request the kits for
fellow Marines in the 1/23,
also known as the Lone Star
Battalion.
“For my last deployment (to Iraq in 2007-08), I
requested 50 kits from Operation Helmet, and it was
a huge success,” Smith said
in an e-mail to the Houston
Chronicle from Pendleton.
“All the Marines said their
helmets were much more
comfortable. The standardissue pads are much thicker
and stiff, meaning the helmet
is not as comfortable and
you either had to upgrade to
a larger size helmet or have
the helmet sit higher on your
head for less protection.”
Smith said he can’t speak
to the level of safety provided
by the standard-issue pads,
“but anything to make it
more comfortable and still
have the same level of protection is definitely welcomed.”
Operation Helmet buys
helmet upgrade kits for $34
each from Oregon Aero, a
company Meaders selected
MEXICO:
ON THE INSIDE: Bob Meaders, a former captain in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, said the Oregon
Aero pads in his helmet upgrade kits mold to the head “like a Tempur-pedic mattress.”
HOW TO HELP
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Moms: QQQT
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after researching top-of-theline protective head gear
recommended by demining
experts.
Meaders said the Oregon
Aero pads mold to your head
“like a Tempur-pedic mattress” for a better, safer fit.
“Some blasts you can’t
survive, just like some car
crashes you can’t survive,”
Meaders said, adding that
wearing a helmet without
pads is like riding in a car
without seat belts. A helmet
fitted with standard-issue
pads is like a car with lap
belts but no shoulder harnesses, he said. “This one,”
Meaders said, holding up
an Oregon Aero pad, “is lap
belt, shoulder harness and
air bags.”
An Army spokeswoman
said military officials are
confident the standard-issue
pad provides the best overall
protection, based on extensive testing in Army and
Department of Defense laboratories.
The Office of the Director
of Operational Test and Evaluation reported to Congress
in 2009 that soldiers and Marines have indicated no clear
preference for any specific
pad supplier or design, Army
Lt. Col. Alayne P. Conway
said in a written statement.
The standard-issue pads
are provided by National Industries for the Blind (NIB)
through a partnership agreement with an Ohio company
called Team Wendy, Conway
said.
She pointed out that the
NIB’s agreement with Team
Wendy expires in fiscal year
2011-12. Any pad suspension
manufacturer, including Oregon Aero, that meets Army
requirements and other NIB
selection criteria will be considered for the next partnering agreement, she said.
Time of the essence
Meaders said service
members can’t afford to wait.
“I’m butting my head
against the wall in terms
of getting the military to
change,” said Meaders, who
made his case in testimony
before Congress. “Obviously,
I think it’s important for us
to continue to give the troops
what they need and what
they deserve.”
Meaders’ grandson,
Justin, took an honorable
discharge last week from the
Marine Corps after two tours
in Iraq, but Meaders says
Operation Helmet’s mission
will continue as long as necessary.
“It’s not done today, and I
can’t quit till it is,” he said.
The “Doc” said he receives a near-constant stream
of e-mails from service members requesting kits.
Nationality unconfirmed
“I didn’t join,” he said of
his gangland career, which reportedly began when he was
12. “They pulled me in.”
Security forces had been
looking for Jimenez since he
appeared last month along
with other teens in YouTube
videos, brandishing weapons
and bragging of their gangland exploits.
Mexican officials say he is
a U.S. citizen, and American
officials are trying to confirm
his nationality.
Wouldn’t be the first
If he is, indeed, proved
to have committed killings,
Jimenez will hardly be the
first U.S. teenager involved in
the Mexican gangs.
Several Laredo teenagers
were convicted in 2007 for
carrying out killings on behalf
of the Zetas, the violent organization entrenched in Nuevo
Laredo and other towns along
the South Texas border.
One of those teens, Rosalio
“Bart” Reta, killed his first
victim at age 13 and might
have murdered more than 30
others before being captured.
Reta was convicted and is now
serving a 70-year sentence in
a Texas state prison.
Once among Mexico’s most
powerful gangs, the Beltran
Leyva organization has fallen
into brutal internecine war
since Mexican marines killed
kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva
last December.
The slain drug lord’s underlings — including Laredo
native Edgar Valdez Villarreal, also known as La Barbie
— quickly began fighting with
one another to replace him.
Their feuding has killed
hundreds of people this year
in and near Cuernavaca and
throughout neighboring Mexico and Guerrero states, including the beach resort of
Acapulco.
Many of those killed have
been beheaded, which in the
past four years has become
a nauseatingly banal terror
A19
Program
exempts fire,
police staffers
HELMETS:
and friends and the rest of
us,” Meaders said. “It’s a
terrible cost to the society in
general and the individual
just because of a silly move
just to save a couple of bucks.
And we feel our troops ought
to have the best America can
provide, not the cheapest.”
Operation Helmet, partnering with Houston Marine
Moms and other Texans,
recently sent 245 helmet
upgrade kits to the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, a
Houston-based reserve unit
training at Camp Pendleton
in California for deployment
to Afghanistan next year.
Meaders would like to raise
enough funds to outfit the
entire battalion of more than
800 Marines.
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
‘QUEEN OF PACIFIC’
CLEARED BY JUDGE
MEXICO CITY — A
Mexican judge Friday
acquitted a reputed
drug cartel “queen” of
organized crime and other
charges, the latest setback
for a judicial system that
has failed to convict the
majority of suspects
captured for drug crimes.
Judge Fernando Cordova
del Valle ruled that
prosecutors failed to
bring enough evidence
against Sandra Avila
Beltran, described by U.S.
and Mexican officials as
a major decision-maker
for the Sinaloa gang,
Mexico’s most powerful
cartel. The “Queen of the
Pacific” had been charged
with organized crime,
conspiracy to traffic drugs
and money laundering.
Avila Beltran, who was
arrested in September
2007, has faced a U.S.
extradition request since
November 2007.
The request relates to
the 2001 seizure of more
than 9 tons of U.S.-bound
cocaine aboard a fishing
vessel in the port of
Manzanillo, along Mexico’s
west coast.
— ASSOCIATED PRESS
tactic of the gangsters.
Among the victims were
more than 50 men thrown
down a 500-foot abandoned
mine shaft outside the colonial tourist town of Taxco and
20 Mexican tourists massacred together in Acapulco, apparently in a case of mistaken
identity.
Fallout from WikiLeaks
Valdez was captured in
August in a Mexico City suburb and awaits extradition to
the United States. Several of
his top lieutenants have been
captured, as well.
The arrest of the alleged boy beheader came as
Mexican and U.S. officials
scrambled to contain damage
caused by diplomatic cables
leaked Thursday that reveal
deep worries about Mexico’s
conduct of a four-year crackdown on organized crime.
The campaign, which has
heavily relied on the military, has led to some 30,000
deaths. Most of those killings
have been in assassinations or
shootouts between gangsters
rather than in battles between
troops and thugs.
Mexico ‘fully in control’
Cables from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, filtered
Thursday to European papers by WikiLeaks, include
criticism of the army’s performance and reports of Mexican officials’ fears that the
government had lost control
of areas of the country.
American
Ambassador
Carlos Pascual issued a statement on Friday condemning WikiLeaks and assuring
Mexicans that the U.S. commitment to their country remains strong.
“Cable reports do not represent U.S. policy,” Pascual
wrote. “They are often impressionistic snapshots of a
moment in time. But like
some snapshots, they can be
out of focus or unflattering.”
On Friday, the Mexican
government’s spokesman for
security matters denied that
officials have ever believed or
feared that they’d lost control
in parts of the country.
The situation across Mexico “demonstrates that the
Mexican government is fully in control of territory,”
spokesman Alejandro Poire
said.
Poire added, however,
that Mexican officials “share
the public’s concern about
criminality that affects, in
particular, some areas of the
country.”
[email protected]
One arrived in his inbox at
10:42 p.m. Wednesday from
the leader of a 20-man scout
sniper team in Afghanistan.
“My guys will go for 40+
hours sometimes, with their
helmets on, and it’s bad
enough that we’ve sustained
a couple TBIs (traumatic
brain injuries), worse when
the helmet compounds their
headaches even more,” the
lieutenant wrote.
“Can you imagine having
a migraine headache for 40plus hours and trying to do
your job as a scout sniper?”
Meaders fumed. “It just
makes you crazy.”
Operation Helmet has a
waiting list for an additional
400 kits requested by soldiers and Marines in Iraq and
Afghanistan on top of the
ones needed for the 1/23.
“Every day we get more
requests,” Meaders said.
“Feel like hell having to say,
‘Sorry, you’re wait-listed.’ ”
[email protected]
MEDICAID:
savings we are working on ...
probably will not materialize
this fiscal year.”
The program will not involve firefighters or police.
Some viewed the proposal
as a mere starting point for
much more draconian cuts
sure to be on the way.
In addition to the $30 million gap the city must close
in the next six months, there
remains a $118 million gap in
2012 and about a $420 million projected deficit in the
next three years. To deal with
those gaps, the administration has begun to contemplate
raising taxes, instituting additional furloughs and renegotiating pension payments.
City Controller Ronald
Green, who said he planned
to take a furlough, predicted
that involuntary furloughs
would be inevitable.
“It’s a good way for us to
gauge how much we can really save,” Green said. “There
are some people who want to
do it. It’s Christmas time, I
think the timing is right.”
‘Too little, too late’
City Councilman Mike
Sullivan said Parker would
have done better to work with
the union and delay for one
year the mandatory 3 percent
pay raises civilian employees
received earlier in the year.
That would have saved
$8.6 million.
“It’s too little, too late,”
said Sullivan, who said he
would take a furlough. “I
compliment her for showing
up to the party, finally, but it’s
not a significant cut and she
needs to make some significant cuts.”
For years, city officials
have staved off public concern about the city’s budget
crisis with firm reminders
that Houston had not yet had
to resort to furloughs or layoffs as most other major cities
have in the recession.
Praise for workers
Parker said the announcement made Friday “a tough
day” for that reason. The
mayor has been beset by budget challenges almost from
the day she took office, raising water rates more than 40
percent, as well as other fees,
and cutting services such as
library hours and jobs, even
in the public safety arena.
The Houston Police Department detailed more than
$15 million in cuts this week,
including the need to have police complete administrative
tasks that were performed
by civilians who have left or
been fired.
Parker praised the Houston Organization of Public
Employees, which she said
volunteered the idea as a way
to stave off cuts next year that
could be far more dramatic.
“We realize that it’s time
for us to do our part,” said
HOPE President Melvin
Hughes, who said he planned
to take a furlough. “A few
days off, that’s going to hurt
us. But we will have a job.”
[email protected]
Reinvention is urged
years after 2014.
“The current Medicaid
system is financially unsustainable for states and the
federal government,” Perry
said.
State Rep. John Zerwas,
R-Richmond, who passed the
2009 legislation calling for
the study, said the report
should end discussion of opting out of Medicaid unless
Congress makes changes.
“It clearly shows the economic and human casualty
that would result from quoteunquote opting out of Medicaid is not a viable option,”
Zerwas said. “What we need
to look at doing is reinvent
the whole program.”
The report, by the Texas
Health and Human Services
Commission and the Texas
Department of Insurance,
said state and federal expenditures for Medicaid will be
an estimated $30 billion in
the fiscal year that begins
Sept. 1, 2011. That represents
a 170 percent increase over
the $11 billion in 2000.
The report said Medicaid
now “consumes more than
25 percent of the state budget
and increasingly strains funding available for other budget
priorities.” It said increases
in Medicaid spending over
time are “unsustainable.”
Undermine spending
Opting out of Medicaid
would undermine 15 percent
of all personal health care
spending in Texas. According
to the report, Medicaid:
Z Assists two-thirds of
Texans who are in nursing
homes.
Z Covers half the births in
the state.
Z Provides billions of dollars to hospitals to cover the
cost of care for indigents,
uninsured Texans and illegal
immigrants.
The companion CHIP program pays for health care for
3.8 million low-income children every month.
Texas also would lose
$15 billion in federal matching funds for client services
while its taxpayers continue
to pay for the program in
other states. Texas hospitals
could lose $2.3 billion in federal funding if the state left
Medicaid, but could see an
increase of $4 billion a year
in uncompensated emergency
room care.
2.6 million would lose
If the state opted out of
Medicaid, the report said,
2.6 million additional Texans
could lose health care coverage, but the state’s emergency
room hospitals still would be
required to provide safety-net
care without compensation.
The report said a drain on
the state Medicaid and CHIP
programs is medical services
provided to noncitizens, both
undocumented immigrants
and legal permanent residents
who are financially eligible
for services. The report said
such services cost the system
$520.4 million in 2009.
That included 36,200
pregnant women receiving
prenatal care and 15,000 children who are legal permanent
residents. Emergency room
services are given to more
than 10,000 immigrant patients a month, costing about
$309 million. The payments
to hospitals are made in lump
sums for indigent care rather
than Medicaid covering individual patients.
The report said Texas
should insist that the federal
government pay for 100 per-
cent of the medical care of
illegal immigrants.
The report also called for a
fairer system of allocating federal Medicaid dollars. It noted
that Texas has 10 percent of
the nation’s population living
in poverty and 13 percent of
the nation’s medically uninsured, but receives less than 7
percent of the federal Medicaid dollars nationally.
Cuts to some programs
Zerwas said the report
removes the biggest portion
of Medicaid from the budget
debate, but he said there still
will be consideration of cuts
to Medicaid programs that are
not entitlements.
For instance, he said, there
are home health care programs that keep elderly people out of nursing homes that
could be cut.
Zerwas said the trade-off
could be that cutting that
program would force more
elderly people into highercost nursing home care where
Medicaid would pay for their
care.
State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said the
report shows opting out of
Medicaid would cost the state
more money to provide fewer
services.
Coleman said he believes
the push to opt out of Medicaid was done to make cuts
to the non-entitlement portions of Medicaid seem less
drastic.
“Gov. Rick Perry’s real
motive is to make other cuts
to the Medicaid program seem
more palatable,” Coleman
said in a statement. “Cutting
optional programs would also
devastate Texans served by
Medicaid.”
[email protected]
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SPOTTY RAIN, HIGH 80, LOW 61 / PAGE B10 YAO TO MISS AT LEAST ONE WEEK / PAGE C1
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 , 2010
Refugees from a town mired in gang warfare
can only flee — but still fear — for their lives
83
In the eye of the storm
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
C I U DA D M I G U E L A L E M A N,
M e x i c o — More than 300 men,
women and children from the
colonial ranching town of Ciudad Mier, a 10-minute drive
from Texas, have taken refuge in the Lion’s Club in this
small city on the Rio Grande
— fleeing for their lives from
the gangland killers called the
Zetas.
The refugees deserted Mier
en masse during the past week
after Zetas attacked in force to
wrest it back from rival thugs
of the so-called Gulf Cartel
narcotics smuggling organiza-
tion. Businesses and houses
were burned, refugees say, and
innocents murdered. Government forces have not yet reacted, they say.
“Either the government
doesn’t want to act or they are
waiting until the bands kill
off one another,” said a refuPlease see REFUGE, Page A18
Rio
Grande
Zapata
Map
area
Falcon
Reservoir
MEXICO
TEXAS
Ciudad
Mier
10 mi.
Roma
Ciudad
Miguel
Alemán
CHRONICLE
P U B L I C D I S P L AY O F G R AT I T U D E F O R V E T S
HELD IN HIGH REGARD
ERIC KAYNE PHOTOS : F O R T H E C H R O N I C L E
BIG BANNER: The Reagan High School ROTC hoists a giant American flag Thursday during the Houston Veterans Day parade.
I
T might have been a cloudy and rainy
Thursday, but that didn’t deter those
who came out for the annual Houston
Salutes American Heroes Veterans Day
Commemoration and Parade. Houston Mayor
Annise Parker added a new element to this
year’s program by partnering with the City’s
Office of Veterans Affairs to host the first
AT&T Veterans Job Fair. The downtown parade
traveled Smith Street between Texas and Lamar.
ALL SET: Felix Sivcoski, left, Nobleton Jones and Eddie Sanchez
GALLERY: See more Veterans
Day photos at chron.com
of the VFW District 4 Ceremonial Detail stack arms before the
annual Veterans Day parade downtown.
Slain Good Samaritan ‘always tried to help’
@ Man is shot trying to aid woman
who was being attacked by a robber
the shelter recently. It’s what
motivated him to stand up to
bullies picking on others in
school.
And that same concern
prompted the 24-year-old to
intervene Thursday morning
By CINDY GEORGE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Sam Irick always had a
weak spot for the underdog.
That’s what moved him
to choose a mixed stray from
when an armed purse snatcher attacked a woman outside
a gas station in Houston’s
Meyerland area. Irick suffered a fatal gunshot wound
to the chest. The robber got
away, but the woman wasn’t
harmed.
“There are instances in the
past that he’s done things like
this and I’ve fussed at him,”
his mother Randi Wood said
late Thursday. “He always
tried to help people. It’s just
him. This makes so much
sense.”
The death shocked Irick’s
family, but the circumstances
did not.
“That was his character,”
said stepfather, Lawrence
Please see SHOOTING, Page A15
¬ ¬ ¬*
HAIR CASTS
DOUBT ON
MAN’S GUILT
@ Only physical
evidence against
inmate executed
in 2000 probably
came from victim
By ALLAN TURNER,
CINDY HORSWELL
and MIKE TOLSON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A strand of light-colored
hair prosecutors insisted
linked career criminal Claude
Jones to the robbery-murder
of a San Jacinto County liquor store owner likely came
from the victim, not from the
accused killer, DNA testing
revealed Thursday.
The new DNA testing came
one decade after Jones’ lawyer filed an unsuccessful execution-eve plea to then-Gov.
George W. Bush to grant a 30day stay so that such high-tech
testing could be performed.
Jones, 60, was executed on
Dec. 7, 2000, for the November
1989 murder of Allen Hilzendager during the stickup of a
Point Blank package store.
Jones consistently maintained that he was innocent of
the crime.
The tests do not offer conclusive proof of Jones’ innocence but raise questions
about his conviction, which
was largely based on the hair
fragment, the only physical
evidence against him.
Thursday’s announcement
came as vindication to Jones’
son, Houston associate engineer Duane Jones, 50, who
NEWSMAKERS
STELLAR
EVENING
Latin Grammys put
spotlight on
stars from
three
continents.
STORY
ON PAGE A2
HOUSTON BELIEF
UNITED
INSONG
Kathy Taylor and
Windsor Village’s
church choir sing
for a live concert CD.
STORY ON PAGE F6
growing up and how he would lead
By RICHARD S. DUNHAM
and STEWART M. POWELL
In George
W. Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points, Texas is portrayed
warmly as the place that
WA S H I N G TO N —
shaped the future president
and his conservative worldview.
He fondly remembers his
childhood in Midland and his
time as owner of the Texas
Rangers baseball team. He
writes kindly about the Texas
INSIDE
WE RECYCLE
Business. . . . D1
Comics . . . . .E10
Crossword . . .E9
Directory. . . . A4
Editorials . . . B8
Horoscopes .E11
Lottery . . . . . A2
Movies . . . . . .E4
Obituaries. . . B5
TV . . . . . . . . . .E8
A GUIDING FORCE
Faith was an underlying theme of
his tenure, Bush says. PAGE F8
was reunited with his father
only after the elder man found
himself on death row.
“I was 98 percent sure
of what he was telling me,”
Duane Jones said of the convicted killer’s claim of innocence, “but now I believe him
100 percent. He was railroaded. He did not shoot that man.
I think not only am I owed an
apology, but so is everybody in
the whole state of Texas.”
Bush’s decision to reject
Please see JONES, Page A15
Crude oil
prices up;
so is pain
at pump
@ $100 a barrel
may be within
reach as industry
bounces back
By BRETT CLANTON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Crude oil prices are creeping higher again, with some
experts predicting a return to
$100 a barrel soon, in a trend
that could be a boon to Houston’s vast energy economy
but a pain for consumers
stuck with the bills.
Prices continued their ascent Thursday, briefly hitting
their highest point in two
years — and almost touching
$90 a barrel — before closing
unchanged from Wednesday.
The recent run-up comes
as a Federal Reserve stimulus
program weakens the value
of the dollar, spurring investors to shift money to commodities, and global energy
demand resumes growth. The
spike, which arrives after
many months of relative calm
in crude markets, already is
pushing pump prices higher
for Americans.
Analysts differ on whether
crude prices have peaked for
now or will continue to rise.
“I think we could see a
break of $90 and a possible
test of $100 over the next
month or two,” said Matt
Smith, analyst with Summit
Energy in Louisville, Ky., who
sees further momentum from
the weak dollar and strengthening economy.
Please see OIL, Page A18
N
EWLYWED
Sabrina Klinge,
27, a passenger
aboard the crippled
Carnival Splendor
cruise ship, leaves the
terminal Thursday in
San Diego after three
days at sea without
running water, hot
meals or electricity.
political cadre that followed
him to Washington, including
Margaret Spellings, who became his secretary of education; Midland oil buddy Don
Evans, the future secretary of
commerce; and his two closest advisers, Karen Hughes
and Karl Rove. He also waxes
nostalgic about the Democratic lieutenant governor
who became his dear friend
and mentor, Bob Bullock.
But the 497-page book
Please see BUSH, Page A15
CLOSER LOOK AT CASE
A timeline from 1989 murder to
recent DNA testing. PAGE A15
It wasn’t
a typical
honeymoon
In Bush book, praise for (some) Texans
@ He writes that state shaped his life
inpf qqe j onf me j hqfee
JAE C. HONG : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
STORY ON PAGE A3
A18
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
REFUGE:
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬
Thousands flee as gangs battle for control
gee, who spoke on the condition his name not be used out
of fear of the gunmen.
The Zetas began attacking Mier just hours after the
killing by Mexican marines
last Friday of Gulf Cartel boss
Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas-
Guillen, known everywhere
as Tony Tormenta, or Tony
Storm. Officials on both sides
of the border have warned
that Tony Tormenta’s demise
is all but certain to unleash
havoc as rivals fight to replace
him.
Events in Ciudad Mier
Crude endures
some wild swings
OIL:
CHARGING BACK
The price of oil is reaching levels not seen since the
economic crisis stopped a run-up to triple digits in
2008. Prices at the pump tend to track crude oil.
CRUDE OIL
GASOLINE
Price per barrel*
Price per gallon**
$150
$4.00
July 3, 2008
$145.29
120
July 17,
2008
$3.96 Thursday
$2.66
3.50
Thursday
$87.81
90
3.00
2.50
2.00
60
1.50
0
2008
2009
Jan. 1,
2009
$1.43
1.00
Dec. 19,
2008
$33.87
30
Friday, November 12, 2010
0.50
2010
0
Sources: New York Mercantile Exchange; AAA Texas
But Alfred Luaces, vice
president of Purvin & Gertz in
Houston, believes the dollar’s
value has likely bottomed-out
and that crude prices will
soften from current levels.
“We think for the moment, it’s probably gone high
enough, and there’s going to
be some sell-off,” he said.
On Thursday, crude oil
for December delivery settled
unchanged at $87.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures at
one point reached $88.63, the
highest midday price since
Oct. 9, 2008.
Because two-thirds of the
cost for a gallon of gasoline
comes from crude oil, pump
prices have also been rising
along with oil.
2009
2010
** Weekly average Thursday price
for a gallon of regular in Houston,
according to survey by AAA Texas
* Weekly Friday closing price per barrel
of crude oil in futures trading on the
New York Mercantile Exchange
2008
JAY CARR : C H R O N I C L E
$2.92 a gallon, set Memorial
Day weekend, before the end
of the year, said Tom Kloza,
senior oil analyst with the Oil
Price Information Service in
Wall, N.J. In the spring, when
fuel demand is higher, prices
could hit $3.25 nationwide.
Forecasters with the U.S.
Energy Information Administration expect retail gasoline
to average $2.84 a gallon this
winter, 19 cents higher than a
year ago.
“Longer term, I don’t believe there is any question
that sometime this decade —
and I believe it will be later,
rather than sooner — we will
be paying $4 to $5 a gallon
for U.S. gasoline and diesel,”
Kloza said.
[email protected]
suggest that the already vicious conflict of the past nine
months between the Zetas
and Gulf Cartel, who were
allies for more than a dozen
years, seems ready to tip into
scorched-earth war.
Warnings
The people of Mier, and
those in neighboring towns
and villages, now writhe in
the jaws of the wolves.
“Everyone knew this was
coming,” said a Texas executive with extensive business
ties on this stretch of the
border. “There is a lack of
discipline that has crept into
the battle.”
No one wanted to be identified for this story out of fear
for their safety and lives.
Banners thrown up by the
Zetas across northeastern
Mexico last Saturday warned
that Tony Tormenta’s fate
awaits other “traitors.” Flyers passed out this week in
some towns invite Gulf Cartel
gunmen to switch sides.
“When the Gulf Cartel is
in charge, we move toward
them, when the Zetas are
in charge we move back,” a
refugee explained. “There is
really no choice.”
The nightmare began for
Mier’s 6,500 residents a decade ago when the Zetas, then
loyal to former Gulf Cartel
boss Osiel Cardenas — Tony’s
Storm’s brother — arrived to
take control.
Spiraling out of control
By all accounts, the Zetas
ran the town like their fief.
Townspeople and ranchers
say they were extorted. Government officials were told
what to do. If federal troops
came to town, as they did in
late August with an attack on
a Zeta base camp near Mier
that killed 28 alleged gangsters, it was only briefly.
What was an at least endurable torment became pure
terror at exactly 8 p.m. Feb. 22
when the Gulf Cartel gunmen
swept into Mier to reclaim it
from the Zetas, following the
groups’ falling out.
At dawn the next morning, gangsters travelling in
at least 40 SUVs and pickups attacked Mier’s police
headquarters, taking all the
Price at the pump up
The national average for
regular gasoline jumped in a
week from $2.81 to $2.86 a
gallon, AAA said Thursday.
In Houston, the average price
rose to $2.66, up from $2.61
last week, the motor club
said.
Until recently, crude prices had been steady for more
than a year, hovering between
$70 and $80 a barrel. Prices
remained stable and high by
historical standards even as
the economy limped and natural gas prices stalled at low
levels.
On Thursday natural gas
closed down 11.9 cents at
$3.93 per million British thermal units.
Crude’s pattern, however,
followed a period of wild
swings, in which oil shot to a
record close of $145.29 a barrel in July 2008 then plummeted several months later to
roughly $30 amid the global
financial crisis.
The recent uptick in prices
has revived concerns about
triple-digit oil and the negative ripple effects it could
have on the still-nascent economic recovery.
But Smith doubts a replay
of the last big run-up: “We’ve
sort of learned our lesson
from a couple of years ago.”
The Federal Reserve said
this month it will try to stimulate the economy by purchasing $600 billion in bonds
under a program called quantitative easing. The surge of
money is designed to reduce
interest rates and jump-start
the economy by spurring
lending, but it has weakened
the value of the dollar against
other currencies. This makes
crude, priced in dollars, a
more attractive investment
for holders of foreign currencies.
$3.25 a gallon in spring?
Analysts said the program
has been a bigger driver of recent oil price gains than stronger-than-expected
growth
in energy demand this year
around the globe, particularly
in China and other parts of
the developing world.
Generally, every $1 increase in the price of oil adds
about 2.5 cents per gallon
to the retail cost of gasoline,
Luaces said.
Pump prices could match
or top this year’s peak of
officers hostage, and stealing
the weapons they could find,
residents said. In a morning
of rampage, entire families
were kidnapped, nearly a dozen houses burned.
“Since that day there have
been other clashes, kidnappings and criminal acts,”
townspeople wrote in a sofar-unrequited plea for help
e-mailed to state and federal
officials. Ranching, the lifeblood of Mier’s legal economy,
has all but stalled, residents
say, because owners no longer
can get out to their pastures
for fear of the gunmen.
“The majority of the
ranches have been taken, destroyed, and are in the hands
of the armed people,” the email sent to officials said.
the last holdouts. This week,
as few as 500 people are living in Mier, refugees say.
Those in the Lion’s Club
say they have no idea when
they can go home again. Soldiers and marines are posted
in Miguel Aleman.
But danger lurks just beyond city limits. And there
are no troops or police guarding those in the shelter. A
Zeta attack can come at any
[email protected]
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Few residents remain
More than 100 local residents remain missing, presumably kidnapped by the
bands.
Mier’s schools were shuttered. Local officials moved
their offices to Miguel Aleman. Baptisms, weddings and
funerals were held elsewhere.
People shut themselves in
their houses as night fell and
didn’t leave again till the sun
was well above the trees.
In early May, suspected
Zetas hung a man in the small
park in front of city hall.
Using a chain saw they cut
off the man’s arms and legs
while he was still alive. They
left a sign with the swinging
body threatening the local
Gulf Cartel boss.
The victim, a local petty
thief, townspeople say, swung
from the tree for four hours
before police gathered the
courage to cut him down.
Three weeks ago, the Zetas
attacked again, torching the
police station and three new
patrol cars parked in front
of it.
Mier is a border town and
many families go back generations here on both sides of
the Rio Grande. Even before
last week’s attacks, officials
estimated half the town’s residents had fled to the United
States or elsewhere in Mexico.
The people now sleeping
on the floor of Miguel Aleman’s Lion’s Club are nearly
time, they say.
With nightfall the fear returns and crouches in the
refugee’s bellies until the sun
rises once again.
“The Zetas are a lot like
cockroaches,” said the Texas
executive. “When the lights
go on they scatter. When the
lights go out, they are in there
eating.”
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PARTLY CLOUDY, HIGH 92, LOW 76 / PAGE B14 UH, A&M OPEN WITH EASY WINS / PAGES C4-5
SU NDAY, SEP TEMBER 5, 2010
Troubles
contradict
former
surgeon’s
persona
S Accusations of
abuse clash with
family-man image
built by owner of
Brown hand clinic
¬¬¬
t` _| w ` } w n`__
MODERN-DAY MOBSTERS
Juan Garcia Abrego:
Imprisoned.
A U.S. citizen
serving multiple life
sentences.
Ramon Arellano
Felix: Deceased.
Killed in gangster
gunfight in
Mazatlan, Mexico.
By TODD ACKERMAN
Edgar “La Barbie”
Valdez Villarreal:
Captured. A Laredoborn Texan arrested
in Mexico.
Francisco Javier
Arellano Felix:
Imprisoned. Captured by DEA while
on a fishing boat.
Osiel Cardenas
Guillen: Imprisoned.
Extradited to
Houston and serving
time until 2024.
DEAD
Vicente Carrillo
Fuentes: On the run.
Head of the Juarez
cartel, wanted in the
U.S.
S Cornyn’s effort
is paying off for
Senate campaign
OR ALIVE:
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The day before Michael
Brown turned himself in Aug.
24 on a charge accusing him
of beating his fourth wife,
the Brown Hand Center’s
marketing department sprang into
action.
The
department pulled from Exclusively
the airwaves some in your print
of the advertising
edition
that has helped
make Brown such a wealthy
and familiar figure in Houston, the former surgeon who,
surrounded by his wife and
kids, promises his carpal tunnel clinics “will care for you
just as I care for my own
family.”
“That’s not a message
Brown wants out there right
now,” said Partha Krishnamurthy, director of the University of Houston’s Institute
for Healthcare Marketing.
“The irony wouldn’t be lost
on many people.”
That irony has been the
dominant theme of Brown’s
life and career for the past
decade. He has made a lucrative business by portraying
himself as a medical pioneer
dedicated to principles of family, compassion and kindness.
But in reality, he appears pos-
By STEWART POWELL
and YANG WANG
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
THE MOST WANTED
WARLORDS IN THE
HEMISPHERE
Their names change, but all meet the
same end — dead, in jail or on the run
By DANE SCHILLER
O
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
NE by one, Mexico’s notorious warlords have come
and gone — household
names and nightmares
with a modern-day twist.
Instead of Al Capone or John Gotti,
they are drug cartel kingpins with
private armies and nicknames like
Shorty, Blondie, Friend Killer and most
recently, Texas-born La Barbie.
Part terrorist. Part rock star. Part
legend. But eventually they all meet
Please see BROWN, Page A17
GOP
RAIDS
DEMS’
DONOR
LIST
the same fate, ending up
dead, in prison or on the
run for life.
They share notoriety
south of the border as
Exclusively
in your print well as across it — having
edition
pushed illegal drugs
through Texas and other
states, some ending up in shackles on
extradition flights headed to Houston
or beyond.
“I have watched this for 20
years. There are no old, retired drug
traffickers,” said Drug Enforcement
Please see KINGPINS, Page A19
INSIDE
WA S H I N G T O N — Tony
Podesta is one of the bestconnected rainmakers in the
nation’s capital, with a web
of personal contacts stretching back 42 years
and six Democratic presidential candidates.
His brother John Exclusively
was Bill Clinton’s in your print
White
House
edition
chief of staff and
an adviser on President Barack Obama’s transition team.
But in an uncharacteristic
twist this year, people at Tony
Podesta’s powerhouse lobbying firm have chosen to donate
$32,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee to help its chairman, Sen.
John Cornyn of Texas, wrest
control of the Senate from the
Democrats.
Since Obama’s election,
the political action committees and employees of 126
businesses that had donated money to Senate Democrats in the 2008 campaign
have switched all or most of
their 2010 contributions to
the Republicans, according to
an analysis of Federal Election Commission reports by
the Houston Chronicle. That
list is led by prominent Wall
Street firms but includes energy companies, manufacturers,
lobbying operations and other
groups with a monetary stake
Please see MONEY, Page A17
Rafael Caro Quintero: Imprisoned in Mexico.
Wanted in the U.S. in the slaying of DEA
agent Enrique Camarena.
Joaquin “El Chapo”
Guzman: On the run.
Head of the Sinaloa
cartel, wanted in the
U.S.
Arturo Beltran
Leyva: Deceased.
Killed in shootout
with Mexican Navy.
Heriberto Lazcano:
On the run. Head
of the Zetas cartel,
wanted in the U.S.
SPORTS
BIG NAMES ON
THE BIG SCREEN
Will this be the
season the Texans
make the playoffs?
The stage appears
to be set. PAGES C9-17
Veteran actors are dominating the fall
movie lineup. A preview of what’s to
come — complete with Harry Potter for
the kids. PAGE 10, ZEST
CITY & STATE
INSIDE
Wildlife officials are hatching a plan to
release whooping
cranes back
into Louisiana’s marshes. PAGE B1
Lottery . . . A2
Movies. . ZEST
Obituaries . B6
Outlook . . .B10
Star . . . . . . G1
TV . . . . . ZEST
NICK de la TORRE : i { i h
Quarterback Taylor McHargue, left, and
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vyb fkm m rpso qpjg a}` PAGE C1
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PAGE A4
ZEST
THE SIGHS OF
OFTEXAS
TEXAS
GOOD
ON PAPER
Business . . D1
Crossword . G5
Dear Abby . G8
Directory . . A2
Editorials. .B13
Horoscopes G8
SHIFT IN POLITICAL WIND?
A review of 10 key races that will
tell us where America is heading
in the 2010 midterm elections.
Ismael “El Mayo”
Zambada: On the
run. Co-leader of
the Sinaloa cartel,
wanted in the U.S.
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Sunday, September 5, 2010
¬¬¬
THE JUMP PAGE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A19
They become targets, just
like U.S. gangsters did in 1920s
KINGPINS:
Administration agent Steve
Robertson, of the Houston
Division. “Violence is the
nature of their business.”
Now, nearly two decades
since the Mexicans took
over from Colombian Pablo
Escobar — the world’s first
true drug kingpin — a review
of Mexico’s top gangsters
over the years traces their
rise, reign and nearly
inescapable fall.
Many have been sent to
the U.S., landing in federal
courtrooms from Texas to
California to either stand trial
on drug trafficking charges
or take a deal: Snitch on
cartel comrades — and forfeit
some of the riches earned
through drugs and blood — in
exchange for leniency.
Borderland butchery
About a dozen major
Mexican drug traffickers
are in American prisons
and many more of their
underlings are imprisoned on
both sides of the border.
Hundreds are vying to
work their way up the ranks
to take their places. But times
are changing. The celebrity
status may be wearing out as
an estimated 28,000 people
have died in Mexico’s drug
war since 2006.
Gangsters have taken
butchery to a new level by
hacking off heads and body
parts, killing rivals by the
dozens at a time, and breaking
the oldest code of organized
crime: Killing family
members and civilians.
The most infamous
of warlords on the run is
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman,
whose nickname translates
as “Shorty.” He has defied
all odds by breaking out of
a Mexican prison nearly a
decade ago and taking his
Sinaloa Cartel to the top of
Mexico’s organized crime
world.
Guzman is the most
wanted man in Mexico and
rubbed salt in President
Felipe Calderon’s wounds
in 2009 by landing on
Forbes magazine’s list of
billionaires.
He is wanted in the U.S.
on drug trafficking and
conspiracy charges, and
there’s a reward of up to
$5 million for his capture.
DEAD,
IN JAIL
OR ON
THE
RUN
The
celebrity
status of
gangsters
is wearing
off as
violence
escalates.
Amado Carrillo
Fuentes: Deceased.
Died from complications following
plastic surgery.
band of brothers who led
the Tijuana Cartel, was
arrested in 2007 by the Coast
Guard on a boat south of
the Mexican coastal resort
of Cabo San Lucas. The
playboy of the family, he
rose to power when few were
left to take the helm. He is
imprisoned in California.
Miguel Trevino Morales,
known as “Comandante 40,”
is a Zetas boss believed to be
responsible for much of the
mayhem on the South TexasMexico border in recent
years. He is a fugitive from
charges in the U.S. and has a
$5 million price on his head.
The same reward
looms over other top-tier
traffickers, including former
soldier Heriberto Lazcano
and Antonio Ezequiel
Cardenas Guillen, whose
brother was the Gulf Cartel’s
chief leader.
Osiel Cardenas Guillen,
considered the most
diabolical of drug bosses,
once put a gold-plated
AK-47 to the heads of two
U.S. federal agents working
an operation in Mexico.
He was arrested by
the Mexican military in a
shootout. After doing time
in a Mexican prison, from
which he continued to run
his cartel, he was extradited
to Houston.
He offers his fellow
gangsters perhaps the
best example for selfpreservation. By cooperating
with the U.S. government,
and offering information
secreted in sealed court
documents, he took a deal to
Hector “El Guero”
Palma Salazar:
Imprisoned.
Extradited to the
U.S. from Mexico.
Antonio Ezequiel
Cardenas Guillen:
On the run. Wanted
in the U.S., has
$5 million bounty
on his head.
do time in prison and go free
14 years from now.
“You become a target, just
like the gangsters from 1920s
Prohibition in the United
States,” said Larry Karson, a
retired Customs Service agent
who is now a criminal justice
lecturer at the University of
Houston-Downtown.
Karson said the
government went after
Al Capone because he
was getting too big to be
tolerated: “I believe the
president of the United
States himself said, ‘Get
Capone,’ because he became
bigger in the public eye than
many people thought was
appropriate for a gangster.”
Mexico’s war continues
The Capone of cartels was
Colombia’s Escobar, known
for his overwhelming wealth
and power. He also spent
millions on taking care of the
poor, who in turn took care
of him.
At one point Escobar
surrendered and agreed to
imprisonment in his own
customized, luxurious
prison, before deciding later
to escape.
He died in a rooftop
shootout in Medellin.
Officers posed for photos
standing over his body.
And so it goes in Mexico,
where President Calderon
has continued his all-out
war on the cartels and noted
in his annual state of the
union address that three
major traffickers have been
captured or killed in the last
year.
Miguel Trevino
Morales: On the
run. Has $5 million
bounty on his head
and is wanted in
the U.S.
Edgar Valdez Villarreal,
who was born in Laredo and
is nicknamed “La Barbie” for
his light hair and eyes, was
arrested in Mexico last week.
He did not look fearful of his
fate and even smirked when
paraded in front of reporters
while flanked by masked
federal agents.
His Houston lawyer, Kent
Schaffer, said he’d been
working for his client for
months to explore options
should he be captured.
He wouldn’t discuss
negotiations.
Beto Cardenas, a Houston
lawyer from Laredo who
went to school with La
Barbie, said it steams him
that anyone would look up
to the mobsters who ride
herd over the borderland
bloodshed.
“Celebrity status for
criminals is based on a
path of destruction and
greed,” Cardenas said.
“No comparison of heroic,
folklore or legendary status
is justified. Heroes save
lives, they do not take them;
legends earn respect with
honest, hard work completed
each day for the betterment
of all.”
Or, put another way by the
DEA’s Robertson, “These are
not Robin Hoods. They are
hard-core, violent criminals
— animals who should be put
in a cage.”
[email protected]
ROBERT F. BUKATY : A S S O C I AT E D P R E S S
A blow to business
A
couple braves gusts in Lubec, Maine, as
Tropical Storm Earl blows through on
Saturday. In the end, the worst damage in
New England was to seasonal businesses hoping
to end summer on a high note. The storm,
far less intense than feared, brushed past the
Northeast and dumped rain on Cape Cod, Mass.,
but caused little damage and left clear, blue skies.
It finally made landfall Saturday in Nova Scotia,
toppling some trees and knocking out power.
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Keeping it in the family
Amado Carrillo Fuentes,
known as the “Lord of the
Skies,” took the most unique
path to his demise. He died
from complications of plastic
surgery intended to make
him less recognizable.
The doctors who did the
deed were killed and their
bodies stuffed in drums.
His brother now runs
the business, but the Juarez
cartel, based in Ciudad
Juarez across the border from
El Paso, has shifted away
from the smuggling of planes
that gave Lord of the Skies
his name and moved on to
the cartels’ new normal of
barbaric crimes.
Amado Carrillo’s
contemporary, Juan Garcia
Abrego, known as “El Señor”
among other names, was
the first Mexican drug boss
to make the FBI’s Ten Most
Wanted list. He refused a
plea bargain and was found
guilty in a Houston court
on an array of conspiracy,
drug trafficking and money
laundering charges. He
is serving multiple life
sentences in the federal
Supermax prison in
Colorado.
His Gulf Cartel, which is
based out of Monterrey near
South Texas, gave birth to
perhaps the most merciless
thugs of them all, the Zetas.
An assassination hit squad
that grew into a full-fledged
cartel, the Zetas introduced
beheadings and other such
savageries to Mexico’s drug
war and are blamed for the
slaughter of 72 immigrants
last month on a ranch.
Just to name a few.
Price on their heads
“You can go on and on
and on. Taking out the head
(cartel leader) is not enough,”
Steve McCraw, head of the
Texas Department of Public
Safety, said of destroying
a cartel. “You have to take
out an entire organization,
and you’ll need to take out
the ability of the entire
organization to profit.”
In fact, not one cartel has
been eradicated.
Francisco Javier Arellano
Felix, who comes from a
After You Serve Our Nation
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STORMS, HIGH 93, LOW 78 / PAGE B10 PITCHING POPS ASTROS OVER CARDINALS / PAGE C1
WED NESDAY, SEP TEMBER 1 , 2010
¬ ¬ ¬*
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IMMIGRATION
A M E R I C A AT WA R
DANIEL AGUILAR : G E T T Y I M A G E S
ON DISPLAY: Edgar “La
Barbie” Valdez Villarreal is
paraded before the media in
Mexico City on Tuesday.
How did
a Texan
get to top
of cartel?
FEW
Chapter in Iraq closes as FIRMS
battles near, far remain FINED
OVER
HIRING
V New program
finds employers
that hire illegal
workers, but isn’t
penalizing them
By SUSAN CARROLL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
V Urban legends
swirl as officials
in Mexico try to
trace his rise in
the underworld
T I M S L O A N : A F P/ G E T T Y I M A G E S
Before addressing the nation Tuesday night from the Oval Office, President
Barack Obama flew to Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, to greet returning Iraq war veterans.
WELCOME BACK:
By DANE SCHILLER
and JASON BUCH
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Borderland folk songs immortalize him as smart, ruthless, powerful and rich.
From the Rio Grande to
Mexico’s Valley of the Beheaded, there is no shortage
of stories about “La Barbie,”
the top-level drug trafficker
born in Laredo and arrested
Monday in Mexico.
Was Edgar Valdez Villarreal really a star high school
football player or just an average guy whose coach nicknamed him La Barbie for
his light eyes and fair-haired
complexion that set him apart
in the Texas border town?
And how did an American
who got his start selling dime
bags of marijuana have the
connections to go on to lead
a team of assassins, let alone
climb to the summit of Mexico’s criminal underworld?
Please see LA BARBIE , Page A6
V Declaring combat over, Obama
turns focus to economy, Afghanistan
By MARGARE TALEV
and WARREN P. STROBEL
M c C L AT C H Y N E W S PA P E R S
WA S H I N G TO N — Declaring the American combat
mission in Iraq over after
more than seven years, Pres-
BY THE NUMBERS
U.S. troop levels:
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ident Barack Obama also
sought to use the milestone
Tuesday night to buy patience from voters on the
economy, and patience from
fellow Democrats on the war
in Afghanistan.
“Through this remark-
Casualties:
V Confirmed U.S. military
deaths as of Aug. 31, 2010:
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able chapter in the history of
the United States and Iraq,
we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn
the page,” Obama said in his
18-minute address, just the
second he has delivered from
the Oval Office.
Turning his attention to
the issue dominant in the
American public’s mind two
months before November’s
Cost:
elections, Obama suggested
that the transition will allow him and the Democratic
majority in Congress to focus
more on the struggling U.S.
economy.
Restoring the economy
and jobs for millions of
Americans is “our most urgent task,” Obama said, and
“in the days to come, it must
Please see OBAMA, Page A14
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V More than $744 billion,
Iraqi oil output
V Estimated prewar
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Immigration
inspectors
poring over the hiring paperwork of a California company
last summer found that 262
employees — a whopping 93
percent of the total workforce
— had “suspect” documents
on file.
At an Illinois service company, auditors found dubious
documents for nearly 8 in 10
of its 200-plus employees.
Inspectors examining records at a Texas manufacturing firm found suspicious
paperwork for more than half
of the 107 employees on the
payroll.
But the companies didn’t
pay a penny in fines. None of
the employers was led away in
handcuffs. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement officials didn’t even issue them a
formal warning, the agency’s
internal records show.
Instead, they were instructed to purge their payrolls of illegal immigrants.
Armed with assurances that
the employees with suspect
documents were fired — or,
in the Texas case, “self-terminated” — the ICE auditors
closed the cases.
The cases are just a few
examples included in ICE’s
internal records on its audit initiative, an enforcement
program launched last July
Please see ICE, Page A6
City explores drilling
for gas below city parks
possible royalties
intrigue council
By BRADLEY OLSON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Several cash-strapped city
parks are poised to get an
injection of revenue from an
unusual source: natural gas
exploration.
City Council is expected
to vote today on a plan to
allow a company to search
for gas reserves underneath
Business . .
Comics . . .
Crossword .
Directory . .
Lottery . . .
INSIDE
D1
.E6
D5
A2
A2
Markets . . .
Movies. . . .
Obituaries .
Editorials. .
TV . . . . . . .
D7
.E2
B6
B8
.E4
Herman Brown, Brock and
Maxey parks, as well as a public works facility.
“We think there’s an opportunity to secure some funding
we wouldn’t normally have
access to, and we think it can
be done in an environmentally and community-sensitive
way,” said Andy Icken, the
city’s chief development officer.
Although any drilling
would take place only under
the surface of park grounds
and not on any park space,
Please see PARKS, Page A7
FLAVOR
CALLOF
NASA
EYE ON THE EYE: The eye of Hurricane Earl, seen from the International Space Station, as it steams across the Caribbean.
East Coast hunkers down for Earl To August:
FEMA warns residents along the Eastern Seaboard to
Bye, scorcher
prepare for evacuations as Hurricane Earl powers its
way across the Caribbean as a Category 4 storm.
Not since 1991 has such a forceful hurricane put
such a wide swath of the coast in its sights. PAGE A4
AMÉRICAS
A chef’s magic
kingdom for diners
hits River Oaks. PAGE
F1
*"&1
#& $'
STORM WATCH: Eric Berger tracks the
developments at blogs.chron.com/sciguy
#%
Houston hasn’t had
a warmer month than
the one just past in
more than a century of
record-keeping. PAGE B1
$
1
V Firm’s lease,
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*
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*-
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'( ',-0-)"+ /. "(!%
A6
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
ICE:
THE JUMP PAGE
¬¬¬
ICE AUDITS
Feds
insist
audits
getting
results
by Obama administration officials.
In the past, ICE had faced
criticism for raiding job sites
and rounding up large numbers of illegal immigrants for
deportation, but not necessarily building cases against
employers. With the audit
initiative, ICE aims to scrutinize the hiring records of
more businesses and impose
what top officials describe
as “tough” and “smart” employer sanctions.
But ICE audit records obtained recently through a
Freedom of Information Act
request show that the agency
has, in many instances, failed
to punish companies found
to have significant numbers
or high percentages of workers with questionable documents. In response to the
public records request, ICE
provided limited details on
about 430 audit cases listed
as “closed” by the agency
through February.
The records show inspectors identified more than
110 companies with suspect
documents, with nearly half
of those having questionable
paperwork for 10 or more
workers.
No employers arrested
In total, the agency ordered
14 companies to pay fines of
nearly $150,000, but noted
no employer arrests in connection with any of the cases.
ICE agents in Atlanta also
reached an agreement with a
manufacturing firm that had
questionable records on file
for 574 of its 1,187 employees.
The agreement allowed the
company to avoid criminal
prosecution on the condition
ICE field
office
Number of
employees
Industry
Atlanta
Manufacturing
Los
Angeles
Employees
with suspect
documents
Fines
Case
outcome
1,187
574
Unknown
Agriculture,
Forestry or
Fishing
281
262
$0
Chicago
Services
262
204
$0
ICE anticipated compliance after
being notified of employee terminations
Dallas
Construction
553
151
$0
Warning notice
Dallas
Construction
734
124
$0
Warning notice
Los
Angeles
Construction
368
117
$0
Warning notice
Baltimore Construction
209
98
$0
Warning notice
St. Paul
161
86
$0
Granted “adjusted compliance” *
Baltimore Services
267
72
$0
Warning notice
Detroit
135
65
$0
Compliance
Manufacturing
Manufacturing
Settlement reached, conditions unknown
Granted
“adjusted
compliance” *
Source: Immigration and Customs Enforcement audit records obtained in August through
a Freedom of Information Act request. ICE last updated the records in February.
that it complies with certain
ICE requirements, though
ICE would not provide additional details.
ICE also has refused to disclose the names or locations of
companies found through the
auditing process to have hired
illegal immigrants, saying the
businesses have a right to
“personal privacy.” The agency did, however, include the
location of the ICE field office
assigned to each case.
ICE officials insist the audits and the agency’s broader
strategy of aggressively pursuing employers are getting
results.
‘You need evidence’
They point to the fact that
this fiscal year the agency
has ordered businesses to pay
a record-setting $4.6 million
in civil penalties and has arrested more than 150 employers, managers or supervisors.
However, some of the arrests
stem from investigations going back several years. And
the fines reflect enforcement
actions that date as far back
as 2007, including $360,000
from the 2008 raid of a Houston rag factory and more than
$536,000 from a 2007 Ohio
chicken factory raid.
ICE did not have a breakdown of how much of the
$4.6 million or how many of
the arrests stemmed directly from the audit initiative,
which began in July 2009.
Brett Dreyer, the head of
ICE’s worksite enforcement
unit, said that ICE attempts
to determine which employers may have been duped into
unintentionally
accepting
fraudulent documents from
employees, and which ones
are “turning a blind eye” to
workers’ legal status.
“We look at each of these
cases to see if they’re doing
that, because that’s the main
purpose of this program —
check employers’ compliance
and make sure that they’re
obeying the law,” Dreyer said.
“But you need evidence. You
need facts. And if we don’t
have that, we can’t charge
them.”
Several gray areas
Immigration experts said
some cases that seem egregious on the surface, like the
company with 93 percent of
its workers providing suspect documents, may actually
have complied with the letter
of the law and not be subject
to penalties.
“You could have a vast majority of workers ultimately
be found to be in undocumented status and yet still
have a good faith employer
simply because of the way the
system works,” said Charles
Foster, a Houston immigration attorney who specializes
in employer compliance.
Foster said an employer
cannot require more than
a Social Security card that
looks “reasonably genuine”
BLOOMBERG NEWS
—
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of
Alaska conceded defeat to Republican primary challenger
Joe Miller, becoming the latest candidate to fall to a Tea
Party-backed newcomer.
In what may be the biggest upset so far this year,
Murkowski bowed out of the
race after failing to erase
Alaska
Miller’s lead from the Aug. 24
primary when absentee ballots were counted Tuesday.
Murkowski, 53, the Senate’s No. 4 Republican, became the latest in a series of
candidates backed by GOP
leaders to be rejected by primary voters. Tea Party candidates have defeated party
insiders in Nevada, Kentucky,
Colorado and Utah.
The little-known and badly
outspent Miller was endorsed
by former Alaska Gov. Sarah
Palin and emerged from the
primary with a 1,668-vote
lead.
Officials posted updates
of the absentee ballot count
throughout the day. Though
Murkowski gained a few hundred votes, she never came
within 1,000 of Miller.
Downfall
began when his
mentor was killed
LA BARBIE:
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BVCPM= @L MC?G@FMM; RI9J ;V;?MO9 N@OVCMB9;A
Murkowski concedes U.S. Senate race in Alaska
A N C H O R AG E ,
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
* One step below a formal warning
CHRONICLE
on its face, or he risks committing an unfair employment practice.
Cost of doing business
In July 2009, ICE officials
announced plans to serve
654 companies with notice
of plans to audit their employment paperwork. In November, ICE announced plans
to target an additional 1,000
companies.
In the two rounds of audits, inspectors examined
more than 221,000 I-9 forms
and identified 22,155 “suspect documents,” which can
signal an employee is in the
country illegally and lacks
work authorization, or that
the employer made a simple
clerical error on the forms,
ICE officials said.
But critics charge that
ICE’s new strategy is soft
on both illegal immigrants,
who generally are not placed
into deportation proceedings,
and employers who can claim
ignorance about fake documents and avoid penalties.
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, RSan Antonio, said the audits
can be an effective part of an
overall enforcement strategy,
but that many employers consider them just a cost of doing
business.
“They are not an effective
deterrent on their own, and
do nothing to bring justice in
egregious cases,” Smith said.
Immigrant advocates estimated the audits, frequently
referred to as “silent raids,”
have cost thousands of workers their jobs. Angela Kelley,
with the Center for American
Progress, said the strategy
appears to be more thoughtful than the worksite enforcement raids of the previous administration, but the impact
is “equally as devastating.”
“You have this drip, drip,
drip of I-9 enforcement audits
all over the country, and it
has the same effect — people
don’t come to work the next
day,” she said.
[email protected]
“There is a lot of speculation as to what relationships
he had and what relationships
led up to where he is now,”
said Laredo police spokesman
Jose Baeza. “He was able to
do enough to gain the trust.
There is something to be
said, that he is an Americanborn person who reached that
rank.”
‘High-impact blow’
Valdez, 37, is nearly a celebrity of sorts in parts of
Laredo as well as Mexico.
People tell stories about running into him in a bar. Or dating his sister.
But Tuesday, the Texan
turned Mexican mobster was
paraded before the cameras in
Mexico City sporting no less
than a green Ralph Lauren Big
Pony polo shirt and a slight
grin on a slightly bearded
face. Government spokesmen
said 1,200 officers took part
in the culminating moments
of a yearlong effort to capture
Valdez.
The arrest dealt “a highimpact blow to organized
crime,” said Alejandro Poire,
a spokesman for President
Felipe Calderon’s national security team. Poire said Valdez
had ties to gangs operating in
the United States and Central
and South America.
Among his drug gangster
rivals, he was widely despised, known for viciously
ordering the decapitation of
his enemies.
Messages to him have been
carved into bodies and painted on sheets and hung near
the mutilated corpses of his
soldiers.
“You’ll have to find another lover. I’ve killed this
one for you,” read a placard
for Valdez that was recently
left with three men hanging
from a bridge.
War with Gulf Cartel
Ramon Eduardo Pequeno,
a commissioner with Mexico’s federal police, offered a
résumé of Valdez’s criminal
life.
He says Valdez was first
arrested on marijuana charges in Missouri nearly 20 years
ago. While he was briefly in
custody in Mexico City years
later, he met Arturo Beltran
Leyva, who became his narco
godfather.
Valdez was later tasked
with going to war with the
Gulf Cartel along the border
in Nuevo Laredo for control
of lucrative smuggling routes
into Texas. He led a team
known as The Blacks, a squad
that enforced the orders of
cartel boss Beltran.
The fighting tore apart
the very region where Valdez
grew up, and the city of Nuevo
Laredo has yet to recover.
He later became the chief
of security for Beltran, and
was among the inner circle in
2007 during a peace meeting
of the leadership of each of
Mexico’s major cartels, according to Pequeno.
The world apparently began to come apart for Valdez
last December when Beltran
was killed in a gunbattle with
the Mexican military. Valdez
ended up not only fighting
Beltran’s surviving brother,
but also Mexican federal
agents as well as his longtime
crime rivals.
After Beltran was killed
by the Mexican military, his
pants were pulled down and
his corpse covered with money and jewelry before it was
photographed in images given
to news media.
Valdez’s Houston lawyer,
Kent Schaffer, said his client has plenty of enemies in
Mexico.
“I think he’d be much
safer in an American facility,”
Schaffer said.
Trial venue unclear
Michele Leonhart, acting
head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,
applauded Valdez’s capture.
“Thanks to the diligence
and continued partnership of
our courageous counterparts
in the Mexican government,
the arrest ... shows that any
violent drug cartel leader is
within reach of the law,” she
said.
Valdez showed no signs
of ill treatment and had the
chance to answer reporters’
questions, but mutely declined to do so, according to
video posted on the Web by
the Mexican government.
He is in a maximum-security prison and it remains to
be seen whether he’ll be tried
in Mexico for charges there
or be shipped to the United
States to face trial.
Schaffer said he was told
the U.S. ambassador to Mexico requested that Valdez be
returned to the U.S., but officials would not confirm that.
“What will happen, I have
no clue,” Schaffer said. “It
sort of makes sense to have
the Americans deal with the
case.”
Valdez faces an array of
charges in the United States,
and was most recently indicted in Atlanta, where he is
accused of smuggling thousands of pounds of cocaine
into this country as well as
moving millions of dollars in
proceeds back into Mexico.
[email protected];
[email protected]