Minimum sentence was ten years, maximum was life. Lou Esper had planned both of these crimes too. He called her into the bedroom. Lee Chagra grossed more than $250,000 in 1972. His plan was to reindict Stricklin, and maybe Chagra too, under an almost unknown section of the 1970 Drug Control Act that spelled out the crime of continuing criminal enterprise, popularly known as the kingpin act. It took three days for an ingenious pulley apparatus to hoist the 100-pound bales to the top of the cliffs. He was really happy that all the money was gone and he had to work again. Hughes knew these had been hard times for his friend. El Pasos legions of smugglersdrug smugglers in particularmanage to get themselves arrested often enough to keep law practices like Lee Chagras busy and profitable. Lee gave Jack Stricklin, now out of prison, $1000 and passed out lesser amounts to other old friends. Out of the corner of his eye Lee could see the reporters scribbling furiously. Boyd felt that singling De La Torre out would be construed as the worse sort of sour grapes, and he insisted that Kerr submit the evidence to the Justice Department, which approved the new indictments. There is no way to calculate how all the damning publicity affected the careers of Sib Abraham and the others. If you scratched Stricklin deep enough, Kerr reasoned, you would find Chagra. During his tenure as magistrate, Boyd and Lee Chagra became friends, and when there was an opening for the job of U.S. attorney after Jimmy Carters election in 1976, Lee, Sib Abraham, and others supported Boyds appointment. It was only in 1970, after Senator John Tower and other ranking members of the Republican Party in Texas made personal pleas, that the staunch Republican lawyer agreed to accept a federal judgeship for the Western District of Texas. Sib remembered: Candidly, we were very, very successful. He got 30 years. His idea of a good time was going home to his wife and newborn son, Joseph, maybe tinkering with his stereo or waxing his speedboat, swimming or lifting weights. Jack Stricklin met him at the airport and drove him to the office. He was the black sheep, the all-star goof-up. I blocked the door with my body, Donna recalled, but he opened it enough to see the money.. When either of the Chagras sat at the blackjack table, he took all seven spots. Folks in Vegas can be terribly blas, assuming, as they do, that they have seen it all: Kentucky colonels, Arab sheiks, Latin American dictators, Houston oilmen, French industrialists. Ten smugglers, two airplanes, and four U-Haul trucks had been seized in the predawn trap. The shotgun murder of an Oklahoma gambler in El Paso some years earlier had convinced him that the Dixie Mafia was making a power play in El Paso, and he had instigated a controversial grand jury investigation. You ought to pay me fifteen hundred dollars an hour to entertain customers. Borrowing heavily from Kerrs own wording, Wood totally agreed: This request appears to be primarily an effort by the defense attorney to obtain reports of an investigation pertaining to him. A rigorous and lengthy investigation into the murder brought Jimmy Chagra front and center. Something about a will, about some large estate in California? They showed him a Xerox copy of the section of the law dealing with continuing criminal enterprise. Lee didnt say anything. Thats the way Lee wanted it. This friendship, the fact that the prosecutor and the judge were seen socializing so often, caused some lawyers to question Woods impartiality. Jo Annies own family, the Abrahams, had considerable wealth, and she continued to collect antiques and preserve an extravagant lifestyle. Jo Annie, Lees boyhood sweetheart and the wife who had seen him through law school and nineteen years of an emotionally charged marriage, met him at the airport. It was a partial victory for Leethe jury found De La Torre guilty of only one charge and he got the maximum, 5 years. He wanted to indict De La Torre on five counts of perjury in an attempt to add another 25 years to the sentencein effect, requiring him to defend his story to a second jury. They were all scammers, everyone he knew or cared about. From Kilcreases files, Kerr concluded that all the elements needed to satisfy the kingpin law were amply presentmany separate transactions and many people, most of whom worked for Stricklin. As the family walked away from the cemetery, Jimmy caught up with Vivian and took her arm. Shortly after noon the next day, Lee telephoned and said: Ninety thousand is nothing for a stepper. Chagra and Wood were on a collision course that was bound to end in catastrophe. Former mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman is credited with the revitalization of downtown Las Vegas including The Smith Center for the Performing Arts and our very own The Mob Museum. By early autumn 1976 Lee was back in El Paso, pumping money. Drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge, retained Las Vegas attorney Oscar Goodman to defend him. It was four years before we lost a case.. A block from the cathedral, on North Mesa at the edge of the downtown business district, Lee Chagras new office building was closed for good. It was the era of the Nixon Administrations much-heralded war on drugs. The perfect vehicle for the imperfect time. This other end represents guilty beyond a reasonable doubt: the government proved its case, and you, the jury, are convinced beyond a moral certainty. Lee held the members of the panel with his eyes, pausing for a few seconds so it could all register. He was already doing time on the fraud charge at La Tuna federal correctional institution, which was on the New Mexico state line not far from El Paso. Hardly a day passed that the flamboyant attorney didnt make the news. If it was a crime to love the fast lane, Lee Chagra was guilty. If she realized how pressed he had been for money in recent months, she didnt show it. Jimmy preferred the Sinatra penthouse with its white baby grand piano and spiral staircase. But she wasnt about to inquire; nothing brought Lee down faster than the slightest hint that he might somehow be beholden to Jimmy, even temporarily. But as usual, Jimmys success only threw Lee into a funk. By the time the jury began its deliberation, it was obvious that the best the prosecution could expect was a tie. The silence was monumental. Patsy Chagras husband, Rick De La Torre, faced four charges in the same conspiracy. Goodman is one of the nations best criminal defense attorneys and was named one of the 15 Best Trial Lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. Jimmy was born the middle son of a Lebanese rug merchant family. If there was a single piece of new evidence, it wasnt mentioned, or even hinted at, in the indictment. They were making a career, or at least a crusade, of trying to prove that Lee Chagra, master criminal lawyer, was in fact master criminal. A few months later two soldiers from Fort Bliss admitted robbing and killing Lee Chagra. He liked to mainline speed and supported his habit by organizing a small-time burglary-robbery ring using young black soldiers from Fort Bliss. Chagras idea of a good time was slapping a Willie Nelson album on the stereo, snorting cocaine, and getting naked in a pile of aromatic bodies. And it was killing Lee. It was hard to imagine two men more different. Wallace confessed that he had taken part in the burglary attempt on Mickey Espers office and also the attempt to rob the poker game at Jimmy Salomes house. On October 20, 1977, as Chagra stood before the bench objecting to Judge Woods personal attack, arguing that it was totally without evidence or cause and that the resulting publicity had done great damage not only to Stricklin but to Lee himself, the judge interrupted and dropped his bomb. He marched straight to a crap table on one side of the casino and told the pit boss to clear the table. As in: Heres a picture of Jimmy in Vegas with Muhammad Ali, both in black tie. Prosecutors suspected Jimmy Chagra, and the FBI began meticulously putting its case together. Every morning when I drive down to the office, I get sick at my stomach, Joe told Patty. In the seven years or so that it had been in on the books, few had bothered to read that section of the drug law. When they called Jimmy he chartered a jet and arrived about two hours later. Up and then down. Vivian said she didnt know. Or for Lee Chagra. She remembers being elated when he got out, and the heartbreak that he was largely unchanged, as was her love for him: He was always looking for the next million and used a credit card a friend had given him strictly for essentials to rack up tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. Fortunately the glass was shatter-proof. Ive been a fool.. Emily McCullar is a senior editor covering pop culture, news, and Texas history. Checking himself again in the mirror, he would fuss with the black cowboy hat that had Lee Chagra and Freedom embossed in gold on the inside until he achieved the proper tilt and slope. Clark Hughes had found a cartoon of a mouse shooting a finger at an eagleit was called The Last Great Act of Defianceand Lees secretary, Sandy Messer, was having it made into a wall plaque. Drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge, retained Las Vegas attorney Oscar Goodman to defend him. [9][13] Reportedly, he used gambling as a method of laundering money he received through trafficking drugs. He would attach his belt to the giant solid-gold buckle with the thick crust of diamonds, and draw on his black alligator cowboy boots. He needs you to look it over before he mails it back.. Kerrs long association with FBI, IRS, and DEA agentsclients, he called themhad convinced him of the same sort of monolithic conspiracy that Boyd himself leaned toward. All of Lees personal affairs, especially those with women, were conducted behind closed doors. Lee Chagra was special, and he went out of his way to prove it: student court, law review, Order of the Coif. Almost every day Jimmy telephoned Lee from his new home in Las Vegas. In the early summer of 1973 Lee experienced for the first time in his life how it felt to be on the other side. The judge was a member of every exclusive club in San AntonioSons of the Republic of Texas, Sons of the American Revolution, Texas Cavaliers, Argyle Club, San Antonio Club, Order of the Alamo, San Antonio Gun Club, German Club, American Legion, San Antonio Country Cluband owned property in the segregated Key Allegro resort on the Texas coastthe list went on and on. If they had, they would have seen the small, trembling figure of the prosecutor crouched in a fetal position below the dashboard, dazed, bleeding from the shards of splintered glass, shaky as a bowl of gelatinbut otherwise unharmed. Clark was painfully aware that all serious gamblers harbored deep and irrational superstitions: once hed seen Lee go berserk because a Chinaman approached the table. Joseph Chagra, a Texas lawyer who admitted his complicity in the first assassination of a Federal judge in more than a century, died last Sunday in Thomason Hospital in El Paso. He decided on James Kerr, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys he had inherited from the Republican regime. [7][13] He had dealings with the Patriarca crime family and Joseph Bonanno, the retired head of the Bonanno crime family. More likely it was because Lee, as chief justice of the student court, had spoken out against segregated dorms and football teams. A case in point was that of an unsuspecting El Paso cafe owner who was conned by two agents into conspiring to buy stolen government weapons. When Lee pinned them down on the exact location from which they had watched the scene, several jurors snickered: not only was the position almost a mile from the field but a massive hill blocked the view. This is a fascinating story written by Jimmy Chagra's daughter. Catherine writes her story and tells what she and her family went through as the daughter of one of the biggest drug smugglers in the 1970s. It's a great read and helps you understand what a child of a person incarcerated goes through. Clark assumed that he would go straight back to Caesars and claim some of his markers, but that wasnt Lees plan. Not long after that, someone attempted to rob a high-stakes poker game at Jimmy Salomes house. All rights reserved. For some unexplained reason, the three assailants (apparently there was a third behind the wheel) raced from the scene without bothering to walk five or six feet and make sure that Kerr was dead. The chiveras are paid $45 to $65, depending on the size and value of the haul; out of that money they are expected to bribe the various Mexican customs officials, who survive on bribes. Joe Chagra testified against the other defendants in exchange for pleading guilty to murder-conspiracy with a maximum sentence of ten years in a plea-bargain deal, and with an agreement that he would not testify against his brother Jimmy in a separate trial. At the intersection of Broadway a mint-green van blocked his route. On the cartoon, Clark had written Wood below the eagle and Chagra below the mouse. Donna hadnt seen him this happy in months. Please feel free to use any other table in the casino. Like so many sheep, the nickel-and-dime players started backing away. Chagra was released from prison for health reasons in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 9, 2003. A second man stood behind him, out of camera range. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms of service, privacy policy and cookies policy. In his time, Lee had invested in a racehorse that ended up as dog meat, a pro golfer who never made the cut, a combination lock that served to secure nothing more than a long, bitter lawsuit, and a caper to corner the Colombian coffee bean market. As Boyd must have realized, Kerr and Lee Chagra were natural enemies. Jimmy, on the other hand, had a true gamblers instinct, a fatalistic kill-or-be-killed attitude. Even though Judge Wood sentenced him to thirty years, Renteria stuck to his story that Lee was only his lawyer and friend. That woman was Vivian, Christa and Catherine and Cynthias mother, who came from humble beginnings in an unincorporated community near Brownwood. They had a surprise for Leea new Lincoln limousine with a portable bar, a TV, a stereo, and even a secret compartment to conceal his guns and playing cards. Once again, Lee went first to his suite and carried out the ritual. Clark Hughes went ahead to the casino to lose my piddling three or four hundred. He never knew why Lee liked to bring him along, but he seldom refused. By maintaining close ties to Democratic Party kingmaker Travis Johnson, Boyd had run the gamut of offices: assistant county attorney, assistant U.S. attorney, district attorney, U.S. magistrate. He certainly knew about it before the feds did. Over the years lawyers encountered scores of cases in which citizens had been lured into crimes by what amounted to federal bounty hunters. As was his custom when he was in one of these expansive moods, Lee sat in his new office with his feet on his desk, telling war stories and handing out money. Catherine figures she was 10 when her dad went to prison. Sandy was to count out $20,000 from the stash under the bathroom sink and have it ready when the woman arrived. He touched the tip of the pointer and said, This small tip represents innocence: the defendants didnt do a thing. Chagra's third wife, Elizabeth, was found guilty of delivering $250,000 to Charles Harrelson to kill Wood. Its riddled with ethnic stereotyping of Lebanese men as reckless womanizers and Lebanese women as subservient slaves to their men. He called himself a pacifist, and yet he was comfortable around violence. Later, a superseding indictment added the charge of continuing criminal enterprise. Another suggestion was to disrupt the drug market by passing out poisoned drugs. He named two of his chows Kilo and Poker., Look how sweet and dorky and innocent I look, Catherine Chagra said. They learned later that Jimmy left town with about $50,000. The government was so rabid for convictions that it destroyed its own case. There wasnt any Mr. Big, Johnson acknowledged, but if the narcs preferred to look at it that way, Lee Chagra was a good a name as any. He would try to join the family by half-time. A short time later there was a knock, and Lee admitted two hookers to the room. He hustled personal injury cases, divorces, wills. I feel that it has all been terribly twisted. The staff knew the ritual, but no one knew for sure what went on behind the closed door. Written by Catherine Chagra, Kerr was frail and sallow-faced and talked in a high-pitched voice that suggested he was about to shatter. Lee handed out $200 in tips before they got to the suite. That was why I jumped bond. Gambling and women, said Lees old friend and fellow lawyer Clark Hughes. [19][20] Chagra faced a possible life sentence without parole if convicted and reportedly feared he would receive a life sentence, according to prosecutors. Lees law practice never recovered. To get to that part of the story, we have to go back in time, to the war on drugs that Richard Nixon initiated, and to three brothers in El Paso of Lebanese descent by way of Mexico. It wasnt the cocaine so much as the lifestyle it symbolized. Catherine moved to Phoenix about three years later to be near the federal lockup where her father did time, visiting every Sunday for 20 years. Despite, or perhaps because of, these tactics, agents of the FBI, the IRS, and especially the DEA became convinced that Chagra not only was involved in international drug trafficking but was in fact the mastermind, the kingpin. The madness seemed to peak in November, when two men in a van sprayed Kerrs car with buckshot and .30-caliber bullets. Lee had wanted to be a lawyer, and so, after some convincing, had the youngest of the boys, Joe. One strategy that Liddy and the newly created Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) finally settled on, as defense lawyers in El Paso soon realized, was the use of agents provocateurs, whose job it was to create crime. He inherited the whole El Paso docket in 1974 when Judge Ernest Guinn died suddenly of a heart attack. Lee flew to Florida and set up a dummy corporation for Jimmy. When Lou Esper learned that Lee was a cocaine user, he found a good supply and usually delivered the goods in person. I want to talk to you. Vivian was startled to see how much Jimmy looked like Lee, how he had grown out his moustache, how his hair was full and shaggy and touched now with streaks of gray. I think Jerry Johnson told us whatever he thought we wanted to hear, DEA agent J.T. Loaves of Syrian bread were baking in the kitchen. Friends, relatives, and people that Donna had never seen before paraded through as though the place were a museum. Jimmy was born four years later, and they soon nicknamed him Little Mischief. A further indignation: The witness protection program first exiled them to Omaha, Neb. Hed never cried about it before. After about an hour Lee had lost $90,000. Of course, not all the authorities are so blas. Jimmy would tip the hotel staff like a salesman with an end-of-the-month goal handing out business cards. Everyone had assumed theyd made loveLee made a point of keeping her in his office long enough, then he flushed the toilet and gave her the money. He nearly bankrupted the family carpet store and maybe even helped along Dad Chagras fatal heart attack. Stricklin hadnt yet met Lee Chagra, but he knew Chagras reputation. He had $250,000 credit. Part of it was paranoia, his gut instinct that some malevolent authority was watching and waiting, and part of it was the sort of perverse obstinacy that makes some men walk through a wall rather than open a door. Wallace was sentenced to death, though this was later reduced to life in prison. Catherine is at work on a book called Dirty Darlings: A Story of Big Shots, Big Hair, Free Falling and a Texas-Sized Return to Grace. She has the tapes and the transcripts and is determined to get her version of the family story told. Lee couldnt hold a grudge, but Jimmy was the kind who would get you by the balls and never let go, said Jimmy Salome, a longtime family friend. A grand jury in Nashville had indicted Chagra and forty others on a charge of conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana. But the mere act of talking on the telephone seemed to boost his confidence. They implicated Lou Esper as the man who had planned the heist and supplied the weapons. He ran a floating blackjack game and started peddling dope. He was arrested without incident in front of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, his second home, where, according to Catherine, hed gone to seek facial reconstructive surgery. [21][3] He reportedly did this in order to have his wife, Elizabeth, released early. Is there any secret about that?. Chagra had little use for public servants, especially prosecutors, and Kerr was a classic bureaucrat, squeaking with authority and wedded to the book. The deal made guys sweating over a ton of weed loaded onto a plane and flown across the border look like chumps. Over the next eight years Wood handed out the maximum sentence in almost every case. [27] Joe Chagra's defense reportedly attempted to plead guilty to a lesser offense of conspiring to obstruct justice instead. For months Lee had been unable to shake the premonition that something wild and uncontrollable had broken loose. Jimmys Florida operation, far from being an immediate disaster, disbanded after successfully offloading fifty tons of grass from a Colombian freighter in March. [33] His wife was never released and she died in custody of ovarian cancer at age 41. Gambling bored him. As the defense had expected, several officers testified that they had arrived at the airstrip in time to witness the off-loading of the DC-4. Family problems were accumulating faster than Lee could catalog them. Is his [dope smuggling] operation totally separate [from another smugglers]? Jimmy Chagra, in another conversation recorded in prison and later transcribed, would not go quite as far, although he further muddied the waters. Lee joked as he gave the Indian the $75,000, and the Indian mumbled and studied his boots. Leave them blank to get signed up. Lee never forgot or forgave. A major law firm that always invited the top six UT law graduates to a spring gala invited only five in 1962. The media reported that the charges were dropped for lack of a speedy trial. Its from some friends in Vegas, he said, handing Vivian the card. Patsy ran out the back entrance and toward the cathedral. As far as having Wood killed, no way, he said. All shed ever had was a future somewhat less than promising. Two of their five children were with her. Paradoxically, though, Lee was secretly jealous of Jimmy. He was convicted of obstructing the investigation of the Like Julius Caesar, John H. Wood was several times offered high office, and several times he refused. Jimmy was known to win or lose $1 million a night, according to Catherine. the Mortal Mustache, a.k.a. Even after the charges were dismissed, there was still the stigma. The Chagra family was a big, big deal in El Paso, Texas, Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum, explained to Nevada Public Radio ahead of the event (he will be moderating). He was widely believed to have been placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The money from the big score in Massachusetts was pouring in, and Lee and Jimmy were racing to see who could lose it first. Drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge, retained Las Vegas attorney Oscar Goodman to defend him. Stricklin started peddling lids when they were still lidsan ounce of grass in a Prince Albert tin. The lawyer mentioned that he sometimes looked down at the office complex that Lee was remodeling and experienced pangs of envy. That was it, Lees ultimate humiliation. There was a ritual that he always observed before going downstairs to the casino. His older brother Lee was a very prominent defense attorney Jimmy was the middle son, and the younger son, Joe, was also an attorney.. In a single short sitting he lost almost $190,000. Kerrs just working the tailings, he said. Wood was finally convinced that it was his duty. [1][2][3] He was implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States District Judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas. The consensus had always been that Jimmy Chagra would never amount to much. This was among over a thousand recorded conversations that the government had collected as evidence. They were rivals in many ways.. About four oclock Bobby Yoseph returned to the office from a shopping trip in Jurez. [5][3], Texas Drug, Gambling Figure Missing; High Bond Forfeited, Jimmy Chagra; Smuggler Linked to Judge's Death. Worse even then the chain reaction of disasters in 1977: the crash of one of his brother Jimmys drug smuggling planes in Colombia, Jimmys botched foray to rescue the pilot, Lees frantic scramble to rescue Jimmy, his running courtroom battle with federal prosecutor James Kerr and Judge John Wood. Lee speculated that the attempt was an inside job. If Jo Annie was conscious of this, she moved among them without rancor, beautifully composed and self-possessed. The government seemed to know it didnt have a case, but it was determined to see how far it could travel. Narcotics and gambling were crimes that grew from a common stem composed of the worst elements in society. Only a few select friends and celebrities like Rosey Grier or Gabe Kaplan were allowed in. He didnt advertise the fact, but Jimmy was helping to pay for the huge cost overrun on Lees new office. [11][24][9], Jimmy Chagra died of cancer on July 25, 2008. He talked about death a lot. Hed brought corsages for all the women on the staff. Except for a few faithful clients like Jack Stricklin, Lees practice was at rock bottom. The case remains unsolved. Still, everyone loved Jimmy and took care of him. Rumors persisted that while Stricklin was doing time at La Tuna, Lee arranged to destroy records that would have established Lees complicity in a number of smuggling operations. In fact, the only evidence that Lee expected things to improve was his new office complex. 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