The Black Striker Gets Hit
Lee Chagra lived in the border underworld of El Paso, a place where drugs were the game and even the good guys didn’t play by the rules. When you live that way, chances are you’ll die that way too.
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A Little Healthy Corruption
If it was a crime to love the fast lane, Lee Chagra was guilty. He had an affinity for cards and dice, for dope dealers and shady politicians, for cripples and nightclub singers, for dabblers in the black market and exponents of the quick buck. They were all scammers, everyone he knew or cared about. He would lend a stranger his last $100, knowing he was kissing it good-bye. 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. His dream was to stash away $20 million, all taxes paid.
Lee was a baffling tangle of contradictions. He was a fanatic about his family: he lavished gifts on his wife, his children, his mother, his sister. Yet he could risk the family’s last penny on a roll of the dice. He called himself a pacifist, and yet he was comfortable around violence. He could be shamelessly sentimental and gentle as a whisper, and yet there was a macho fury inside that could make him turn on those closest to him. He referred to all of his male friends as “brother,” and yet there was a time when he couldn’t keep his hands off his real brother’s wives and girlfriends. “Gambling and women,” said Lee’s old friend and fellow lawyer Clark Hughes. “They were like a sickness with him.”
Lee also loved El Paso and had never thought of living anywhere else. He loved the streets and the people who plied them—whores, gamblers, smugglers, cops. El Paso and Juárez have always floated on a little healthy corruption. Crimes against persons are treated with extreme gravity, but crimes against the economy are treated with a wink and a smile. Traditionally, gambling and smuggling are on a par with fixing parking tickets and hiring illegal aliens. A ton of marijuana is no better or worse than a ton of quicksilver. It is estimated that one out of every five households in these two communities of one million is supported by some type of illegal activity. A few years ago, the director of El Paso customs acknowledged: “If we stopped all smuggling activity right now, the economies of two cities would fall flat on their faces.”
Millions of dollars’ worth of goods are smuggled daily across the three main bridges connecting Juárez and El Paso. Drugs are currently in fashion, but over the years whiskey, cigarettes, perfume, Swiss watches, silver, kitchenware, and of course, laborers have been staples in the trade. Fayuqueros (smugglers) from Mexico usually make two trips a week across the border, carrying about 250,000 pesos ($10,000) worth of goods each way. When the items are small, such as bottles of American perfume or jewelry, the fayuqueros hire old women called chiveras (shepherds), who actually carry the merchandise across the bridge and as far as Chihuahua City, 236 miles into the interior. 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. “These people used to steal,” a Mexican policeman told the Associated Press recently, “but there is more money in contraband. Before, they ate beans and a little meat. Now they eat three meals a day and imported cheese. It’s good business for everybody.”
Of course, not all the authorities are so blasé. El Paso’s legions of smugglers—drug smugglers in particular—manage to get themselves arrested often enough to keep law practices like Lee Chagra’s busy and profitable. It was fitting in a way that Lee should end up championing the drug dealers’ rights; his brother Jimmy was destined to join their ranks.
The Chagras were fiercely proud people, a handsome, hardy, beguiling line of Lebanese merchants and vendors who migrated near the turn of the century to Mexico and then to El Paso. The family name was originally Busha’ada, but Lee’s grandfather mexicanized it during the revolution. The old man, who was a dead ringer for Pancho Villa, was imprisoned and almost shot before he and his family could escape across the border into El Paso.
Lee was the first college graduate in his family, and the first professional. He worked his way through the University of Texas law school, graduating fourth in his class in 1962. Lee Chagra was special, and he went out of his way to prove it: student court, law review, Order of the Coif. Some in the legal community thought he was too special, too outspoken. A major law firm that always invited the top six UT law graduates to a spring gala invited only five in 1962. Some speculated that they omitted Lee Chagra because he was from El Paso and had a Spanish surname. More likely it was because Lee, as chief justice of the student court, had spoken out against segregated dorms and football teams. When Lee was murdered sixteen years later, Charles Alan Wright, one of the country’s leading authorities on constitutional law, called him “one of the few students who stand out in my memory.”
There was never any doubt that when Lee passed the state bar exam he would join Jo Annie’s brother, Sib Abraham, who had finished law school the previous year and had already set up his practice in El Paso. In a few years Abraham and Chagra had the leading anti-establishment law firm in the city. They volunteered for every hard-core criminal case that came along: murder, rape, robbery, burglary. Sib remembered: “Candidly, we were very, very successful. It was four years before we lost a case.”
Lee adopted a wardrobe suitable to his image—a black cowboy hat, fancy handmade boots, and an assortment of expensive jewelry, including a gold bracelet that spelled the word freedom. He had several of the bracelets made for close friends and members of the family. Later, Jo Annie gave him an ebony cane with a gold satyr’s-head handle. It became his trademark. Fighting seemingly hopeless causes became his passion. Part of the reason was his honest conviction that even the lowest, meanest, rottenest scum on the face of the earth deserved, and in fact were guaranteed, a right to a fair trial. Part of it was the publicity: Lee loved to see his name in headlines. Part of it was his steadily increasing need for money. 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.
Scoring Big
Lee had already made a name for himself before he began taking drug defendants, but the string of cases that would make him one of El Paso’s most famous—or infamous—figures began in the early seventies when U.S. customs agents busted a smuggler from Tennessee named Tom Pitts and two other men who were attempting to bring six hundred pounds of marijuana across the Rio Grande. Since he was a stranger to El Paso, Pitts asked a local smuggler named Jack Stricklin for the name of a good lawyer. Stricklin hadn’t yet met Lee Chagra, but he knew Chagra’s reputation. “I’d grown up in El Paso,” Stricklin recalled. “I didn’t trust Arabs. But everyone said Lee was the best.” Pitts arrived at Lee’s office looking like a hippie who had just crawled out of a Goodwill box but acting like the owner of a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Chagra laid out the cold, hard facts: “I can’t save you. You’re going to get five years each. You’ll do at least eighteen months. And I’m going to charge you ten thousand dollars.”
Lee meant $10,000 for all three defendants, but Pitts didn’t understand that. Pitts fancied himself a big-timer and concluded that Chagra must be pretty big himself if he was demanding thirty grand. The Tennessee dope dealer rolled down his sock and slapped the cash on Lee’s desk. Lee didn’t say anything. He just picked up the money and tossed it in a drawer. But his eyes spun like a blur of cherries on a slot machine.
It took Lee less that half a day to discover that the search warrant used to bust the Tennessee smugglers was faulty. Case dismissed. Soon every drug dealer on the border carried one of Lee Chagra’s cards. Some of them deposited large sums in the lawyer’s safe, against the inevitable.
Lee’s success in trying drug cases soon led him to meet Jack Stricklin, who had sent the Pitts case his way. Stricklin was an enterprising and likable young man who had grown up in one of El Paso’s better neighborhoods. His father was a vice president of El Paso Natural Gas. Stricklin started peddling lids when they were still lids—an ounce of grass in a Prince Albert tin. By the late sixties he had put together an organization capable of moving tons of marijuana across the river. Narcotics agents believed that Stricklin and his associates supplied a good part of the South and Southwest with Mexican marijuana.
Despite the differences in background and age (Stricklin was almost ten years younger), Chagra and Stricklin became more than lawyer and client; they became close friends. Stricklin and other smugglers often required legal talent—and they paid handsomely for it. Lee Chagra grossed more than $250,000 in 1972. The next year he paid taxes on $450,000, including $125,000 declared as gambling winnings. That was the year Lee and Jo Annie started building their new home on Frontera Road in the Upper Valley. Lee referred to it as “the mansion that Jack built.” It was 6500 square feet, with pool and stables, electronically operated gates, and closed-circuit television monitors.
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