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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Paying the Price
It looked as though Lee had struck gold, but quicksand might have been closer to the truth. It was the era of the Nixon Administration’s much-heralded war on drugs. A shake-up of the entire federal drug enforcement apparatus was under way, ramrodded by Nixon’s ranking authority on drugs, G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy came up with one farfetched idea after another. He helped develop Operation Intercept, a massive media event in which millions of U.S. citizens were stopped and searched at the border. He discussed with the CIA the possibility of “liquidating” all major drug traffickers in the Middle East; it was estimated that 150 key assassinations would do the job. Another suggestion was to disrupt the drug market by passing out poisoned drugs.
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. Over the years lawyers encountered scores of cases in which citizens had been lured into crimes by what amounted to federal bounty hunters. 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. The weapons existed only in the agents’ imagination, but at one point the trap got so bizarre that the poor cafe owner believed he was negotiating for a used submarine. “It was a totally ludicrous story,” Sib Abraham recalled, “but it got very serious when the jury convicted him.” In time, Lee and Sib became targets themselves. As his friend Clark Hughes warned him, “One of the problems with being a criminal attorney is that all your clients are crooks. If you’re not careful, your friends become crooks, too.” Lee first had the dangers of his association with criminals brought home to him in 1973.
In the early summer of 1973 Lee experienced for the first time in his life how it felt to be on the other side. On June 20 a team of narcotics agents appeared at his law office with a warrant for his arrest and hauled him away in handcuffs. A grand jury in Nashville had indicted Chagra and forty others on a charge of conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana. A few hours later, the 38-year-old attorney, stunned and bewildered, found himself being transferred to the county jail, handcuffed to Georgie Taylor, who was a legend in local drug circles (he had made a million before he was eighteen) and who happened to be Jo Annie’s nephew. Although Jo Annie appeared at the federal courthouse with $50,000 in bail money, Lee was obliged to spend the night with Georgie Taylor, Jack Stricklin, and virtually the entire hierarchy of El Paso drug trafficking.
The indictment was so vague as to make it impossible to respond or even to contemplate a defense. The charges against all the defendants were eventually dropped, but not for two years. The media reported that the charges were dropped for lack of a speedy trial. In fact, the charges were dismissed because there was no evidence to bring charges in the first place. A scathing memorandum written in March 1975 by the chief judge of the Middle District of Tennessee declared the indictment to be “obviously and fatally defective.” He also said it was “so worded as to be utterly meaningless, and therefore, the indictment actually charged nothing at all.” Judge Frank Gray, Jr., went out of his way to rebuke agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and federal prosecutors, declaring that the restraints on the defendants’ liberty and their being forced to live for two years under “a cloud of anxiety, suspicion, and often hostility” violated basic principles of justice. Much later, Lee Chagra learned that the single piece of “evidence” against him was a statement made by Tom Pitts, claiming that he and another drug dealer had once used Lee’s office to cut a deal.
The months of suspicion and hostile publicity almost wrecked Lee’s law career. “Hardly anyone wanted a lawyer who was under indictment,” recalled Joe Chagra, Lee’s youngest brother, who by then had joined the law firm. “Even after the charges were dismissed, there was still the stigma. Every time the local papers wrote anything about Lee, the story started with ‘Indicted drug trafficker Lee Chagra…’”
Lee never forgot or forgave. His dislike for narcotic cops, particularly agents provocateurs, had been stoked to a white-hot hatred that nearly consumed both his private and his professional life. He began taping most of his telephone conversations and collecting every scrap of evidence that even hinted of government malfeasance. He filed a freedom-of-information request demanding that the government furnish him with all documents relating to its investigations of him, and before long the files filled two heavy-duty storage boxes. The documents revealed that hardly a week passed without some agent’s making inquiries into Lee Chagra’s private life. His office and home telephone records as far back as 1970 had been subpoenaed, and so had his income tax records. Almost every one of Chagra’s clients who had been sent to prison reported visits from DEA agents who pumped them for information about Chagra and offered deals if they would incriminate him. From time to time agents provocateurs posing as clients came to his office to discuss a phony case, then ended up trying to score some drugs from him. Lee developed a standard ploy - he secretly taped the conversation, then gave the agent the phone number of “the real Mr. Big.” It was the unlisted number of the local DEA chief.
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.
His Brother’s Keeper
The feds reasoned that Lee was the mastermind because Lee was so smart, and they became so preoccupied with this scenario that they failed to see the obvious irony: Lee was too smart to play that role. And yet, right there under their noses was another Chagra not at all handicapped by brains or good judgment. Lee’s younger brother Jimmy, who grew up hustling and hanging out with some of Lee’s more prosperous clients, wanted nothing more than to be recognized as Mr. Big.
The consensus had always been that Jimmy Chagra would never amount to much. He was the black sheep, the all-star goof-up. In some ways, they said, he was like Dad Chagra, old Abdou, a man stunted by his dreams. Lee had wanted to be a lawyer, and so, after some convincing, had the youngest of the boys, Joe. Patsy, the second, was the “miracle baby,” born against all odds and medical opinions; on the morning of her birth Abdou walked barefoot to the summit of Sierra del Cristo Rey and dropped to his knees and thanked the Virgin. Jimmy was born four years later, and they soon nicknamed him Little Mischief. He was a mama’s boy, always pouting and complaining. When things were going poorly for him—and they usually were—he could be amazingly rattlebrained and cruel. When Patsy, who at one time weighed 180 pounds, finally worked up the courage to wear a swimsuit in public, Jimmy humiliated her mercilessly. She had worn a pair of panty hose under the suit and as they were cruising out in the middle of a lake in Joe’s speedboat, Jimmy called everyone’s attention to her bizarre outfit and ripped her panty hose in one thigh. “A big blob of fat came pouring out,” she remembered. “Jimmy couldn’t stop talking about it.”
Still, everyone loved Jimmy and took care of him. They had to take care of him because he spoiled everything he touched. He ruined his marriage to Vivian, left her and the children. He nearly bankrupted the family carpet store and maybe even helped along Dad Chagra’s fatal heart attack. He ran a floating blackjack game and started peddling dope. He gambled in Vegas and wrote bad checks and was constantly calling Lee to bail him out. They say Jimmy lacked ambition. They say there was nothing Jimmy really wanted to be, but that wasn’t entirely true. Jimmy wanted to be Lee. He wanted to dress the way Lee dressed, in fine clothes and jewelry, and he wanted to hear whispers of respect when he walked into a room and silence when he told a story. Sometimes Jimmy pretended he was Lee, signing his name Lee Chagra and repeating Lee’s stories as though they had happened to him.
For years there had been a rivalry between the two brothers, a fierce and unyielding competition that only the two of them completely understood. Lee protected Jimmy, but he also contributed to Jimmy’s sense of inadequacy. Paradoxically, though, Lee was secretly jealous of Jimmy. Lee fought like hell for everything he had, but things came easy for Jimmy. And Jimmy seemed better able to laugh off the competition between them. He wanted everything his brother had, but he just didn’t want to work for it. In the summer of 1975, Jimmy finally hit the big time. The idea originated with a friend of his, a highly decorated former Army helicopter pilot who was rumored to have Mafia connections, and with Jack Stricklin, who provided most of the technical expertise. But Jimmy took most of the credit. The scam brought in more money than Lee had ever thought of making in his law practice.
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