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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It was four years before most people recognized Jimmy’s achievement, but the operation was a landmark in marijuana trafficking. It was the first time anyone from El Paso had thought of using a tramp steamer. Instead of flying in the customary small planeload of 2000 pounds from Mexico, they imported 54,000 pounds from Colombia. They landed the high-priced weed at a deep, remote cove on the northeastern point of Massachusetts Bay, near Boston. It took three days for an ingenious pulley apparatus to hoist the 100-pound bales to the top of the cliffs. It took almost a year for all the money to work its way back to Jimmy and his partners. The best guess is that they divided at least $5 million.
Lee’s position in this venture was that of highly paid legal adviser for the gang of smugglers. The feds could never prove he had any part in the operation or even that he knew about it in advance, though he probably did. He certainly knew about it before the feds did. And when it came to squandering the profits, Lee was at the head of the line.
Firing at Vegas, Part I
The next summer the Chagra brothers hit Vegas like a blizzard of kamikaze locusts. The money from the big score in Massachusetts was pouring in, and Lee and Jimmy were racing to see who could lose it first. Folks in Vegas can be terribly blasé, assuming, as they do, that they have seen it all: Kentucky colonels, Arab sheiks, Latin American dictators, Houston oilmen, French industrialists. Hunter Thompson once described how a casino shot a three-hundred pound bear out of a cannon right in the middle of the floor and no one looked up. But Vegas had never seen anything that surpassed the performance of Lee and Jimmy Chagra.
Lee drew a crowd simply by walking through the front door at Caesar’s Palace, passing out money, and asking how much they loved him. “Do you love me, do you love me?” He knew the answer, but he had to hear it again. Everything was on the house. On five minutes’ notice, Caesar’s would dispatch a Learjet to fetch one or both of the Chagras. People in the Chagras’ party didn’t bother to register: they just walked up to the desk and someone handed them a key to a six-room suite. Jimmy preferred the Sinatra penthouse with its white baby grand piano and spiral staircase. Food, drinks, girls—anything one might fancy was there in a whisk.
The real show was on the casino floor in special sections roped off for the Chagras. Security guards kept the riffraff away. Only a few select friends and celebrities like Rosey Grier or Gabe Kaplan were allowed in. When an average high-stakes player sits down at one of the seven places around a blackjack table, his limit might be as high as $1000 a hand. Lee’s limit was $3000, and he would have played for $10,000 had Caesar’s Palace allowed it. He had $250,000 credit. Eventually, Jimmy’s limit was $10,000 a hand and his credit almost unlimited. When either of the Chagras sat at the blackjack table, he took all seven spots. Lee loved being at the middle of the table, flanked by armed guards and at least one beautiful “broad” who would act as his lucky piece. They could barely deal fast enough for Lee…all the spots covered with white chips, $21,000 riding on every deal.
Curiously, this kind of heavy action seemed to bring out the best in Jimmy and the worst in Lee. When Lee hit a losing streak, he could fly into a snit, blaming anyone handy, especially Jo Annie, who more than once hurried off the casino floor in tears. Jimmy, on the other hand, had a true gambler’s instinct, a fatalistic kill-or-be-killed attitude. “Lee couldn’t 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. “For pure gambling, Jimmy may have been the strongest anyone in Vegas ever saw. There have been people who gambled higher in one sitting, but week after week, month after month, nobody kept coming, kept flat firing at ‘em, like Jimmy Chagra.”
Then suddenly the money was gone. By early autumn 1976 Lee was back in El Paso, pumping money. He hustled personal injury cases, divorces, wills. He was practically chasing ambulances.
“Lee didn’t seem at all depressed,” said Donna Johnson, the law firm’s bookkeeper. “He was really happy that all the money was gone and he had to work again. Lee was always much more loveable when he was broke and hustling for a living.”
The Beginning of the End
One client who occupied a good deal of Lee’s time during the autumn of 1976 was Jerry Edwin Johnson, a local con man and admitted drug smuggler accused of masterminding a scheme to defraud the IRS of a quarter of a million dollars. 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. Now the government was trying to prove that Johnson had helped smuggle a pound of heroin out of Mexico.
What Lee didn’t know at the time was that Johnson had, as they say, “gone over.” He’d become a government snitch, albeit not a very reliable one. In a secret interview with a group of DEA agents and prosecutors, Johnson had implicated at least sixty El Paso citizens as major drug traffickers. There wasn’t 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. The interview was patently leading; most of the questions were of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife variety. A sample:
Q.—What about Lee Chagra? Is his [dope smuggling] operation totally separate [from another smuggler’s]?
A.—I think now it’s a separate deal…I’m not sure.
The agents thought so little of the information gleaned in the interview with Johnson that they didn’t even bother to place him under oath. “I think Jerry Johnson told us whatever he thought we wanted to hear,” DEA agent J.T. Robinson later admitted. The fifty-page text of the interview was used as supplemental material by a grand jury investigating a tax fraud, but it was never given the slightest weight as courtroom evidence. By law, the interview was to remain a secret, known only to a handful of agents and prosecutors who read the transcript as part of their official duties. Instead, this flimsy, highly prejudicial document was destined to dog both Lee Chagra and his nemesis, Judge John Wood, to their graves.
For the time being, the Jerry Johnson episode played itself out in obscurity, but the Chagra name burst into the headlines in the opening days of 1977. The news that a task force of federal and state agents had seized a DC-4 with 17,000 pounds of top-grade Colombian marijuana in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on December 30 hit El Paso like a sonic boom. (At that point the public had no inkling of the earlier, even bigger Boston haul.) By New Year’s Day it was the top story in town, and the defendants were being called the El Paso Ten. Though Jimmy Chagra’s name was never officially mentioned, almost everyone assumed that he had masterminded the scheme. In a short time the bust was being described as the biggest one in El Paso history. The fact that Lee Chagra was the lead attorney automatically made the case big-time. Hardly a day passed that the flamboyant attorney didn’t make the news.
Before the case could be brought to trial, however, Jimmy eclipsed his brother in the headlines with a new and even more spectacular exploit. Jimmy had chartered a jet and attempted to rescue an El Paso pilot who had been badly burned when a DC-6 crashed on takeoff at an improvised field near Santa Marta, Colombia. Jimmy and the crew of the chartered jet were arrested by Colombian authorities. No charges were filed, but it was apparent that the crash was another of Jimmy’s scams gone up in smoke.
Back in El Paso things weren’t going much better. Family problems were accumulating faster than Lee could catalog them. Jo Annie was talking about divorce; she and Lee got as far as the courthouse steps before one or both backed out. Joe was talking about resigning his partnership in the law firm. Jimmy was just talking. Even as Lee was working to salvage what he could from the ruins, Jimmy was plotting a new deal. Several times Lee talked to Vivian and others about dying. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he confided. He had started using cocaine some months earlier, and now he was using it daily. On top of everything else, he had developed hemorrhoids and they hurt like hell.
Coming as it did in the midst of his misery, Lee’s brilliant defense of the Ardmore bunch had to be his most satisfying victory. The boys had been caught red-handed with 17,000 pounds if marijuana. That was a fact. Ten smugglers, two airplanes, and four U-Haul trucks had been seized in the predawn trap. Another indisputable fact. And yet by the end of the trial, a majority of the jurors refused to find the defendants guilty.
“The greatest job of bullshit advocacy I’ve ever seen,” Clark Hughes said of Lee’s performance. Hughes, who assisted in the defense, thought that Lee won in his opening remarks to the jury. Chagra used one of his trademarks, a solid-gold retractable pointer, to demonstrate his case. With the pointer fully retracted, Lee approached the jury box, smiling. He touched the tip of the pointer and said, “This small tip represents innocence: the defendants didn’t do a thing. 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. Then he expanded the pointer, an inch at a time. “The rest of it,” he said, his voice sure and unwavering, “represents not guilty. As he said the words, Lee extended the pointer to its full length.
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