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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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. 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. The government was so rabid for convictions that it destroyed its own case. Each time he caught a narc in a lie, Lee made eye contact with various jurors, the corners of his mouth twitching with mirth as though he expected tiny okra plants to sprout from the witness’s nose at any moment.
By the time the jury began its deliberation, it was obvious that the best the prosecution could expect was a tie. After two days the jury reported itself hopelessly deadlocked, eight to four for acquittal. At the victory party that followed the declaration of mistrial, one of the jurors told Lee: “I know those boys did everything they said they did, but dammit, they didn’t prove it!”
Three Nemeses
Lee got the best of the feds in Ardmore but that was about the last time. The government had been after him ever since Nashville, but 1977 was to be worse than anything that had gone before, largely because of three men: U.S. attorney Jamie Boyd, Boyd’s assistant James Kerr, and Judge John Wood.
Jamie Boyd was the consummate politician. In his eleven years on the El Paso political scene, Boyd had been elected to public office only one time, to fill out the unexpired term of district attorney in 1970, and yet no politician in town had a better feel for the bureaucracy or for subtle shifts in power and opinion. 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. 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 Carter’s election in 1976, Lee, Sib Abraham, and others supported Boyd’s appointment.
Boyd had never been regarded as a crusader, but one exception was his views on gambling—he hated gamblers. 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. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he had refused to let go of the notion that El Paso was being overrun by the Mafia.
To combat what he perceived as the inroads of organized crime, Boyd needed someone tough and relentless to take over the El Paso docket as federal prosecutor. He decided on James Kerr, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys he had inherited from the Republican regime. A graduate of SMU’s law school, Kerr had worked for the Justice Department and helped draft the 1970 Drug Control Act. Later he built a reputation as a hard-driving prosecutor in charge of the docket in Del Rio, where he and Judge John Wood became fast friends. This friendship, the fact that the prosecutor and the judge were seen socializing so often, caused some lawyers to question Wood’s impartiality. “A judge can’t associate socially with a prosecutor the way Wood did with Kerr and still call ‘em correctly,” John Pinckney, the first U.S. attorney, had said.
Kerr’s long association with FBI, IRS, and DEA agents—clients, he called them—had convinced him of the same sort of monolithic conspiracy that Boyd himself leaned toward. Narcotics and gambling were crimes that grew from a common stem composed of the worst elements in society. Composed of, and by, organized crime. The Mafia!
“Kerr was an empire builder,” Boyd said. “I knew he would take a hard look at narcotics and organized crime.”
As Boyd must have realized, Kerr and Lee Chagra were natural enemies. Lee despised Kerr, and Kerr had every reason to despise Lee. It was hard to imagine two men more different. Kerr was frail and sallow-faced and talked in a high-pitched voice that suggested he was about to shatter. Chagra had little use for public servants, especially prosecutors, and Kerr was a classic bureaucrat, squeaking with authority and wedded to the book.
Chagra’s 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. Kerr preferred playing Bach fugues in the dim light of the First Presbyterian Church and going to the symphony. Kerr thought Chagra was vulgar and common, and Chagra enjoyed enhancing this image by slipping up behind Kerr and whispering things that made the prosecutor blush. Chagra could win or lose more in a single session at a Vegas crap table than Kerr made in a year. Kerr claimed that money didn’t matter, that his mission in life was “vigorously and, I hope, successfully” prosecuting all offenders that his clients could provide, but the mere fact that his adversary put such emphasis on money and the trappings of wealth must have touched some deep reserve of resentment in him.
In Judge John Wood’s courtroom Kerr found the perfect forum for his crusade. Like Julius Caesar, John H. Wood was several times offered high office, and several times he refused. 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. Wood was finally convinced that it was his duty. The nation was at war, not only in Viet Nam but in the streets, alleys, and barrios of America, where the menace of drugs was destroying the will to fight, or to work, or to do almost anything of traditional value.
Although Wood had devoted his career to civil law, there was no more ardent law-and-order advocate anywhere. It was in his blood. His great-grandfather had come from New York and fought in the Texas Revolution. His grandfather had been an ironfisted sheriff of Bexar County when lawmen still fought off Apaches. No man could have been prouder of his heritage than Wood; he was a confirmed, unapologetic elitist, a descendant of hardy pioneer-stock aristocrats. The judge was a member of every exclusive club in San Antonio—Sons 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 Club—and owned property in the segregated Key Allegro resort on the Texas coast—the list went on and on.
In January 1971 Wood was sworn in as a U.S. district judge, with jurisdiction over about a quarter of the El Paso docket. He inherited the whole El Paso docket in 1974 when Judge Ernest Guinn died suddenly of a heart attack. Wood’s first big drug case came in May 1971. The defendant was one Melchor de los Santos, who was caught with 262 grams of heroin; since the going rate was $30 a gram, it was a fairly substantial bust for the times. Maximum sentence was 15 years on each of three counts, and that’s what the judge gave him—45 years. Over the next eight years Wood handed out the maximum sentence in almost every case. He bragged that he never once granted probation in a heroin case. It wasn’t just in hard-drug cases; Wood appeared to make no distinctions. He once sentenced a dope dealer to 35 years for contempt of court. Whatever the maximum penalty was, that was generally what he gave. The bonds that he set in marijuana cases averaged $200,000. His harsh, unbending policy of sentencing and his blatant pro-prosecution posture astonished lawyers and embarrassed other judges, including those that sat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In short order, Wood surpassed Guinn’s unenviable reputation as the most reversed judge in the district. This didn’t seem to disturb Wood any more than it had Guinn, who used to cackle, “I can sentence them a lot faster than they can reverse them.” Nor did Wood protest when they started calling him Maximum John. He loved it.
Kerr Closes In
On April 11, 1977, James Kerr made an unpublicized trip to Nashville to review the allegations of the 1973 indictments against Lee Chagra and Jack Stricklin. The case had been dead for two years, but Kerr had a plan. 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.
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. The language was vague and ambiguous, but essentially it said that a person was a kingpin if he (1) committed a continuing series of violations of the drug act, in concert with “five or more other persons with respect to whom such person occupies a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management” and (2) obtained “substantial income or resources” from those violations. The law was wide open to interpretation—tailor-made for a crusading lawman like James Kerr.
But the real bite of the law, the element that made it harsher than any other federal law on the books—harsher even than penalties for rape, murder, or kidnapping—was its inordinate range of sentences. Minimum sentence was ten years, maximum was life. And that wasn’t all. Defendants convicted on a kingpin rap were not eligible for parole, period.
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