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.
(Page 6 of 9)
As Kerr reviewed the 1973 conspiracy charges in the dead files of the Middle District of Tennessee, he must have felt empathy with the prosecutor, Irvin Kilcrease. There were at least twenty lawyers for the defense, but apparently the entire burden of prosecution fell on poor Kilcrease. It was obvious that the prosecution and the DEA had problems coordinating their investigation. In fact, many aspects of the case were never investigated. Kerr had the advantage of interviews with a number of dealers who had been arrested since 1973—one informant claimed he had personally paid Stricklin $500,000. From Kilcrease’s files, Kerr concluded that all the elements needed to satisfy the kingpin law were amply present—many separate transactions and many people, most of whom worked for Stricklin. Or for Lee Chagra. If you scratched Stricklin deep enough, Kerr reasoned, you would find Chagra.
Shortly after the Ardmore trial, DEA agents visited Jack Stricklin at La Tuna federal correctional institution, where he was doing time for a drug rap Lee hadn’t been able to get him out of. “You help us and we’ll help you,” the agents told Stricklin. They wanted information on the real kingpin of dope trafficking in El Paso. They mentioned four names—Lee Chagra, Jimmy Chagra, Sib Abraham and Vic Apodaca (a well-known bail bondsman). If Stricklin cooperated, they would work for his early release. If he refused, they would see that he was reindicted under the kingpin act and sent away for life without parole. They showed him a Xerox copy of the section of the law dealing with continuing criminal enterprise.
“Do yourself a favor,” one of the agents said. “One way or another, we’re gonna get Lee Chagra.”
Stricklin looked at the copy of the law for a few seconds, then returned it to the agents. “Fold this five ways and stick it where the elves don’t play,” he said. A month later, Jack Stricklin was standing before Maximum John Wood, contemplating life without parole.
At first Lee wasn’t terribly worried about the new charges against Stricklin. “Kerr’s just working the tailings,” he said. The case against Stricklin appeared to be nothing more than a rehash of the long-discredited Tennessee indictment mushed together with evidence from the deal for which Stricklin was serving time. It appeared to be a clear example of double jeopardy—same events, same evidence, same witnesses. If there was a single piece of new evidence, it wasn’t mentioned, or even hinted at, in the indictment. The government seemed to know it didn’t have a case, but it was determined to see how far it could travel. In the court of John Wood, Chagra realized, that could be some distance.
The Family Cracks
In the summer of 1977, sensing the heat but also attracted by the opportunities being suggested by his new partner, a wily, borderwise ex-con named Henry Wallace, Jimmy told Lee he was moving his base of operations to Florida. Lee concurred and told other members of the family that Jimmy was dead broke and needed their help. Joe and his wife, Patty, who had been married for about eighteen months, sold some of their furniture and gave Jimmy some money and their Blazer. They learned later that Jimmy left town with about $50,000. “Which for Jimmy was almost the same as being broke,” Patty said. Lee flew to Florida and set up a dummy corporation for Jimmy. It was called Capital Acquisition, and its purpose was to channel funds through several banks in Mexico and then into Jimmy’s new business.
By now all the Chagras knew that Jimmy was a major drug trafficker, and they must have suspected that Lee’s arrangement with his brother and his relationship with Jack Stricklin were more than traditional lawyer-client dealings. Rumors persisted that while Stricklin was doing time at La Tuna, Lee arranged to destroy records that would have established Lee’s complicity in a number of smuggling operations. And yet federal agents still had no proof: for all the loose talk, there was not a shred of hard evidence that Lee had committed any crime. Lee had never let his name be linked to an illegal enterprise before the fact. Until now. The Florida operation had the potential to make millions, but it could also spell disaster for Lee. If the feds could compromise even a single member of the conspiracy, the whole organization might crumble—and Lee with it. By setting up the corporation for Jimmy, Lee had, for the first time, made himself vulnerable.
Joe Chagra told Lee he was a fool.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Lee replied. “I’ve been a fool.”
There was no bitterness or rancor, but by the end of August Joe Chagra realized that he had had all he could take. Joe was quieter and more introspective than his brothers. Gambling bored him. 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. He was a good, sound, all-around lawyer, but he didn’t have Lee’s appetite for controversy. When Joe and Lee had drawn up their partnership, the arrangement was that they would share all revenues and losses, but Joe hadn’t counted on sharing Lee’s gambling losses. “Every morning when I drive down to the office, I get sick at my stomach,” Joe told Patty. “I never know if we have fifty thousand dollars in our account or fifty cents.” He’d fought a lot of tough battles at Lee’s side, and he loved them because they were something that he and Lee did together. But lately Lee was taking new directions. Joe announced plans to open his own law firm. The family was breaking apart.
Wood’s Bombshell
On August 31, 1977, Lee Chagra appeared in Judge Wood’s court to file a motion of discovery, asking that the judge turn over DEA reports, customs reports, grand jury probes, any material that would reveal when Stricklin was supposed to have engaged in continuing criminal activity. Chagra argued that the indictment smacked of double jeopardy, but there was no way he could prove it until the government got specific.
In a written response the following week, Kerr reminded the court that although Lee Chagra was not named in the present indictment, he had been indicted in the Tennessee affair. Then Kerr observed that “the request for reports…is an overt act on the part of the defense attorney…to obtain government reports and documents concerning him.” That is, concerning Lee Chagra. “The government questions the good faith of this request,” Kerr concluded.
Borrowing heavily from Kerr’s 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. This conduct suggests to the court that the defendant is not making a good faith claim concerning former jeopardy, but that he is more interested in determining the extent of the government’s evidence against him.”
When he read copies of Kerr’s motion and Wood’s reply, Chagra was flabbergasted and then outraged. What investigation against him? It was Stricklin who was on trial, not Chagra. Lee had been accused of a lot of things, but this was the first time anyone had ever accused him of representing himself and not his client. Until now the media had treated the charges against Stricklin as routine news, but Wood’s ruling added a bizarre new twist. Reporters flocked to the federal courthouse to get a look at what was happening to Lee Chagra.
On October 20, 1977, as Chagra stood before the bench objecting to Judge Wood’s 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.
“I imagine everyone in this area knows that you’ve been the subject of a grand jury investigation ever since the Tennessee indictment,” Wood announced. “Is there any secret about that?”
“Well, I didn’t know about it,” Lee said, dumbstruck. He had known that the DEA was watching him, but a grand jury? And even if it was true, for Wood to reveal it in open court was outrageous.
The judge said he had spent “eight or ten hours” reading Jerry Edwin Johnson’s 1976 grand jury testimony and the transcript of the IRS investigation. Wood was apparently confusing the fifty-page transcript of the secret interview with actual grand jury testimony. Technically and legally, the unsworn interview shouldn’t even have been a part of the grand jury report. Wood pressed on, however, announcing that the grand jury investigation concerned not only Lee Chagra and Stricklin; it also involved Sib Abraham and others. Out of the corner of his eye Lee could see the reporters scribbling furiously. Visions of the 1973 fiasco in Nashville that had almost ruined his law career danced through his mind. What was happening here?
Lee continued to object. He made a motion for Judge Wood to recuse (disqualify) himself in the Stricklin case. “I can’t practice in front of you, and I don’t think you can honestly say that you can treat me or my client fairly in any court,” Chagra told Wood.
Now it was the judge who was having difficulty. Wood began to crawfish. “I have never found anything,” he said pleasantly, “in any of these grand jury investigations. That’s the reason I’m going to release it to you….That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I have not seen anything that would actually disqualify me from trying this case.” Eventually Wood agreed to give Lee a copy of the Johnson interview but refusing to remove himself from the Stricklin case as Chagra requested. Technically Lee had won the battle, but there was little doubt that Wood had landed a crippling, perhaps fatal blow to the attorney’s already battered reputation. Wood’s blunder was the last straw. Lee and Joe began to consider filing a harassment suit against Wood, Kerr, and various federal agents.
There is no way to calculate how all the damning publicity affected the careers of Sib Abraham and the others. Lee’s law practice never recovered. Over the next year Lee had only a handful of cases. The tragedy was that it was all unnecessary: before the Fifth Circuit had a chance to rule on the question of jeopardy, Jamie Boyd decided to drop the continuing criminal enterprise charges against Jack Stricklin.
My Library
