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 feds worked around the clock to build cases against both Chagras, an agent provocateur came forward with information that could potentially put both of them away for life. The agent had wormed his way into the confidence of one of Lee’s protégés, a singer and part-time actor named Joe Renteria who was hot to start his own smuggling ring. With the agent providing invaluable assistance at every stage, Renteria and several others were drawn into the government trap. Jamie Boyd, who had known Renteria for years (the prosecutor once chaperoned him in a Boy of the Year competition), expected that once Renteria realized the seriousness of his situation he would name Lee as the kingpin. Boyd was wrong. Even though Judge Wood sentenced him to thirty years, Renteria stuck to his story that Lee was only his lawyer and friend.
Patsy Chagra’s husband, Rick De La Torre, faced four charges in the same conspiracy. Though the prosecution recognized there was hardly any chance that Rick would turn on his family, James Kerr did everything in his power to put him away for 40 years. This would be the last time Lee Chagra and James Kerr faced one another in a courtroom, a sort of last hurrah for both. It was a partial victory for Lee—the jury found De La Torre guilty of only one charge and he got the maximum, 5 years. But Kerr wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to indict De La Torre on five counts of perjury in an attempt to add another 25 years to the sentence—in effect, requiring him to defend his story to a second jury. Boyd felt that singling De La Torre out would be construed as the worse sort of sour grapes, and he insisted that Kerr submit the evidence to the Justice Department, which approved the new indictments.
But the feds’ real ace in the hole was Jimmy and his partner, Henry Wallace. What no one knew at this point was that the feds had already busted Wallace. In secret interviews Wallace as singing like a drunken angel. He had no information incriminating Lee, except that he confirmed that Lee had set up some dummy corporations to launder money, but he was willing to finger Jimmy as the kingpin. Boyd’s strategy was to indict Jimmy on multiple counts and wait for him to break. Boyd believed that one way or another Jimmy would take him to Lee. And he’d better. Boyd, Kerr, and the DEA had worked so hard selling the media on the contention that El Paso was the hub of dope trafficking in the Southwest that everyone took it as gospel. Now the feds had a yard of hot real estate on their hands; they desperately needed someone to buy it.
Whether or not he knew the details, Lee surely sensed the magnitude of the disaster that was bearing down on him. As the year progressed, so did his paranoia, his insistence that someone was out to get him. In fact, the only evidence that Lee expected things to improve was his new office complex. While it was being renovated, he occupied an office in a building on Montana owned by another lawyer friend, Mickey Esper, who was related to Jo Annie.
It was during this period that Lee was introduced to Mickey’s black sheep uncle, Lou Esper, a pale, seedy, rat-faced Syrian hoodlum who had spent about half his fifty years in prisons. Uncle Lou, who had recently been paroled in California, had a drug habit of long standing. He liked to mainline speed and supported his habit by organizing a small-time burglary-robbery ring using young black soldiers from Fort Bliss. When Lou Esper learned that Lee was a cocaine user, he found a good supply and usually delivered the goods in person. On several occasions he watched Lee remove one of his boots and count out the cash. Esper had also observed Lee making large cash payoffs to various collectors. Lee didn’t appear to like Lou Esper, but he was one of the few people in town who tolerated him.
Almost every day Jimmy telephoned Lee from his new home in Las Vegas. The family was worried about Lee. He seemed burned out, used up, and he was hitting the cocaine pretty hard. Clark Hughes had found a cartoon of a mouse shooting a finger at an eagle—it was called “The Last Great Act of Defiance”—and Lee’s secretary, Sandy Messer, was having it made into a wall plaque. On the cartoon, Clark had written “Wood” below the eagle and “Chagra” below the mouse. “No, you got it backwards,” Lee said when he saw it. “I’m the eagle!” But Sandy noticed there were tears in his eyes.
Lee cried a lot in those days. He cried when he thought of Jimmy. He didn’t advertise the fact, but Jimmy was helping to pay for the huge cost overrun on Lee’s new office. Jimmy was also taking care of Lee’s half-million-dollar marker at Caesar’s. Then, in a fashion that was typical of his relationship with Lee, Jimmy decided to take it one step farther. He went to the big guys at Caesar’s and told them that, by God, the next time his brother walked in that joint he wanted him treated like a goddam celebrity! That was it, Lee’s ultimate humiliation. He would never go back to Vegas. Jimmy had ruined it. Lee always suffered shamelessly when he was down and Jimmy was up, but this was different. He’d never cried about it before. Sandy and the others began to realize that this was something truly personal; it was as though Lee were mourning his own impending death. He talked about death a lot. It was becoming an obsession. His sister, Patsy, recalled, “It scared me to hear Lee talk like that. Lee had always been our strength.”
Lee couldn’t shake the feeling that something or someone was stalking him. He told Jimmy Salome that he was taking out a new insurance policy. He asked Bobby Yoseph, a young lawyer who had recently joined his staff, what he would do if he came in and found the office had been robbed? Before Yoseph could think of an answer, Lee asked another question: “What would you do if you came in and found I’d been murdered?”
This preoccupation wasn’t totally without foundation. Early in the fall someone had broken into Mickey Esper’s law offices and attempted to haul off a safe. Not long after that, someone attempted to rob a high-stakes poker game at Jimmy Salome’s house. Lee and several others heard the crash of metal against the patio door. Fortunately the glass was shatter-proof. Lee grabbed an old musket, the only gun in the house, and several of the poker players chased two black men across a field before losing them along the river. Lee speculated that the attempt was an inside job. Someone was supposed to open the door from the inside. “I thought it was just an isolated thing,” one player said, “but Lee kept brooding about it. As it turned out, he was right.”
By mid-November the feds had just about made their case against Jimmy Chagra, and rumors of his imminent indictment were rampant. James Kerr was devoting almost all of his time to his organized-crime investigation. The 38-year-old prosecutor had given up his apartment in El Paso and moved back to San Antonio, where he felt more comfortable.
Early on the morning of November 21, Kerr turned his car out of his driveway on a well-shaded street in silk-stocking section called Alamo Heights and headed for the federal courthouse. At the intersection of Broadway a mint-green van blocked his route. Kerr was maneuvering his car around the obstacle when the rear doors of the van opened and two gunmen started firing. A blast of double-aught buckshot and .30-caliber slugs ripped across the hood, left fender, and windshield of the car: police officers later counted nineteen bullet holes.
For some unexplained reason, the three assailants (apparently there was a third behind the wheel) raced from the scene without bothering to walk five or six feet and make sure that Kerr was dead. If they had, they would have seen the small, trembling figure of the prosecutor crouched in a fetal position below the dashboard, dazed, bleeding from the shards of splintered glass, shaky as a bowl of gelatin—but otherwise unharmed.
The attempt on Kerr’s life unleashed the most sweeping drug investigation in the history of the Southwest. The next morning FBI agents called on Lee Chagra, confiscated his gun collection, and asked him to take a lie detector test. Chagra was outraged. “Would you ask Kerr to take a lie detector test if someone tried to kill me?” he demanded. The case remains unsolved.
“It’s David Long”
On the morning of the day Lee was murdered, his bookkeeper, Donna Johnson, arrived at the office about ten o’clock. Lee was already there. He’d brought corsages for all the women on the staff. He was wearing his boots and jeans and enough jewelry to sink a deep-sea diver. That old watch-me-carry-the-world smile was back on his face. He was bubbling over with tales of the previous day’s Tucson victory. Donna hadn’t seen him this happy in months.
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