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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The office was a maelstrom of activity, none of it having anything to do with the practice of law. Friends, relatives, and people that Donna had never seen before paraded through as though the place were a museum. The complex included not only a maze of well-appointed offices but also a fully equipped kitchen, a law library, and completely furnished two-bedroom suite. Donna made fresh coffee and explained the new telephone system to Lee. Lee sparkled like a kid with a new toy as he showed Donna and Sandy where the various safes were concealed. They knew about the safe in the floor of the bathroom, but there were others—one beneath the carpet near the fireplace in the living room of the private suite and another in the master bedroom. Lee had never discussed with any of the staff the purpose of the apartment at the rear of the complex, but they knew he was having a regular evening affair with a stripper from the Lamplighter Club. Most afternoons as Donna and Sandy were crossing the parking lot after work, they saw her, and sometimes two or three other strippers from the Lamplighter, hurrying toward Lee’s office. It was apparent from the manner in which the furniture was rearranged and toppled about that the orgies were quite vigorous.
As was his custom when he was in one of these expansive moods, Lee sat in his new office with his feet on his desk, telling war stories and handing out money. There was plenty of cocaine to guarantee a holiday spirit; at least five ounces had been delivered a few days earlier. Lee gave Jack Stricklin, now out of prison, $1000 and passed out lesser amounts to other old friends. During the course of the morning, a man called the Cowboy appeared on the alley TV camera. Donna had never seen him before, but Lee said that he was expecting the man and pressed the electronic button to admit him. Lee gave the Cowboy $10,000, and the others guessed that he was a collector for some bookie.
Lee kept detailed records of gambling transactions, but no one else had any concept of home much he bet or with how many different bookies. He had telephoned Sandy from Tucson on Friday and told her that a woman named Butch would stop by the office later in the day. Sandy was to count out $20,000 from the stash under the bathroom sink and have it ready when the woman arrived. This wasn’t an unusual request: just a week before, Lee had given Sandy $50,000 to carry around in her tote bag, ostensibly for safekeeping. Donna helped Sandy count the $20,000. They didn’t count all the bundles of cash in the tennis bag, but there was more money than either of them had ever seen in one place, something like $450,000. While they were counting, Bobby Yoseph appeared at the door and tried to shove his way inside. “I blocked the door with my body,” Donna recalled, “but he opened it enough to see the money.”
By early afternoon the party was over, and staff and hangers-on had gone. Jo Annie went on to the Sun Bowl and telephoned her husband at halftime. Lee told her he still had a pile of work on his desk. What she didn’t know was that he was in his private apartment, watching the game on TV with his friend Sailor Roberts, a bookie who had recently been busted in James Kerr’s organized-crime probe. Jo Annie left the game early, and when she stopped by the office Roberts was just leaving. “I waited around to wish you and the kids a merry Christmas,” the gambler told her. She dismissed the greeting as a typical Sailor Roberts lie: she didn’t believe for a second that he’d gone out of his way to wish her anything.
Lee seemed restless and preoccupied, as though he were late for an appointment and couldn’t wait for Jo Annie to leave. He said he would meet her at home in a couple of hours. Jo Annie telephoned one final time, from her mother’s house on Rim Road. It must have been nearly three-thirty by then. Again, Lee sounded as though he had something else on his mind. It was the way he sounded when he was counting money or totaling figures, an abstract, business-first attitude.
“I’ve got to go,” he told her. “There’s a client buzzing at the door.” Jo Annie tried to picture the man who had called that morning waiting outside.
Lee turned the channel selector to the camera over the alley entrance. On the monitor he saw a tall, muscular black man in his early twenties. A second man stood behind him, out of camera range. “It’s David Long,” the first man said. An electronic current unbolted the door.
Lee left the money spread across the bed and closed the bedroom door behind him. He crossed the living room and closed the apartment door behind him. He may or may not have locked it. He walked to the top of the stairs and looked down at two black men with guns.
About four o’clock Bobby Yoseph returned to the office from a shopping trip in Juárez. Yoseph let himself in the front entrance with the key that Lee had given him that morning. He walked upstairs to his own office. He’d never seen it so quiet there.
The first thing he noticed was his filing cabinet. All the drawers were open and papers were scattered on the floor. He left his hat and keys on the couch and walked down the hall to Lee’s office. The door was partially open, but the office appeared empty. Yoseph’s gazed moved around the room. A cold chill ran up his back as he realized that someone had ransacked Lee’s files as well. Two overstuffed easy chairs were pushed together against the front of Lee’s desk, blocking the path across the room. Lee’s vial of cocaine was open on the corner of his desk. It was not the kind of clutter Lee Chagra would leave. Yoseph walked behind the desk and dialed Lee’s home number.
While the phone was ringing, Yoseph allowed his eyes to run along the wall to the left of the desk. First he saw Lee’s boots standing in one corner by the door to the balcony, then he saw the blotch of blood on the wall. As one of the daughters answered the phone, Yoseph saw Lee’s body. He hung up without speaking. Lee was lying face up on the floor, blood trickling from his mouth. His eyes were open, but he was obviously dying.
Last Farewell
When they called Jimmy he chartered a jet and arrived about two hours later. Jack Stricklin met him at the airport and drove him to the office. Sib Abraham and some other old friends and members of the family were there. Someone had gone after Jo Annie, who had collapsed when she first heard the news but now wanted to be there with the family. Patsy heard the bells from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the next block and remembered Mom Chagra. Mom would be returning from mass just about now, walking toward Lee’s office, unaware that anything had happened. Patsy ran out the back entrance and toward the cathedral. Jimmy knelt beside the bag that now contained the remains of his brother and started bawling. Looking on, Joe marveled. His two older brothers were so much alike it scared him. They could have been twins. What a strange, twisted love.
Lee Chagra’s funeral was a microcosm of all the extremes in his life. The Most Reverend Sidney Metzger, bishop emeritus of El Paso, came out of retirement to say mass. While federal agents snapped photographs from the parking lot across the street, hundreds of mourners jammed St. Patrick’s. State senator Tati Santiesteban, who had known Lee Chagra most of his life, led the procession of pallbearers. The district attorney, several district judges, and a former mayor stood elbow to elbow with Sailor Roberts, gambler Amarillo Slim, and at least a dozen convicted dope dealers. There was no way to count the number of ex-lovers who crowded the cathedral to say their last farewell, but they were discreetly scattered and only occasionally exchanged glances. If Jo Annie was conscious of this, she moved among them without rancor, beautifully composed and self-possessed.
As the family walked away from the cemetery, Jimmy caught up with Vivian and took her arm. “I’ll drive you home,” he said in a low voice. “I want to talk to you.” Vivian was startled to see how much Jimmy looked like Lee, how he had grown out his moustache, how his hair was full and shaggy and touched now with streaks of gray. But more than anything, it was his clothes; Jimmy showed up at the funeral wearing an outfit exactly like Lee’s Black Striker costume. The gesture was unmistakable: he’d come to replace his brother.
A block from the cathedral, on North Mesa at the edge of the downtown business district, Lee Chagra’s new office building was closed for good. A black banner was stretched across the entire front of the building. In broken white letters, like shards of milk glass on velvet, it said FREEDOM. The family posted a $25,000 reward and announced that the freedom banner would hang until the killers were caught and the case was closed.
Aftermath
A few months later two soldiers from Fort Bliss admitted robbing and killing Lee Chagra. They implicated Lou Esper as the man who had planned the heist and supplied the weapons. One of the soldiers, David Leon Wallace, signed a confession that not only admitted the robbery and murder of Lee Chagra but also substantiated Lee’s seemingly paranoid belief that he was being stalked. Wallace confessed that he had taken part in the burglary attempt on Mickey Esper’s office and also the attempt to rob the poker game at Jimmy Salome’s house. Lou Esper had planned both of these crimes too. Wallace was sentenced to death, though this was later reduced to life in prison. The other soldier, Don White, pleaded guilty and is now doing sixty years. Since he was not technically involved in the murder, Esper escaped with a relatively light sentence of fifteen years. None of the missing $450,000 was ever recovered.
For all the smoke generated by James Kerr’s highly publicized grand jury probe of organized crime, there was hardly any fire. No Mafia figures were ever indicted. In fact, the only indictments handed down by the racket-busters involved a Bandido who resisted arrest after FBI and DEA agents kicked down his door, a former manager of the Lamplighter Club, a city judge charged with fixing parking tickets, and bail bondsman Vic Apodaca, who was charged with income tax violations. And, of course, Jimmy Chagra.
Jimmy was indicted on a number of drug charges by a grand jury in Midland, a legal maneuver that many lawyers believe was blatant forum shopping: by indicting in Midland rather than El Paso, the prosecution could be sure that the case would be assigned to Judge Wood’s court. Later, a superseding indictment added the charge of continuing criminal enterprise.
The shock of Lee’s death didn’t really hit Jimmy until he faced the prospect of walking into Judge Wood’s courtroom without Lee. On May 29, 1979, the day that Jimmy was originally supposed to go on trial in Judge Wood’s court, John Wood was assassinated in the driveway outside his apartment. Investigators, the press, and even the Chagras themselves have said for months that they expect Jimmy Chagra to be indicted for the first murder in this century of a federal judge.
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