A Guard In Gangland
When Luis Sandoval went to work for the Texas prison system, he did the wrong favors for the wrong people. But, he insisted, that didn’t make him a murderer.
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While Sandoval said there were other guards—and even supervisors—involved in drug activity, the Texas Syndicate preferred that Garcia deal directly with Sandoval, a fellow Hispanic. Sandoval’s apparent relationship with the gang did not escape the attention of the Ellis I population. “I’d say about eighty percent of the inmates knew he was dealing clamed one inmate who was close to the action. “They’d say, ‘Don’t mess with him.’”
The new boot thereby became a feared boss among bosses. To the newer guards, Sandoval’s stature among the inmates was something to behold. “Sandoval was one of the officers I wanted to be like,” said one correctional officer whom Sandoval helped train. “I could watch him deal with inmates and think, ‘This guy knows something I don’t know.’”
One evening, while gazing out from his apartment balcony, Sandoval saw a car drive slowly by. Paranoia overcame him. He grabbed the stash of marijuana he had recently picked up, ran to the bathroom, and flushed it down his toilet. “Look, man, I think I’m being watched,” Sandoval told Garcia the next day. “Armando, I can’t jeopardize my life, man.”
Garcia took the story to the Texas Syndicate. They didn’t believe Sandoval. The mule, they believed, had done the drugs himself. Either way, Sandoval was out. The next day, Sandoval recalled, “I walked into work feeling good. I had the burden lifted from my shoulders.”
The Hit
“You have these inmates,” said an Ellis I correctional officer, “where you write ‘em up [for rule infractions] and nothing happens. Rank is taking care of them.”
Joe Arredondo was one of those inmates, an arrogant squirt barely over five feet tall who frequently provoked guards but never got in trouble for it. In fact, his disciplinary record was almost spotless, and he enjoyed the privileged position of commissary clerk.
By the fall of 1986, several months after the gang lockdown policy had been instituted, Joe Arredondo’s cockiness began to catch up with him. Arredondo was a Texas Syndicate member. He had been ordered to carry out a hit on another inmate and had failed to do so. Arredondo did take part in a different contract killing, but when all the conspirators except Arredondo were placed in administrative segregation, TS members concluded that Arredondo had snitched on the rest to save himself. The decision was reached: Arredondo would be taken down. The question was when. He had a one-week prison furlough coming up; the gang didn’t want to spook him, fearing that he might not return to Ellis I. To keep him at ease, the Texas Syndicate requested that the inmate return from his furlough with two hundred dollars’ worth of heroin and marijuana. Arredondo took the two hundred dollars, went home, and blew the money.
Ellis I officials caught wind of the deal through a snitch. Upon Arredondo’s return, they ushered the inmate to an infirmary cell, where a guard stood nearby, waiting for Arredondo’s bowels to evacuate a container of drugs. But Arredondo had brought back nothing. Word spread through the unit the way it always had, at bewildering speed: Joe Arredondo was a dead man.
The roles in the Arredondo hit were decided in either the chow hall or the chapel, where numbers were drawn from a cup. According to testimony, the man who drew the magic card, number one, was TS sergeant Carlos Rosas, a 31-year-old Dallas resident who was serving thirty years for aggravated robbery. Rosas would do the killing, while another TS member held Arredondo and two others stood by as lookouts. The murder would take place in a corridor abutting the B-wing: the maximum-security area where Luis Sandoval often worked.
The B-wing, a loud and grossly overcrowded area, “was considered the hellhole,” in the words of Cade Crippin, the CO who worked the B-wing with Sandoval the afternoon of the murder. Some of the state’s most violent criminals were housed there. At certain times, more than five hundred of them might flood the B-wing hallway en route to the gym, the chapel, the woodshop, or the chow hall. When asked on the witness stand if the hallway was ever undermanned, the reply of Nolan McCool—another officer working the B-wing that afternoon—was emphatic: “Constantly.”
Conditions were no different on December 17, 1986, which was why Sandoval was given the assignment of B-wing hall boss that afternoon. He had long since survived the new boots’ six months of hell. By now he was a CO III, an old boot, and he had trained many of the guards who now worked with him. His assignment was one of the toughest jobs in Ellis I. The west end of the B-wing hallway was left unguarded after three-thirty every afternoon, when the guard normally stationed there was transferred to the chow hall. This practice violated the Ruiz stipulation that an officer must be present at all times at any entrance or exit of the main building. It was also a dangerous practice in light of the fact that a narrow corridor intersected the west end of the B-wing and only an officer standing at that end could see what was going on in the corridor.
But Ellis I officials, like so many other wardens in the post-Ruiz era, were playing a numbers game. Chow time meant that vast numbers of inmates would be crowded together in one room. Extra guards to supervise the gathering had to come from some other post. Officials knew this meant that every day from three-thirty until after chow time, activities in the narrow corridor went unmonitored. It was a blind spot, and unit officials hoped the inmates wouldn’t notice. But according to one Ellis I officer, “Inmates watch everything we do. That’s all they do—look for our weaknesses.”
At about five-thirty that afternoon, Sandoval approached CO II Cade Crippin, who was inside a cellblock, observing the inmates. “Take over the hallway for me,” Sandoval said to his subordinate while handing him his keys. Then he headed for the bathroom, a route that took him through a confined area guarded by CO II Nolan McCool. McCool opened the picket gate to allow Sandoval into the rest room. Just as he entered, Sandoval heard someone yell, “He’s on the floor! He’s bleeding!” He whirled and burst into the B-wing hallway. Looking toward the chapel, he could see Crippin ahead of him, heading for the hidden narrow corridor at the west end of the B-wing.
When they got there they found Joe Arredondo lying on his back. Blood was gushing out of a hole in his neck; he was unconscious but gasping wildly. An eight-inch metal shank lay nearby. Sandoval put his hand against the wound, looked up, and saw Crippin and McCool standing there, gaping. “Yell ‘fight,’” he said, but the two officers seemed paralyzed. Sandoval got up, ran into the hallway, and yelled “fight” twice. Then he returned to Arredondo. “Give me your shirt,” he ordered an inmate and with it applied pressure to the wound. Crippin knelt and lifted the inmate’s legs. “Leave them on the floor!” said Sandoval. “You’ll drain all the blood to his head.” Three other officers arrived on the scene. “Get these inmates in the chapel,” he told them. “And call for a gurney.”
Joe Arredondo was taken to a hospital in Huntsville. He was pronounced dead at seven that evening, a victim of twenty stab wounds. By that time, things were quiet again at Ellis I. There was no further violence, a signal to those who understood gang behavior that Arredondo had been snuffed out by one of his own rather than by a rival gang. The following day, Chaplain Alexander Taylor, who witnessed Sandoval’s efforts, wrote the CO III a letter of commendation. That afternoon, Ellis I warden Jerry Peterson called Sandoval into his office to congratulate him on a fine job. The warden would later testify that Sandoval’s actions were “somewhat heroic.” But, Peterson added, the hero had seemed awfully calm in the midst of all the bloodshed—perhaps too calm.
On a Westbound Bus
Ten months after the murder, on October 23, 1987, Sandoval was again summoned to the warden’s office. This time, however, four Internal Affairs officers greeted him inside by reading him his rights and charging him with murder. He was accused of leaving a door unsecured and unguarded as part of a murder plot. Sandoval was then ordered to take off his uniform and replace it with inmate furlough clothes. The officials fitted Sandoval with handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain. He was whisked off to the Walker County jail.
That afternoon in the interrogation room, Special Prison Prosecution Unit investigator Royce Smithey bore down on Sandoval. You were in the hallway, Smithey said. A man was stabbed twenty times. Whoever killed him had to have come through the B-wing hallway and had to have been dripping with blood. You’re telling us you saw nothing? You’re telling us it’s a coincidence that you weren’t down at the end of the hallway? Come on, Sandoval. We know who you’re tied to. We know who you take orders from.
Sandoval insisted that he didn’t know anything about the Arredondo murder other than what he filed in his report. The guard said he wasn’t tied to anyone. But things got more interesting when Internal Affairs investigator Dale Schaper walked into the room and handed Sandoval copies of his phone records, showing that 25 phone calls he had made on Vicente’s behalf were to a high-ranking TS official named Felix Benavidez.
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