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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Sandoval buckled. Yes, he had made the phone calls. Yes, he had mailed Vicente’s letters, had cashed two money orders for the inmate, and on three different occasions, had delivered packages from a parking lot to a telephone booth. The packages, he admitted, most likely contained drugs. Dale Schaper dutifully typed up his report, and sent it through the proper channels. (Today, Sandoval says that statement was coerced.) Six weeks later, in December 1987, Luis Sandoval was terminated from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
It took more than three years for the Arredondo murder case to come to trial, during which time a number of things happened to Sandoval. His wife divorced him. His father died. He was arrested for driving while intoxicated, following a one-car accident that left his limbs temporarily paralyzed. To pay for his legal expenses, his mother sold the family home. Sandoval, in the meantime, worked at J.C. Penney in Plano.
One day Sandoval received a phone call at work. The caller advised Sandoval not to show up for his March 18, 1991, trial, and then hung up without identifying himself. On the witness stand, Sandoval suggested that the caller was someone from TDCJ Internal Affairs; more likely, he was a Texas Syndicate member delivering the message that the TS would not be amused if Sandoval blew the whistle on their activities. Even before the call, Luis Sandoval had been sweating bullets. Armando Garcia had seen this coming. Garcia would later say that he told Sandoval shortly after the Arredondo murder, “Man, you’re in deep shit. They’re gonna be looking at you, and all that stuff in the past is gonna come up. They’re gonna say you were in on it. You better get the hell out of here, Sandoval.”
Sandoval took the advice three years after Garcia gave it. On March 19, the name of Luis Sandoval was called three times in the Walker County courthouse, but the defendant did not respond. He was on a westbound bus, fleeing the state. Sandoval got off in Los Angeles and found his way to Van Nuys, where a cousin put him up in his apartment. For several days, Sandoval read the Bible and considered his options. He called his mother, who begged him to turn himself in. He told her that he feared the Texas prison authorities, who by now had surely discovered that the murder of Joe Arredondo was, if anything, a result of prison mismanagement. It was their fault, not his, but someone would have to take the fall. Sandoval did not tell his mother why he was such a vulnerable candidate.
He did not turn himself in. Instead, he wrote an impassioned, handwritten 24-page letter that his mother sent to a few members of the media. The letter was not what one might expect from a former prison guard. It criticized TDCJ’s good ol’ boy system, which Sandoval claimed “has ruled with an iron fist since the penal system was first established.” Hispanic guards, he said, were “either coerced into quitting or found doing something wrong.” Supervisors treated inmates “like animals.” He further wrote, “I am not the only one who worked there that knows that TDCJ is linked to the gangs and their illegal activities. Inside the walls of each prison is drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion, and grand theft, but no investigation into any of these things has ever been made.” The letter did not say what such an investigation would say about Luis Sandoval.
When he sent the letter off to his mother, he knew it wouldn’t be long before law enforcement officials discovered his whereabouts. With what was left of his final J.C. Penney paycheck, Sandoval and his cousin drove to Las Vegas, a place Sandoval had always yearned to visit. They blew the paycheck on the slot machines; they had a wonderful time. On the way home Sandoval asked his cousin to drive the scenic route. “I want to see the mountains,” he said.
A few days later, on April 12, 1991, FBI agents showed up at the apartment where Sandoval had been hiding and took him to the Los Angeles County jail. Twelve days later, Texas chief prison prosecutor Travis McDonald flew to L.A., took custody of Sandoval, and flew him back to Huntsville, where he was held without bond at the Walker County jail.
Not Guilty
For all of Sandoval’s claims that the system was making a sacrificial lamb out of him, the system came to his rescue in the end.
The two inmate snitches who testified against Sandoval understated their criminal history, contradicted each other, and came off looking like dirtbags who would say anything for the right price. In contrast, sixteen current or former Ellis I employees testified. Not one of them pinned the murder of Joe Arredondo on Sandoval. Not one of them said that Sandoval was a bad officer; many, in fact, went out of their way to laud his abilities. Several of them testified vigorously that Ellis I was understaffed and overcrowded, and that the unit was riddled with blind spots.
None of them knew anything about Sandoval and drugs. Asked point-blank by his attorney, Did you ever bring drugs inside TDCJ? Sandoval lied: “No, sir.” Contradicting this claim, Internal Affairs investigator Dale Schaper took the stand and read his report of the night Sandoval was arrested. But the report was not a signed confession. When asked about it, Sandoval testified that the report merely contained Schaper’s accusations, which Sandoval denied then and would deny now, under oath. Had Schaper’s investigation been thorough, this denial might have seemed implausible to the jury. But the report made no mention of Armando Garcia and El Carpintero; nor did it offer any evidence that Sandoval had actually smuggled drugs into Ellis I.
It took the jury 33 minutes to decide that Sandoval was not guilty. After their verdict was announced on Wednesday, May 29, the jurors milled around outside the courtroom and vented their disgust with the state’s case to the media. One juror phoned Sandoval’s brother that afternoon and told him that in her view the case against Sandoval was racially motivated. A week later another juror wrote Sandoval a four-page letter, expressing her chagrin that he had been put through all the agony.
Not everyone was so sympathetic, however. After the trial, Sandoval’s attorney, Steve Fischer, contacted TDCJ officials and asked them to let bygones be bygones. “Louie would love nothing more than to be a guard again,” Fischer told them. The attorney was advised that his client would never again wear gray in a state penal institution.
Were he to pay his old workplace a visit, Luis Sandoval would notice several changes at Ellis I. Video cameras monitor the hallways. The corridor where Joe Arredondo was murdered is now permanently guarded. Beneath the cosmetic alterations, however, things at Ellis I are just as Sandoval left them. On August 26, 1990, a death row inmate proved his loyalty to the Aryan Brotherhood during his daily recreation hour by strangling a black inmate in a recreation yard with a jump rope while the latter was performing oral sex on the former. And in March 1991, McDonald’s prosecution force indicted yet another Ellis I guard. “He was muling,” said McDonald.
Sandoval described Ellis I warden Jerry Peterson as “a good man but a figurehead. His assistant wardens run the building.” Indeed, Peterson said to me that his unit’s drug problem “isn’t rampant,” but he also acknowledged that much has escaped his attention over the years. Even after Arredondo’s murder, when the Special Prison Prosecution Unit began to gather incriminating evidence against Sandoval, Peterson showed little interest in the details. “The investigators didn’t tell me much, nor was I particularly inquisitive,” he said.
Gangs still terrorize the prisons. “There’s no way to shut them down,” Sandoval said. Yet a former prison drug-runner confirmed the obvious—that without the help of TDCJ employees, the flow of drugs into state prisons would dry up. Without drugs, gangs would have little income; without income, they would have little power over the system. But the system will not change. Employees come and go unfrisked, unobserved. The system snitches on one mule while protecting another. “And there’s always somebody,” the ex-drug runner told me, “who’ll do something for you.”
“I didn’t do it,” Sandoval announced to me in a recent phone conversation. Reminded that our earlier on-the-record, on-tape conversation contradicted this, he said, “I have my life to think about….I made my mistakes. But I was a good officer.” Thus, the former good officer now wished to disavow everything he had told me earlier. As to everything he had told his investigators—none of that was true either, he said. He had lied to his own investigator, just as inmates and Internal Affairs had lied to the jurors. No one, he seemed to be suggesting, was capable of telling the truth about Luis Sandoval—not even Sandoval himself.
A Good Kid
The inmate, a former gang operative now in protective custody, pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of his white shirt and lit it. He squinted through the smoke and the bars and the memories. “I can’t honestly tell you why he did it,” said the inmate of Sandoval. “There were many times when he said, ‘I ain’t gonna do this shit anymore.’ And we’d think, well, maybe we’re putting too much pressure on him. So we’d just lay back, let him cool down. Then he’d say, ‘Damn, I wish I had twenty dollars to go buy a couple of beers.’ And I’d say, ‘Just wait here, I’ll be back.’ And I’d collect fifty dollars for him. Then he’d have to do something for us.
“When Arredondo got killed, Sandoval was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the Texas Syndicate had told him there was a murder happening, he wouldn’t have gone for it. I remember when he yelled fight. I was in the dayroom. I looked up and as he was running by, he looked at me…like he wanted to cry, you know? I knew he didn’t have nothing to do with it.
“Sandoval, he was a good kid,” said the inmate of the guard who had once done him favors. “He just got involved with the wrong people.”
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