The Ranger Bandit
He was the drug kingpin with connections in high places. When he beat a rap, he taunted cops with an ad that said, “Better Luck Next Time.” Steve Benifiel called himself …
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IN 1974 A STRANGER NAMED steve Benifiel swaggered into Ranger and announced that he was looking for a job. In his blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirt, he didn’t look like the typical redneck ruffian who made his way to Ranger. He was so wiry and baby-faced that other men sizing up Benifiel would estimate that they would stand a good chance against him in a fistfight. But there was a daring, reckless side to this new-comer. He was a great braggart, the biggest talker the town had seen since the oil boom. “People used to tell me,” he said, grinning, “that I’d grow up to be either one good lawyer or one good crook.”
Raised in Florida, Benifiel said, he ran away from home when he was eleven, bounced around foster homes, served in Vietnam, then eventually made his way to the Texas Panhandle, where he worked as a mechanic. He said that he wanted to own a truck stop, a distinguished profession in those parts. A man who’s good at “turning wrenches”—local slang for working on automobile engines—is treated with deep respect in Ranger, and Benifiel quickly became known as one of the best.
By 1979 the ambitious Benifiel had bought a small garage and decided to expand. He bought wreckers—the ultimate status symbols among Ranger’s paint-and-body crowd—and he hired mechanics and proclaimed that he would eventually control the interstate. Every time there was an accident or a breakdown on I-20, Benifiel said, he wanted it to be handled by one of his red-and-gold wreckers with the shiny chrome bumpers and “Steve’s Garage” painted on the door. He wanted those cars and trucks to be towed into his garage, where, one of his business associates said, he was “a master at taking a twenty-dollar repair and turning it into a five-hundred-dollar bill.” Someday, Benifiel boasted, he would have Steve’s Truck Stops at interstate off-ramps from Fort Worth to El Paso, and his wreckers would cover every mile of the road.
It was not long before truckers along I-20 were swapping Benifiel stories on their CB radios. They talked about the roll of bills Benifiel kept in his front pocket, the girls who hung out at his shop, and the scams he pulled that led to his nickname, the Interstate Thief. In one infamous episode, Benifiel allegedly persuaded a buddy from the Ranger Police Department to park a squad car near the beginning of a gradual, curving hill west of Ranger on a freezing winter’s night. The truckers would have to slow down to avoid a speeding ticket, then would find themselves going too slow to make it up the icy grade. There, halfway up, sitting behind the wheel of a wrecker, would be Benifiel himself, his face illuminated by the glint of his cigarette. He told the stalled truckers he would happily tow them to the top of the highway for $100.
Ranger citizens would gather for coffee, talking endlessly about Steve Benifiel. For a town long accustomed to a lusterless daily routine, to bleak jobs and summers as hot as wool, Benifiel must have been like something out of a Pecos Bill folktale. His desire for adventure seemed as great as his desire for loot. At his garage, he tossed a $100 bill in his rattlesnake aquarium and declared, “If you got the courage to grab it, then you get to keep it.” He owned a mountain lion and a Bengal tiger as pets. Benifiel would drive around town with the tiger sitting in the front seat, its head sticking out of the window like a dog wanting fresh air. The tiger’s name, appropriately enough, was Bandit.
Benifiel made a list entitled “Steve’s Ten Steps to Success.” The tenth step was “Buy your friends. This way you’ll know everybody’s price.” For entertainment, he played chase with the local cops. One afternoon he saw Charles Edwards, then the town’s chief of police, driving toward Eastland. Benifiel leaped into one of his sports cars, came up behind Edwards’ car outside the city limits, tapped the back bumper, sped around him from the left side, slowed down, sped around him from the right side, and then took off. A grim Edwards admitted that not once in his two years as chief was he able to catch up to Benifiel to give him a speeding ticket—and he couldn’t arrest him later because he would not have been able to prove in court that Benifiel had been driving the car. One of the few times Benifiel did receive a speeding ticket, he laughingly signed it “The Ranger Bandit.”
In a way, Steve Benifiel was a frontier anti-hero, a direct throwback to the “lawless breed” of the oil boom. “Back in the old oil-boom days in Ranger,” said Texas Ranger Gene Kea, who worked that area of Texas, “the feeling there was that if you couldn’t find any blood, then there was no foul. You were allowed to get away with a little bit more. And it’s a feeling you still find out there among the Ranger people today.”
Benifiel openly ran a loan shark business right out of his garage, offering money, no questions asked, at a minimum of 20 percent interest a week. (If a man borrowed $1,000, he owed Benifiel $200 a week until he could pay back the full thousand.) Though he loaned up to $10,000, he rarely had to worry about collecting it. He would simply lower his eyelids and stare hard at his customer, and then he’d say, “Your interest payment is due back exactly at this time in exactly seven days, not a minute later.” Said a business associate of Benifiel’s: “He never had to tell you he’d break your legs. You just knew.”
Ranger was overrun with stories—most of them, no doubt, apocryphal—about people who had crossed him. Some talked about the student at Ranger Junior College who owed Benifiel money. He disappeared one day and was never seen again. “For all we know, the kid got sick of school,” said a former police officer. “But for months, all anybody wanted to talk about was how Steve Benifiel did away with that kid.” The story that Benifiel had once been a hit man and a member of the Mafia gained such fervent support on the local grapevine that an FBI agent quietly did some checking. The story, he said, was not true.
If Steve Benifiel was a crook, the cops couldn’t prove it. Officers in Eastland County investigated all sorts of allegations about Benifiel. They tried to catch him trafficking in stolen cars and illegally selling firearms (it was once known that he kept up to one hundred guns in his home). They tried to learn what Benifiel might have known about a couple of unsolved West Texas killings. But only once were they able to get a criminal charge to stick against Benifiel. In 1989 he was given deferred probation and fined $2,909 for attempting to cut off the electric meter at his home (he still hasn’t paid the fine). Other charges—including a separate incident in which he threatened a Ranger police officer—were dismissed. Benifiel never even paid for any of his speeding tickets. Mysteriously, said courthouse sources, he would appeal his tickets at the Eastland County courthouse, and they would disappear.
Benifiel made sure the lawmen knew they were losing. In 1985, after a lengthy investigation that the Texas Rangers conducted with the Eastland County Sheriff’s Department and the Department of Public Safety, Benifiel was arrested for auto theft. The case was later dropped because of lack of evidence. A few days later, an ad appeared in the Ranger Times, addressed to the officers who led the investigation. It read, “Better Luck Next Time. The Ranger Bandit.”
“You don’t know how bad we wanted to get that old boy,” said Texas Ranger Gene Kea.
By the late eighties, Benifiel owned half a dozen wreckers, one of which cost $325,000. He owned a gigantic eighteen-wheeler truck capable of cleaning up hazardous wastes. Besides his Corvette, he owned a Cessna airplane, a $50,000 Pantera sports car, a ski boat, a Honda touring motorcycle, and a dragster that he kept down at the Ennis speedway. He wore a $25,000 Rolex on his wrist.
The town’s biggest businessman, Benifiel helped a couple of his buddies start garages of their own. He began planting his wreckers at other garages and gas stations along the interstate. He invested in places like Lillie’s Cafe and opened a laundromat. “By my count, he owned twelve businesses in Ranger,” said one town leader. “It’s sad to say, but he kept our economy going.”
Few residents of Eastland County believed that Benifiel made all of his money solely from those businesses. Most of the rumors about him suggested that he was involved in the drug trade. If so, the news wouldn’t have surprised anyone. The drug profession had long been a popular one in Eastland County.
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