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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The men decided that no one but themselves and the local Texas Ranger should know about the investigation. They refused even to go to the county courthouse to look up records regarding Benifiel. If anyone connected with Eastland County government, especially the sheriff, learned what they were doing, the chances were too strong that word would leak back to Benifiel. Clark and Bush were so dedicated to the mission that they both grew beards as disguises and drove an old pickup so no one would recognize them.
Clark knew this investigation would not be easy. Steve’s Garage was located along busy Highway 80; there was no place for an officer to hide to set up a surveillance operation. If a stranger came to Ranger and started asking a lot of questions, somebody was going to get on the phone to Benifiel. When Clark would ask informants to wear a wire at a meeting with Benifiel or record a phone conversation, they would look at him as if he were crazy.
Clark and Bush had even more trouble when they tried to bring their own undercover agents into Ranger to purchase drugs. It turned out, to their dismay, that Benifiel had persuaded a buddy of his, a square-jawed, highly decorated DPS state trooper named Acey Steel, to run vehicle registration checks on cars coming through Ranger that Benifiel didn’t recognize. One vehicle that Steel checked turned out to be an unmarked state police car that Clark and Bush were using to spy on Benifiel.
Steel was something of a local hero. In 1985 he saved the lives of many people in Eastland County when he controlled the spillage of deadly chemicals after a tractor-trailer collided with a train and exploded. It didn’t seem possible that Benifiel could persuade such a man to come to his side. Yet, when Steel ran across two DPS narcotics officers at an Eastland grocery store, he passed the information along to Benifiel.
Ranger was an impenetrable fiefdom. Everyone seemed beholden to Steve Benifiel. Clark and his team, pondering their options, realized their one bleak hope was the telephone wiretap. Secretly, in a closed hearing in a federal court in Lubbock, a judge ordered a tap on Benifiel’s phones.
It didn’t seem likely that Benifiel would be so careless as to use the phone to make drug deals. He was already suspicious, he would later say, that the police were closing in. He would pat down people who came into his office, looking for a wire. He would fly his airplane above town to see if he could spot any unusual police surveillance. He secretly recorded conversations with people in his office who he thought might be turning on him.
The wiretaps came on-line in early November 1990, and agents started listening around the clock. Astonishingly, they hit pay dirt within three days. Benifiel and Guy Kincaid were heard talking about someone named Dickey. Bush began to tremble with excitement. They were onto Billy Dickey! “I had been working narcotics for twenty-four years and had never been this carried away,” said Bush. “We realized we had a chance to take down two untouchables, Benifiel and Dickey, together.”
A few days later, another Kincaid conversation was recorded, this one about a meeting with the ring’s meth dealer from Odessa. The dealer, according to the conversation, discussed buying half a pound of meth for $7,000. Then Kincaid called Benifiel to talk about the deal again. Clark was flabbergasted. No major drug dealers used the telephone so freely to talk about their work.
Benifiel must have felt so invulnerable in Eastland County that he apparently never worried about a simple wiretap; at the least, he figured one of his sources in law enforcement would have told him about it. Clark realized Benifiel’s arrogance was going to hang him.
Quickly Clark and Bush put together a surveillance team to follow Kincaid. They tailed him to a parking lot outside an Abilene honky-tonk called the Caboose Club, where one officer witnessed Kincaid and the Odessa dealer exchanging meth and money. But to keep Benifiel guessing, no arrests were made. Kincaid headed untouched back to Eastland County. And the Odessa dealer was almost back home before a DPS trooper pulled him over for speeding. The trooper, who had been briefed about Clark’s investigation and told what to do, then asked if he could search the Suburban. Inside he found a boxed radio with the guts removed and replaced with meth. The task force finally had its hard evidence.
But there was more. Through December, Clark listened in disbelief as Benifiel arranged to personally sell meth to a couple of friends. Clark’s team slipped into Ranger long enough to witness Benifiel making a sale to a man right in front of Steve’s Garage. Clark listened to Benifiel ask Sheriff Hogan about how to get rid of a large cache of guns he kept at his home. They witnessed other drug deals.
On January 4, 1991, Clark and a team of other officers poured into Steve’s Garage. Benifiel didn’t say a word. He just sat in his chair. Then he gave the officers one of his cocky grins and held out his hands to be handcuffed.
Over the next few months officers fanned out over West Texas and arrested other members of Benifiel’s ring. So many of them were caught that a Border Patrol bus was brought down to the Eastland County jail to transport them all to Lubbock, where the arraignments were to take place. “It looked like a high school band trip,” said one resident. Wide-eyed residents circled the jail in their cars. Some got out and taped the scene with their video cameras. County Still High After Drug Bust, read the headline in one Ranger weekly newspaper. And in the Ranger Times, the same paper that had once run Benifiel’s ad trumpeting his escape from the law, a new ad appeared, paid for by one of the officers Benifiel used to chide. The ad read, “Better Luck Next Time. Bye Bye Bandit.”
It was, indeed, the Bandit’s final ride. The case against him was airtight. According to federal agents, the Benifiel gang had produced and sold more than $4 million worth of drugs. All thirty of those arrested pleaded guilty to participating in a drug conspiracy or trying to cover it up—including DPS trooper Acey Steel and Sheriff Dee Hogan. In federal court, Steel shook as he received a two-and-a-half-year sentence. Hogan bowed his head when the judge handed him a three-year sentence. Dickey got twelve years and eleven months, and Kincaid got six years and eight months.
When Steve Benifiel stood before the judge, he was in a white dress shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. “Look at him, no different, not a feather ruffled,” whispered a Ranger resident who had shoved her way into the packed courtroom. “Good God, he’s a cocky one.” The judge gave Benifiel twelve years. Benifiel smiled knowingly and left the courtroom, his head held high, with five U.S. marshals surrounding him.
A YEAR AFTER HIS ARREST, some townspeople still could not let go of the Benifiel myth that had for so long enriched their lives. At the high school, a teenager passed around baseball caps that read, “Eastland County Bandit Boosters.” One prominent Ranger woman, the wife of a county commissioner, kept insisting that Benifiel wasn’t guilty of anything at all, that he had been working undercover the whole time for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to expose bigger drug dealers.
Benifiel wouldn’t speak on the record about any of his past criminal activities, but he loved hearing the latest tales that were being spread about him. “Listen, those people made my reputation for me, okay?” he said. “I didn’t spread all those Mafia killer, hit man stories. I just visited with people, bought them coffee.”
Benifiel cheerfully said he could wait out his prison sentence, then hinted that his sentence might get reduced after he tells all about public corruption regarding drugs in West Texas. “This ball game hasn’t even started,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “All the players are not in. Believe me, I know the whole story, the whole story, and nobody else knows it.”
He blew more smoke into the air, then lowered his eyes and flashed a half-lidded look that could only be described as threatening. For all his good humor, it suddenly became obvious why Benifiel could also scare the bejesus out of a person. “It ain’t fair to throw the rule book at me when everyone else was breaking the rules already,” he said. “The big boys are just mad because I was stealing more than they were.”
There was still a lot of outlaw left in Steve Benifiel—a distrust for the law, an antagonism for any man with a badge, a sworn vow to get even.
Already a rumor was circulating through Eastland County that before his arrest, Benifiel had buried hundreds of thousands of dollars in the abandoned Ranger oil fields. Someday, it was said, he would return in the dark of night to dig up his money and start all over again.
When asked about the story, Benifiel smiled mysteriously. “Don’t worry,” said the Ranger Bandit, defiant to the end. “You ain’t seen the last of me yet.”
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