The Sheriff Who Went to Pot
Hidalgo count’s top cop, brig marmolejo, was a champion of law and order—until mexican drug smugglers made him an offer that even he couldn’t refuse.
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“Politics for me is easy because I just always try to get along with everybody. Except the feds,” says Brig Marmolejo. He manages a mirthless laugh as he reposes in the living room of his Edinburg home. It is September 15, nearly two months before his sentencing. Until then, the hours will be long for the sheriff. With characteristic defiance, he has kept his badge and his salary, refusing to relinquish either. (He eventually resigned under pressure on November 7.) But he no longer shows up for work and instead spends his days working on his ranch, planning his appeal, and practicing his gallows humor.
It is Marmolejo’s nature to be braced for the worst. Even in a situation that invites despair, his is disarmingly engaging. He greets strangers with an informal air and sprawls back into his seat as a way of encouraging guests to make themselves at home. In face-to-face conversation, he is given to filling the silence with comically pessimistic chatter about the weather, the traffic, and women. It is, of course, through small talk that he avoids more-revealing disclosures.
“Hell, nothing surprises me,” he says. “It never did. Over the years I’ve been investigated by everyone, from private investigators to the Texas Rangers to the FBI.” Marmolejo sighs as he falls back heavily into his living room sofa and folds his arms just over his prodigious belly. “The goddamned Republican federal agents,” he then adds, citing in a single epithet the two most loathsome characteristics he can imagine. “They sent them down here mostly to keep an eye on me.”
Marmolejo’s easy tenor and welcoming expression pay into all the stereotypes of the good-natured, slow-moving Hispanic bumpkin, an image he does not altogether discourage. Nonetheless, his successes as a sheriff and a politican owe to his complicated nature. Described by almost everyone as a “man of the people,” Marmolejo has four years of college education and tends to ridicule those who do not. He is quick to befriend yet trusts almost no one. He is of the Valley but not from it, having been reared some two hundred miles up the road in the agricultural hamlet of Yorktown. He spent his youth working in cotton fields and today asserts with proletarian hostility that “there’s no fat people in Yorktown”—seemingly unaware of his own physique, which reflects decades of easy living. His amiability is both genuine and a front for darker preoccupations.
Yet it was not so long ago that Brigido Marmolejo, Jr., seemed to be nothing less than a knight in shining armor. When he made his first run for sheriff, in 1976, Hidalgo County was still very much a dark-skinned region run by white-skinned patricians named Bentsen and Newhouse. The sheriff at the time, Claudio Castaneda, Sr., was the county’s first Hispanic sheriff in nearly a century, but he was hopelessly out of his depth and certain to be defeated after his second term. Hispanic leaders feared a political backlash. They looked to 42-year-old Brig Marmolejo as their savior. His had been the career of a peace officer who could do no wrong: at the Edinburg Police Department, where, at the age of 32, he became the youngest assistant chief in the Valley; at the Hidalgo County highway patrol, which he directed; and at the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, where he spent more than five years chasing bootleggers. Marmolejo was a political novice, but he had an able tutor in his brother-in-law, veteran Valley campaign manager Jim Wilson. Just as important, he was thoroughly “anglocized,” and it pleased the power bosses that Marmolejo, unlike the incumbent, had a reputation as a head-cracking law-and-order cop who would keep the common folk in line. His campaign slogan said it all: “A Big man for a Big Job.” Marmolejo defeated Castaneda and three other candidates in the Democratic primary and coasted through the general election.
The new sheriff’s first term was all that any law-abiding voter could hope for. Shortly after taking office, Marmolejo called a press conference to announce that the county’s newly built jail was shoddily constructed and susceptible to escapes, and that he would appoint a blue-ribbon panel to fix the mess. He demanded (and received) increased fuding for more jailers to replace the current inmate-guards, noting dryly, “Even though they’re called trusties, they can’t be trusted,” When more than two hundred protesting farm workers from Alabama and Georgia marched down to the border to block the Hidalgo-Reynosa bridge, he waded in and arrested all of them. The message was clear: Anyone who raised a ruckus in Hidalgo County was bound for jail.
But the distinguishing event of Brig Marmolejo’s first term occurred in 1978. The county’s most powerful official at that time was district attorney Oscar McInnis. Word reached the sheriff from one of his snitches at the Hidalgo County jail that McInnis was trying to get rid of the ex-husband of a woman he was seeing on the sly and that he had solicited the snitch’s help. Marmolejo placed a wire on the inmate and sent him off to talk to McInnis. The resulting taped conversation featured the Hidalgo County DA offering the inmate money to kill his girlfriend’s ex-husband. Marmolejo faced pressure to abandon the investigation, but he pressed forward until McInnis was indicted for solicitation of murder and disbarred in 1979.
The following year, Marmolejo won reelection easily. Yet there would linger a fallout over his clash with Oscar McInnis, who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and later had his law license reinstated. The Texas Rangers, who were loyal to McInnis, retaliated with their own investigation of Marmolejo, while local FBI agents made known their resentment of the sheriff for being excluded from his investigation. Later he would raise the ire of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which he accused of hiring thieves and drunkards. “Brig earned the never-ending enmity of every one of those agencies,” says Jim Wilson. “They had it in for him. And they were going to get him.”
But to do this, they would need the invaluable assistance of Brig Marmolejo.
Throughout the eighties the Hidalgo County sheriff routed his election-year opponents and rapidly became the most popular politician in the region. But in the impoverished Rio Grande Valley, the role models were not the ones wearing badges.
One of the most respected men in Brig Marmolejo’s county was an Edinburg High School teacher’s aide named Juan Frank Garcia, who had done federal time for smuggling marijuana. Garcia was generous with his money, and no one in Edinburg seemed preoccupied with the source of his wealth. When Garcia threw a party for the Valley football coaches that included alcohol, marijuana, and strippers among the party favors, the normally timid Edinburg Daily Review was moved to denounce his poor taste. “We got a lot of negative response from readers who liked Juan Frank and thought we were picking on him unfairly,” remembers the Review’s editor, Gilbert Tagle. When Garcia was found shot to death in 1989—apparently by Colmbian cocaine traficantes who felt threatened by his growing distribution network—an embarrassed silence fell over the county.
Yet Garcia’s presence in the Rio Grande Valley paled in comparison with that of Ramon Martinez, known as El Lechero (“the Milkman”) from his early days of delivering marinjuana out of a milk truck. Martinez, a lifelong resident of Donna, got his start in the early seventies transporting marijuana supplied by a former Mexican military officer. Despite three different convictions, Martinez’s distribution network had grown to unfathomable proportions. Much of his pot was funneled to Oklahoma City, where it was dispersed across the country. He employed hundreds of men and women, owned more than thirty trafficking vehicles, and established distribution links at ranches outside Inez and Corsicana. El lechero donated thousands of dollars in hush money to the families of convicted subordinates. Using sham transactions he invested in real estate and laundered money through his horse-racing business. Unimpeded by Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, Ramon Martinez was well on his way to becoming the wealthiest man in Hidalgo County.
To the people of Donna, Martinez was el patron. He purchased softball uniforms for the Donna police department’s team. When the city’s lawn mowers were in disrepair, Martinez loaned Donna his own equipment. It would have surprised only an outsider that, when Martinez was brought into court for a bond hearing in the late eighties, numerous prominent citizens—including Mayor Hector Casiano—showed up to lend their support. He paraded around with his $16,000 belt buckle and his Anglo girlfriends, his fortune amassed, he said, through his horses and his fighting roosters. Like other high-rolling traffickers in Hidalgo County, Ramon Martinez waved his ill-gotten wealth like a matador’s cape. And the county’s bull of a law enforcement official, Sheriff Brig Marmolejo, blinked.
It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when Marmolejo discarded what his 1976 campaign literature cited as “the public obligation to enforce the law wherever and whenever it is broken.” Likely the sheriff himself does not know when—or, for that matter, why. Perhaps the reinstatement of former DA Oscar McInnis’ law license convinced him that justice was a fool’s pursuit in the Valley. Perhaps his continual exposure to crooked cops and federal agents on the take corroded his own integrity. Perhaps he saw the futility of the War on Drugs. Perhaps he saw the money others were making and decided that some of it should be coming his way.
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