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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After his trial, in the privacy of his home, Marmolejo acknowledged that he had been offered bribes on numerous occasions throughout his eighteen-year tenure. On one occasion a close friend involved in the drug trade offered the sheriff some money in exchange for some “assistance.” Marmolejo agreed to meet the friend at an Edinburg restaurant. After the meal, the man said to the sheriff, “I’ve got that money for you.”
According to Marmolejo, his reply was, “Tell you what. I’ve been broke all my life, and I might as well go ahead and stay broke.” He did not take the money; nor, however, did he arrest the man for attempting to bribe an officer. The friend’s overture remained their little secret, and life went on as before in the Valley.
Yet close observers could see that something about the sheriff had changed. “He became more lax in law enforcement,” says one of his former deputies, “as if he wasn’t interested.” Though Marmolejo often claimed credit for drug busts that were actually made by city cops, he and his deputies were seldom active in major federal cases. Edinburgh Daily Review editor Gilbert Tagle recalls thinking, “Too many guys out there are making big money. Is Brig doing enough?”
Where once Brig Marmolejo had stood for law and order, for getting tough and not trusting inmates, he was now developing a reputation as a softy. “Brig never cared who he was seen with,” admits Jim Wilson. “He was always friendly to the bad guys. If they were out on bond, they’d buy him a drink and he’d sit and laugh with them and pat them on the back.” Marmolejo would tell people that dopers were voters too. But they were more than that. They were big-time contributors who often threw pachangas, or fundraising parties, for the Hidalgo County sheriff. It did not amuse federal agents to walk into a bar and see the sheriff boozing it up with traffickers who loudly bragged about their latest shipments.
In the meantime, what was Brig Marmolejo doing about the infamous Ramon Martinez? “We couldn’t get near the guy,” Marmolejo says today—though Kerr County authorities had arrested El Lechero once and the feds had nailed him three times. And what about Juan Frank Garcia, the Edinburg teacher’s aide linked with Colombian traficantes? “He was a good friend of mine,” Marmolejo says without a moment’s hesitation.
No doubt the sheriff had his enemies. But it was his friends he should have been worrying about.
In 1992 Marmolejo ran for a fifth term and won, but not by the usual breathtaking margin. “He got lazy and cocky,” says Jim Wilson, who did not run his brother-in-law’s campaign that year. “He was worn down to a frazzle.”
As both politician and sheriff, Marmolejo was a shadow of his former self. Whenever and however the transformation had begun, by 1992 it was complete: The once-pugnacious sheriff now presided over the state’s most drug-infested county with a peculiar disinterest. Several of the area’s big-time traffickers would eventually be arrested, though seldom by Hidalgo County deputies. And since no federal pretrial facility exists in the Valley, such prisoners would often wind up at the Hidalgo County jail, in the care of Brig Marmolejo.
Among federal inmates, word spread: If you wanted special treatment, such as “contact visits” (when inmates may talk to visitors outside of the visitation room, privately, and make physical contact with them), this could be arranged at the Hidalgo Count jail. The doling out of contact visits consumed an inordinate amount of Marmolejo’s time. He personally met with families of inmates and showed himself to be un jefe muy simpatico. It was an excellent way to curry favor with constituents, since many Valley residents had at least one family member tied up in the drug trade.
But the doling out of contact visits benefited Marmolejo in more tangible ways as well. “It was commonly known that if you had the money, you could get contact visits,” says a former Hidalgo County deputy. “Now, it’s true that a lot of good, humble people would get visits. But there were also times when I saw people turned away because they didn’t have the right amount of cash. The term was ‘political contributions.’”
There is, of course, another term for this type of conduct: “bribery.” In exchange for money, Marmolejo was giving wealthy smugglers preferential treatment in his jail. “In effect,” says assistant U.S. attorney Greg Surovic, the man who would ultimately prosecute Marmolejo, “he was saying, ‘Bring your drug business to Hidalgo County, because if you get caught, we’ll make it fun for you in jail.’”
Above all, the sheriff made jail fun for Homero Heraldo Beltran-Aguirre. Unlike the other high-dollar traffickers in the Valley, Beltran maintained a low profile. He was from Monterrey and kept most of his assets, which included a multimillion dollar mansion, in Mexico. He did not throw pachangas for politicians or hang out in Edinburg’s Echo hotel bar with other dealers and their defense attorneys. Nonetheless, Homero Beltran was Ramon Martinez’s chief supplier of marijuana and perhaps the single largest exporter of Mexican pot in the Rio Grande Valley. Beltran’s source was said to be the Quintero family, suspected in the 1985 murder of Drug Enforcement agent Enrique Camarena. From 1984 until 1990 Beltran was the conduit through which tens of thousand of pounds of marijuana from the Quintero farms made its way onto El Lechero’s eighteen-wheelers and across the United States.
But the Quintero-Beltran-Martinez axis began to crumble in 1989, when El Lechero was arrested and charged in a 92-count federal indictment. Faced with a federal life sentence, which precludes the possibility of parole, El Lechero agreed to a “debriefing.” He ratted on every major player in his network, including his supplier, Homero Beltan. In April 1991 the information he supplied led directly to Beltran’s arrest in San Diego, California.
Like Martinez before him, Homero Beltran analyzed his prospects and decided he’d better sing. He knew other distributors and money launderers in the Valley, and federal agents involved in those cases hung on his every word. They decided to keep him close. Arrangements were made to transfer Beltran from California to Marmolejo’s Hidalgo County jail.
By September 1991, Beltran happened to notice that another federal drug prisoner in the jail, Freddy Gonzalez, was enjoying frequent contact visits. Gonzalez was from Progreso, where, as Marmolejo put it, “he helped me out quite a bit with votes.” The trafficker and the sheriff were friends, according to both men, and the former exploited their relationship by convincing the latter to hire three of Gonzalez’s nephews as jailers, who in turn allowed their uncle to have contact visits whenever he wished. Gonzalez told Beltran that some of these visits were not merely contact, but conjugal, and that he was paying Marmolejo several thousand dollars in return. Gonzalez let it be known that he wasn’t the only federal inmate paying for private visits with women in the jail library. If Beltran was interested, Freddy Gonzalez would see what he could do—for a fee, of course.
Thus did the marijuana exporter and the sheriff have breakfast together one fall morning in 1991. The two men hit it off; as Marmolejo later testified, somewhat vaguely, “He was a good person to have a conversation with.” From a profit standpoint, Beltran proved to be a particularly good conversationalist that morning. The deal they ultimately settled on gave Beltran three “private” contact visits every week; in return, Marmolejo would be paid $5,000 per month and an additional $1,000 per visit. To keep things discreet, no money would change hands between the two. Instead, Beltran would use a trusted intermediary who managed his affairs in Monterrey. The man who would deliver Beltran’s money, his wife, his children, and later his girlfriend, was his brother-in-law, Juan Antonio Guardado.
Since his indictment in January, Marmolejo has consistently maintained that every gift he received and every deal he entered into with Guardado was done to develop a connection with him, not Beltran. “I was approached by Guardado, who told me he was a policeman in Mexico,” Marmolejo says. “He said his brother-in-law was in jail. Basically I was just trying to work a relationship with him. It’s a hell of a lot better knowing somebody from Monterrey or Reynosa or wherever. It opens a lot of doors in Mexico.”
Guardado was in fact a butcher, not a police officer, when the sheriff first laid eyes on him in October 1991. Marmolejo admits that he didn’t attempt to confirm whether the drug trafficker’s brother-in-law was the policeman he claimed to be because, as he puts it, “in Mexico, anybody has a damn badge.” Yet for reasons unexplained, the sheriff courted Guardado from October 1991 until July 1993 as if he were the only cop ever to cross the border. During that period, the “Mexican policeman” did not assist Marmolejo in a single investigation. What did happen, however, was that Guardado frequently brought visitors to Beltran, and the visits took place in the sheriff’s office. When Beltran’s family showed up, they often brought candy and cabrito for the inmate and various deputies. So elaborate were these mealtime visits that annoyed Hidalgo County officers began to refer to Beltran’s group as “the picnickers.”
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