Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Fall of the Last Patrón.
His father battled the political bosses of Starr County, but he became one. For seventeen years, Sheriff Eugenio Falcón ruled his bailiwick—until the lure of easy money brought him down.
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Gene’s family had a reputation for being civic-minded. His mother, Emma, a schoolteacher, made sure the four boys attended services every Sunday in the yellow-brick Methodist church that earlier generations of Falcóns had helped build. All the boys chose government or public-service careers: Antonio practices family medicine, José works as a schoolteacher, and Federico became an officer with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Gene became intrigued with police work because of two neighbors. “One was a state game warden,” he said. “And one was a state trooper. They were kind of my idols.” In 1974, two years after his father died abruptly from a pulmonary embolism, he started working for the highway patrol out of Harlingen. “I’d trust him with my life,” said his former partner, Sherwood Hamilton. “In fact, I have.”
Four years later, Falcón transferred back to Rio Grande City, where he soon acquired a reputation as a straight arrow. “As a state trooper, he was very, very strict,” recalled former district attorney Arnulfo Guerra. “Sometimes the authorities weren’t as strict as they should have been in dealing with people who drank. Gene represented the opposite.” Such an unyielding posture might not have worked to his political advantage under normal circumstances, but in the spring of 1980 the Democratic nominee for sheriff unexpectedly died. Though Falcón was only 28 at the time and had never run for office, he asked the executive committee of the county Democratic party (made up of the precinct chairmen) to appoint him the party’s nominee. “I felt there was a need for leadership,” he said. “At that time there was a very poor relationship between the sheriff’s office and the other agencies. The state troopers didn’t back up the sheriff’s office, and they didn’t back us up. I thought that was very important.”
He barely squeaked through the selection process. At first only one precinct chair supported his bid—a woman who’d worked with his father—but eventually she swung the others around by arguing that Falcón could operate unhampered by political ties. “To be quite frank, a lot of people didn’t want Gene,” said Arnulfo Guerra. “The politicians were afraid of him. They thought he was too independent, too straight, and too strict. And too young. The reason he eventually prevailed was that the people who supported him said he’d be a refreshing face in the political structure here. And he proved to be that for—well, he has for years and years.”
AT FIRST FALCÓN EMBODIED THE IDEA OF INDEPENDENCE, BUT in time he came to represent something else, something even more dear to Starr County residents: He stood for progress. Of the 254 counties in the state, Starr ranks last in per capita income, and the ardent desire for economic advancement explains much of the local culture, from a lenient attitude toward smuggling to the ferocious political infighting. Falcón presented an image of steady improvement. He started out with minimal resources and devoted most of his considerable energy to expanding his operation. “That’s what sheriffs have to deal with on a daily basis: How are you going to pay your bills?” he said. He did what patróns have always done: funded his projects from the deepest pockets he could find—in this case, Uncle Sam’s. Falcón engineered a politically astute deal with the United States Marshals Service to house federal prisoners, thereby obtaining $1 million in federal funds to build a new county jail. The sprawling white complex stands on the crest of a sloping hill at the very center of Rio Grande City, making it the highest structure in town. From his office at the peak of the hill, Falcón could look down over the capacious, yellow-brick county courthouse, where he formerly worked out of a windowless office in the basement.
The jail complex grew exponentially. After Falcón presided over an $8 million expansion, also with the help of federal funds, he typically housed 220 federal inmates at a time. Last year that generated an average of $150,000 a month in housing fees. Trustee inmates performed all of the jail’s maintenance, cooking, cleaning, and laundry; the sheriff even had them service his pursuit vehicles. As Falcón liked to point out, all of these innovations meant that no local taxpayer money was required to run the jail. “It saved the taxpayers over $700,000 a year,” he said.
As the jail grew, Falcón’s staff multiplied, going from 9 to 95. The sheriff started out with a fleet of 3 used cars and wound up with a fleet of 24, most of them new. Soon the height of Falcón’s office on the hill represented his new place in the order of things: Twelve thousand people lived in Rio Grande City, and most of them now looked up to him. It was bootstrapping economic development, as opposed to crime fighting, that gave Falcón the most satisfaction. “My greatest accomplishment was providing the leadership to furnish a salary so that a deputy could provide for his or her family,” he said. The steady expansion of the office occupied most of his time; typically he didn’t concern himself with sleuthing. He would make an appearance at the scene of a crime, but afterward he gave his investigators a leeway that most appreciated. “He let us work,” said Guadalupe Marquez, now the chief of police in Rio Grande City.
The jail expansion had saddled the Sheriff’s Office with a stiff mortgage that hovered around $55,000 per month, however—and that responsibility gradually transformed Falcón. “Let me tell you, the sheriff’s job was like running a business,” he said. “We had to produce revenues to keep working. So every day, the first thing I did was to check inmate population. That was the first thing. Because the bills were constant.” His primary concern became keeping the jail full at all times. This must have been the beginning of the erosion of his character: Falcón had started out as a state trooper interested in law and justice, but as sheriff, he came to think the top priority of law enforcement was paying the bills.
FORTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD U.S. ATTORNEY James DeAtley was born to work for the government. “My dad was a civil service employee in the Navy,” recalled DeAtley. “And my grandfather was with the Department of Justice. I think it was the bonds and spirits division. He used to prosecute old-time moonshiners.” DeAtley grew up in Washington, D.C., and moved to Texas to attend Baylor University. After completing law school there as well, he worked briefly as a public defender before becoming a federal prosecutor. In 1993, when he was working in the Western District of Texas, based in San Antonio, his career meandered into a weird cul-de-sac: For three years, while the appointment of the new U.S. attorney was stranded in political limbo, DeAtley served as acting U.S. attorney, unable to exercise full authority. Last October the Justice Department moved him to Houston as the head of the Southern District, a vote of confidence that gave him the chance to put his stamp on that office in a way he’d never been able to do in San Antonio. “Each U.S. attorney tries to set priorities for the district,” said DeAtley. “For the border area, my number one priority is public corruption. We can’t be worrying about criminal activity within our own law enforcement community. We’ve got to get that issue resolved.”
Shortly after arriving in Houston, DeAtley held a meeting with prosecutors in the division of public integrity. Like a football coach hectoring his team, he told the division its area was his top concern. “He wanted us to aggressively pursue these cases,” said assistant U.S. attorney Richard Smith, a pugnacious trial lawyer in the division. “He placed an emphasis on pursuing cases along the border because of the problems that exist there. I’m not saying every public official along the border is corrupt. I’m saying that wherever we found corruption, he wanted us to aggressively address it, go after it, and eradicate it.”
Petty corruption is part of the border’s terrain, and in trying to reform it, DeAtley was taking on a Sisyphean task. DeAtley, however, attributed the area’s problems to the new curse of drugs rather than the old bonds of tradition. “We are a drug-trafficking center,” he said. “With that drug activity has come a mountain of cash, and it has had a dominating and corrupting in�uence. Other people see this going on and think, ‘If they can do it and get away with it, what about me?’ That’s part of the message that I have to get across: The price isn’t worth it. Sooner or later we’re going to identify you, we’re going to investigate you, and we’re going to prosecute you. You’re not going to like the result.”
DESPITE ALL HE DID FOR STARR County, Sheriff Falcón’s tenure was marred by a series of confusing incidents that aroused suspicion. Many of his difficulties began during the predawn hours of August 23, 1986, when four men in camouflage fatigues jogged into the Hospital Civil de Reynosa across the border from McAllen. Finding Raul Margarito Piedra Ayvar, a convicted marijuana dealer, handcuffed to a hospital bed on the second �oor, the commandos pumped seven rounds from an Israeli machine gun into his body.
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