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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Shortly after the raid, a prisoner staying in the same room told Mexican authorities that Falcón had participated in the assault. Two days before the murder, Falcón had visited Piedra at the hospital to question the dealer about a triple homicide that had taken place in Starr County. “I was escorted by the head of the state judicial police to interview Piedra,” recalled Falcón. “There was not much information exchanged because he refused to talk to me about the murders.” Now the prisoner claimed to know Falcón from that visit. “When they turned on the lights, that’s when I recognized the sheriff,” he said in his statement. “. . . I tell you, it’s one of them that came here before.”
Mexican authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Falcón, who denounced the charges as a frame-up. “My reaction was, ‘Come on, you’re kidding me,’” said Falcón. “I knew I wasn’t guilty of anything.” Ultimately, the prisoner reversed himself, and Mexican authorities convicted a reputed hit man of the murder. That made the entire episode seem nothing more than the Kafka-esque fallout of policing the border. “That crap about the sheriff going over to Reynosa and bursting into a hospital room and killing somebody—that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” said Arnulfo Guerra, the former DA. “Totally, totally incredible.”
Still, talk about the killing swaddled Falcón’s name in innuendo, causing opinion of the sheriff to cleave in two. The incident undoubtedly drew the notice of federal authorities; Falcón himself said, “I’ve been looked at for years and years. Everything I did was closely scrutinized.” If federal officials were indeed watching Falcón at this time, they would have noted that he socialized with individuals suspected of being drug traffickers—but so did just about everyone in Starr County. Some of the suspected dealers were people Falcón had known all his life. “There’s a whole bunch of families—and I can’t recall their names offhand—who enjoy reputations as being drug families,” said Guerra. “The sheriff has been known to deal with those people, in the sense of talking to them. But if somebody invites you to a party, and you are the sheriff, you go. You go to a pachanga, you go to a gathering. That’s the nature of the beast here in Starr County.”
In 1990 the old murder charge became the subject of a Dallas Morning News article headlined PROFILES IN SUSPICION. Stitching together facts and rumors, the story strongly suggested that Falcón was facilitating the drug trade and hinted that he might even have bumped off Piedra as a favor to an alleged trafficker named Ramon Garcia Rodriguez. (He became a fugitive and was never convicted.) The Morning News reported that Falcón had investigated a previous attempt on Garcia’s life and later bought a $90,000 ranchstyle brick home with a swimming pool that had once belonged to the drug dealer’s wife, though Falcón had purchased it from a subsequent owner. The medium-sized house sat on ten acres of land, surrounded by a cinder block wall; it was hyped in other stories as a sprawling ranch-style home.
To Starr County residents accustomed to the border’s close-knit ways, the sheriff’s links to Garcia appeared tenuous and benign. People in the county have long resented the bad press the area perennially attracts, and it was easy for them to dismiss the story, particularly after Falcón successfully sued the Morning News for libel. When he donated the $45,000 he won to the local Boys and Girls Club, the victory elevated him to a folk hero. His constituents also saw Falcón as a figure of morality. He led a campaign to keep dirty movies out of the hands of children and tried to steer wayward teenagers onto the right path. (“I’m going to send you some kids that won’t really come under your jurisdiction,” he told new municipal court judge William Page, “but if you don’t talk to them, there’s nowhere else for them to go.”)
Eventually, however, some of his fellow elected officials came to feel that the location of the sheriff’s office at the apex of town took on a more sinister significance: No longer an outsider like his father, Eugenio Falcón, Jr., had become the closest thing Starr County had to a modern-day political boss. Heriberto Silva, the current district attorney, became the sheriff’s implacable enemy by initiating a series of grand jury investigations probing whether Falcón was still the strict lawman he’d once been. “I’m having a problem with the level of competence in the sheriff’s office,” Silva told me. “He’s become more of a politician than a law enforcement officer.” Silva investigated whether Falcón was currying favor by furloughing inmates after a woman complained that her husband had harassed her when he was supposed to be locked up in his cell. “I wasn’t able to prove it or disprove it,” said Silva. Later he charged the sheriff with assault and abuse of official power after Falcón allegedly punched Adrian Cortez—a particularly opinionated character who had once worked for the sheriff—when Cortez arrived at the jail to help serve subpoenas for Silva. Cortez asked that the charges be dropped before trial. More recently, Silva took over the county’s drug task force from Falcón after state officials began investigating whether Falcón hoarded forfeited money and vehicles for use by his department alone, rather than sharing them with other agencies.
Even so, most of Falcón’s constituents never lost faith, believing that he had adopted the ways of a strongman for the sake of bettering the community. Certainly the fact that the district attorney was spending so much time investigating the sheriff had little impact on Starr County voters, who saw it merely as part of the blood sport of South Texas politics. For these reasons, nobody in Rio Grande City paid much attention when Ernesto Castañeda and his son, Octavio, filed suit against Falcón in 1992 alleging favoritism in how bail bonds were distributed. Castañeda’s Insurance and Bail Bonds owned several properties within a stone’s throw of the large white jail, and the Castañedas covered the buildings with huge, garish signs advertising their calling. Yet they didn’t get anywhere near the share of business they thought they deserved. Most people sided with the sheriff. Unlike Falcón, Ernesto Castañeda was not a reputable figure in town: He’d once been convicted of providing false information to government officials, and he’s now under indictment for money laundering. And so, when the Castañedas insinuated to others that Falcón might be on the take, it was easy to dismiss their remarks as bitterness. A judge ruled for Falcón, but the case remains on appeal.
WHEN JAMES DEATLEY ARRIVED IN Houston in the fall of 1997, assistant U.S. attorney Richard Smith had been investigating Falcón for seven months—though few people knew that. “We went to great lengths to keep it that way because we didn’t want to do anything that would have a chilling effect on the conduct that was going on,” said Smith. The burly prosecutor grew up in Talladega, Alabama, in a humble but strict setting. “You did three things in our household: You went to church, you went to school, and you went to work,” he said. “It was in that order.” He started his career as an assistant state attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, and began working as a federal prosecutor in Houston in 1992. There he demonstrated a tenacity and a zest for courtroom combat that resulted in a striking track record. Public-corruption cases are notoriously difficult to prove: “It’s almost a given that the public officials charged will have noteworthy, very sincere character references from people who just can’t believe they would have committed this kind of an offense,” said DeAtley. “That alone can raise an issue of reasonable doubt.” And local juries are often predisposed to favor their officials. Yet Smith won every public-corruption case he tried—including four in South Texas.
Then he trained his sights on Falcón. The investigation started after Smith heard some interesting news from FBI agents in McAllen. “They had two confidential informants who were providing information about Homero Arturo Longoria and the bail-bond business that he was attempting to open in Rio Grande City,” recalled Smith. “They believed the bondsman was paying bribes to get business.” The question was whether he could gather solid evidence. “You never know,” said Smith. “Sometimes investigations fizzle out. Unlike a bank robbery, where you’re trying to find out who committed a crime, in corruption cases you’re trying to determine if in fact a crime has been committed.”
The prosecutor knew Longoria’s involvement could compromise the case. It was an ill-kept secret that Longoria had worked as a snitch for the federal government, although few people knew the full extent of his cooperation. Later, court documents would reveal that he had fed information to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents for sixteen years—almost exactly as long as Falcón had been sheriff. In that time he had assisted DEA agents in no fewer than 205 cases and had been paid approximately $107,000. (“Arturo is about as slippery as they come,” said Arnulfo Guerra, summarizing popular opinion.) In this instance, however, Longoria himself was being informed on.
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