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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According to court documents, the bribery scheme was set in motion on March 7 of last year, when Longoria met with Falcón at a Whataburger restaurant to tell the sheriff he wanted to open a bail-bond business. Falcón asked Longoria to contribute to his petty-cash fund. One of the informants later said Longoria had told him that the sheriff’s department was behind Linda’s Bail Bonds “one hundred percent” because Longoria was going to give them “a lot of money.” But the informants could only describe when officials were showing up at Linda’s Bail Bonds, not what transpired in the back office. Smith was worried that their testimony would never persuade a jury. “Do I want to try a public-corruption case just on the word of a confidential informant and have the defense show that this person has baggage, which could cause a jury to question his veracity?” he asked. He needed corroborating evidence. In May FBI agents installed a wiretap on Longoria’s phone. In July Smith summoned the bondsman to McAllen, where he presented Longoria with the gist of what he’d learned. Knowing his cooperation would mean a lighter sentence, Longoria agreed to have his phone calls tape recorded, wear a wire, and notify FBI agents whenever he was approached about a meeting so that the agents could videotape the bribes.
Linda’s Bail Bonds sat in plain view of the Sheriff’s Office, making the videotaping plan a logistical nightmare. Agents Dave Staretz and Leo Martinez managed to smuggle the equipment inside the redbrick office building. Every time Longoria called to say an official wanted money, Martinez would sneak back in, put a tape in the hidden video camera, hit the record button, and lock up the camera so that nobody could delete anything. Afterward, he would sneak back to retrieve the tape. The agents quickly bagged images of a Starr County jailer and a justice of the peace taking kickbacks. Although they were certain Falcón was involved, a month passed without his paying a visit to Linda’s Bail Bonds. On August 7 he arrived wearing the striped shirt and gimme cap and disappeared into the back office. After Falcón left, Martinez removed the videotape that had been rolling and drove back to McAllen to view it.
Falcón had followed Longoria into a room lined with fake wood paneling, where the two sat down at a large desk. Leather-bound law books stood on shelves beside them. As casually as a bank teller, Longoria counted out $1,000, specified that it was for the referral of an inmate to him, and handed the money to Falcón. The sheriff pocketed the money. (What they said then isn’t public record, but on another occasion Falcón took a payment and said to Longoria, “Thank you for paying me what you owed me on the horse that I sold you.” Longoria laughed and said, “Okay, on the what?”)
As FBI agents watched the encounter between Falcón and Longoria unfurl, they felt like fishermen who finally get a tug after watching a large dark shadow meander under water for a long time. The infamous mordida takes place in private, between two consenting individuals, both of whom have no interest in publicizing the transaction, which is why many people in South Texas can be gulled into thinking that the mordida is only a myth. But there it was, in grainy black and white.
IN SUBSEQUENT WEEKS FEDERAL AGENTS recorded Falcón taking two more bribes and captured images of three other county officials accepting kickbacks as well. On January 14 federal officials rounded up Falcón, five of his deputies, and a justice of the peace, drove the county officials to the federal courthouse in McAllen, and charged them with corruption. The news traveled through Rio Grande City like a seismic event. Some doubted Falcón had taken the money, others doubted the government could prove he had. AH CHIHUAHUA, INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY read the headline in the Rio Grande Herald. The paper portrayed federal prosecutors as overambitious outsiders on a misbegotten quest for glory. It also disparaged the case as �aky, since it apparently relied solely on Longoria (who pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to a year and a day).
People who admired Falcón found the allegations completely at odds with the man they knew. “He’s about as honorable a person as I’ve ever come across,” said his former highway patrol partner, Sherwood Hamilton. “I simply can’t imagine that he would dishonor his family in this way.” It didn’t seem to make sense that the sheriff—who had survived charges of murder and stories insinuating involvement in the drug trade—would be brought down for taking picayune bribes. “If somebody came and offered me five thousand dollars, I’d say, ‘You’ve got to be crazy, man,’” Hamilton said, fuming. “If you offer me a million, well, we could maybe negotiate. The whole idea is just ludicrous to me.”
But as its very name implies, the mordida has always been a small cut of the legitimate transactions that it helps bring about. And as soon as the discovery process began, attorneys hired by the seven defendants learned exactly how devastating the government’s case was. They also learned that Richard Smith was spending sixteen hours a day preparing to go to war. Everyone in Starr County expected the combative sheriff to fight, but Falcón must have known that he was sunk as soon as he saw the videotapes. On March 4 Falcón slipped into a nearly deserted courtroom in Brownsville. He wasn’t expected for two more days, when jury selection in his trial was scheduled to begin, but he had come to enter a guilty plea. He would get less time that way and could avoid the humiliating publicity of a trial. Falcón admitted taking a total of $11,050 from Longoria in exchange for funneling a steady stream of inmates to the bondsman. U.S. district judge Filemon Vela asked Falcón if he was pleading guilty because he really had committed the crimes or was doing so simply at his attorney’s urging.
“I’m guilty, Your Honor,” replied Falcón.
“Do you understand the charges before you?” asked Vela.
“Yes, sir,” the sheriff said.
His sentencing was set for late May.
Richard Smith found the outcome mildly de�ating, since he’d spent months gearing up to do battle. “Any good trial lawyer would love to try a case like this, but you do what’s in the best interests of your client,” he said. “Having a guilty plea ensured a successful conclusion of this case. And in this arena, it’s important not to lose cases, because you’ll send the wrong message to the community.”
ON MARCH 16 FALCÓN TURNED IN HIS badge. We met the following day in the lobby of a hotel in Austin. He looked much the same; he was wearing another Western-style shirt, dark green this time, new Wrangler jeans, and black boots. But the absence of a hat revealed his thinning hair, which left him looking more vulnerable.
I said, “Hello, Sheriff Falcón.”
“Call me Gene,” he said. “Don’t call me sheriff.”
We sat down on some overstuffed chairs in the red-tiled lobby. Falcón’s career had just ended in the most humiliating of fashions, and all my questions only made the disgrace more apparent; I had to admire his courage in agreeing to talk. Falcón said he had come to Austin to look for a consulting position. “I’ve got to work,” he said. “I’ve got four daughters to support.” After going over the details of his early career, however, he declined to speak further, saying he couldn’t address the subject of the bribes. I said I wanted to ask just one more question. Starr County being a place thoroughly permeated by rumors, it’s hard to tell where facts end and fiction begins. Even after sifting out unreliable gossip, I was left with two exceedingly disparate images of the sheriff—the whitewashed version painted by his longtime supporters and the darker version painted by prosecutors. How did he think I should reconcile these two sketches?
The sheriff’s eyes misted. “I’ve hurt my family,” he said. “I’ve hurt my daughters. I’ve hurt my wife. It was quite a bomb. It’s amazing to find out how weak you are. But the community has been real supportive.
“It’s hard to end a career this way. I just hope—there’s a saying in Spanish, ‘Por un mal, viene un bien.’ ‘From a bad situation, something good will come.’ I strongly believe that. I know God has a plan for me.”
Although he had sidestepped my question, there was a directness to his manner that impressed me. Clearly he had elements of nobility in his character—though there was nothing noble about his behavior at Linda’s Bail Bonds. Falcón could have been a heroic figure, but in becoming the sheriff of a Mexican irredenta, he had instead evolved into merely a powerful man—and then, like Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, into a corrupt one. Perhaps to a patrón the act of bribery is nothing more than an honorarium, an acknowledgement of status. In that regard, the degree to which Falcón fell short of the man he might have been is the measure of the difference between morality in Starr County and morality in society at large. But of all the people elected to public office in Starr County, Gene Falcón was the one person who was never supposed to assume the habits of the men that his father had opposed. This was not the way things were supposed to turn out—and that is what makes Falcón’s fall a parable of South Texas itself. That geography won out in the end, that circumstances corroded his character, speaks volumes about the difficulty of change in this place, where the sun bleaches every surface and nothing escapes the dust.
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