Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Bad Guy With the Badge
Conrado Cantu called himself “the people’s sheriff.” He spoke to school-children about the evils of drugs and patrolled the dark back roads to prevent crime. But all his charisma couldn’t hide the sad truth that he was yet another crooked South Texas lawman who betrayed his community.
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In Cameron County (population: 378,000), only between 20,000 and 30,000 people vote in the Democratic primary; the number climbs in general elections when the presidential race is on the ballot. Because family is paramount here, one way to begin getting the 12,000 to 15,000 votes needed to win office is to make friends with large extended families, which are not hard to find. The smaller towns in the Valley are also notoriously loyal to their crests, so if a prominent family in a town supports a certain candidate, chances are good that other voters there will do the same. Candidates also boost their support by teaming up with popular candidates in other places, even if the relationships are temporary or contrived. And if more votes are needed, there’s always the option of hiring politiqueras, fierce women political workers who will journey door-to-door to help the eldest of the electorate fill out their early-voting ballots and drive vans crammed with people to the polls on Election Day.
Of course, these kinds of liaisons are not for nothing. After the elections come the laundry lists of expectations and favors owed. “You were going to build us a community center.” “You said you would pave my road.” “You promised my brother a job with the county.” “I voted for you, so can’t you be easy on my friend who was arrested for hitting his wife? He’s a good man.” Promises delivered reinforce constituencies; promises unkept feed a sense of futility among would-be voters and a growing feeling that all políticos are the same. This messy web of relationships is what constitutes politics in Cameron County, and wrapped in that is the everyday necessity of governing, and of governing well.
At the same time that Conrado Cantu was running for constable in 1996, Yolanda de Leon was campaigning for district attorney. But she knew she was getting it all wrong. She wasn’t smiling enough, wasn’t saying enough of the right things, wasn’t shaking enough hands, wasn’t attending enough pachangas or church services or funerals of people she didn’t know. Crowds were not her forte. Fifty years old, she was, by nature, a deeply guarded and reserved person. This didn’t mean that she was unkind, only that she could come off as cold or aloof—not the sort of person who usually runs for office in South Texas. And certainly not like Cantu, who campaigned as naturally as babies learn to crawl.
It was Cantu who first suggested that de Leon try a little harder to engage with voters. Actually, he suggested it to de Leon’s husband, because in the South Texas political world, it is always easier to speak man-to-man. Like Cantu, de Leon was a political outsider who was trying to unseat a well-established politician, but they had little else in common. A matronly woman with short, gray hair, green eyes, strikingly light skin, and a misplaced Southern drawl that she had picked up in Tennessee while her husband was attending dental school, she was as reticent as Cantu was outgoing. De Leon didn’t think he seemed particularly intelligent, nor did she trust the fact that he talked so much. But she had to hand it to him for being able to sense what people wanted to hear and deliver it, the way a talented lover can give a woman a rose and make her feel graceful and beautiful.
De Leon was aware of the political culture of South Texas when she ultimately won her race. But what the new DA was willing to do about it—when, inevitably, she was asked to bend the rules a little or when she discovered someone else was bending them—was another question. A self-described righteous person, de Leon had a laserlike focus on what she thought was just and fair: the ideal of creating a system by which all citizens, rich or poor, could receive the same access to justice. The office she inherited did not measure up to her standards. The previous DA had admitted publicly to having an affair with his secretary. One of his investigators had been convicted of dismissing DUIs. De Leon felt she had a mandate to begin from scratch and take the office in a different direction.
She established strict standards—perceived by some as too rigid—that required her prosecutors to justify the dismissal of any case. In Texas, a district attorney has complete discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case, and her constituents anticipated that she was someone they might massage for help, which they were used to doing. But de Leon’s response when lawyers visited her to request leniency for their clients was always the same: “Let me look at the file. Let me talk to the prosecutor who’s handling the case.” When she turned down ordinary citizens in their requests for favors, which happened all too often, their response was barely veiled: “I voted for you,” they would say, or they might remind her that elections were coming up.
During de Leon’s first year in office, a county commissioner noticed that she was losing some of her battles. “The problem is you don’t know how to play the game,” he told her. “Yes, I do know how to play the game,” she replied. “The problem is, I don’t choose to play.”
BY THE TIME Cantu set his sights on becoming sheriff in 2000, de Leon had been DA for four years. She had heard rumors that Cantu offered protection to lawbreakers who would support him for sheriff. She had heard rumors that he might even have liaisons with drug traffickers. Around de Leon’s office, assistant DAs began to refer to the constable as Conrado “Protect the Load” Cantu.
De Leon had called the Texas Rangers and asked them to investigate the accusations that Cantu, who by now had won the Democratic nomination and was certain to become sheriff, was letting lawbreakers avoid arrest by not turning in their case files. While the Rangers were still investigating, however, she recused herself and asked a local judge to appoint a special prosecutor. Her request was granted. But the prosecutor, El Paso district attorney Jaime Esparza, said that while Cantu had no legal authority to dismiss cases simply by sitting on the files, the Rangers’ investigation did not yield enough evidence to prosecute. It might have been de Leon’s biggest mistake as DA to turn over the case; had she won a conviction, she might have prevented Cantu from ever taking office.
If Cantu knew that de Leon had him under scrutiny, he certainly didn’t change his behavior after he became sheriff. One day, he came looking for the DA with a solemn face. He wanted to put in a good word for a man who was facing prosecution. “He’s a good man,” Cantu assured her. It was that same subtle request; again, de Leon replied as she had with others. But unlike the others, who with time learned not to ask for these favors, Cantu had more gall. After he made his plea, he placed a $100 personal check on her desk. “This might help you out,” he said. De Leon replied coolly, “You may want to take that back. You don’t know what I’m going to do on this case.” Cantu tried to backtrack. “No, no, no,” he said. “It’s a campaign contribution.”
For all his supposed political savvy, Cantu had underestimated de Leon badly. She didn’t always react visibly, but her encounters with him and other courthouse politicians who didn’t have the same righteous streak that she did only strengthened her backbone and made her more determined to push forward against public corruption. She was sure that Cantu had flouted the law even before he had become sheriff. She worried what might happen with him at the head of that powerful office. So far, nothing flagrant had occurred, but she had formed an opinion of him that would become reinforced throughout the next four years. “Conrado Cantu didn’t have anything that centered him, that grounded him about law enforcement,” she said much later. “It was all about personal promotion.”
NOT FOR A MOMENT was Cantu’s four-year term as sheriff without controversy. The missing files flap, which had come up during the campaign, never went away. His new management team consisted of two former constables, Captain Robert Lopez and chief deputy Juan Mendoza, who had worked with him during the times of fervid patrols and had resigned from their offices to become his right-hand men. Soon there were published reports indicating that Cantu had hired Mendoza’s father and son and that he was awarding wrecker-service contracts on a preferential basis. His management of the county jail system was questioned after a body was discovered in a jail cell and the county pathologist delivered a preliminary autopsy report that suggested that the inmate might have been murdered, based on “extremity bruising and neck trauma” suggesting “a choke hold at the time he died.” The pathologist later changed his mind and attributed the death to liver failure. A grand jury did not indict anyone. But a subsequent investigation found that no lieutenants were supervising the county’s four jails at night, despite a county policy mandating that they do so.
The first hard evidence of corruption came when a reporter for the Herald revealed that county commissioner Natividad “Tivie” Valencia had written an angry letter to a newly appointed constable whom Valencia had voted to hire. According to the Herald, Valencia questioned why the constable hadn’t given a job to one of his friends. Cantu, Lopez, and Mendoza had promised him that that would happen if Valencia voted for the constable, he told the Herald. Valencia was convicted of bribery, but no charges were brought against Cantu or his top aides.
Cantu had every reason to feel secure. He had continued to expand patrols and crime-watch programs. School principals raved about his appearances. In June 2002 county judge Gilberto Hinojosa issued a press release in which he lauded the sheriff, having become his close supporter. The pair had filmed campaign commercials for Hinojosa’s reelection bid. “Conrado Cantu will be considered a great sheriff,” Hinojosa said, “not only in our county, but across the State of Texas, because he treats every person the same way: with kindness, courtesy and the respect and dignity that they deserve.”
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