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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Three weeks before the March 9 Democratic primary, a grand jury indicted Cantu for abuse of official capacity and misuse of government property. The offense was a class A misdemeanor, which carried a sentence of up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Cantu pleaded not guilty and was released on a $15,000 bond. “It’s all politically motivated,” he told the press afterward, his white cowboy hat in hand. “I am innocent.” The case would never come to trial, but the damage to Cantu’s reelection prospects was done. He faced four opponents, including Omar Lucio, the incumbent sheriff whom he had defeated several years earlier.
His world was collapsing. Five more jail inmates had escaped recently, prompting the U.S. Marshals to remove close to three hundred federal prisoners, costing the county more than $2 million in revenue. A week after Cantu appeared in court, an attorney who represented Sandra Guajardo wrote a letter to the county attorney threatening to sue unless they settled for $30,000. Somebody—the attorney will not say who, but it was not the county—promptly paid Guajardo in cash. By then, however, Channel 4 had posted the entire transcript of the sheriff’s phone conversation with her on its Web site.
On that long-awaited election night, when the voters had their say, both Cantu’s and de Leon’s reigns came to an end. Cantu missed a runoff against Lucio by nineteen votes. De Leon was defeated by Armando Villalobos, a defense lawyer and a former assistant DA under de Leon, who had claimed he could run the office better than she had—de Leon had been a delegator instead of a hands-on litigator. His margin of victory was a decisive 2,705 votes. The políticos who wanted de Leon out of office worked hard for the challenger; the county judge, Hinojosa, poured $2,900 into Villalobos’s campaign. Both Cantu and de Leon were now lame ducks. But such were the strange days of Cantu’s term in office that the saga that had roiled the Cameron County Sheriff’s Department in the past years would pale in comparison with what would unfold—unknown to all but a few—in his final, and most corrupt, months.
OMAR LUCIO BORE the badge of sheriff again in 2005, and the residents of Cameron County thought Conrado Cantu was old news. But on a sultry June morning, federal agents arrested Cantu near his home in Olmito. Two days earlier, a federal grand jury in Houston had handed down a 45-page indictment charging the former sheriff with ten counts of extortion, drug trafficking, obstruction of state and local law enforcement, witness tampering, and bribery. It also described the incident in which he had ordered the release of Rodolfo Federico Garza, his friend, after his own deputies had arrested him. (After Cantu left office, Garza paid a $2,000 fine and received deferred adjudication according to a plea agreement.) The indictment confirmed what Garza’s release had suggested: Cantu not only thought he was above the law but had come to believe that he was the law.
The ultimate stage of Cantu’s downfall began shortly after his electoral defeat. Sheriff’s deputies had stopped a truck on the highway and seized $25,000 in purported drug profits. Later that day, the driver made a telephone call to a man he knew could help him: Jerry Garcia, the same person Cantu had picked to run the county’s jail commissary. He asked Garcia if he could find out which law enforcement agency had provided the tip that had led to the seizure. Five days later, Garcia delivered.
Soon, the driver received a second call from Garcia. If he wanted to transport drug proceeds without a problem, he could pay the sheriff $4,000. There were several more calls. More deals were struck. Small amounts of money changed hands. At the driver’s next meeting with Garcia, the sheriff was present. The driver offered $5,000 in cash for the tips he had received and to secure future movements of drug money. Cantu directed him to hand the payment to Garcia. Later that day, Cantu and Garcia met at a Chili’s restaurant, and the money changed hands. A camera’s shutter went off nearby. Neither man had suspected that the truck driver was a government informant.
Assistant United States attorney Jody Young, a popular and well-known figure in Brownsville, had been on Cantu’s tail for eighteen months, ever since a drug probe by the FBI had led to the sheriff. Yolanda de Leon had been working side by side with the feds. Also snagged with Cantu were Jerry Garcia; Captain Rumaldo Rodriguez, Cantu’s chief of criminal investigations, who took instructions from the sheriff on whether to let drug money shipments go through or seize the money; Garcia’s brother-in-law Reynaldo Uribe, who was paid to drive drug proceeds; and restaurant owner Hector Solis, who had asked Cantu to warn him about raids on gambling establishments.
The drug racket had been going on since the first month Cantu had become sheriff in 2001 and had lasted into his very last days in office. In mid-October 2004, Cantu offered to provide the truck-driver-turned-informant with an escort from the sheriff’s office in exchange for 10 percent of the profits. Time was of the essence, he said. The drug runs had to take place during the next ten weeks, before his term expired.
A QUIET SENSE of shame prevailed in Cameron County in the aftermath of its sheriff’s indictment. Cantu had been the fifth border sheriff in the past eleven years to go down for abusing his office. Some shrugged it off with the observation that corruption is an inevitable byproduct of power. In an interview, county judge Hinojosa offered an extended list of examples that included former congressman Tom DeLay. One did not have to leave Congress to find other names: Randy “Duke” Cunningham, William Jefferson. Each case of corruption revealed a unique culture of power, with its own web of political relationships. Cantu’s misdeeds, though all too familiar to his constituents, were just part of a much larger picture.
Political administrations in South Texas are not as the rest of the state believes they are: a fated and immutable succession of corrupted leadership. They are instead something like the reigns of Roman emperors or medieval popes: They fluctuate across time between good and bad and everything in between. The reason Cantu’s malfeasances matter is because they laid bare the political culture that enabled him to survive for so long. The fact is that Cantu was not just the villain of local politics but the product of a long tradition that pressures political workers and voters to tolerate criminal and ethical infractions so that insiders can maintain their way of doing business. Indeed, most of the political insiders in Cameron County—most notably Hinojosa—preferred Cantu, who represented the worst of the culture, to de Leon, who tried to reform it. But the culture did not want to be reformed. And no one knew that better than de Leon.
“How do we make decisions?” the former DA said as she reflected on Cantu’s rise and fall. “Is it based on how a person smiles, how he greets you? Is it based on whether they remember your name and call you by your name? That they inquire about your family? Is that all that we want? Is that all that we need?”
On July 8, 2005, Cantu pleaded guilty to racketeering in federal court, as did his co-defendants. He and Garcia had received nearly $50,000 from drug traffickers and undercover sources. On the day of their sentencing, they all had a chance to speak before the judge. What Cantu chose to say was both revealing and painful to observe. He launched into a rambling and highly emotional defense of everything that he had been accused of during his tenure, including the jail breaks and sex scandals, which had nothing to do with his crime. He blamed the press. Envious law enforcement agents. Dirty politicians. Alcohol. It seemed that Cantu was the last person who still believed in his self-created image.
“Maybe I wasn’t educated enough for this position,” he said, choking on his tears. “Maybe I wasn’t prepared enough.” Then he blamed Garcia. “I was influenced by a man that did wrong, and I’m not saying it’s his fault. It’s mine. I should have stopped, but I couldn’t. I was lost. I was totally lost.
“I’m a different individual,” he went on. “This is the real Conrado Cantu, the man that has passion and love and writes songs. I have a charisma. I love to share my love with people, my ideas. I have a lot to offer if you could send me to a place where I can be productive, to speak at the schools, police academies, and educational programs, where I can help the community back and make it up to them. I’m not a bad person. I’ve never hurt anybody maliciously …”
But the man who had been so adept at telling people what they wanted to hear did not move the judge. “You promoted disrespect for the laws of the State of Texas and the United States in spite of the fact you were sworn to uphold those same laws,” she said. “You engaged in conduct that allowed drug traffickers to work without fear of law enforcement from the time that you entered office until you left in 2004… . The fact of the matter is that, instead of using your charisma to help the community, your self-professed charisma, you used your charisma to betray your community.”
His fate was decided swiftly. The judge sentenced the sheriff to 24 years and 2 months in a federal penitentiary. At age fifty, Cantu faces what amounts to a life sentence. He and his attorneys were stunned; they had expected more-lenient treatment. They announced their intention to appeal. But this time, the story of the people’s sheriff was really over.
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