Its better to try. While the phone was ringing, Yoseph allowed his eyes to run along the wall to the left of the desk. There was a line from The Picture of Dorian Gray that she liked to paraphrase: I hope that when I die and go to hell, they deduct those four years I spent with Jimmy Chagra. She almost said it now, but the suffering in Lees eyes cut her off. All have, understandably, complicated Lee joked as he gave the Indian the $75,000, and the Indian mumbled and studied his boots. I did not worry about a long-term jail sentence until Wood was killed, he said. Jimmy had ruined it. And hes this huge drug kingpin. Out on bail before sentencing, he went on the lam for five or six months and was on the FBIs 10 most wanted list. Any craps! she shouted, throwing a $5 chip on the table. Chagra's third wife, Elizabeth, was found guilty of delivering $250,000 to Charles Harrelson to kill Wood. Whether or not he knew the details, Lee surely sensed the magnitude of the disaster that was bearing down on him. An inextricable connection, whether emotional or physical or both, would continue between Lee and Vivian long after Vivian and Jimmy were married, Catherine would later learn. Eventually, Jimmys limit was $10,000 a hand and his credit almost unlimited. An electronic current unbolted the door. The real show was on the casino floor in special sections roped off for the Chagras. In the winter. The perfect vehicle for the imperfect time. Only a few select friends and celebrities like Rosey Grier or Gabe Kaplan were allowed in. They volunteered for every hard-core criminal case that came along: murder, rape, robbery, burglary. Universal Studios Is Coming to Frisco. Hughes never knew whom he called or whyLees life was like hornets nest, with thousands of isolated cells, and no one person, however close, ever saw more than a single cell. [39], Chagra married his third wife, Lynda Ray, while living under the name James Madrid on November 22, 2005. He loved it. A second man stood behind him, out of camera range. He couldnt have flushed it down the toilet faster than the way he gambled it and lost it, she said. It is estimated that one out of every five households in these two communities of one million is supported by some type of illegal activity. Patsy tearfully asked for respect from the press during the crisis. He named two of his chows Kilo and Poker., Look how sweet and dorky and innocent I look, Catherine Chagra said. Ive got to go, he told her. After two days the jury reported itself hopelessly deadlocked, eight to four for acquittal. He helped develop Operation Intercept, a massive media event in which millions of U.S. citizens were stopped and searched at the border. He had an affinity for cards and dice, for dope dealers and shady politicians, for cripples and nightclub singers, for dabblers in the black market and exponents of the quick buck. None of the missing $450,000 was ever recovered. If they had, they would have seen the small, trembling figure of the prosecutor crouched in a fetal position below the dashboard, dazed, bleeding from the shards of splintered glass, shaky as a bowl of gelatinbut otherwise unharmed. Several times Lee talked to Vivian and others about dying. Lees vial of cocaine was open on the corner of his desk. It was hard to imagine two men more different. On August 31, 1977, Lee Chagra appeared in Judge Woods court to file a motion of discovery, asking that the judge turn over DEA reports, customs reports, grand jury probes, any material that would reveal when Stricklin was supposed to have engaged in continuing criminal activity. The case against Stricklin appeared to be nothing more than a rehash of the long-discredited Tennessee indictment mushed together with evidence from the deal for which Stricklin was serving time. All of Lees personal affairs, especially those with women, were conducted behind closed doors. Lee had seated himself at a table and ordered $5000 in chips, but the dealer refused. He marched straight to a crap table on one side of the casino and told the pit boss to clear the table. [38] A fictitious name reference to the Judge John Wood assassination also appeared in an The FBI Files episode "Dangerous Company" as the show regularly changed names of real-life people to protect privacy. Fortunately the glass was shatter-proof. Lee and Joanne Chagra raised their five children in a rarified world of glitz, glamour and money few other El Pasoans could imagine. A third, Cynthia Jones Chagra, lives in Austin. He wanted to dress the way Lee dressed, in fine clothes and jewelry, and he wanted to hear whispers of respect when he walked into a room and silence when he told a story. He knew how to quit while he was winning. He walked to the top of the stairs and looked down at two black men with guns. Wood was apparently confusing the fifty-page transcript of the secret interview with actual grand jury testimony. This would be the last time Lee Chagra and James Kerr faced one another in a courtroom, a sort of last hurrah for both. And Im going to charge you ten thousand dollars.. In prison, Jimmy would say he got hooked on gambling faster than heroin.. I feel that it has all been terribly twisted. It was four years before most people recognized Jimmys achievement, but the operation was a landmark in marijuana trafficking. Whatever Jo Annie was thinking, she wouldnt say anything. No Mafia figures were ever indicted. Jimmy knelt beside the bag that now contained the remains of his brother and started bawling. When you live that way, chances are youll die that way too. His great-grandfather had come from New York and fought in the Texas Revolution. Oh, yes. One weekend after the fiasco in Judge Woods courtroom, Lee Chagra did what he always did when he felt the world collapsing around himhe telephoned Clark Hughes and suggested a trip to Las Vegas. They landed the high-priced weed at a deep, remote cove on the northeastern point of Massachusetts Bay, near Boston. But Jimmy took most of the credit. To mark the 40th anniversary of the trial of drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, who was accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge John Wood, Oscar Goodman, former mayor and at the time Chagras defense attorney, will join the late mobsters daughter, Catherine, to revisit Narcotics and gambling were crimes that grew from a common stem composed of the worst elements in society. A blast of double-aught buckshot and .30-caliber slugs ripped across the hood, left fender, and windshield of the car: police officers later counted nineteen bullet holes. The family was breaking apart. He was wearing his boots and jeans and enough jewelry to sink a deep-sea diver. A short time later there was a knock, and Lee admitted two hookers to the room. He could betray a trust as casually as tipping a dealer a chip worth more than the dealer made in a month. I blocked the door with my body, Donna recalled, but he opened it enough to see the money.. Boyd was wrong. Part of the reason was his honest conviction that even the lowest, meanest, rottenest scum on the face of the earth deserved, and in fact were guaranteed, a right to a fair trial. To mark the 40th anniversary of the trial of drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, who was accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge John Wood, Oscar Goodman, former mayor and at the time Chagra's defense attorney, will join the late mobster's daughter, Catherine, to revisit the event. He was already doing time on the fraud charge at La Tuna federal correctional institution, which was on the New Mexico state line not far from El Paso. On top of everything else, he had developed hemorrhoids and they hurt like hell. Jimmy was born the middle son of a Lebanese rug merchant family. He was widely believed to have been placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Another indisputable fact. The Indian brushed a strand of limp hair over his bald spot as he walked toward Lees car. Jimmy had given her a couple of kids and a lasting pain in the ass. By the late sixties he had put together an organization capable of moving tons of marijuana across the river. He looked smaller than life as he stood there, facing the dresser, looking at the picture of his father and seeing his own reflection. What was happening here? When Lee hit a losing streak, he could fly into a snit, blaming anyone handy, especially Jo Annie, who more than once hurried off the casino floor in tears. Knewz is a registered trademark. There was plenty of cocaine to guarantee a holiday spirit; at least five ounces had been delivered a few days earlier. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. The pit boss snapped his fingers and motioned for the guards to bring the velvet ropes. Christa remembers the family being on food stamps after her dad went to jail. In a few years Abraham and Chagra had the leading anti-establishment law firm in the city. Although Jo Annie appeared at the federal courthouse with $50,000 in bail money, Lee was obliged to spend the night with Georgie Taylor, Jack Stricklin, and virtually the entire hierarchy of El Paso drug trafficking. They didnt count all the bundles of cash in the tennis bag, but there was more money than either of them had ever seen in one place, something like $450,000. I thought it was just an isolated thing, one player said, but Lee kept brooding about it. Shortly after the Ardmore trial, DEA agents visited Jack Stricklin at La Tuna federal correctional institution, where he was doing time for a drug rap Lee hadnt been able to get him out of. November 2022 Reader Quiz: What Did You Learn? Leave them blank to get signed up. Youre going to get five years each. In the early summer of 1973 Lee experienced for the first time in his life how it felt to be on the other side. [16], On December 23, 1978, Lee Chagra was shot and killed in his law office in El Paso. The complex included not only a maze of well-appointed offices but also a fully equipped kitchen, a law library, and completely furnished two-bedroom suite. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services. [21] Facing life for smuggling, Jimmy Chagra allegedly decided to have the judge killed. If there was a single piece of new evidence, it wasnt mentioned, or even hinted at, in the indictment. She had worn a pair of panty hose under the suit and as they were cruising out in the middle of a lake in Joes speedboat, Jimmy called everyones attention to her bizarre outfit and ripped her panty hose in one thigh. Lee had $15,000 riding on the game. The judge was a member of every exclusive club in San AntonioSons of the Republic of Texas, Sons of the American Revolution, Texas Cavaliers, Argyle Club, San Antonio Club, Order of the Alamo, San Antonio Gun Club, German Club, American Legion, San Antonio Country Cluband owned property in the segregated Key Allegro resort on the Texas coastthe list went on and on. October 2022 Reader Quiz: What Did You Learn? He was 50. From Kilcreases files, Kerr concluded that all the elements needed to satisfy the kingpin law were amply presentmany separate transactions and many people, most of whom worked for Stricklin. You ought to pay me fifteen hundred dollars an hour to entertain customers. Lee didnt seem at all depressed, said Donna Johnson, the law firms bookkeeper. Back in El Paso things werent going much better. They went down there, they took pictures of everything And I was able to take that model and demolish their case. A major law firm that always invited the top six UT law graduates to a spring gala invited only five in 1962. Kerr was maneuvering his car around the obstacle when the rear doors of the van opened and two gunmen started firing. He wanted everything his brother had, but he just didnt want to work for it. On the night before he was murdered, Lee Chagra returned home to El Paso flushed with the euphoria a gambler feels when he believes his luck is changing. Something about a will, about some large estate in California? Jimmy was known to win or lose $1 million a night, according to Catherine. He called himself a pacifist, and yet he was comfortable around violence. I knew he would take a hard look at narcotics and organized crime.. The Museum is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a mission to advance the public understanding of organized crime's history and impact on American society. It looked as though Lee had struck gold, but quicksand might have been closer to the truth. [36][37] However, his sister Patsy stated that he was not in the witness protection program at the time of his death. Catherine moved to Phoenix about three years later to be near the federal lockup where her father did time, visiting every Sunday for 20 years. On several occasions he watched Lee remove one of his boots and count out the cash. Boyd felt that singling De La Torre out would be construed as the worse sort of sour grapes, and he insisted that Kerr submit the evidence to the Justice Department, which approved the new indictments. Kerr preferred playing Bach fugues in the dim light of the First Presbyterian Church and going to the symphony. Because they forgot that the murder took place May 29th, and down there in Texas, the trees were in bloom. [14], Prior to his arrest, he accumulated approximately $100 million in various bank accounts, today amounting to about $500 million. Lee always suffered shamelessly when he was down and Jimmy was up, but this was different. Yoseph let himself in the front entrance with the key that Lee had given him that morning. Chagras idea of a good time was slapping a Willie Nelson album on the stereo, snorting cocaine, and getting naked in a pile of aromatic bodies. The language was vague and ambiguous, but essentially it said that a person was a kingpin if he (1) committed a continuing series of violations of the drug act, in concert with five or more other persons with respect to whom such person occupies a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management and (2) obtained substantial income or resources from those violations. Chagra and his wife, Liz, and young daughter relocated to Las Vegas in 1978 and moved into a house across the street from attorney Oscar Goodman. Two of Chagras daughters, Christa and Catherine, now live in Smithville. Lee Chagra grossed more than $250,000 in 1972. Now the feds had a yard of hot real estate on their hands; they desperately needed someone to buy it. I want to talk to you. Vivian was startled to see how much Jimmy looked like Lee, how he had grown out his moustache, how his hair was full and shaggy and touched now with streaks of gray. A few hours later, the 38-year-old attorney, stunned and bewildered, found himself being transferred to the county jail, handcuffed to Georgie Taylor, who was a legend in local drug circles (he had made a million before he was eighteen) and who happened to be Jo Annies nephew. The sisters today say that if Lee Chagra had not been killed, Wood would not have been, either. Lee wanted to be head of the family, and Jimmy was constantly jealous of Lee because he stole the glory that Jimmy wanted. Boyd had never been regarded as a crusader, but one exception was his views on gamblinghe hated gamblers. A few months later, Luis "Lou" Fred Esper, a small-time drug dealer and acquaintance of Lee Chagra, and two U.S. Army soldiers from Fort Bliss were held on various charges related to the murder of Lee. Jo Annie telephoned one final time, from her mothers house on Rim Road. He left his hat and keys on the couch and walked down the hall to Lees office. Part of it was his steadily increasing need for money. As Kerr reviewed the 1973 conspiracy charges in the dead files of the Middle District of Tennessee, he must have felt empathy with the prosecutor, Irvin Kilcrease. He asked Bobby Yoseph, a young lawyer who had recently joined his staff, what he would do if he came in and found the office had been robbed? The months of suspicion and hostile publicity almost wrecked Lees law career. I colored the Kleenex sheets with green marker and I put it in the tree branches. And yet federal agents still had no proof: for all the loose talk, there was not a shred of hard evidence that Lee had committed any crime. On November 21, 1978, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Kerr was ambushed and shot at near his home by two men who fired 19 bullets at his car. Lees success in trying drug cases soon led him to meet Jack Stricklin, who had sent the Pitts case his way. Jo Annie, Lees boyhood sweetheart and the wife who had seen him through law school and nineteen years of an emotionally charged marriage, met him at the airport. There have been people who gambled higher in one sitting, but week after week, month after month, nobody kept coming, kept flat firing at em, like Jimmy Chagra.. It was three days before Christmas, 1978. It is like I am reading about a third person.. With the pointer fully retracted, Lee approached the jury box, smiling. One strategy that Liddy and the newly created Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) finally settled on, as defense lawyers in El Paso soon realized, was the use of agents provocateurs, whose job it was to create crime. Joe announced plans to open his own law firm. On December 23, 1978, Lee Chagra was shot and killed in his law office in El Paso. Lee had been involved with Jimmy in his drug smuggling and the killers took $450,000 that was owed to Joe Bonanno for a drug deal. Right there before your eyes Lee Chagra became the Black Striker. Despite the differences in background and age (Stricklin was almost ten years younger), Chagra and Stricklin became more than lawyer and client; they became close friends. Please feel free to use any other table in the casino. Like so many sheep, the nickel-and-dime players started backing away. Jimmy was indicted on a number of drug charges by a grand jury in Midland, a legal maneuver that many lawyers believe was blatant forum shopping: by indicting in Midland rather than El Paso, the prosecution could be sure that the case would be assigned to Judge Woods court. Kerr escaped with only minor glass cuts. [21] His drug case went to trial and Chagra was found guilty in August 1979 and sentenced to 30 years. Lee never forgot or forgave. Many a night, the Chagra brothers would play all six spots on a blackjack table, for anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 a hand. And that wasnt all. It was a totally ludicrous story, Sib Abraham recalled, but it got very serious when the jury convicted him. In time, Lee and Sib became targets themselves. Looking on, Joe marveled. At this point in his life Lee was bored with the tame pace of the blackjack table. During the course of the morning, a man called the Cowboy appeared on the alley TV camera. He was up and down all his lifestruggling. Jimmy, on the other hand, had a true gamblers instinct, a fatalistic kill-or-be-killed attitude. It was the way he sounded when he was counting money or totaling figures, an abstract, business-first attitude. It must have been nearly three-thirty by then. Jamie Boyd was the consummate politician. On the trials 40th anniversary, Goodman and Chagras eldest daughter, Catherine, will look back at the case and what it meant for Goodman and the Chagra family.A book signing of Catherine Chagras Chagra: The King of Dope Drugs, Deceit and Dirty Darlings will follow this program.Member and Donor Exclusive: Enjoy a meet-and-greet with Oscar Goodman and Catherine Chagra at 6 p.m. prior to the program. Minimum sentence was ten years, maximum was life. Hughes knew that it would be several hours before Lee worked himself into the proper frenzy. The feds could never prove he had any part in the operation or even that he knew about it in advance, though he probably did. "[35] It was otherwise described as "one of the most intense investigations in the annals of the FBI". Hunter Thompson once described how a casino shot a three-hundred pound bear out of a cannon right in the middle of the floor and no one looked up. It was an incredible sight. He was arrested without incident in front of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, his second home, where, according to Catherine, hed gone to seek facial reconstructive surgery. Dirty Darlings Paperback November 6, 2015. I knew he was dying, Catherine Chagra said. Lee protected Jimmy, but he also contributed to Jimmys sense of inadequacy. Lee Chagra was special, and he went out of his way to prove it: student court, law review, Order of the Coif. This is gonna be one theyll write a book about, he told Hughes. They mentioned four namesLee Chagra, Jimmy Chagra, Sib Abraham and Vic Apodaca (a well-known bail bondsman). Here she is in the Sinatra suite at Caesars, the tacky wallpaper so thickly felted it practically had to be brushed. As far as having Wood killed, no way, he said. In the 24 hours since their arrival, he had signed markers totaling $240,000. Lee got the best of the feds in Ardmore but that was about the last time. Lees law practice never recovered. He would try to join the family by half-time. But Kerr wasnt satisfied. When Patsy, who at one time weighed 180 pounds, finally worked up the courage to wear a swimsuit in public, Jimmy humiliated her mercilessly. All have, understandably, complicated feelings about their father. [2][22][6] He was the first federal judge to die by assassination in over a century. Which for Jimmy was almost the same as being broke, Patty said. It was four years before we lost a case.. Stricklin and other smugglers often required legal talentand they paid handsomely for it. Composed of, and by, organized crime. There was no way to count the number of ex-lovers who crowded the cathedral to say their last farewell, but they were discreetly scattered and only occasionally exchanged glances. Worse even then the chain reaction of disasters in 1977: the crash of one of his brother Jimmys drug smuggling planes in Colombia, Jimmys botched foray to rescue the pilot, Lees frantic scramble to rescue Jimmy, his running courtroom battle with federal prosecutor James Kerr and Judge John Wood. [5][3], Texas Drug, Gambling Figure Missing; High Bond Forfeited, Jimmy Chagra; Smuggler Linked to Judge's Death. Lee had never let his name be linked to an illegal enterprise before the fact. Chagra was released from prison for health reasons in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 9, 2003. The consensus had always been that Jimmy Chagra would never amount to much. And yet by the end of the trial, a majority of the jurors refused to find the defendants guilty. 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