ToddBensman.com
Express-News April 2006 to present
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Power play in San Antonio
John Branch, San Antonio Express-News
Council members and top city staff worked in concert to kill an audit of playground inspections and drive the auditor out of his job. But the Express-News conducted its own audit and found widespread safety problems, no regular city inspection regimen and obstinate administrators refusing to publicly acknowledge need for improvements
By Todd Bensman
Express-News
In April, City Auditor Pete Gonzales thought he was going to get a pat on the back. Instead, what he did so angered his bosses that he found himself fighting for his job. His bad deed? Gonzales proposed to audit San Antonio's playground safety inspection program. Checking how well the city was doing that job on its 114 playgrounds, he argued, would keep kids safe and protect the government and taxpayers from lawsuit damages in case of tragedy.
Outside your authority, accused Audit Subcommittee council members John Clamp and Delicia Herrera. The last thing that's needed, said incensed City Attorney Michael Bernard. Not a priority, asserted City Manager Sheryl Sculley. All is inspected and well, assured Parks and Recreation Department Director Malcolm Matthews.
Within days, Gonzales was out of a job, his suggestion to audit the playground inspection process dead and buried.
But the San Antonio Express-News resurrected the idea that cost Gonzales his job, and the findings are at sharp variance with many of the assertions made by ranking city leaders. Had Gonzales been allowed to conduct his work unopposed, he would have uncovered major problems with city playgrounds that top officials may not have wanted to public to know about.
Among the newspapers findings:
•San Antonio's Parks and Recreation Department could produce no records showing it conducted nationally recommended design and equipment safety inspections on playgrounds in four of the past five years. The department's top official now concedes that's because none was conducted, and that the city has no formal plan for such safety checks, contrary to guidelines set forth by national playground safety associations.
•While Gonzales was under attack, the city had just received the first inspection reports completed since 2003, which found 15 of 114 inspected playgrounds were so dangerous or substandard that they should be torn down, put off limits to children or extensively repaired. Dozens of other reports list serious safety problems at playgrounds that might have been noticed years earlier with proper inspections. Yet those reports remained under wraps while city officials worked in concert to rein in Gonzales.
•A number of older playgrounds flagged for major repair or teardowns during the 2003 inspections never were, and survived to be flagged again as safety problems this year. Even playgrounds reported as dangerous in the months before Gonzales was forced out of a job in April remained largely untended as of late May.
•The apparent failure of the city to follow a regular equipment safety inspection program in line with voluntary national standards, and to repair playground equipment long reported as dangerous, has raised the city's exposure to more and bigger personal injury legal claims, say private lawyers who specialize in such litigation. The Express-News found no recent playground injury claims. Yet the city attorney's office worked to kill an audit plan that might have lowered the city's liability in the event one is filed.
City reacts to Express-News investigation, orders covert playground repairs while publicly denying problems
Mayor Hardberger, City Manager Sculley hold ground on no audits
By Todd Bensman
Express-News
Plastic yellow construction-zone tape wrapped the old wooden playground gear at Second Baptist Park like a gift-wrapped package, except its black lettering warned: “Caution. Do Not Enter.”
The East Side playground finally was under repair Tuesday morning, a full four months after a variety of safety problems were flagged and seven work orders were submitted as part of an inspection report that concluded: “This is a dangerous playground.”
City carpenters worried over how to replace the four completely rotted wood pillars supporting wobbly monkey bars, so heavy a crane might be needed to lift it.
Also Tuesday, other city carpenters started sawing and hammering the all-wood HemisFair Park playground, where a host of safety hazards and code problems was cited 2 1/2 months earlier. The workers systematically replaced rotted gray boards with freshly cut pine behind yet another yellow construction tape barrier.
The work on the two facilities was part of a wider city effort this week to fix playgrounds after the San Antonio Express-News reported Sunday that they had this year received their first in-depth safety inspections by certified personnel since 2003, which had produced long lists of serious problems at some older playgrounds. Read the story here.
Workers found repairing HemisFair playground,
with orders not to answer media questions.
Photo by Jerry Lara
Editorials/columnists opine while top city leaders won’t acknowledge safety and auditor freedom issues:
City response eroding public trust
By John Branch, Express-News
Parks director forced to resign
City Manager Sheryl Sculley still won’t acknowledge news report showing playground safety mismanagement, audit halt issues
Parks and Recreation Department Director Malcolm Matthews resigned abruptly Friday after nearly two weeks of public controversy stemming from a San Antonio Express-News report that showcased mismanagement of playground safety inspections and repair.
City Manager Sheryl Sculley sought and obtained Matthews’ resignation, the Express-News reported, but refused to acknowledge a particular reason, telling the newspaper only that the move was based on the 10-year directors’ “overall performance.”
Matthews’ personnel records, however, indicate no serious problem with his performance and in fact show that as recently as February Sculley was so pleased with the department head that she awarded him a $1,000 bonus.
Mayor forms commission to study auditor office independence
A city panel seeking to define the duties of the next internal city auditor hopes to draw on private industry and government best practices “to fill in obvious holes” in the City Charter, Mayor Phil Hardberger said Wednesday.
But no auditor or auditing specialist was among appointees to the panel.
Hardberger on Tuesday announced creation of a committee he will head whose goal is to solve one of the city's most vexing — and public — problems: what the City Council expects from an office that was created outside the city structure to ensure its independence. Read the story:
--------------------------------------
Divine Retreat
A mysterious ranch east of San Antonio, home to a Noah’s Ark of exotic species, serves as a lavish family haven for the iconoclastic leader of Light of the World Church, a controversial Mexico-based denomination followed by allegations of child sexual abuse and intimidation
Thronged by faithful at Guadalajara headquarters,
Samuel Joaquin Flores leads the Light of the World Church
as a kind of messiah who claims a direct link to Jesus. He’s
been taking his vacations at a lavish ranch compound near
San Antonio, built in part on the labor and tithings of his
fanatically devoted minions. Associated Press photo
By TODD BENSMAN
The San Antonio Express-News
KINGSBURY, Tx. -- Almost every day, at least a few of the 27,500 motorists who drive Interstate 10 through this speck of a ranching community pull over to check out a curious fenced ranch just off the highway. Easily visible from the interstate, twin white domes of a massive structure poke up like mushrooms on the 340-acre forested reserve. A giant brone bison statue stands in plain view, as do live stick-legged emu birds and ostriches.
But tourists never get through the well-appointed limestone facade entrance that seems to beckon them into The Silver Wolf Ranch. As they have for 10 years since the property came under new ownership, polite Spanish-speaking workers shoo away the camera-toting motorists with the same unrequited promise; the ranch will open soon, very soon. It never does, though.
The land, a 40-minute drive from San Antonio, remains just as enigmatic to immediate neighbors left to ruminate — sometimes darkly — about relentless construction activity, howls of unseen wolves, reports of gun-carrying guards, and especially the tint-windowed SUV caravans for which the gates do occasionally open.
“I don't know nothing; I don't want to get involved,” said neighbor Jesse Weinaug, who owns a cattle ranch next door. “They don't come over here. I don't go over there. It ain't none of my business.”
But now the curtain can be thrown back from The Silver Wolf Ranch. The San Antonio Express-News was given limited access to parts of the property and to those who speak for its long-hermetic owners.
The property, it turns out, is the private playground of a Mexican family that has grown immensely wealthy and politically powerful while ruling as a dynasty over the controversial religious denomination known as Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, or The Light of the World Church. The Pentecostal-like denomination's supreme leader, the iconoclastic 71-year-old Apostle Samuel Joaquin Flores, is viewed as a messianic figure to be worshipped as a direct link to God and obeyed by church faithful in Mexico and abroad.
READ THE FULL EXPRESS-NEWS STORY HERE
---------------------------------------------------
Afghan Nationals Caught with Mexican Passports.
A U.S. Security vulneratibility in Mexico’s foreign offices?
By Todd Bensman
The San Antonio Express-News
March 2008
Three Afghani Muslim men caught posing as Mexican nationals last month while en route to Europe were part of a human smuggling operation and carried what are now believed to be altered but genuine Mexican passports for which they paid $10,000 each, Indian investigators told The San Antonio Express-News. An ongoing transcontinental investigation, which now involves Mexican and Indian authorities, began Feb. 11 when a suspicious airport customs official in Kuwait noticed the three Afghanis, traveling under Mexican pseudonyms, could not speak Spanish during a layover on their air trip from New Delhi, India to France. READ MORE, plus don’t miss:
Are Terrorists Crossing American borders? Find the answer here
---------------------------------------------------
SAPD Bent Hiring Rules
Affirmative Action misapplied
BY TODD BENSMAN AND GUILLERMO CONTRERAS
January 27, 2008
In 1994, aspiring police officer Joseph Anthony Evans finally got his lucky break with a big city department. For several years, his cadet applications ended up in the rejection baskets of police departments in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio. Background investigators found he had a drunken driving conviction. They also concluded Evans tried to hide a criminal trespass arrest, a hit-and-run conviction and an internal investigation of sexual misconduct at a corrections officer job.
Beyond his past, San Antonio also denied Evans a badge because polygraphs showed deceptive or inconclusive answers to questions ranging from illegal drug use to stealing from employers. But a second try with the SAPD two years later had a happier outcome for Evans, even though employment screeners once again recommended he not be hired for all the old reasons.
Then-Deputy Chief Gilbert Sandoval overrode the recommendations and ordered the 30-year-old Army veteran onto the force, according to records the San Antonio Express-News obtained from Evans' personnel file. That decision, it turns out, would be one the department would regret.
Some 12 years into his career, in 2006, Evans' own colleagues in the narcotics and SWAT units swooped in to arrest him on what would become federal charges of allowing methamphetamine trafficking out of his Churchill Estates house. READ MORE
Law keeps public in dark on police hiring practices
01/27/2008
Twenty years ago, police unions in Texas converged on the Capitol with a mission. They found friendly legislators to push a bill that appeared to address only a mundane administrative matter about personnel record-keeping. It quickly passed in 1987 with little public notice. But buried inside were provisions that ever since have kept taxpayers in the dark about some of the most important management practices of public institutions in Texas. The law forever closed to the public whole sections of city personnel files. READ MORE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Iranian national flag now flies over a new consulate office
in Managua. Photo by Todd Bensman
Iran’s move into Nicaragua cause for purported national security concern
By Todd Bensman
Monkey Point, Nicaragua -- The second military helicopter in as many days hovered over the jungle and then landed to a most unwelcome reception from several dozen angry Rama Indian and Creole villagers.
Rupert Allen Clear Duncan, a leader of some 400 Creole who live along the shoreline, confronted the foreigners, who were dressed in suits and military uniforms that day in March. The villagers demanded to know the purpose of these aerial trespasses.
“This is our land; we have always lived here, and you don’t have our permission to be here,” Duncan spat, when refused the courtesy of an explanation.
Not until Duncan threatened to have his machete-waving followers damage the aircraft did they learn that some of the men were from the Islamic Republic of Iran and had come promising to establish a Central American foothold in the middle of their territory. As part of a new partnership with Nicaragua’s Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, Iran and its Venezuelan allies plan to help finance a $350 million deep-water port at Monkey Point on the wild Caribbean shore, and then plow a connecting “dry canal” corridor of pipelines, rails and highways across the country to the populous Pacific coast. Iran recently established an embassy in Nicaragua’s capital.
In feeling threatened by Iran’s ambitions, the people of Monkey Point have powerful company. READ THE REST HERE IN THE SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS...
See video and photo display of Monkey Point, a way of life at risk.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In early 2007, Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed publicly disclosed the existence of a criminal probe targeting Sheriff Ralph Lopez and some of his acolytes over their awarding of a jail commissary contract to Premier Management Enterprises of Louisiana. The following stories represent a small sample of dozens written about an unfolding investigation. The stories and investigation eventually led to Lopez’s resignation under indictment, a 10-year prison sentence for his closest aid, John Reynolds, and an ongoing FBI investigation of the company given the jail commissary contract.
Close ties helped seal commissary deal
07/29/2007
BY TODD BENSMAN
In the summer of 2005, a determined effort by Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez to privatize the county jail commissary stores — which generated some $2 million a year in gross sales — was on the verge of foundering. In Texas, elected sheriffs enjoy wide leeway and independence in managing and operating county jails, including the jail commissary, where inmates can purchase everything from snacks to toiletries.
But Lopez had met strong resistance from several board members of a nonprofit "Benevolent Fund" corporation that he had established several years earlier to run the commissaries. They saw no good reason to contract out the operation to a private vendor of Lopez's choice, Premier Management Enterprises, or any other business. The deal seemed all but dead when Premier's fortunes took an abrupt turn for the better.
Some board members, including the chairman who staunchly opposed the deal, resigned. The new leaders of the board along with a new member, all allies of Lopez, would push the Premier contract through the rough patch. Within weeks of the contract approval by the sheriff's Benevolent Fund board in August 2005, Lopez, an avid golfer known to travel the country playing at elite resorts, was visiting Costa Rica, where he spent time on the greens with Premier officials at the expense of Premier's principal owners, Patrick and Michael LeBlanc.
Later, less than a month after the contract was officially inked, board Chairman John Reynolds was allegedly depositing the first of four checks totaling $27,500 from Premier into accounts named for charities that were "shells" and "fronts," according to court documents filed by a district attorney investigator. And within four months, board Vice Chairman John E. Curran III was preparing to cut his own financial side deal with Premier. Curran's temporary worker company, PersoNet, now provides the very commissary employees that Premier uses to carry out the contract Curran helped along as vice chairman. READ MORE
Money-Stuffed Envelopes, Cover-up Alleged in Jail Commissary Case; DA says sheriff's aide attempted cover-up
BY TODD BENSMAN
August 24, 2007
Sheriff Ralph Lopez's longtime friend and campaign manager orchestrated a cover-up of payments he took from a Bexar County jail contractor by handing out envelopes full of cash to his friends, purportedly for scholarships for their children, according to new allegations from the district attorney's office Thursday.
According to the scheme outlined in a search warrant affidavit, John Reynolds used a fake charity account with the Optimists name to deposit checks from the contractor, Premier Management Enterprises, which Reynolds had helped to win lucrative jail contracts. Over time, Reynolds transferred thousands of dollars from the Optimists account into his private bank account for personal use. Once investigators started to follow the money trail, Reynolds concocted the scholarships to cover up for spending $22,500 he solicited from Premier as donations, the DA alleges.
The affidavit also says the sheriff's wife, Nancy, signed checks from his campaign accounts, totaling thousands of dollars, that were routinely deposited into Reynolds' accounts and siphoned out for personal use. None of the payments were reported as expenditures as required by election laws.
The new allegations draw Nancy Lopez into the investigation's arc as well two sheriff's deputies and come on the heels of the indictment last week of Ralph Lopez on three misdemeanor charges. Lopez is charged with accepting gifts from Premier, based in Louisiana, and not reporting them. He has denied any wrongdoing. READ MORE
Sheriff’s Beleaguered Aide Had Long History of Troubles
BY JOHN TEDESCO AND TODD BENSMAN
When prosecutors said last week that John Reynolds may have pocketed $27,500 from a Louisiana company after he voted to let it run the county's jail commissary, most politicians might have quickly distanced themselves from the Democratic operative.
Not Sheriff Ralph Lopez.
"I trust John," Lopez said of his longtime campaign manager, former chief of staff and inveterate golfing buddy. "If his integrity has been injured, I go back to my Marine Corps training: You don't leave your injured troops behind."
It wasn't the first time the county's top law enforcement officer stood by his man.
Reynolds, a 65-year-old Vietnam veteran and political consultant who began working for the sheriff years ago, has spent much of his adult life fending off charges of ethical lapses. In 1993, Republican County Court-at-Law Judge Shay Gebhardt sued Reynolds, claiming he and other Democrats forged signatures on a petition that would have helped a candidate run against her.
Lopez stood by Reynolds.
The sheriff kept him close in subsequent re-election campaigns and appointed him to law enforcement-related nonprofit boards. A decade later, Reynolds was accused in an affidavit of taking $2,000 meant to pay off a trustee of Alamo Community Colleges.
Lopez stood by Reynolds again.
And just last week, a court record revealed the Bexar County district attorney's office is investigating Reynolds as it looks into a lucrative county contract that Premier Management Enterprises received to run the jail's commissary service in 2005.
Among the prosecutors' accusations: About the time the sheriff-appointed board on which Reynolds served was awarding the contract, Reynolds began accepting checks from Premier and depositing them into “fronts” and “shell” bank accounts.
Lopez said he'll stand by Reynolds and have him run his re-election campaign — even if the accusations about bogus charity accounts later prove to be true.
Some political observers are shaking their heads, wondering why Lopez's bond to Reynolds shows no signs of fraying. But interviews and a review of hundreds of records detailing Reynolds' life reveal a troubled past that precedes his relationship with the sheriff. READ MORE
Premier's Benefits Didn't Stop in Bexar
BY TODD BENSMAN
September 9, 2007
KINGSVILLE -- Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez and some of his friends weren't the only ones in South Texas who enjoyed the benefits of helping Premier Management Enterprises secure lucrative jail commissary contracts, according to interviews and records examined by the San Antonio Express-News. Like Lopez, the sheriffs of two other counties awarded contracts to the Louisiana jail services company, and either they or their associates reaped financial benefits.
Those sheriffs, now out of office, also boasted to their staffs about going on a golf and fishing trip to Costa Rica with Premier officials, the same trip that last week forced Lopez to resign. Here in Kleberg County, then-Sheriff Tony Gonzalez, a close friend of Lopez, gave Premier a contract to run his jail commissary when he was in office in 2004 and has been paid by the company for consulting work of an unknown nature.
In Nueces County, one associate of former Sheriff Larry Olivarez, another Lopez friend, reaped rewards after helping Premier win a jail commissary contract there in 2005. The associate, a commercial real estate broker who was appointed by the sheriff to an ad hoc committee that awarded the contract, later earned a commission from the sale of 56 acres where LCS Corrections Services Inc., another company owned in part by Premier's principals, is building a private detention center, the Express-News has learned. READ MORE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I -- Katrina Crime: Perceived or Real?
October 29, 2006 Sunday
BY TODD BENSMAN
Just days after the first of about 30,000 Louisiana hurricane evacuees began arriving in San Antonio, Mayor Phil Hardberger was asked a simple question he laughingly brushed off. What might be the impact of the influx on city crime rates and services?
It was Sept. 7, 2005, and the mayor was riding high on national praise for a CNN appearance during which he had projected an image of his city as unflinchingly philanthropic. People displaced by Katrina still were flooding in.
"That's like if my house is on fire and I'm looking to you for a bucket of water, and you ask what the new house will look like," he said with a laugh. "Everybody's been worried about crime, and the impact on social services. But so far, it is just worry; it hasn't been factual."
More than a year later, the issue remains unaddressed, conspicuously so in light of a 55 percent spike in murders the first eight months of this year, increasing violent crime rates in San Antonio, a stretched police force and widespread media reports linking some evacuees in Houston to similar crime trends there.
So: Did the sudden arrival of about 30,000 evacuees, a group equal to Del Rio in population, cause additional crime? The question, loaded with the kind of politically sensitive racial implications that can discomfit some politicians, is much more than academic. Millions of dollars could be at stake. READ MORE
PART II. Complex with Katrina Evacuees Became a Criminal Haven
October 30, 2006 Monday
By TODD BENSMAN
Maybe it was the armed and uniformed peace officers induced by rent breaks who moved in. Or maybe it's just because enough of the troublemakers have moved out. Whatever the cause, a fragile sense of peace has replaced chaos and fear since management started kicking out dozens of mostly young and male Katrina evacuees over the summer at the 248-unit Artisan at Willow Springs Apartments.
"It was hell," said New Orleans evacuee Lashawn Mason, a young mother who lives at Willow Springs. "They had the police running up in here pulling guns. It was all this drama all the time."
While the relative calm is welcome, it's still interrupted. Mason said the other day someone pulled out an AK-47 and began firing in the air.
The complex's first year in the 500 block of Gembler Road has been rough, starting the day in September 2005 when it opened its new gates to its first residents -- evacuees. Over time it gained a reputation on the streets of East San Antonio as a criminal hot spot.
Since the city declined to track whether increases in crime were related to 30,000 displaced New Orleans residents who came to San Antonio, there are no firm numbers to show whether or how much crime went up because of the influx. But if skeptics question the existence of "Katrina crime" around other San Antonio apartment complexes where evacuees resettled, police statistics and internal records reinforce the perception that it reigned at Willow Springs. READ MORE
--------------------------------------------------30--------------------------------------------
Part I. Official's Ties to Developer Scrutinized
5/21/2006
By TODD BENSMAN
5/21/2006
In his unpaid role as a commissioner of the Housing Authority of Bexar County, Carlos Madrid Jr. portrays himself as an honest steward of public funds and unstinting advocate for the poor.
Having grown up dirt poor on the West Side, Madrid says his motivation for spending years on the board was to provide the kind of good housing he believes can shape children into productive adults. But Madrid has submitted his resignation letter, and it provides no hint that he gained much more from his board work. For the past several years, he has received thousands of dollars in contract work from a Dallas-based affordable housing developer that had business before the board. The developer found in Madrid an unwavering advocate.
Interviews and a San Antonio Express-News examination of housing authority records show Madrid's construction design company, MCMG Inc., did contract work for Southwest Housing Development Co. before the housing agency and Southwest entered into partnerships to build two multimillion-dollar apartment complexes. READ MORE
Part II. Developer's Ties to Multiple Housing Officials Raise Questions
05/22/2006
BY TODD BENSMAN
As San Antonio's biggest developer of government-subsidized affordable apartment complexes, the Dallas-based Southwest Housing Development Co. is certainly no stranger to the necessary art of building relations with often contrarian public agencies and neighborhood groups.
But an ongoing FBI investigation targeting Southwest's dealings with Dallas officials and an Express-News examination of the company's relationships with several Housing Authority of Bexar County commissioners raise questions about how Southwest may have exerted its influence to get projects built here.The board has asked for a full audit of the agency's two partnerships to build apartment complexes with Southwest, which can qualify for substantial tax breaks.
Housing Commissioner Carlos Madrid Jr., who submitted his resignation from the board earlier this month, received thousands of dollars in contract work from Southwest. He said his work with Southwest did not affect his public role and that he did nothing wrong.Records and interviews show that two other then-commissioners had private relationships, as well.
Southwest forged a housing partnership with a nonprofit run by Commissioner Dario Chapa while he was still on the board and continued to make decisions in his official capacity regarding Southwest Housing's business. Additionally, in the same month that Commissioner Ken Brown resigned from the board, Southwest hired him to do lobbying and legal work. READ MORE
Feds Probe Ex-Officials' Links to Developer
12/15/2006
Todd Bensman
A federal investigation is under way of past financial relationships between San Antonio's largest affordable housing developer and former board members of the Bexar County Housing Authority who were serving when the agency partnered with the company on two apartment complexes, authorities confirm.
The investigation is based at least partly on an internal audit ordered earlier this year after the Express-News requested financial records related to the housing authority's stake in the two federally subsidized projects with the Dallas-based Southwest Housing Development Co., said current board chairman Rudy Rodriguez. READ MORE
----------------------------------------------------30------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TEXAS PRISON SYSTEM’S LAST FUGITIVE
Dead or Alive, He's Still Wanted
July 16, 2006 Sunday
TODD BENSMAN
At 9:45 p.m., the guards at the Texas prison system's Garza East Unit had just herded the day's last group of convicts out of the recreation yard and into the main building for bed when inmate No. 762622 saw his chance and took it. It was March 22, 1997, and Jose Salaz Jr. wasn't even a year into his 35-year sentence at the Beeville prison, a 90-minute drive southeast of San Antonio.
He was in for a botched kidnapping in Houston that had left two cops wounded in a war zone of spent shell casings, a smashed getaway car and a bag of ransom money. The jagged scars from police buckshot fired into his legs and lower torso still were tender when Salaz saw through the window that a yard gate outside had been left open.
Salaz made his break. He sprinted 40 yards through the gate to the other side of the recreation yard, according to incident reports. Leaping from a picnic table next to the 12-foot-high chain-link fence, he clawed his way up, through the rolled razor wire on top, and dropped down the other side. Bleeding from razor wire cuts and aware that guards would be trying to gun him down, Salaz went over two more perimeter fences the same way. By the time they sounded alarms, the guards only could watch as he dashed into the dark brush of South Texas ranchlands, leaving a blood trail behind.
That was nine years ago, the last time anyone from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice saw Salaz. Today, he claims a special distinction: Of the state's 101 inmates who have escaped since 1961, Salaz remains the only one who hasn't been captured, killed or discovered dead.
Now, the same law officers who fruitlessly hunted Salaz back then -- older these days and perhaps slower -- are hunting their familiar prey again. READ MORE
CUBA REFUGEES TALE OF MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS
Only Cuban boat people known to have landed in Texas lived to tell different versions of shipmate's fate
By Todd Bensman
SPECIAL TO THE EXPRESS-NEWS
08/21/2005
DALLAS -- The firefighters of Corpus Christi's Station 16 rode south
along the water's edge of Mustang Island, the searchlight on their
truck slicing the darkness. It was a moonless night last August, and the dispatcher had reported a small boat washed ashore. Shadowy figures had been seen staggering toward the lights of the mostly vacant Mayan Princess condominiums, knocking on doors and scaring residents.
The firefighters' searchlight came to rest on an 18-foot fiberglass
sports fishing boat, beached on its side. Nobody was inside, but the boat held a squalid tangle of debris -- cans, bottles, bits of clothing -- suggesting someone had occupied the craft. Farther up the beach, the firefighters found the castaways.
An elderly Cuban woman, dressed in filthy rags and severely
dehydrated, lay unmoving on the boardwalk. Next to her a bearded man,
skeletally thin and almost black from sun exposure, stared blankly. Four other castaways, bearded and hollow-cheeked, were in custody;
police had picked them up as they wandered the beach, knocking on
doors and begging for water. Now the police car bearing the men pulled up and the ragged little group was reunited.
``Where are we?'' one of them asked.
``You are in Corpus Christi.''
``What is Corpus Christi?''
``Texas,'' a firefighter said. ``You are in Texas, in the United
States of America.''
Puzzled faces brightened.
``This,'' one of the castaways declared, ``is a gift from God.''
Although it's common for Cuban refugees to sail the 100 or so miles to
South Florida, none had been known to land in Texas more than 1,000
miles away. READ MORE
Muky Tale of Mutiny Becomes Clearer
Two years after 6 Cubans landed in Texas, officials hope to charge a suspect.
By Todd Bensman
06/19/2006
Luis Estrada Sanchez-Core was among seven Cubans who put out to sea in an 18-foot motorboat the summer of 2004, at the height of hurricane season. The 39-year-old father and husband declared himself captain in what was to have been a three-day journey across the Caribbean to Mexico and then an overland trip to a better life in America. Instead, one calamity after another left Sanchez-Core and his fellow Cuban refugees adrift and at the mercy of a very angry sea. They ran out of fuel first, then water, then food, then hope. Sanchez-Core suffered with his passengers through what became an epic struggle for life while Tropical Storm Bonnie and then Hurricane Charley bullied them hundreds of miles off course.
Sanchez-Core made it through all of that. But he would not be on board when, 61 days later, the six skeletally thin refugees grounded off the coast of Corpus Christi in August 2004, causing a brief sensation as the only Cuban boat people known to have ever landed in the state of Texas.
Two years later, as another worrisome hurricane season gets under way, the death of Sanchez-Core continues to shadow the six survivors of that cursed journey, amid allegations of mutiny, murder on the high seas and a determined three-agency federal investigation to unravel the initial conflicting accounts. Now confident they know what happened, government authorities are calling on Sanchez-Core's shipmates to tell their story for the first time in open court this week, as part of a legal gambit to keep their prime suspect behind bars.
According to new investigative records obtained by the Express-News, a near-unanimous account provides a chilling depiction of the starving captain's final moments. He was thrown overboard -- alive and aware -- late one night by armed mutineers grown crazed by the journey's relentless deprivations, according to those records. READ MORE
