ERNIE HERNANDEZ INDICTMENT: A PRIMER IN CORRUPTION

By Juan Montoya
Forget vindictiveness, conspiracies and plots and subplots.
The grand jury which indicted Pct. 2 Cameron County Commissioner Ernie Hernandez was presented evidence by the District Attorney's Office investigators and issued an indictment containing eight counts, true bills on actions they deemed criminal by the commissioner.
Hernandez was indicted on Wednesday, booked, paid a $35,000 bond that was lowered from $75,000, and released Thursday afternoon. The delay in his being booked and bonded was due in part to the use of the Odyssey computer program at the Rucker-Carrizales corrections center. A jail administrator said the lengthy wait Hernandez had to undergo was "poetic justice" for the commissioner who was one who voted for the program that the sheriff department does not like.
COUNT I:
That Ernie Hernandez, "with intent to obtain a benefit for Roberto Cadriel and harm and defraud another, to wit: Cameron County, intentionally or knowingly violate the law relating to the defendant's office and employment as a public servant , namely tampering with Governmental Records, "by soliciting, encouraging, directing, and attempting to aid Carmen Vera to sit and take the Civil Service Exam in the name of Roberto Cadriel.

At the heart of this count is the fact that the DA's investigators believe that they have proof that can show that it was Hernandez who initiated the whole process that saw Cadriel – his brother-in-law – go to his administrative assistant Raul Salazar to help him land a job with the county. At the time, Cadriel, who was living in his pickup truck in the parking lot of Fiesta Graphics, the Hernandez family business, was told his sister he needed a job and Norma suggested the HEB or the Brownsville Independent School District. Cadriel said Ernie then stepped in and suggested the county.
And – as they did in the Salazar trial – will show that it was Norma, Ernie's wife and Cadriel's sister, who filled out his application for him. Cadriel said on the stand – and Hernandez has also stated publicly – that he can neither read nor write and was a convicted felon, making him ineligible for county employment. Because Ernie, a county commissioner, directed Salazar and others in county employ, including Human Resources employee Carmen Vera, to take the Civil Service examination for Cadriel, he is named as the main instigator in the scheme.
Vera, the low woman on the HR totem pole, dis as she was told by HR Director Robert Lopez, and took the exam, scoring an 86 after Cadriel had failed miserably twice and scored in the 30s on both attempts.
When Lopez was told Cadriel couldn't pass it on the second attempt and that that county policy requires applicants to wait a year before taking it a third time, Lopez said he made an exception and then – witnesses testified that Salazar and Lopez – decided on Vera, a then-27-year-old mother of two who had been in the department for less than a year, and the last on the pecking order in the department.
Testimony indicated that Lopez told Vera "you know how politics is in Cameron County" and told her to take the test for Cadriel. Under questioning from Asst. DA Gustavo Garza, she said both Lopez and Salazar  were involved in telling her to take the third test in Cadriel's stead.
"Did you feel pressured at the time?" Garza asked her.
"I felt like I was going to lose my job. I have two kids I got to raise," Vera stammered.
COUNT II:
This count also names Hernandez as the instigator in getting Salazar to "obtain a benefit for Roberto Cadriel" by "soliciting, encouraging, directing, aiding, and attempting to aid Raul Salazar in providing Roberto Cadriel with the answers to the Civil Service Exam." This count includes tampering with a governmental record and misuse of official information.
Cadriel's first application was for a position as an animal control officer, in other words, a dog catcher. After Vera had been directed to take the test for him and she scored an 86, another  Dalia Saldivar, Vera's superior found out about her taking the test and confronted Lopez. The Cadriel hiring was put on hold and all three test results disappeared.
The job, apparently, had been given to someone else by the Health Department by then.
Vera said that right after she took the test for Cadriel, Salazar came up to her at the HR counter and asked if "I had done as I had been told to do."
Eighteen days later, on June 28, Cadriel showed up again to take a written test, this time for a position as a non-commissioned security guard at with the county's international bridge department. The state says Lopez – under the pretext that he was trying to get the bridge system's test modernized so it can be taken on a computer – had acquired the answer key to it and passed it on to Salazar. Salazar met Cadriel outside the Dancy Building, told him to miss at least seven questions, and Cadriel copied the answers before taking the written test.
He forgot Salazar's instructions, Cadriel testified, and missed only three, the last three. He scored a 96.
COUNT III:
This count in the indictment deals with Hernandez directing Salazar to get Lopez to give him the answers to the Civil Service Exam mentioned above where Cadriel scored a 96 and got the security guard job at the bridge.
COUNT IV:
This count deals with Hernandez's role in setting the whole process in motion that resulted in Vera taking the Civil Service Exam and making a false entry taking the test in his name.
COUNT V AND VI:
This count deals with Hernandez's abuse of his official capacity for telling Cadriel, who was in probation at the time (February 2013), that he could have it revoked if he cooperated with law enforcement, with the intent to influence him to withhold testimony and information in the grand jury investigation into his illegal hiring.
The latter count (VI) deals with the prosecution's claim that they have proof that Hernandez offered and gave Cadriel money (in August 2011) to allow him to leave town so that he would not be found by authorities so that he could provide investigators his statements and to elude summons to give them information into his illegal hiring.
Cadriel's relatives say that after he was told by the Hernandezes to make himself scarce, he was living in various places outside the county, among them in Weslaco, in Hidalgo County. At times, he was said to have lived below freeway overpasses because he could find no employment. Relatives said that he was afraid to return to Brownsville because he and been warned to stay away when the Cameron County – and later DA's investigators – were looking for him. His girl friend during this period was selling food plates on 14th Street bars and door-to-door to help the couple make ends meet because Cadriel could not make enough money to support their household. She said that at one time he was hired as a funeral home embalmer's assistant but that she made him quit because he came home smelling "bien feo" of the chemicals and fluid odors generated by the embalming process. It wasn't until DA investigators realized that Cadriel had to report monthly to his probation officer that they were able to find him and give statements to them and to testify for the grand jury and court in the Salazar trial.
COUNT VII:
This count relates to the prosecution's claim that Hernandez – upon learning of the possibility that county assistant administrator David Garcia testifying in the illegal hiring of Cadriel – threatened to have his job "for unlawful reasons." A pretext for this was Garcia's being paid at least $115,000 from the budgets of four county departments and an additional $75,000 for part-time work for the Cameron County Regional Mobility Authority.
Garcia's double triple and quadruple dipping had long been a sore point with many county employees and administrators. A holdover from the Gilbert Hinojosa years, Garcia was making more than any county elected official and two or three times as much as any commissioner. As asst. administrator, Garcia was directly responsible for the operations of the HR Department and had to prepare a report on the Cadriel firing fiasco. During the course of the Salazar trial, Garcia and other administrators testified that Hernandez would often call personally to have them "move the (Cadriel) application along." What persuasive comments Hernandez may have made to Garcia and what remains on record, is probably at the core of this count.
As a response to the gathering furor created by Garcia's peculiar salary arrangements, the county and the CCRMA inked an agreement that has the CCRMA reimburse the county for time that county employees work for the authority.
COUNT VIII:
 This count appears to be separate from the Cadriel hiring and refers to the alleged abuse of his official capacity by Hernandez in trying to influence Chief Emergency Officer and Homeland Security Director Humberto Barrera to re-open an eight-liner illegal gambling establishment that had been closed by his department.