MOST EFFECTIVE CORRUPTION DEFENSE: BLAME DEAD GUY

By Juan Montoya
By now there has been a pattern established locally when it comes to pointing fingers to blame someone for missing public money or corruption.
Simply blame the dead guy.
It is n established dictum that one cannot libel a dead person, and the same concept applies to blaming those who are no longer around when you want to divert attention away from your wrongdoings.
The prototype for this was elegantly laid out when a new board of directors of the Brownsville Navigation District sought to get the story behind the missing $21 that was lost in the shuffle on the construction of the Bridge to Nowhere.
After an investigation was conducted where it was discovered that Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio had convinced the former board of directors that they should switch engineering companies for the bridge from Brown and root to Dannenbaum Engineering for whom he was a paid consultant, and then later, the funneling of money to shell corporations in Mexico, everyone started looking for a scapegoat.
The drama was gaining traction and as the accounting began, it was learned that some of the principals in the Houston engineering firm had been in close contact with then-U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz and his right-hand guy Lencho Rendon. The Washington boys had virtually had a say in who was getting hired and fired. Of course, they denied it.
As the shell companies in Mexico began to be uncovered and their links to local people were disentangled, the heat was unbearable. In the middle of all this, the linchpin between Ortiz, Dannebaum and Lucio turned out to be the port director Raul Besteiro. Just as the lawyers got involved, Besteiro died of a massive heart attack and – after a decent interval – the thing died down and everyone went on their merry way.
Suddenly, when a question came up on who approved this or that expenditure, the fingers all pointed toward the late port director. What to do? Apparently, there was nothing to be done since he was no longer among the living.
His family still harbors a deep rancor toward those who conveniently pointed a finger in their relative's direction when accusations of corruption surfaced.
This wasn't much different when investigators for the Cameron County Sheriff's Department and the District Attorney's Office were hot on the trail of missing money (more than $80,000 it was rumored) from the office of the late Justice of the Peace Tony Torres.
Investigators had the goods on at least two of his office workers and were closing in fast when Tony did the unexpected. Yup. He checked out in the middle of the probe.
Those accused could simply say that he had told them to do this or that and that if investigators wanted to get at the truth, why they could ask Tony, who was gone by then, of course.
And so it goes on and on.
There are, of course, different kinds of deaths.
Besides the physical kind, there is also political death.
Take for example, the non-probe into the buying and selling of mail-in and haul-in votes by paid political hacks known as politiqueras. For a while, a state and federal task force was hot on the trail of the Hernandez vote-harvesting machine. Interviews were conducted, people hauled in, a few minor players were indicted and pleaded out.
Cameron County District Attorney indicted Ernie Hernandez, the traditional beneficiary of the fraudulent votes, on an unrelated charge of coercing a public employee and – in return for his resignation – agreed to deferred adjudication – and a slap on the hand. The probe into his wife Norma's involvement in the vote-fraud schemes were thrown out the window as was the alleged involvement of Erin, his daughter, in the illegal issuance and sale of waivers to the 72-hour state-mandated waiting period between getting a marriage license and the performance of the ceremony.
The voters, in their wisdom, rejected both daughter and son in the Democratic primary and everything died down.
The assumption seemed to be that since they were politically dead, there was no use proceeding with prosecuting them for the other alleged misdeeds.
Well, as the Walking Dead series shows us, sometimes the dead don't stay dead and there are already rumblings that Erin will be a candidate for city commissioner this coming May.
Her father has already been overheard telling people that he might make a run for mayor since he has technically been convicted of a crime after the deferred adjudication is concluded.
The danger, of course, is that death is contagious, anyway, political death. If people feel strongly about the seeming lack of prosecution of the Hernandez vote-harvesting machine principals, they might deal a death blow to those they think allowed them to come back from the dead.