CONRADO CANTU SENTENCE: HAS IT BEEN 12 YEARS ALREADY?

By Juan Montoya

Has it been 12 years already that convicted Cameron County Sheriff Conrado Cantu was sentenced to 24 years and two months in prison without parole?

To some county residents it may seem like it was only yesterday that Cantu, in a green jumpsuit of a federal prisoner, was sentenced by federal judge Hilda Tagle for protecting drug traffickers, money launderers and illegal gamblers during his four years as Cameron County sheriff.

At the time of his sentencing on December 13, 2005 he was 50. Today, 12 years later, he is 62 and will be 77 when he finishes serving his sentence. After that he will still have five more years of probation to serve, probably in a halfway house.

 But his life as he knew it has long been over. His sons are men now, one of them a medical doctor, and his former spouse is no longer his wife. During his trial, he was deemed a flight risk because it was divulged that he had a woman with a child in Matamoros.

If you were around Cameron County in the 1990s, you probably remember the memorable political campaigns that Cantu engaged in with the likes of the late constable Arturo Gonzalez, Omar Lucio, Abel Perez and Terry Vinson.

Cantu rose from obscurity just as other local politicians have. He was a former plumber, a used-car salesman, and and later, the owner of a seafood restaurant who had served as a chief deputy constable for a year before being elected constable, in 1996. If you lived in Brownsville, chances are that you met him or even knew him. He was a fixture at political rallies and campaign functions.

During his time in public office he rubbed elbows with practically every elected official from state reps, senators, and county judge to justices of the peace. During the opening of the renovated "Old Bridge" he was glad-handing Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Tamaulipas Gov. Tomas Yarrington and then-Texas Gov. George Bush.

In the 1990s, elections were no-holds barred political slugfests and the participants engaged with gusto in the fray.

The Gonzalez extended family, which included former Cameron County District Clerk Aurora de la Garza, never forgave Cantu for unseating her brother Arturo. And the hard feelings toward Cantu were even more deeply ingrained in current sheriff Omar Lucio, who lost once to the singing constable, as he was called.  After defeating Lucio, the incumbent sheriff, in a Democratic primary runoff, he went on to beat his Republican challenger by 2,341 votes.

Cantu served as the county's top lawman between January 2001 and December 2004. He pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering charge in July of that year.

As part of a plea agreement to dismiss six other charges, Cantu admitted to running a three-man crime ring with his former captain and former county jail commissary vendor and that he abused his office to solicit and extort bribes from drug traffickers.

Court records show that Cantu took a $10,000 bribe to protect a drug trafficker, only one month after taking office.The men admitted to profiting from the sheriffs single term in office through several illegal acts that included accepting bribes and money laundering. Prosecutors charged that the three men interacted with at least four known drug trafficking organizations.

That, as county residents would learn during his trial and those of the other defendants, was the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of the trial and related press coverage they heard of Cantu and his co-defendants accepting bribes from drug dealers to look the other way, interfering in lawful arrests for close friends of the sheriff, and even of recorded conversations between a woman and the sheriff over a promised job in return for sexual favors.

All that is a thing of the past and people who lived through those days remember his fall from grace. Cantu is not eligible for release until serving the full sentence, with the possible exception of one months credit per year of good behavior. His earliest release would come in 2026.

After he was sentenced and serving his time, Cantu and his attorneys still maintained that federal prosecutors had reneged on a plea-bargain deal and that the pre-sentencing report by federal probation officers omitted any mention of the deal. They submitted lie detector tests to the court to make their case for a lower sentence to no avail.

With 12 years behind him and another 15 years to go, he will emerge from prison an old man who will have nothing but memories of those bygone days.