LAWSUIT: PORT OF B'VILLE EMPLOYEES FUNNELED $386,000 PAYMENTS TO VENDOR AT A VACANT HOUSE; STEVE GUERRA WAS CHAIRMAN IN MIDDLE OF SCHEME PERIOD

By Tez Romero

AIG Insurance

Risk, Compliance and Legal

"The case is a textbook example of how a sham vendor, cooperative insiders, and weak procurement controls can combine to produce a six-figure loss that only surfaces when someone finally checks the invoices against the loading dock".

An AIG subsidiary says three port authority employees and two outside accomplices ran a fake-vendor invoice scheme worth $386,410. Now it wants the money back.

National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh - part of the AIG group - filed the complaint on September 15, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas. National Union paid out the claim under an employee-theft policy and is now standing in the insured's shoes, chasing recovery from the people it says caused the loss.

The insured is the Brownsville Navigation District of Cameron County, the public entity that runs the Port of Brownsville – the only deep-water port on the US-Mexico border, according to the complaint.

Here is what the filing alleges happened.

Between roughly February 2022 and October 2022, three BND employees conspired with an outside vendor and its principal to "misappropriate funds from BND through fraudulent purchases of electronic equipment." The vendor was a company called C&A Industrial Supply, LLC and its agent is listed as Claudia Llamas.

(Just before, in 2018, Steve Guerra, now running for Cameron County Judge, was elected to the board, and then in May 2022 – in the period in the middle of the theft scheme – was appointed chairman and reappointed in 2024. The public – despite Guerra's claims of accountability and transparency – was never informed of the theft scheme or investigation. How can you pass a balanced budget missing $386,410? )

BND's then-director of human resources Jaime Martinez  allegedly placed the orders. The complaint lists a Cisco Firepower firewall priced at $224,000, 30 Cisco Catalyst switches for $126,000, and four Cisco transceivers at $9,102.52 each. Two IT department employees - Juan Blanco, a supervisor, and Carlos Cardenas, coordinator - allegedly signed off on the payments.

None of it was what BND thought it was buying, the filing says. The items listed on C&A's invoices "were either never delivered to BND or were replaced with inferior, outdated, or used equipment."

The scheme started to unravel in October 2022, when BND's deputy port director spotted what the filing calls "potentially irregular purchasing practices." By December 7, 2022, Eddie Campirano, the port director, had authorized a full audit. Current Port Director William Dietrich was then the port's police chief.

What turned up was hard to miss. The complaint states that C&A's invoiced address was "a vacant residential property with disconnected electricity." (The lawsuit dies not list the house address ) 

Between December 8 and 20, 2022, BND interviewed IT staff. According to the filing, not one of them could identify the items on C&A's invoices. What they found instead was "inferior, outdated, or used equipment that did not match the quality or value of the items specified."

Then things moved fast. The complaint alleges the IT supervisor and coordinator resigned without notice during the investigation and "deleted all of their stored emails, making them irretrievable." The HR director was subsequently terminated.

National Union says it indemnified BND under Policy No. 011352891 and has stepped into BND's shoes to pursue recovery. The total alleged loss is $386,410.

The insurer is pressing three counts: fraud against all five defendants, breach of fiduciary duty against the three former employees - the legal obligation people in positions of trust owe to act in their employer's best interests, not their own - and civil conspiracy against all five. National Union is seeking $386,410 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, interest, and costs.

For claims teams and underwriters handling fidelity and crime portfolios, the case is a textbook example of how a sham vendor, cooperative insiders, and weak procurement controls can combine to produce a six-figure loss that only surfaces when someone finally checks the invoices against the loading dock.