Corruption costly for Maverick residents
By: Jason Buch
PUEBLO NUEVO — From the dusty streets of this impoverished neighborhood in rural Maverick County, the FBI alleges, public officials plundered hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past three years.
It’s easier to get around the subdivision southeast of Eagle Pass since a $15 million grant from the Texas Department of Transportation paved over most of its dirt roads, but the poverty still is apparent. Some streets remain unpaved.
Unlike many colonias, Pueblo Nuevo has sewer and water hookups, and the streets have some new homes. But they’re alongside poorly built houses that have fallen into disrepair, and many residents don’t have a means of transportation.
The FBI says county officials took kickbacks to hand out swollen bids for paving roads in Pueblo Nuevo. And the allegations don’t stop there.
Other county employees are accused of submitting fake invoices for equipment and pocketing the cash. Others took bribes to dole out bids from a Homeland Security Department grant destined for the Sheriff’s Office, court documents state.
So far, nine people — six of them county employees and two of those county commissioners — have been arrested on a range of charges stemming from the FBI’s investigation into Maverick County corruption.
Meanwhile, the county is faced with a fiscal nightmare. It’s millions of dollars in debt, and the county can’t make simple purchases from vendors with whom it has racked up large bills.
And underneath the debt and allegations of fiscal malfeasance lies something more sinister. One precinct foreman, the official who oversees construction projects in a county district, had just been released from prison, where he was serving time for acting as a straw buyer for guns getting smuggled to Mexico when he was picked up on corruption charges.
And the commissioner who represents Pueblo Nuevo, Rodolfo Bainet Heredia, sits in a Del Rio jail waiting trial on charges he sold his truck to the Zetas drug cartel and smuggled the money into the U.S.
With a median household income of $29,000, Maverick County is one of the poorest in the state and relies heavily on grants to provide infrastructure and services.
Streets in many of its poor colonias had remained unpaved for decades. So when the TxDOT grant was announced for Pueblo Nuevo and other colonias, it was a windfall for Maverick residents.
It also was a gold mine for county officials and their entrepreneurial friends.
“I had never seen so many local companies crop up in Eagle Pass,” said Manuel Reyes, the recently retired county treasurer who spent more than three decades on the job. “So many. Everyone became a construction company.”
Caught on wiretaps
Rodolfo Heredia was born in Eagle Pass and grew up on both sides of the border.
His oldest brother is a retired Border Patrol agent. The second-oldest brother, Claudio, is a lawyer and the tight-knit family’s patriarch.
Rodolfo Heredia, who goes by Rudy, is a well-known figure around the county. He’d worked as an auto parts salesman and for a time owned his own auto parts store.
He eventually landed a job as a real estate agent for Chad Foster, Eagle Pass’s late mayor, a mustachioed and cowboy-hat-wearing legend with close ties to businessmen and politicians in the neighboring Mexican state of Coahuila.
Heredia became a commissioner 10 years ago. In Democratic-dominated Maverick County, almost every race is decided in the spring primary elections.
“Rudy has a big heart,” Claudio said. “If you come up to Rudy and you’re a stranger and you tell him a sad story about your kid having cancer or you can’t pay your electric bill, and he has $50 in his pocket, he’ll give you the 50 bucks.”
Heredia’s Precinct 2 is the poorest district in Maverick County, his staff said, which has the 10th-highest proportion of families below the poverty line in Texas.
Most of them live in the sprawling Pueblo Nuevo subdivision, a mishmash of trailers, new homes and rundown cinderblock houses.
For years, rumors had circulated that Heredia was involved in illegal activity. In the past couple of years, things began to unravel.
A weekly bilingual publication, the Maverick County Press, reported last year that county equipment was being used on private property in Precinct 2. In April, Rudy was arrested and charged with public intoxication.
All the while, Claudio said, the family heard from people who had received letters from the FBI alerting them they’d been recorded speaking with Rudy on wiretaps.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 18, FBI agents arrested Rudy Heredia at his house and hauled him before a federal judge in Del Rio.
At a detention hearing, FBI agent Jarrett Doss said the investigation into Heredia’s activities began in 2009, when Drug Enforcement Administration agents listening to phone calls made by members of the Zetas drug cartel overheard the commissioner on their wiretaps.
Heredia is charged with selling his truck to members of the Zetas, but Doss went on to allege that the commissioner also took kickbacks for contracts that were overbid, and he traveled to Mexico for sex with underage girls.
After selling the truck, the agent said, Heredia boasted in a phone call that the purchaser was “40,” the radio call sign of Zetas leader Miguel Treviño Morales. He brought up the county equipment being used on private property.
Over the objections of Heredia’s attorney, a judge ordered the commissioner held without bond.
“They had my brother under surveillance from 2009 to 2011 and the best they could come up with was my brother sold his truck to a cartel member,” Claudio said. “There certainly was no allegation of drug dealing. There was no allegation of money laundering. So what did this three years of surveillance show?
“The scary part about it is the government has all these resources, they spent all this money and man-hours, to come up with a county commissioner in Maverick County selling a used truck for $13,000 to an alleged Zeta leader.”
He said someone else arranged to sell Rudy’s truck.
“Are we going to be held accountable for everything we say while boasting to a friend or under the influence of a few beers?” Claudio asked.
Even though he’s in jail, Heredia remains in office. During a recent Commissioners Court meeting, Jose Reyna, president of the Maverick County Republican Party, asked why the commissioners haven’t asked a district judge to remove Heredia.
“After we pay the taxes to keep him in jail, why are we still paying his salary?” Reyna asked.
Colonia work stops
Maverick County’s problems aren’t limited to the ongoing corruption investigation.
The county is more than $24 million in debt, on an annual budget of about $14 million. At a recent meeting, Commissioner César Flores complained he couldn’t buy dirt from Lowes for a softball field and a cemetery.
“They said they couldn’t deliver it because we owe something like $10,000,” Flores said.
County Judge David Saucedo, who’s been in office two years after more than a decade as a commissioner, said the county has cut the budgets to individual precincts and has laid off county staff.
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “We’ve been reducing the deficit, particularly over the last couple of years. We’ve had to raise taxes, but we’ve also cut expenses.”
To add to the problem, almost half of the county’s 54,000 residents live in unincorporated areas, most of them in the bane of South Texas local governments: colonias. The impoverished neighborhoods lack basic infrastructure and require large government investments.
In the colonia of Pueblo Nuevo, the county’s financial straits are obvious. Without the TxDOT grants the FBI says county officials misused, almost all of the colonia’s roads would remain unpaved. As it is, many of the roads still are dirt, prone to potholes and flooding. Since Heredia’s arrest, precinct officials said, repair projects have ground to a halt.
But the slowdown in services started before that, Pueblo Nuevo resident Suzie Garza said.
The 47-year-old mother of two said that over the past few months, the county has stopped holding language classes, computer training and other services at the Nick Carr Youth Center in the heart of the colonia.
“They never gave us an explanation,” Garza said.
Because its tax base is so small — the county brought in about $8.8 million last year — the county relies heavily on grants to provide infrastructure and services, Saucedo said.
It’s those grants, the FBI alleges, that commissioners and others used to line their pockets.
Dividing the spoils
The FBI says Heredia, Precinct 1 Commissioner Eliaz Maldonado, who was arrested Thursday, and other county officials used TxDOT and DHS grants in a kickback scheme.
Maldonado would rely on other county employees to act as the middlemen, except on occasions where contractors insisted on dealing directly with him, prosecutors allege.
Doss, the FBI agent, testified that Heredia had a similar system going with the TxDOT grants. In 2008, the county was approved for about $15 million in grants for the Border Colonias Access and Program. Of that, more than $3 million went to Heredia’s district.
Most of the paving involved laying asphalt, and that was carried out by county employees.
Some of the work, mostly pouring concrete pads at intersections in the colonia, was outsourced to private contractors. One of those was C&A Construction, a company owned by Maverick County Justice of the Peace César Iracheta and based out of his home.
Iracheta said he checked with the county attorney before accepting the $28,700 construction job in 2011. He hired subcontractors to do the work, and the county provided materials, the judge said.
“The reason that the project wasn’t done or finished was because the county ran out of money for materials, and the contract was for labor only,” Iracheta said.
An investigation by TxDOT found the money spent on outside contractors in Pueblo Nuevo had been overbid, Doss testified in the October detention hearing.
“Their preliminary findings were that over $300,000 of the funds were overbid,” he said. “The jobs were overbid by 40 percent.”
In November, Eagle Pass resident Joe M. Rodriguez, 37, pleaded guilty to theft charges in connection with the bribery scheme. According to Rodriguez’s plea agreement, he created a shell company at the behest of Jaime Flores, 33, a former county employee who oversaw construction work in Maldonado’s district and is the brother of Precinct 4 Commissioner César Flores.
César Flores did not return a call seeking comment. Jaime Flores has pleaded not guilty.
Throughout 2011, Rodriguez’s company was paid thousands of dollars for construction work that never was completed, according to the plea agreement. The money was divided among Flores, an employee in the auditor’s office and a county commissioner, according to the court records.
In the latter part of last year, Rodriguez began billing the county for construction equipment, according to court records. The county paid $17,000 for a forklift and motors, but never received them.
Rodriguez’s sentencing is set for April. Former Maverick County purchasing agent Juan Carlos Moncada, 32, was indicted with Rodriguez and Flores and has pleaded not guilty.
Flores was replaced at the county by Eduardo Rene Rodriguez, 40, who in September finished serving a prison stint for acting as a straw buyer for weapons traffickers.
In early November, Rodriguez was arrested on charges that he misused DHS Operation Stonegarden grants, which reimburse the Sheriff’s Department for mileage, overtime and equipment.
Alejandra Garcia, a 26-year-old former employee of the county auditor’s office, also is charged with misusing Stonegarden grants.
The department has received about $8 million in Stonegarden grants since 2005, Sheriff Tomas Herrera said.
Connecting the dots
Corruption probes frequently visit this slice of the border.
In 1995, federal and state investigators arrested the chief investigator for the district attorney’s office that covers Maverick, Zapata and Dimmit counties. Along with the Maverick sheriff’s chief deputy and the county’s jail administrator, he was charged with drug distribution and stealing government money.
But the case fell apart two years later as defense attorneys raised questions about the investigators’ credibility, and the federal prosecutor lost confidence in a key informant.
More recently, an investigator for the district attorney and another for the county attorney admitted to taking bribes to protect 8-liner establishments.
These days, FBI agents are regular figures at Maverick County offices. They show up at the auditor’s office and ask for documents.
Sometimes, newly minted auditor Fidencio Ortiz said, he calls the FBI as his employees dig through years of poorly kept county books. A month after their initial search, agents showed up at Heredia’s county office and peered in the air ducts.
Herrera, the sheriff, said he hasn’t heard from the FBI. Any misuse of the funds happened at the auditor’s office, he said.
The indictments, Herrera said, caught him off guard.
“I was surprised,” he said. “And from what I hear of, other people are coming down. Someone finally added everything together.”
jbuch@express-news.net
Database Editor Joe Yerardi, Research Assistant Julie Domel, Research Editor Mike Knoop and Express-News archives contributed to this report.
