Political race

If you own or manage a media outlet, and one of your reporters just happens to find out about a 19-year-old cold case double-homicide investigation out of neighboring Starr County in which the name of a current candidate for public office will get mentioned in a negative light, based on who the reporter chooses to interview, do you write and publish the story?

Sure, if something brand new in the cold case has come to light. This is after all, election season, so no one in the media wants to be accused of influence peddling.

If there is nothing new to the criminal investigation, then wait until after the election to run the story. What’s the hurry? It’s a 19-year-old cold case, and there is still no new news to report.

In elections, timing is everything. Get popped for a DWI during early voting, for example, and watch your support plummet. Any negative news during an election can’t be good.

Take, for example, the 1997 story that lost the race for Othal Brand, Sr., who was running against City Commissioner Leo Montalvo, trying to win his sixth term as McAllen’s mayor. About a week or so before the election, news came to light that Brand had taken a finder’s fee ($36,000) for land that the city had recently purchased on its northwest side. Othal said the city should build a new golf course there, and since he controlled the commission majority, the deal was consummated.

The Monitor broke the story after someone presumably dropped a dime. Sure enough, there deep in the closing documents was Othal’s name with $36,000 next to it. Brand claimed he had done nothing wrong, but the voters thought otherwise.

When that news hit the street, some Brand supporters flipped, and he lost the tight race to Montalvo, who would go on to serve two terms.

No News

Recently, a local news outlet ran a story about the murder of a high-level local criminal gang member who may have been tied to a cold-case double homicide out of Starr County. Maybe, maybe not. The double murder (man and woman) took place in 2003. The murder of the gang member, who was also a government informant, took place in 2007.

The murder of the high-level gang member/government informant was, however, solved. Turns out, according to a press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office Aug. 30, 2011, that an employee of a current political candidate’s law practice informed two gang members that they had a snitch in their midst and gave up the name. As a result, the gang member/government informant was soon found shot to death.

The trigger man was sentenced to life, and the lawyer’s employee, the guy who confessed to passing on the confidential info to the gang members, was sentenced to 52 months custody and a threeyear supervised probation.

In this recent news story published last Thursday, four days before the start of early voting, the only time the candidate’s name gets tied to leaking the informant’s name, as opposed to his employee, is when it cites testimony from an ATF agent, circa 2010/2011 who says that based on his investigation, the lawyer/ current political candidate did it.

That’s nothing new though. The testimony from the ATF agent dates back approximately 10 years.

I had a seasoned lawman tell me this week — who isn’t a fan of either candidate by the way — that to get the full picture of what the ATF agent was saying, one needs to put it in context and not just take “a tiny snippet from the entire testimony.”

Then, last week’s story quotes the former commander of the Starr County Special Crimes Unit who left his job this January. The special unit has now been disbanded, meaning that the cold case has even less chance of closure.

On the street, the rumor is, the commander wants a job with the DA’s office post election, so if a story comes out making one candidate possibly look bad, so much the better? We all know how rumors are, though. Some are true and some are not.

There’s just no way to really explain the sudden appearance in print of this cold-case double homicide story, coupled with the murder of a government informant four years later, and its ties to a current political candidate’s law-office employee who pled guilty.

Nothing new here, so why publish it smack dab in the middle of a heated election?

I’d name all the players, but why give this story any more publicity, especially if I don’t agree with it. Enough readers will already know who I’m talking about.

The only reason I looked up the story was that I had an attorney tell me this week that after reading last week’s story, he was voting for the female candidate. So I read it, looking for something new, some reason to publish it now, and could find none. I re-read it again. Still nothing. I read it a third time and thought, this is more than a little weird.

A front-page story that paints one major political candidate in a negative light? You can’t buy that kind of publicity if you’re the opponent in this race.

You know why I don’t believe this particular candidate had anything to do with “outing” a government informant, which ultimately led to his death? It’s because the guy in the law office who copped to the crime and actually gave up the informant’s name wouldn’t have done so if his boss was the actual culprit.

If anything, the feds would have gladly settled for the moderately high-profile attorney if they had a shot. They always focus on the “big fish.”

No one can tell me that some U.S. attorneys didn’t work hard to get him to admit to that very scenario.

“Tell us that it was your boss who gave up the gang member’s name, and you’ll get awarded points during the sentencing phase.”

Please.