It became his trademark. Im sick and tired of being the fall guy, Lee said, and Vivian knew that he was talking about Jimmy. As Boyd must have realized, Kerr and Lee Chagra were natural enemies. In these pictures shes 9 or thereabouts. Lets go downstairs and give them one they can write home about. Clark said he would dress and meet Lee in the casino. Some in the legal community thought he was too special, too outspoken. He earned a lot of money and became a high roller in Las Vegas, known for his very generous tipping. When he appeared several hours later in his Black Striker ensemble, a woman asked Clark Hughes if his friend was a movie star. But Vegas had never seen anything that surpassed the performance of Lee and Jimmy Chagra. The madness seemed to peak in November, when two men in a van sprayed Kerrs car with buckshot and .30-caliber bullets. Drugs are currently in fashion, but over the years whiskey, cigarettes, perfume, Swiss watches, silver, kitchenware, and of course, laborers have been staples in the trade. Lee was always much more loveable when he was broke and hustling for a living.. It is hard for me to go back into my cell and think of myself as the man the newspapers have made me out to be. By New Years Day it was the top story in town, and the defendants were being called the El Paso Ten. He was also used in FBI: The Untold Stories. Vivian did her best to smile. Lee didnt seem at all depressed, said Donna Johnson, the law firms bookkeeper. On top of everything else, he had developed hemorrhoids and they hurt like hell. Two overstuffed easy chairs were pushed together against the front of Lees desk, blocking the path across the room. It was in his blood. 196 The shotgun murder of an Oklahoma gambler in El Paso some years earlier had convinced him that the Dixie Mafia was making a power play in El Paso, and he had instigated a controversial grand jury investigation. Even as Lee was working to salvage what he could from the ruins, Jimmy was plotting a new deal. A known gambler and hit man, Harrelson had apparently been cleared in the Wood murder. Lee developed a standard ploy he secretly taped the conversation, then gave the agent the phone number of the real Mr. Big. It was the unlisted number of the local DEA chief. Clark Hughes had found a cartoon of a mouse shooting a finger at an eagleit was called The Last Great Act of Defianceand Lees secretary, Sandy Messer, was having it made into a wall plaque. Lee told her he still had a pile of work on his desk. He loved the streets and the people who plied themwhores, gamblers, smugglers, cops. Jurors heard hours worth of tape recordings and more than 500 pages of documents were presented. Here she is in the Sinatra suite at Caesars, the tacky wallpaper so thickly felted it practically had to be brushed. Sandy and the others began to realize that this was something truly personal; it was as though Lee were mourning his own impending death. But lately Lee was taking new directions. In the summer of 1977, sensing the heat but also attracted by the opportunities being suggested by his new partner, a wily, borderwise ex-con named Henry Wallace, Jimmy told Lee he was moving his base of operations to Florida. This didnt seem to disturb Wood any more than it had Guinn, who used to cackle, I can sentence them a lot faster than they can reverse them. Nor did Wood protest when they started calling him Maximum John. You help us and well help you, the agents told Stricklin. [40][3], He had seven children, including a daughter named Catherine, who wrote a memoir about the family. Thats the reason Im going to release it to you.Thats what Ive been trying to tell you. They had to take care of him because he spoiled everything he touched. It was the way he sounded when he was counting money or totaling figures, an abstract, business-first attitude. Chagra had little use for public servants, especially prosecutors, and Kerr was a classic bureaucrat, squeaking with authority and wedded to the book. Now the government was trying to prove that Johnson had helped smuggle a pound of heroin out of Mexico. Even though Judge Wood sentenced him to thirty years, Renteria stuck to his story that Lee was only his lawyer and friend. With virtually unlimited spending at the hotel, and often left to entertain herself, shed go down to the lobby and buy so many toys that security had to haul them back to the suite. The best guess is that they divided at least $5 million. On April 11, 1977, James Kerr made an unpublicized trip to Nashville to review the allegations of the 1973 indictments against Lee Chagra and Jack Stricklin. Many a night, the Chagra brothers would play all six spots on a blackjack table, for anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 a hand. To mark the 40th anniversary of the trial of drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, who was accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge John Wood, Oscar Goodman, former mayor and at the time Chagra's defense attorney, will join the late mobster's daughter, Catherine, to revisit the event. Sandy was to count out $20,000 from the stash under the bathroom sink and have it ready when the woman arrived. None of the missing $450,000 was ever recovered. It was called Capital Acquisition, and its purpose was to channel funds through several banks in Mexico and then into Jimmys new business. Please feel free to use any other table in the casino. Like so many sheep, the nickel-and-dime players started backing away. Lee had $15,000 riding on the game. The hitman, Charles Harrelson, was the father of actor Woody Harrelson. The bonds that he set in marijuana cases averaged $200,000. His dream was to stash away $20 million, all taxes paid. When Lee pinned them down on the exact location from which they had watched the scene, several jurors snickered: not only was the position almost a mile from the field but a massive hill blocked the view. Chagras defense accused the feds of venue-shopping so that their client was almost sure to get life. What she didnt know was that he was in his private apartment, watching the game on TV with his friend Sailor Roberts, a bookie who had recently been busted in James Kerrs organized-crime probe. He named two of his chows Kilo and Poker., Look how sweet and dorky and innocent I look, Catherine Chagra said. Lees finances were in shambles, but he still had plenty of credit in Las Vegas. Drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, accused of paying a hitman $250,000 to kill a federal judge, retained Las Vegas attorney Oscar Goodman to defend him. The fifty-page text of the interview was used as supplemental material by a grand jury investigating a tax fraud, but it was never given the slightest weight as courtroom evidence. Jo Annie, Lees boyhood sweetheart and the wife who had seen him through law school and nineteen years of an emotionally charged marriage, met him at the airport. I cant practice in front of you, and I dont think you can honestly say that you can treat me or my client fairly in any court, Chagra told Wood. Donna helped Sandy count the $20,000. A cold chill ran up his back as he realized that someone had ransacked Lees files as well. They knew about the safe in the floor of the bathroom, but there were othersone beneath the carpet near the fireplace in the living room of the private suite and another in the master bedroom. He may or may not have locked it. In broken white letters, like shards of milk glass on velvet, it said FREEDOM. [31][32], In a deal with the federal government, Jimmy Chagra admitted to his role in the murder of Judge Wood and the attempted murder of Assistant United States Attorney James Kerr. When Patsy, who at one time weighed 180 pounds, finally worked up the courage to wear a swimsuit in public, Jimmy humiliated her mercilessly. She still has paintings he made while locked up, a hobby he never resumed after getting a medical parole in December 2003. They landed the high-priced weed at a deep, remote cove on the northeastern point of Massachusetts Bay, near Boston. [11][24][9], Jimmy Chagra died of cancer on July 25, 2008. Lee had always been our strength., Lee couldnt shake the feeling that something or someone was stalking him. He helped develop Operation Intercept, a massive media event in which millions of U.S. citizens were stopped and searched at the border. Kerrs just working the tailings, he said. A division of Empire Media Group Holdings LLC. A short time later there was a knock, and Lee admitted two hookers to the room. No charges were filed, but it was apparent that the crash was another of Jimmys scams gone up in smoke. He decided on James Kerr, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys he had inherited from the Republican regime. Kerr claimed that money didnt matter, that his mission in life was vigorously and, I hope, successfully prosecuting all offenders that his clients could provide, but the mere fact that his adversary put such emphasis on money and the trappings of wealth must have touched some deep reserve of resentment in him. Kerrs long association with FBI, IRS, and DEA agentsclients, he called themhad convinced him of the same sort of monolithic conspiracy that Boyd himself leaned toward. The feds could never prove he had any part in the operation or even that he knew about it in advance, though he probably did. When you live that way, chances are youll die that way too. Fold this five ways and stick it where the elves dont play, he said. In the early summer of 1973 Lee experienced for the first time in his life how it felt to be on the other side. Paperback November 6, 2015. by Catherine Chagra (Author) 168 ratings. He just picked up the money and tossed it in a drawer. Reporters flocked to the federal courthouse to get a look at what was happening to Lee Chagra. He told Jimmy Salome that he was taking out a new insurance policy. One time she wrote about sports. He had known about Lees cocaine habit, but since Clark had been appointed a judge, Lee hadnt flaunted it. But Lee trusted him. Wood was apparently confusing the fifty-page transcript of the secret interview with actual grand jury testimony. Jimmy Chagra was a lot of things: a high-rolling gambler who chummed around with celebrities in Las Vegas, probably the biggest pot smuggler in the Western world and a father to children he arguably adored and unarguably failed. [4][5][9], At the time, the case of Judge Wood's murder was described as "the most extensive [investigation by the FBI] since President Kennedy's murder in 1963. Jimmy, on the other hand, had a true gamblers instinct, a fatalistic kill-or-be-killed attitude. Joe was quieter and more introspective than his brothers. Chagra could win or lose more in a single session at a Vegas crap table than Kerr made in a year. By mid-November the feds had just about made their case against Jimmy Chagra, and rumors of his imminent indictment were rampant. I didnt trust Arabs. If Stricklin cooperated, they would work for his early release. The lawyer mentioned that he sometimes looked down at the office complex that Lee was remodeling and experienced pangs of envy. In some ways, they said, he was like Dad Chagra, old Abdou, a man stunted by his dreams. Chagra laid out the cold, hard facts: I cant save you. The consensus had always been that Jimmy Chagra would never amount to much. It was the first time anyone from El Paso had thought of using a tramp steamer. That was it, the last of the half-million the Black Striker had blown in Vegas the year before. Every time the local papers wrote anything about Lee, the story started with Indicted drug trafficker Lee Chagra. He was wearing his boots and jeans and enough jewelry to sink a deep-sea diver. Lee drew a crowd simply by walking through the front door at Caesars Palace, passing out money, and asking how much they loved him. Catherine is at work on a book called Dirty Darlings: A Story of Big Shots, Big Hair, Free Falling and a Texas-Sized Return to Grace. She has the tapes and the transcripts and is determined to get her version of the family story told. 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