A guest editorial appeared in the El Paso Times on June 24, 2007. It was signed by 14 elected officials pledging to “rebuild public trust” by being ethical. The “Pledge to El Pasoans” (see below for the text of the pledge) disappeared from the public as quickly as it appeared. Except for a brief public signing ceremony and the guest editorial, the promises made to the public never materialized. Today, calling the number to report unethical behavior routes the caller to a car insurance service offering to lower the caller’s car insurance rates.
The lead promise made in the pledge was to create A Citizen’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Ethical Government. It was never created. However, some of the people who signed the pledge in 2007 recently pointed to recent ethics commission investigations of city officials as if insinuating that they did their job to protect El Pasoans.
Ethics Commissions
An attempt to create a statewide ethics commission in Texas was placed on the May 18, 1971, ballot. Voters rejected the measure because a last-minute amendment was tacked on to the proposal setting a pay scale for legislators, effectively taking the decision on pay out of the hands of the voters. Several more attempts were made at the state to create an ethics commission, including one proposed by then-El Paso State Rep. Mary Polk in 1983. Finally, in April 1983, the Texas House created a nine-member ethics committee, and Texas Governor Mark White signed the bill creating the State Ethics Advisory Commission on June 17, 1983.
Among the state’s first ethics commission investigation included then-El Paso Rep. Bobby Valles, a Democrat, for accepting state reimbursement for travel on state-owned aircraft. Valles, blaming the reimbursements on his staff making a “clerical bookkeeping” error, reimbursed the state $265 in travel money he received for two trips between Austin and El Paso.
On June 18, 1991, the El Paso City Council voted to create an Ethics Review Commission. The vote to establish the commission was tabled several times, until the city council voted to establish it on August 20, 1991. But then Mayor Bill Tilney had to cast a vote in favor of establishing the ethics commission after a tie-vote was cast by the city council members.
It is important to understand the chronology of El Paso’s Ethics Commission because it has been insinuated by some of the signers that the ethics commission was the result of the Pledge to El Pasoans, especially after the commission made numerous headlines last year with reprimands issued to city council members.
The spectacle of the Pledge to El Pasoans was made after a large-scale FBI corruption investigation into El Paso officials began three years before. Over 40 people were publicly implicated in several instances of public corruption. Operation Poisoned Pawns uncovered a sprawling network of bribery, influence-peddling and contract manipulation that reached deep into the heart of county government, school districts and businesses receiving lucrative government contracts.
Like other public corruption scandals like ABSCAM, Operation Greylord and Operation Silver Shovel, El Paso’s Poisoned Pawns promised structural political reform to curtail corruption. Several elected officials rallied behind the Pledge to El Pasoans promising the reform El Pasoans were looking for.
They failed.
Operation Poisoned Pawns
Operation Poisoned Pawns began in the mid-2000s, when federal investigators detected irregularities in El Paso’s public contracting processes. The probe uncovered a complex web of bribery schemes involving county officials, school district trustees, and private contractors. It led to around 40 convictions.
After identifying patterns of irregularities in public procurement processes and unusually close relationships between elected officials and private vendors, the FBI launched an investigation in 2004 to investigate irregularities. Over several years, agents deployed extensive investigative tools, including wiretaps, informants, surveillance, and grand-jury subpoenas to create a map of what amounted to a pay-to-play ecosystem. Ultimately the investigations exposed schemes in which public officials steered lucrative government contracts to vendors in exchange for bribes, political assistance, or other personal benefits.
The investigation was unprecedented to El Paso. Dozens of individuals were implicated or convicted, including elected county officials, high-ranking administrative staff, school-district trustees, and business owners. While the details varied, the underlining pattern was consistent: public authority was routinely leveraged for private gain and those with access to decision-makers could effectively purchase favorable outcomes. The large number of guilty pleas underscored the depth of the corruption.
Strikingly several elected officials proclaimed a Pledge to El Pasoans to enact structural changes to ensure it never happened again. Unlike two other communities who had to deal with corrupt officials among them, except for one newspaper editorial, nothing came about the pledge to keep corruption in El Paso at bay.
Greylord and Bell City
Unlike El Paso’s corruption investigation, Operation Greylord resulted in reforms designed to expose corrupt individuals and practices. Operation Greylord was launched by several federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, around 1980 to investigate corruption among judges in Illinois. By March of 1984, the investigation had resulted in 17 judges, 48 lawyers, several police and sheriffs’ officers, and one state legislator convicted or pleaded guilty to accepting bribes.
The widespread corruption uncovered by Operation Greylord led to the establishment of a Special Commission on the Administration of Justice which issued 165 reform ethics recommendations for Chicago. By the time the dust settled, Greylord had created deep systematic reforms that influence Chicago to this day.
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As El Paso’s corruption cases were winding down another one emerged in California. For many years, people in Bell City California suspected that their elected officials were secretly paying themselves six-figure salaries. Every time they tried to bring the matter before the city council they were mocked or intimidated by the very people they believed were corruptly overpaying themselves. One of the favorite tools used by the Bell officials to silence community questioning was limiting public speaking to two minutes.
Corruption at Bell City started soon after Robert Rizzo was hired by the city as the city’s administrator. Rizzo had been Hesperia’s first city manager but had left under a cloud of suspicion four years later. After Rizzo’s appointment, by 2004, business owners in Bell started to complain about being required to make payments to stay in business. One business owner, Gerardo Quiroz, was “so outraged” that he would write “bribe” in Spanish on his $300-a-month check to the city.
With just under 400 voters voting to convert the city into a charter city in 2005, they unwittingly voted to allow their city elected officials to exempt themselves from the California state law that limited their government salaries. By 2010, city council salaries had jumped to $96,999 a year. Publicly, the elected officials were being paid around $673 each month, but they were also receiving almost $8,000 a month for sitting on boards and commissions, unbeknownst to the city’s voters.
The Bell self-serving left Bell property owners paying the second-highest property taxes in Los Angeles County. Not only were city council members making close to $100,000 annually, but the city manager, Rizzo, was receiving an annual salary of close to $800,000 in 2010, at least publicly.
Records would later reveal that his salary was actually $1.5 million.
By late 2010, with law enforcement publicly investigating the self-dealing city officials, Bell residents, paying one of the highest property taxes in Los Angeles County organize themselves as the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse (BASTA). They collected around 16,000 signatures to recall the city council members.
On September 21, 2010, six current and former city council members were arrested, in what Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley described as a “corruption on steroids.”
Robert Rizzo, the city manager that set in motion the Bell corruption pleaded no contest to 69 charges and agreed to serve 10 to 12 years in state prison on October 3, 2013. The judge sentenced him to 12 years. Some of his co-conspirators also pleaded no contest to the charges on April 9, 2014. Angela Spaccia, the former city manager, was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Victor Bello was sentenced to a year in county jail. George Cole was sentenced to home confinement. Former mayor Oscar Hernandez was sentenced to one year in jail. Teresa Jacobo was sentenced to two years in prison. George Mirabal was sentenced to one year in jail. All were required to pay restitution to Bell City.
Luis Artiga was acquitted of the charges.
Bell City Versus El Paso Comparison
Since around 2000, members of El Paso’s community have regularly appeared before the city council and county commissioners to complain about corruption. They were dismissed by officials as ankle-biters and in some cases intimidated.
Bell officials also used time limits to keep public commentary about corruption silent at public forums. El Paso uses time limits, as well, to this day, but often takes the step further by threatening to arrest speakers, arresting some speakers and having others removed from public property.
In El Paso, it was federal prosecutors who brought an end to the corruption, at least for some targeted corruptors. Unlike El Paso, it was the Los Angeles District Attorney who successfully prosecuted the Bell city council members. El Paso’s then-District Attorney was Jaime Esparza, whose only contribution to the El Paso corruption crisis was signing the Pledge to El Pasoans. Another signer of the Pledge to El Pasoans was José Rodríquez who was the County Attorney at the time. It is the job of the El Paso County Attorney to scrutinize county contracts for irregularities. Many of the guilty pleas and successful prosecutions involved county contracts reviewed by Rodríguez’s office.
Like residents of Bell, El Pasoans today pay one of the highest property taxes in Texas.
Unlike El Paso’s Pledge to El Pasoans, which never amounted to more than an editorial in the local newspaper, Bell’s BASTA members recalled the city council members involved in the corruption. On March 8, 2011, 95% of Bell’s voters removed the entire city council, thanks to the activism by BASTA.
El Paso’s corruption cases and those of Bell and Chicago expose differences in how Bell and Chicago reacted to the corruption by making structural changes to control future corruption, whereas El Paso did nothing
Structural and Political Aftermath in El Paso
Unlike Bell and Chicago, El Paso’s response to Operation Poisoned Pawns were simple administrative reforms basically acknowledging what had already become common knowledge – that there were vulnerabilities in how the county handled purchasing.
By 2016, the county enacted ineffectual conflict of interest rules, mandated ethics training and created a purchasing code of ethics. They were and are nothing more than window dressing.
El Paso’s administrative reforms are, are best, administrative and offer no structural protections against corrupt practices. There is no oversight bodies created like there were in Bell and Chicago. The promised Citizens’ Blue Ribbon Commission on Ethical Government remained only a suggestion in the newspaper’s editorial pages signed by the elected officials of the time.
Although many in El Paso were prosecuted, there was no political realignment like there was in Bell City. To this day, there has been no state-level legislation governing ethics and procurement, except for the 1983 state commission that obviously failed El Paso.
The most troubling aspect of the aftermath of El Paso’s corruption cases is that 21 years after the FBI launched Operation Poisoned Pawns to investigate corruption in El Paso and with the criminal cases concluded, many of the court records remain sealed, unavailable to the community.
Many suspect that other politicians were secretly implicated in the corruption scandals but are protected by sealed court records to this day. The case of Carlos Cordova is one example, not only had Cordova insinuated that he knew of other cases of corruption, but the company that he pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe from remains unnamed to this day. Bribing an elected official is a crime for both the one who accepts the bribe and the one who makes it. Cordova died in 2015 without revealing more about the corruption cases he alleged he knew about.
In the end, Operation Poisoned Pawns did not produce any structural political changes in El Paso comparable to the structural reforms triggered by the Bell and Chicago corruption scandals. While the investigation dismantled key corruption networks and introduced incremental administrative reforms, it did not lead to an oversight as promised by the Pledge to El Pasoans, nor substantial political realignment. Many of the same people in office at the time remain active in El Paso’s political spheres today, including the ones that pledged to ensure corruption never happened in El Paso again. Today, El Pasoans pay one of the highest taxes in the state, and recently went so far as to attempt to collect a street fee for El Pasoans to use El Paso’s streets.
Author’s note: the details in this report, unless otherwise noted, are taken from personal testimonies of people involved, news media reports, court documents and contemporaneous notes made by the author. Details about Operation Poisoned Pawns can be found here, a website maintained by the author.
The Pledge to El Pasoans (2007)
We make the following commitments to you, our constituents. We will:
Create A Citizens’ Blue Ribbon Commission on Ethical Government. We must establish an intergovernmental blue-ribbon commission on ethical government in El Paso. The commission must be given the authority to investigate and advocate best practices in ethics, contracting, whistle-blower protection, civic participation and other critical policy areas.
Report Misconduct. Official misconduct must be immediately reported to proper law enforcement authorities. We will create a new hotline to take your reports on misconduct. Officials, citizens and government contractors will be able to call 1-866-MY-REFORM (697-3367) to file a report.
Promote Open Government. We must make all public meetings, no matter how seemingly insignificant, accessible to the public through television and/or the Internet.
Strengthen Financial Transparency. We must strengthen financial disclosure by our public officials and in our public institutions. That means having campaign finance reports and ethics reports, from school trustees to county officials to irrigation board members, accessible through the creation of a single, consolidated Web site; and strengthening financial disclosure reports filed by all our public officials.
Encourage Voter Education. We must do more to promote voter education and increase civic participation. As public servants, we pledge to devote 100 hours each annually to promote nonpartisan voter education initiatives aimed at increasing local voter awareness and voter turnout.
Signed by: (in order as published in the El Paso Times, June 24, 2007)
John Cook (mayor)
Jaime Esparza (District Attorney)
José Rodríguez (County Attorney)
Ann Morgan Lilly (District 1 city representative)
Susie Byrd (District 2 city representative)
Alexandro Lozano (District 3 city representative)
Lisa Colquitt-Muñoz (District 1 trustee, EPISD)
Eliot Shapleigh (Texas state senator)
Pat Haggerty (Texas state representative)
Veronica Escobar (county commissioner, Precinct 2)
Dan Haggerty (county commissioner, Precinct 4)
Presi Ortega (signed as former city representative, District 5)
Steve Ortega (District 7 city representative)
Beto O’Rourke (District 8 city representative)
The previous Council made a point of exposing the many 380A agreements made by the city and how they were not being monitored for compliance. The latest example of this shows that the Hotel Occupancy Tax is in arrears with several hotel owners, but nothing seems to be done about it. It is as if the Council exists to keep these arrangements under wraps.
Not quite sure you can lump the Lorenzo Garcia mail fraud/cheating scandal at EPISD to the “Poisoned Pawns.” That seemed to be a separate, singular aberration within the city, albeit not completely unexpected.
Now, looking at the many years of chronic illegalities on local school boards/ districts and their out-of-town Superintendents might be another topic altogether worth investigating, and why school boards insist in hiring leaders with no skin in the El Paso game.