The Hidalgo County Sheriffs Department’s Panama Unit was a federally-funded unit that was supposedly fighting narcotics. But it was not really fighting narcotics. The officers were working with the cartels and escorting their drug loads through the border county, sometimes stealing from the cartels and selling, paid by federal Justice Department COPS funding to fight the drug trade while making money off the drug trade.
A trio of deputies were handed sentences Tuesday ranging from 8 years to 12 years in federal prison.
Former Sheriff Lupe Trevino (D) has already pleaded guilty to money laundering.
His son, Jonathan Trevino, was a deputy and led the Panama Unit. He turned the Panama Unit into a drug trafficking scheme, as the Texas Observer reported last year.
Then one day in August 2012, Gerardo Duran and Sal Arguello—two members of the Panama Unit, a rogue narcotic task force led by Jonathan Treviño, the son of Sheriff Guadalupe “Lupe” Treviño— approached [narcotics investigator] Flores with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Duran told me ‘you seem to know a lot of people with good information,’” Flores said. “I told them I’d be happy to introduce them to some of my informants, so they could make some arrests.”
But, according to Flores, that wasn’t what Duran had in mind, replying, “We don’t arrest them. We take their shit.”
Duran started describing to Flores how the Panama Unit operated. The unit’s seven officers had been stealing drug loads. They also were escorting drug loads for dealers through Hidalgo County in marked police cars only to return later and rip off the same drug dealers who had paid them for the escorts. As the Observer reported in a March feature story, the Panama Unit had been brazenly ripping off drug dealers for at least three years, according to multiple law-enforcement sources and federal indictments.
Flores had heard the rumors about the Panama Unit being dirty. Jonathan Treviño, Flores said, acted as if he were invincible because he was the sheriff’s son. “I knew this wasn’t going to be good for me either way,” Flores said.
Flores went to the DEA, who handed him off to the FBI, and one of the investigations into the Panama Unit’s activities was on.
Trevino pleaded guilty last May. His sentencing resumes today.
Meanwhile, the dirty cops have caused yet another problem: The Hidalgo County district attorney has thrown out dozens of criminal cases because those cases relied on the testimony or evidence of the Panama Unit.
The COPS funding that fueled the corrupt Panama Unit was gained and sustained through lies — namely, Sheriff Trevino’s fake crime statistics secured the federal grants and then kept those grants flowing to the county. Those fake stats not only sustained the Panama Unit, they ended up coming back from the Washington in the form of then Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declaring in 2011 that “the border is better now than it has ever been.”
The border cannot be “better than ever” when the border cops themselves form a crime syndicate.
Update: Jonathan Trevino has been sentenced to 17 years in federal prison.
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