Suspected Sex Trafficker Caught After Pursuit
And: Coffin Caper, a Repulsive Episode in Falfurrias
Hello again Friends,
Deputies and other lawmen in the area continue their efforts, reporting 4 different pursuits in Kinney County since the weekend— with two coming Monday morning alone.
Most notable was one of the weekend chases that saw a deputy pursue a suspect as part of a 50 mile chase that ended in the northern reaches of the County on the way to Rocksprings, TX. The further West you go, the bigger the counties get in Texas— but a 50 mile chase is still somewhat exceptional. What really makes the incident stand out, however, is that the suspect had a load of all-female illegal aliens. The suspect appears to be from the Austin area, and is tentatively being identified as a member of the Texas criminal gang “Puro Tango Blast,” which as the name indicates is a mostly hispanic organization that consists of a loose conglomeration of street and prison gangs based in Texas cities. The suspect also had several outstanding warrants for his arrest in Austin.
The reason we’re taking a closer look at this one, is not just the matter of mileage, but also the freight. An all female load of illegal aliens. This is not an accident of fate or fortune that someone just happened to find an entire group of the fairer sex to smuggle. Most loads are predominantly male. This suggests a party of women that were bound for some kind of “special” purpose. Special how? Nothing good. Surely readers and subscribers can guess. The male suspect is in custody— it’s a certainty that the women were referred to U.S. Border Patrol for processing. Some of them may try and make asylum claims, others will be returned to Mexico. It’s possible they may linger in the US as part of an investigation into sex trafficking.
Over time, it seems that there hasn’t been much emphasis on the growing undercurrent of sex trafficking along the border. There’s always been some sex trafficking, of course, but it seems like it’s becoming a bigger and bigger moneymaker for the cartels, with human trafficking in general becoming a greater component of their financial portfolios, competing with their traditional narco-dollars.
According to Wikipedia, the City of Houston has about 200 active brothels. How accurate is that number, anyway? And how old is that estimate? Right now, the number very well could be much higher.
Going back to 2005, one finds pretty decent coverage of a case involving a man named Maximino “El Chimino” Mondragon who was convicted of running a ring of 120 women and girls brought in from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. We’re told the women were forced to work in several Houston-area cantinas Mondragon owned, that were actually fronts for his brothels. So— the women were working in the front of the house as waitresses, and forced to turn tricks in the back.
There’s a well done article about the case in the Houston Chronicle. It’s tempting to try and speculate about the situation in Houston now, on the basis of this one case, but we’re told it’s actually an outlier. One of the biggest cases of sex trafficking in US history. Interestingly, it appears that Mondragon may’ve known authorities were closing in— having purchased a 1-way ticket to Central America, and was arrested the night of his going away party at one of his clubs.
Apparently, Mondragon breathed new, twisted life, into the old saying about people being enslaved to the company store. The women were not only being forced to pay off their smuggling debts— they were also being charged for the food they ate, the places they slept, for virtually every last aspect of their enslaved lives, Mondragon was keeping detailed ledgers of what each “owed.”
One of Mandragon’s partners, who pled guilty, was described as an abortion doctor. One imagines some women were also being charged for that doctor’s “services.”
In the end Mondragon was only sentenced to 13 years in prison. One might wonder, how someone who apparently visited several cumulative lifetimes of misery on so many women for what was apparently a very long time, could be so lucky to have such a light sentence. He was also ordered to pay 1.7 million dollars in restitution, but even so. This makes one recall how justice can be a funny shaped ball, bouncing in unpredictable ways.
Mondragon was sentenced in 2009, so he was due for release sometime in 2021, assuming he didn’t rack up further charges while in the slammer.
We’re told that in the lead up to this case authorities expected to find maybe 50 or 60 women and were shocked when the numbers were double that. At the time, this suggested that the true state of sex trafficking in Houston was worse than anyone was predicting.
In the years since then, does anyone think it’s gotten better? Or worse? The traffic we are all seeing along the border right now would seem to support only one conclusion.
Realize friends, that lost in the sea of relatively benign folks looking for a better life, seeking asylum, turning themselves in at the Ports of Entry, there are many people being victimized by the Cartels. Perhaps more than ever. This sea of unchecked migration is a cruel enabling factor for unchecked criminality, that most of us as individuals and a people are not fully appreciating.
We recently highlighted reporting by Breitbart, citing internal documents from ICE and Homeland security that in the month of December alone, the Cartels booked an estimated 1-Billion dollars from human smuggling.
The way things are going, one strongly suspects, that without changes, any enforcement efforts in Houston, Dallas, or other major trafficking cities, are ultimately doomed to fail. Doomed to fail to make an appreciable dent in this quiet flood of human misery, lost in the greater deluge of illegal immigration. How is some vice cop in Houston supposed to make a dent in something like this, when for every investigation he opens, there’s enough new “product” arriving to open 2 new brothels every week?
We made that number up just now: 2 new brothels every week. The truth is, one has to expect any stated figure related to illicit border crossings to contain a healthy dose of guesstimation, because there truly are no reliable statistics on just how many folks are crossing. Authorities base their guesses on the numbers of “got aways” and other points of contact with illegal aliens, but in the end, it’s just some kind of statistical alchemy. Voodoo. Numerical black magic. Is it ballpark accurate? One hopes. Perhaps the sacrifice of a fine bird, or perhaps even a fattened calf will help. But in the end, these numbers are all we have to work from.
Circling back to the front end of this newsletter— one hopes that law enforcement takes a good long look at this pursuit, and wrings every last scrap of information they can out of the suspect. Where were they going? Who does he work for? How many girls?
But, when considering the larger picture, and all the special loads that don’t get caught, one wonders how are some tiny little counties like Kinney County, Dimmit County, or even larger neighbors like Val Verde, Uvalde, or Maverick County supposed to cope with this kind of business? At times, it all has the feel of Don Quixote and his pointless crusade. Making it sadder, and ultimately pathetic, is if you believe that it is an unintentionally manufactured crusade, brought on by ill-advised changes at the U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security.
Witness the near mutiny of Border Patrol Agents during recent gatherings with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Some seem to believe that the U.S. Border Patrol is made up of unrepentant racists, eager to inflict misery on downtrodden brown folks. Others would like to ascribe the noblest of motives and emotions behind their work and efforts. Obviously the truth is rather more human and pedestrian. By and large, most are certainly just regular folks who want to earn a wage, but also be able to perform a task of some consequence. To live a life of some meaning, even if toiling in obscurity on the U.S. Mexico border. Imagine what it must be like, knowing better than almost anyone what the human cost behind all of this smuggling is— and be unable to do anything about it— hamstrung by feckless policies and the short-sighted encouragement and aid being given to asylum seekers by Washington D.C. politicos and internationally active non-governmental organizations being fed U.S. tax dollars.
And finally, a story that caught our eye at the tail end of last week on Twitter— from out of the Falfurrias area. A Galveston man is pleading guilty to charges of smuggling illegal aliens in a coffin, covered by an American flag. He was going through a Border Patrol checkpoint, where agents questioned him about the coffin and flag in the back of the van. The suspect said he was hauling a “Dead Guy. Navy guy.” The lawmen were suspicious— for one thing, deceased U.S. Servicemen are not shipped about like anonymous freight. For another, the coffin was visibly beaten up, and the flag was secured to it with packing tape.
Two illegals were inside the coffin.
Marcus Aurelius tells us “You have power over your mind— not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” The wisdom of a Roman Emperor, written down in his own hand and idiom and tested by time.
These challenges facing Texas can and will be met. But it’s going to take a whole lot of stoicism in the short term. And we’re going to have to wake up our sleeping neighbors. Be joyful, once ignorance is lost, one can never return to that state of mind. It is in this mindful environment that change and improvement may come. Keep your eye out for further reporting here on sex trafficking. There seems to be much more to illuminate on this subject.
For the curious, we invite you to google the phrase: “El Potrero Chimino Bar” which is the name of one of Mondragon’s old Houston clubs. Just do it, and see what pops up. Notice how many similar establishments around the country with similar names seem to pop up, advertising the coldest drinks and prettiest girls. Weird no? How about the google customer reviews? Weird! It may well be that these are legitimate businesses, latin-american equivalents to Hooters, but one can’t help but wonder.
As always, opinions and errors expressed in this newsletter are entirely our own— and are put out into the world without the oversight or active input of the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office which is presently employing us. We mention this employment in the spirit of full disclosure, and also to remain in compliance with the County’s regulations regarding employees and social media.
We’ll see you again sometime further on down the road.