Lucky #13

From The Lion Star Blog by Jaime Abeytia

I’ve been going through the indictment to see what other information I can get out of it. So far, there are a couple of parts that have me perplexed but number 13 on page 11 of the indictment is the one that I keep finding myself going back to.

Here’s what it reads, “13. On or about February 13, 2006 defendants, MARK SCHWARTZ, and FRANK APODACA, secured the vote for ACCESS of an elected member of Commissioners Court, in exchange for a $500 campaign contribution to a relative of the elected member of Commissioner’s Court, who was running for elected office.”

What bothered me about this particular portion of the indictment was the fact that the feds are alleging that Schwartz and Apodaca bribed a member Commissioner’s Court, but the member apparently isn’t indicted?

Perhaps this something that is coming down the road, after all the FBI did indicate that these indictments marked the end of only one phase of the investigation.

But it’s not too hard to narrow down the possible members of Commissioner’s Court.

I’ll bet I’m not the only one trying to figure out who else it could be.

The biggest clue in the indictment is the fact that feds say that the Commissioner in question had a relative running for political office. So that narrows things down quite a bit. County Judge Briones is actually named (her initials anyway) in another part of the indictment, so that eliminates Briones.

The only other two members of Commissioner’s Court at the time that had relatives running for office were Commissioner’s Teran and Haggerty.

Teran’s daughter Monica was running for Justice of the Peace. Ironically she was running against Fred Chavez, husband of Linda Chavez, a member of the Ysleta Independent School Board that is set to resign today and was one of the 11 indicted.
Commissioner Dan Haggerty’s brother Pat was running for re-election to the State House.

So the next step for me was to check campaign finance reports to see which of the two received a campaign donation around that time in the amount of $500, in order to figure out who the mystery member of Commissioner’s Court is.

Well, after an exhaustive examination of both candidates’ campaign finance reports at the time, I am unfortunately no closer to identifying the member of Commissioner’s Court in question. Both candidates had more than one contribution in the amount of $500 in those reports.

Interestingly, Monica Teran did have a $500 contribution from her father in her run-off election, which was in that time frame. Haggerty had plenty of campaign money and didn’t appear to have a hard time collecting contributions. In fact, I was surprised at the amount of PAC money he was taking.

Sorry folks, I was really hoping to be able to find the Commissioner in question but it appears that I am unable to eliminate the possibility of either. Which I guess means it’s one of the two, but who knows which one?

You’ll have to make up your own mind on that one or wait til the feds reveal it in a later indictment, if that ever becomes the case.