Former U.S. attorney reflects on storied career
Cases involved mountain of cocaine and home-grown terrorist schemes
If anyone had the stuff to outlast President Donald Trump’s housecleaning at the Justice Department, it was Ken Magidson.
The straight-laced U.S. attorney was as neutral as it gets in Texas — tapped in 2008 by Republican Gov. Rick Perry for a short stint as district attorney and then three years later by President Barack Obama to oversee federal law enforcement in a Pennsylvania sized chunk of Texas.
After four decades in the courtroom, Magidson was as gung-ho about crime fighting as a newly sworn prosecutor. He knew the big picture as few did, overseeing lawsuits to protect vulnerable populations and pushing the siloed investigators at the FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, immigration, homeland security and other agencies to work jointly to dismantle criminal networks that paid no heed to international borders.
Few Houstonians recognized him on the street, but Magidson was privy to the highest secu-
rity briefings, meaning he knew more about threats to their lives and livelihoods than virtually anyone else in the region.
As he saw it, “You’re in the middle of everything. That’s where I wanted to be, in control of the action.”
Magidson anticipated his eventual ouster following Trump’s victory in November and planned a graceful exit at the end of April with goodbyes and a farewell cake.
But that’s not how it went down.
Despite assurances from the Trump administration that there would be no mass firings, the end came swiftly and unceremoniously. Along with 45 other U.S. attorneys across the country appointed by Obama, Magidson got the news late on a Friday: Resign by midnight or be fired.
Now, as Houston awaits the arrival of a new U.S. attorney for the vast Southern District of Texas, Magidson’s tenure offers a formidable template for his successor. His years of trial experience, deep knowledge of the multiple law enforcement units in the federal government and a devotion to putting criminals behind bars could be hard to match. ‘New way of prosecuting’
From his appointment in 2011 until the fateful call March 10, Magidson led a team of 180 lawyers tackling the heftiest criminal docket in the country, with a teeming port, a major metropolis and a bustling international border.
His domain stretched from Louisiana to the Laredo crossing. The cast of criminals his team prosecuted included corrupt public officials, drug kingpins, human smugglers, fraudulent business proprietors, cyber thieves and homegrown terrorists.
Magidson had six years of felony trial experience at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in 1983 when he joined the ranks at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Two years later, a case dubbed Operation Blueprint propelled his fledgling federal career into the limelight.
It was the heyday of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, with Don Johnson leading prime-time television as a shoulder-padded narc on “Miami Vice,” when the little-known federal prosecutor in Houston mounted one of the most comprehensive racketeering cases ever pursued.
The case had everything — exhippy identical twins, high-volume international drug hauls, private jets, Swiss bank accounts and groovy gatherings — bankrolled by a cocaine and marijuana empire stretching from the borderlands of Mexico to Boston by way of a blueprint shop on Buffalo Speedway.
Magidson told jurors the complicated case painted a portrait of “organized crime in America today.”
Jurors agreed, convicting nine defendants and stripping the ringleaders of millions of dollars in cash, homes, vast acreage, sports cars and aircraft from Santa Fe to El Paso, Austin and Marble Falls.
For the first time, prosecutors had fused a mix of criminal violations with a newly minted federal forfeiture law to bring down a network of criminals — a major victory for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, or OCDETF.
“No one had ever done wiretaps and forfeiture and money laundering all in one indictment,” Magidson said. “This was a new way of prosecuting. We were the pathfinders.”
The Blueprint case propelled Magidson to the center of a sweeping federal effort to fight crime. By 1987, Magidson been named chief of the office’s narcotics investigations and regional director of the organized crime drug task force for the Gulf Coast states.
In 1996, he agreed to spend a year working with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in Washington, D.C., as director of the organized crime task force, rallying support among U.S. attorneys to preserve federal funding for the task force.
He returned to Houston a year later to coordinate drug trafficking and money laundering investigations in 11 judicial districts in the southwest, from Texas and Oklahoma to New Mexico, Arizona and the southern reaches of California.
Magidson and his team focused with a new intensity in the late 1990s on toppling the deadliest and most influential cartels funneling Colombian cocaine up through Mexico to America’s big cities. Circuitous route to Houston
Magidson grew up with a front-row seat to history in Washington, D.C.
He was born in New York, but his family moved when he was an infant to Washington. His father was a career staffer at the Department of Defense, and his mother worked at what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Kenny chimed in during rousing political debates at the family dinner table, undeterred by his older brother David and his identical twin Josh, both of whom grew up to be prominent private lawyers. The boys learned civics between daily doses of neighborhood baseball.
As a teenager, he watched pallbearers carry John F. Kennedy’s casket up the Capitol steps and witnessed the Civil Rights Act debates from the Senate gallery.
Given his roots, Houston felt provincial when Magidson arrived in 1973 to enroll at South Texas College of Law. The biggest news that summer was the Chicken Ranch, a folksy brothel later immortalized in a Broadway musical as “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
Magidson recalled being floored by the triviality.
”I come down here, and they’re talking about some fakakta ranch house in La Grange, Texas?” he recalled, using the Yiddish word for ridiculous or outrageous. “What kind of town have I moved to?”
As a budding lawyer, he hoped Texas would offer more substantive arenas to pursue justice.
Texas more than delivered. After law school, Magidson took a job prosecuting murders, rapes and robberies at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. He gained a reputation as a thorough, tenacious and fair attorney, said longtime friend and former colleague Paul Coselli.
Magidson had a unique way in front of a jury, recalled attorney Paul Schiffer, a summer camp friend who lured Magidson to
Houston and helped him get hired at the DA’s office.
“He had a stage presence, and he backed it up with intelligence and flair for the dramatic,” Schiffer said. “He had a reputation as a solid trial dog. There wasn’t a case that ever intimidated him. There wasn’t a case he wasn’t prepared to try.”
It was at the Franklin Street DA’s office that he met his wife, Anita Myers, a secretary in the misdemeanor division with a sharp sense of humor. He was the grandson of an orthodox cantor in Sheepshead Bay; she was the granddaughter of Baptist paper mill worker from Nederland near Port Arthur.
Anita told him she’d gladly move anywhere as long as it wasn’t north of the Red River. They were rooted in Texas, through the birth of their daughter Amy, now 33, the arrival of grandchildren and Anita’s death from breast cancer in 2013.
Through Anita, Magidson said, he came to understand the Texas Gulf Coast. She didn’t make him wear boots or take him two-stepping, but she taught him how to relate to a Texas jury.
“She softened my corners. She took the edge off,” he said. “She made sure I was less arrogant and more responsible.” A mountain of cocaine
The poster-sized photo loomed from the wall in the inner sanctum of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a snapshot of an FBI agent standing, like a big-game hunter, in front of a 9-ton mountain of Colombian cocaine.
The single seizure with a street value of $3 billion from a stash house in Harlingen in 1989 was the first clue that eventually would lead investigators up the chain to Juan Garcia-Abrego, the mercenary leader of the Gulf Cartel.
By then, Magidson had moved into the U.S. Attorney’s Office and through the ranks to narcotics chief and regional director of the Gulf Coast Drug Enforcement Task Force.
Garcia-Abrego lorded over a massive narcotics pipeline that shipped in Colombian cocaine, warehoused at his enormous ranches in Matamoros, Mexico, and sent it up through Brownsville, Harlingen and McAllen to Houston and on to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
Garcia-Abrego was extradited from Mexico in 1996 for a closely watched three-week trial that illuminated the inner workings of the cartel. He was convicted on 22 counts of money laundering, drug possession and drug trafficking and, under newly beefedup sentencing laws, sentenced to 11 concurrent life terms and ordered to pay $128 million in fines.
Magidson had moved on to Washington by the time GarciaAbrego was convicted. But he was back in time to guide the same multi-agency strategy against Ociel Cardenas-Guillen, Garcia-Abrego’s former capo, who became the boss of the Gulf Cartel and later the Zetas, a powerful gang that operated like a criminal paramilitary squad.
As he coordinated major prosecutions, the ever-confident Magidson saw himself as the leader of the national effort to stop illegal drug trade.
“I was the number one cartel fighter in the U.S. as far as I was concerned,” he said. “We were the tip of the weapon.” Quick stint as DA
Magidson took the long view again when the Texas governor tapped him in 2008 to finish out the term of Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who was forced to resign amid an email scandal in an election year.
He agreed to accept the position with the understanding that he would return to the U.S. Attorney’s Office — with all his benefits intact — once a new district attorney was elected.
During his brief tenure, he said he tried to spread goodwill, reaching out to judges and law enforcement agencies and sitting in on hearings. He also released $20 million in discretionary funds seized from drug dealers, illegal gambling operations and other criminal activities to local agencies.
Crime Stoppers of Houston collected a $250,000 check with his signature on it. The forfeiture money bought new dashboard cameras for Deer Park police cruisers. Galena Park police officers spent their windfall on a fingerprint database.
Magidson was equally calm at the helm when Obama appointed him to run the Southern District of Texas, overseeing indictments for health care fraud, armored car heists, corrupt international trade deals, dark web child pornography and hate crimes.
Later in 2015, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch honored the region with a distinguished service award for helping take down 73 members and associates of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white supremacist prison gang. Mixed impressions
Around the Rusk Street courthouse, Magidson’s tenure drew mixed reviews.
Though he vigorously pursued street crime, a common gripe among defense lawyers was that he failed to devote sufficient resources to white-collar criminals.
“I’m sure he did fine with drugs and immigration,” said
“When he was U.S. attorney and you were trying a case, he would come down into the courtroom and check on things. He was not just checking on prosecutors — he’d say hello to the defense lawyers. That’s Kenny’s personality. … He stands out as being a guy that was very straightforward and honest, and an effective prosecutor.” Dick DeGuerin, defense lawyer
Ronald G. Woods, a defense attorney who served as U.S. attorney from 1990-93, during Magidson’s early days in the office. “It’s always the choice of the local U.S. attorney which cases to emphasize and how you manage the investigative agencies and encourage them.”
Dick DeGuerin, a renowned Houston defense lawyer who represented one of the 1985 Operation Blueprint defendants, said Magidson was honest, fair and ever-present.
“When he was U.S. attorney and you were trying a case, he would come down into the courtroom and check on things,” DeGuerin said. “He was not just checking on prosecutors — he’d say hello to the defense lawyers. That’s Kenny’s personality. … He stands out as being a guy that was very straightforward and honest, and an effective prosecutor.”
It’s fair to say that Magidson was not beloved by all his staff.
A handful of current and former employees who declined to be named said that “the majority disliked him” and he engendered “some unhappiness with his management style and decisionmaking.”
One attorney saw the courtroom visits as a form of intimidation, exacerbated by the fact that Magidson wasn’t available for attorneys to drop in and speak with him.
James Buchanan, a former assistant U.S. attorney who left the office in 2014 after Magidson removed him from a leadership role in the fraud unit, said morale began to dip after Magidson took over.
“The office as a whole and the prosecutors in particular had very high hopes when Magidson was appointed because he was a career prosecutor and a proven administrator,” Buchanan said. “But I think his choice of people in high places, to surround himself with, was poor.”
Magidson brushed off the criticism.
“I always selected the best candidates who I believed could get the job done,” he said.
He earned admiration among some judges for his hands-on approach.
“I would often see him slip quietly into the back of the courtroom and watch the assistant United States attorney argue a motion, examine a witness or cross-examine a defense witness. Just as quietly, he’d slip out,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, who is not related to the former district attorney. “He wanted to be sure that all the lawyers in his office were properly representing the United States of America. I really respected the fact that Ken cared so much.”
U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who has known Magidson since he clerked at Hittner’s firm in the 1970s, said Magidson’s brief courtroom appearances stood out.
“That really impressed me, that he was here watching his people, not in a critical way, but in a supportive way,” Hittner said.
U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison agreed.
“He understood why the Office of the U.S. Attorney was important,” Ellison said. “But, critically, he also understood the importance of the other players — the criminal defense bar, the probation officers, and the court.” Looking ahead
In the three months since the fateful call from the Justice Department, Magidson, 69, has fallen into a new routine. He golfs, drives his three granddaughters to swim lessons and Vacation Bible School and takes long walks, contemplating options for his first job in four decades in the private sector.
He regrets that his storied career ended in a jolt, as his staff put the final touches on a sweeping indictment of former U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman on charges he collected charitable donations under false pretenses.
He didn’t see to fruition two cases still pending against young Houston-area men accused of providing homegrown ISIS support.
Nor will he see the outcome for a group of men nabbed in an armored car sting.
He’s eager to move on, but the abruptness of his last day still stings.
“It’s not like I’m going to steal things,” he said. “I didn’t have an opportunity to say goodbye to my fellow employees, because I had to be out of there by midnight. It was the midnight part that bothered me.”
He returned to his old office the Monday after he resigned, signing in as an official visitor to hand over his keys, security passes, tablet, smartphone and laptop. It was a quiet end to a civil service legacy dating back to the days of telecopied offense reports and reel-to-reel wiretaps.
Among the items he carted out was a novelty nameplate that had been gathering dust for years: G’vina HaGadol, Hebrew for “The Big Cheese.”