Middlemen plead guilty in Cuellar case
Two strategists admit to laundering bribes for House member, his wife
Two political strategists close to Henry Cuellar have agreed to plead guilty to conspiring with the South Texas congressman to launder more than $200,000 in bribes.
The Department of Justice struck plea deals with Colin Strother, of Buda, and Florencio “Lencho” Rendon, of San Antonio, ensuring their cooperation in the investigation of Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, according to court documents unsealed this week in Houston federal court.
A federal indictment unsealed last Friday accuses Cuellar, 68, and his wife, Imelda, 67, of collecting nearly $600,000 in payoffs from a Mexico City bank and Azerbaijan government officials from 2014 to 2021. The alleged payoffs passed through Strother’s consulting business to a shell company set up by Imelda Cuellar.
Prosecutors filed criminal information documents in February against Rendon and Strother, a high-profile campaign manager known in San Antonio for his outspoken, aggressive style. They signed plea deals in secret in March.
The two men agreed to plead guilty to money laundering conspiracy, with each facing up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $500,000.
They also agreed to cooperate with the Department of Justice in its case against Henry Cuellar, a member of Congress since 2005 who sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
Like other cooperating defendants in public corruption cases, they could end up with lighter sentences than the ones spelled out in their plea agreements.
Chris Flood, one of Henry Cuellar’s defense attorneys, denied the congressman had committed any wrongdoing, saying, “There was no bribery in this case.”
He also cautioned against a rush to judgment based on the word of Rendon or Strother.
“We are not afraid of the truth,” said Flood, who is also vice president of the Texas Ethics Commission. “We know in a trial, the judge will warn everyone about the credibility of those two witnesses.”
The Cuellars pleaded not guilty to the charges at a court appearance last Friday in Houston. He and his wife were each released on unsecured $100,000 bonds.
What they allege
Rendon, 73, runs two consulting companies and is a former chief of staff for then-U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz. The Democrat represented the Corpus Christi area in Congress from 1983 to 2010, and Rendon worked for him for 23 years.
He currently lives in the gated community of Oakwell Farms in Northeast San Antonio.
In October 2015, Rendon went to a conference in Mexico City, which Henry Cuellar also attended. The scheme was hatched over breakfast, according to Rendon’s plea documents. Henry Cuellar told him about an opportunity to enter a consulting agreement with a Mexican bank. (News reports this week identified the bank as Banco Azteca.)
Rendon signed on, and
Henry Cuellar helped arrange meetings between his longtime associate and bank executives later in October. Because of U.S. regulations, the Mexican bank was having trouble finding a partner U.S. bank to process remittances, the transfer of money from Mexicans working in the U.S. to their relatives in Mexico.
Rendon again met with bank officials in Mexico City on Dec. 17, 2015, to sign a “sham contract” for consulting services to be provided by Imelda Cuellar, prosecutors said. Imelda Cuellar, a retired tax enforcement officer at the Texas comptroller’s office, “performed little or no legitimate work in exchange for the payments,” according to the Cuellars’ 54-page indictment.
The contract was backdated to June 2015, according to Rendon’s plea deal.
In February 2016, Henry Cuellar allegedly directed Strother, 50, to meet with Rendon. At a San Antonio restaurant, Rendon asked Strother to work with a Mexican company that was looking to test and certify a fuel additive it wanted to sell in the U.S., according to Strother’s plea deal.
Rendon told Strother he would pay him $11,000 a month, but that he had to hand over $10,000 to Imelda Cuellar’s company, the plea deal said. Rendon then sent him a contract to sign for consulting services.
Strother initially believed the work was legitimate and “made some efforts to advance the project,” his plea agreement said. But he eventually stopped working on it, realizing it was a part of an alleged scheme to funnel money to the Cuellars.
Rendon paid Strother $11,000 a month from March 2016 to December 2017, for a total of $242,000. Strother forwarded $214,890 in payments to Imelda Cuellar over those 22 months, according to his plea deal.
At one point, however, the Cuellars came to believe Strother was withholding money from Imelda Cuellar. The congressman directed Rendon to stop paying his longtime campaign manager.
But Henry Cuellar soon told Rendon to start paying Strother again. Rendon sent three more payments to Strother — two for $7,000 and one for $5,000.
Henry Cuellar then told Rendon to “cut it off,” said Rendon’s plea agreement.
Strother’s plea deal said he talked with Henry Cuellar about his suspicion — that Strother was failing to send payments to his wife — in the parking lot of a Laredo restaurant after dinner in October 2018.
After Strother showed him a spreadsheet of payments he’d made to her shell company, satisfying Henry Cuellar, Strother continued sending money to Imelda Cuellar through 2019, according to his plea deal.
In late 2021, Henry Cuellar asked Rendon to hire the Cuellars’ adult child under the contract. Rendon agreed and paid that person $2,000 at a meeting at a restaurant in Laredo in November 2021.
In January 2022, however, a federal grand jury issued Rendon a subpoena for documents related to the contract, and he stopped paying the Cuellars’ child, according to his plea deal.