In S. Texas, corruption probe test of community’s strength
CRYSTAL CITY — So where’s Popeye when you need him? For decades, the old sailor with the fab forearms and corncob pipe has occupied a place of honor in this little South Texas town, and yet it looks like he’s just been standing around lately, while Bluto and his pals were allegedly pillaging the public till.
While Popeye dithered, Dick Tracy and a passel of G-Men moved in a few days ago and arrested most of the town’s elected officials, leaving residents shaking their heads and wondering what happens next. They’ve known political turmoil before — Crystal City was a La Raza Unida hotbed throughout the 1970s — but nothing like this.
It’s not something you see every day — 80 FBI agents and other law enforcement officials rolling before sunrise into the self-proclaimed “Spinach Capital of the World,” then rolling out with five current and former city officials and an eightliner operator in custody. They’re charged with bribery and kickbacks.
The man at the center of a long-running public corruption probe, San Antonio lawyer James Jonas III, 54, was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and three counts of bribery. The hard-scrabble little town paid Jonas — a man the San Antonio Express-News described as a “one-time Republican lobbyist down on his luck” — $216,000 a year as both city manager and city attorney. That’s quite a salary for a town with annual tax revenues of about $600,000.
Jonas reportedly had been casting about for
a public relations consultant to tout his work on behalf of the town he apparently tried to make his own. It would take a spinach-fueled PR professional, to be sure, to convince Crystal City residents of his worth, given what’s happened since he blew in from San Antonio. “When tax rates go up 30 percent, when water rates are two and three times higher than they were, that’s when you know something’s wrong,” said Richard Diaz, a former city council member who went to the FBI with corruption complaints.
In addition to Jonas, the G-Men arrested Mayor Ricardo Lopez and the mayor pro tempore, as well as a former city council member and the operator of an illegal gambling operation who’s known as “Mr. T.” A fourth person on the city council was arrested last month on human smuggling charges. According to a San Antonio TV station, he admitted to chauffeuring undocumented immigrants across the border.
‘Don’t know what to do’
The arrests left Joel Barajas as the town’s sole council member. “I really don’t know what to do,” he told Express-News reporter John MacCormack.
All was quiet last weekend in the Zavala County seat, an isolated community surrounded by miles and miles of South Texas brush country. Getting there, you speed on long, straight roads past prickly pear and mesquite thickets so impenetrable ranchers almost have to machete their way through, the tough terrain broken up occasionally by weathered cattle pens and open pasture. Crystal City, a hundred miles southwest of San Antonio, gets its name from the clear artesian water in the area.
Last Saturday four elderly gents were sitting in the shade of a gazebo near the downtown H-E-B, but they weren’t interested in answering an outsider’s impertinent questions. On the broad main street running parallel to the railroad tracks, a street lined with mostly abandoned buildings, Melissa Martinez and her friends were serving up homemade beef tacos, raising money for her to go to permanent cosmetics school. She lives outside town, the young woman said, and doesn’t know much about Crystal City politics. (The tacos were good.)
Good place to grow up
The weekend peace and quiet didn’t last. At its regular Tuesday-evening meeting this week, the city council took up the prickly proposition of a recall election to remove the mayor and the indicted council members. A scuffle broke out, and the mayor was hauled off to county jail in handcuffs. “He was inciting a riot,” the city police chief said.
“I think the whole town has gone crazy,” Dora Palomo, a former municipal judge, told the Express-News.
That’s not the Crystal City her brother, Juan Palomo, remembers. A columnist in years past for the late Houston Post, Juan, now 69, grew up in the little town, back when its onion, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetable crops earned it a “winter garden” sobriquet (along with Spinach Capital), back when Del Monte provided steady work at its cannery and can-making factory.
The youngest of eight children, Juan and his family were migrant farm workers. Every April the Palomos, along with 90 percent of their neighbors, packed up and convoyed with friends and relatives to North Dakota and Minnesota to hoe sugar beets, then to Wisconsin to pick cucumbers and then back to North Dakota to harvest potatoes. They’d get home in late September or early October.
Juan remembers a community where you left the house unlocked when you headed north for five months, with neighbors who stayed behind looking after things; where he and his siblings when they were little played la matetena, a game similar to jacks but with rocks; where the Dairy Kreme’s most popular item was an ice cream treat called “the queer” (nobody knows why); where there were three movie theaters, one Anglo and two Mexican, and where the son of the owner of Teatro Luna would drive through the neighborhoods every afternoon announcing the Mexican movie that would be showing that night, his voice blaring from loudspeakers mounted on the roof of his car.
“There were no middle-class Mexicans,” Juan said, but even though most folks were poor, it was a good place to grow up. There was blatant discrimination, to be sure — a quota on MexicanAmerican cheerleaders, for example — but the little town also was nurturing and stable.
The city’s sounds
Juan once wrote about the noises he grew up with, including the amplified sounds of Celestino Luna, the theater owner’s son. “In a small town,” he recalled, “we knew that life comes with sound, full stereophonic sound. We knew that a rooster has to crow and that a donkey has to bray and that a celebration, by definition, involves loud, boisterous sounds.”
The crowing and braying and the boisterous sounds these days are not sounds of celebration, although Diaz, the former council member, assured me things will get better. “It’s going to take awhile,” he said. “The city’s very deep in debt. We owe $3 million.”
Del Monte’s still in operation, but spinach isn’t as big as it used to be in the Spinach Capital of the World. Popeye, it seems, will need some nourishment if he’s going to come down off his pedestal and set things right in his adopted home town.