A Waiting Game to Snare the Top Man

EL PASO —  Smuggler Pat Valdes never set foot inside the United States, although he sometimes sent flunkies over from Mexico to fetch him takeout from Red Lobster or the Olive Garden.

The son of a Texas lawyer, Valdes started out hustling drivers for another immigrant smuggler. But by age 28, with the help of his younger brother Roman, he’d gone into business for himself.

His method: Enlist shuttle operators who ferry American truckers from El Paso across the border to Ciudad Juarez for a night of boozing. Pay them to steer the truckers to bars worked by his recruiters. Buy the truckers a few drinks, then ask if they’d like to make some easy money. Offer them $100 to $300 a head to haul illegal immigrants.

By the summer of 2002, Valdes was moving five loads a week, an average of 20 immigrants a load.

Now, in the aftermath of a smuggling run turned deadly, the Valdes brothers had gone into hiding.

A few weeks after that July 27, 2002, tractor-trailer trip, U.S. and Mexican authorities met at the Border Patrol office in El Paso. The subject: apprehending Pat and Roman Valdes -- both American citizens -- and returning them to the United States.

Negotiations had to be handled carefully. Informants warned that Pat Valdes had paid bribes before to prevent deportation. If tipped, he’d take off for good.

“We’ll get them,” a Mexican official promised, asking for a little time.

In Juarez, Mexican agents began watching Valdes’ hangouts -- and waited.

And waited.

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U.S. investigators had plenty of work to do.

Migrants, including Luciano Alcocer, helped investigators find the Chaparral, N.M., mobile home where smugglers had hidden them before loading them into the tractor-trailer. It was abandoned, but a raid at another of the ring’s stash houses led to three arrests.

David Fry, special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, followed the money trail.

Relatives of some of the migrants had wired thousands of dollars to pay for the trip, and records turned up more names for the growing list of suspects.

But three months into the investigation, only six people -- including truck drivers Troy Dock and Jason Sprague -- were in custody.

Prosecutors had enough evidence to show that Pat Valdes was a smuggler, but not enough to prove that he organized the fatal trip. The truck drivers had fingered him, but considering their part in the ordeal, the government wasn’t about to go easy on them in return for testimony.

Investigators needed some breaks. On Halloween night, they caught one.

Mexican police surrounded a vehicle in Juarez. Hours later, they rendezvoused with U.S. Border Patrol agents on a bridge joining Juarez with El Paso.

“Are you willing to give us a statement?” a Border Patrol agent asked the handcuffed prisoner.

“You want a statement?” Pat Valdes said. “I’m innocent. That’s the statement.”

A month later, another break.

Mexican authorities picked up Roman Valdes and turned him over as well. If he could be persuaded to deal, U.S. prosecutors thought, they could put his brother away for a long time.

In 1999, Roman Valdes had given the Border Patrol information about his brother’s smuggling operation. Pat didn’t pay him enough, wouldn’t give him responsibility, he complained.

“I want to be done with it,” he said, but then he stopped cooperating.

This time, it was different.

U.S. agents read Roman Valdes the charges against him. Was he ready to talk?

He hesitated briefly. Then: “All the things I’ve ever gotten in trouble for, it’s always been with Pat. I was ... a peon,” he said, “even though I’m his brother.”

He asked the investigators: “What do you need to know?”

On April 14, 2003, Pat Valdes went on trial for conspiracy and alien smuggling in federal court in El Paso. On Day 2, Roman Valdes took the stand, answering Special Assistant U.S. Atty. Tom Roepke’s questions.

It was his job to recruit truck drivers for the smuggling ring -- to “hook” them with liquor and prostitutes in Juarez, Roman Valdes said.

“Who paid for the services of the prostitute?” Roepke asked.

“Pat,” Roman Valdes said.

“How was the driver paid?”

By a “loader” who put migrants in the truck, Roman said.

“And where did the loader get the money from?”

“From Pat,” he said.

“Who paid you?”

“Pat.”

Jurors stole glances at Pat Valdes. He seemed stricken.

Roepke turned to the fatal trip.

That night, Roman said, his brother tracked him down in Juarez and said they had to disappear. The police might be looking for them.

Why? the prosecutor asked.

“He said that some of the people on the trailer died.”

That tied Pat Valdes to the deaths. Now Roepke wanted the jurors to know what it was like to be one of the estimated 10,000 migrants that the ring had smuggled over the years.

The courtroom lights dimmed, and scenes captured by a state police video camera flashed on a screen: A trooper opening a tractor-trailer’s cargo doors. Climbing inside. Shouting. Dragging a limp body out.

The lights went up. Roepke called his next witness.

A tall, thin teenager strode to the stand.

Jurors stared as the realization dawned: Could this be the person they had just seen being pulled from the trailer?

Speaking softly, Edson Rojas, almost 17 now, told the story of his 12-hour ride in the truck’s ventless freight compartment.

Everything seemed OK until the sun came up, he said through an interpreter. But then “the trailer started heating up.” There was nothing to drink.

When the rig finally arrived at a truck stop in Dallas, he said he tried to follow as others pushed out the door. But he was too weak. He shouted for help, but the cargo doors closed and the truck began moving again.

“What did you start to think?” McDonald asked.

Rojas shook with sobs. “That I was going to die.”

The judge ordered a 10-minute recess. As the jurors filed out, most of them were crying too.

The jury took only a few hours to reach a verdict.

At his sentencing June 18, Pat Valdes apologized -- not to the migrants, but to prosecutors and investigators. Then he offered to help take down others in the smuggling business.

“If they ever need me,” he said, “they can look me up.”

U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez sentenced him to 27 years in prison.

Roman Valdes, who got a break for testifying, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to smuggle aliens and was sentenced to 7 1/2 years.

In all, 19 members of the smuggling ring were indicted in addition to the Valdes brothers. Twelve remain at large. One awaits a decision on her competency to stand trial. Six pleaded guilty to various charges.

Among them were the drivers, Dock and Sprague, who admitted to conspiracy to smuggle aliens, racketeering and interstate travel in aid of racketeering.

At the drivers’ sentencing hearing in October, a dozen migrants who survived the trip spoke, reliving the horror. Two men had died inside that sweltering trailer. If the trip had lasted 10 minutes longer, everyone might have perished, said Alcocer, the carpenter from Mexico City.

“You see the doors to death,” he said.

Defense attorneys argued that the migrants who hired the smugglers bore some responsibility.

U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis wasn’t buying it.

Some may believe that illegal immigrants “don’t enjoy the same dictates of humanity that others would,” he said a month later when he imposed punishments. But, he added, “they should.”

He sentenced Dock and Sprague to nearly 34 years in prison each. According to prosecutors, the sentences are the longest ever meted out in a human smuggling case.

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Epilogue

Today, Edson Rojas lives in Kansas with his father. The 11th-grader goes to school, plays soccer and sees a counselor to help mend the scars from his journey to the U.S.

“I get very nervous when I get into a car,” he said. “I have a lot of nightmares.”

Luciano Alcocer works as a furniture maker in Monroe, N.C. Lawyers are seeking visas to allow him and the other survivors to remain in the United States. If he is sent back, Alcocer says, he might try again to come to America. But it won’t be by way of a smuggler.

“God gives people opportunities, but not many,” he said. “I escaped. I do not want to try it again.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Sources for This Story

Pat Valdes’ criminal history comes from interviews with INS investigator David Fry, Border Patrol agent Rudy Valdez, other investigators and prosecutors, as well as from interviews with and letters from Valdes.

Details of the investigation come from those sources, court records and trial testimony.

Details of Roman Valdes’ 1999 and 2002 interrogations and Pat Valdes’ 2002 arrest come from Border Patrol videotapes and interviews with agents. Scenes from Pat Valdes’ trial are from trial transcripts and interviews with a juror, investigators, and prosecutors Tom Roepke and Greg McDonald.

Details of the truck drivers’ sentencing are from court transcripts, interviews with prosecutors and the reporter’s observations.

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The Story So Far

At first, the truck drivers lied. They couldn’t imagine how more than 40 illegal immigrants had gotten into the back of their truck. They didn’t know that some were dying back there on the long, hot drive from El Paso to Dallas. But finally, under police interrogation, they cracked. Yes, they were in the business of smuggling human cargo, working for a man named Pat Valdes. Investigators knew the name. Valdes ran a major smuggling ring on the Texas border. As investigators began to build their case against the ring, several migrants, including a 16-year-old boy, fought for their lives in Texas hospitals.