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(6) Attacking Corruption in Duval County When I raised organized crime as an issue in my campaign for attorney general, I envisioned creating a task force to coordinate with state and local law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute sophisticated crime syndicates like the Mafia. To my surprise, the largest nexus of organized criminal activity to demand my office’s resources was operated by small-town local government officials, not professional gangsters. These crooks were not a handful of sinister underworld villains operating tightly disciplined gambling, prostitution, or drug operations. They were a loose confederation of elected or appointed public servants who had made a cottage industry of stealing from the public till. Their ill-gotten gains generally were readily evident in public documents and were common public knowledge. Those conditions should have simplified our prosecution of their crimes. But that overly simple view addressed neither the convoluted paths these officials used to transfer money and thus cover their tracks nor the iron grip these outlaws held on local law enforcement and judicial systems. Bringing them to justice gave us every bit as much of a challenge as dislodging an entrenched Mafia operation. The location of this enterprise was Duval County, situated halfway between Corpus Christi and Laredo. It was home to 12,700 residents, mostly gathered in three towns, and 74,000 head of cattle roaming mesquite -choked pastureland that overlay significant oil and gas deposits. It is situated in what was called the “Nueces Strip” in Texas’ early days, a desolate and lawless no-man’s-land between the Rio Grande and Nueces River.1 The mouths of the two rivers are about 140 miles apart, and the Nueces Strip extends upriver on the Rio Grande about 300 miles, narrowing at some points to about 50 miles. It was a flat, forbidding scrub Corruption in Duval County (117) and brush landscape claimed by two governments. Mexico insisted the Nueces was its boundary with Texas, which claimed land all the way to the Rio Grande. The dispute precipitated the U.S.-Mexican War after Texas was granted statehood in 1845, and it cost Mexico the loss of 525,000 square miles of territory. Too remote from either nation’s major cities and military forces to warrant diligent law enforcement, these rural areas along the border saw frequent cross–Rio Grande raids by bandits, adventurers, and political schemers from both sides who were a menace to all but the most hardy settlers into the early part of the 1900s. Novelist Larry McMurtry immortalized the area in his best-selling book and television miniseries Lonesome Dove by selecting it as the site of the Hat Creek Cattle Company operated by the saga’s two heroes, retired Texas Ranger captains Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call. As the area’s reputation for freewheeling social, business, and political cultures mellowed over the decades, the residue found its most fertile home in local politics. The patrón system of ranch management in northern Mexico, where large landowners enjoyed undisputed sway over a large underclass of manual laborers and their families, provided a cultural foundation easily exploited by political leaders intent on using their governmental powers to establish a fiefdom. The corrupt local governments that ruled several of the Nueces Strip counties in the last decades of the 1800s and early twentieth century created a loose confederation of boss-ruled counties that slowly succumbed to reforms. Land developers took advantage of turn-of-the-century completion of railroad access and development of agricultural irrigation capabilities to attract hordes of opportunists, who replaced the feudal frontier society with a more democratic political system. While these developments and accompanying population growth brought modernity to counties along the lower Rio Grande, Duval County’s remoteness and lack of significant irrigation water left it unaffected by the prosperity and political reforms one hundred miles to the south.2 Duval County’s rough-and-tumble existence was tamed by men like Archie Parr, who parlayed his experience as a teenage trail boss for a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail into a job in 1882 as manager of one of the county’s large ranches. He later owned his own small ranch near Benavides in the center of the county.The county courthouse was located in San Diego, only fifteen miles to the northeast but a world away culturally. As both the political center and, because the railroad from Corpus Christi to Laredo [3.16.15.149] Project MUSE...

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