Texas jury begins deliberating in rare public trial of accused cartel hit man

Jury gets case against alleged cartel hit man

LAREDO, Texas — Amid a hail of gunfire, the Gulf Cartel and its enforcers moved huge bundles of cocaine, marijuana and cash while working their way through a list of men drug bosses wanted dead, a federal prosecutor said during closing arguments at an alleged hit man’s trial Wednesday.

“What this defendant and his associates did was rain hell down on Laredo for nearly a year, kidnapping and murdering people,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jose Angel Moreno said before jurors began deliberating the charges against Gerardo Castillo Chavez. “He’s so proud of what he did he likes to brag about it.”

Castillo — indicted in 2008 under the assumed name “Armando Garcia” and known as “Cachetes,” or “cheeks” in Spanish — faces up to life in prison if convicted in U.S. District Court on conspiracy, drug and weapons charges. Jurors deliberated for about five hours Wednesday and were scheduled to resume discussions Thursday morning.

Castillo’s attorney, Roberto Balli, argued that prosecutors failed to show that Castillo did anything more than get caught with a few grams of cocaine when he was arrested at a Houston house. He noted the lack of physical evidence placing Castillo in the getaway cars or stash houses confiscated from the cartels’ assassins, Los Zetas, following investigations of drug trafficking, kidnapping and murders in 2005 and 2006.

“If he’s Gulf Cartel, Zeta, why wasn’t he with the others?” said Balli.

During the trial that began last week, two convicted cartel assassins took the witness stand to tie Castillo to the cartel.

A convenience store photo taken shortly after a 2006 grenade attack on a Monterrey, Mexico, nightclub showed one confessed assassin, Rosalio Reta, and a man that he identified as Castillo. Balli argued the man in the black-and-white photo behind Reta, who has admitted to killing roughly 30 people while working as a teenage assassin, was not Castillo.

Reta testified that Castillo bragged about being part of a hit squad that killed Jesus Maria “Chuy” Resendez and his 15-year-old nephew in April 2006 at a busy Laredo intersection.

After one failed attempt, a group of assassins — including Castillo according to authorities — rolled up next to Resendez and opened fire, spraying the truck with about 100 bullets.

“Chuy Resendez was a really big target. Everyone wanted him,” said Moreno, noting an alleged $90,000 one group of assassins was paid to kill Resendez, an alleged member of a rival cartel.

A second confessed assassin, Raul Jasso Jr., also testified that Castillo took part in the hit on Resendez. He said Castillo was among the hit squad members who gathered after the slaying at a local park.

Balli attacked the testimony as unreliable because the men had reached plea agreements with prosecutors to reduce possible charges and sentences.

“This case is about crooks coming into court against someone who is an easy target. Why is he an easy target? Because he’s not Gulf Cartel,” said Balli, arguing that the hit men would be too afraid to testify against a real member of the organization.

Moreno said, however, that the hit men were experts in the cartel’s operation and took big risks to provide key information about the conspiracy.

“You can’t have angels for witnesses in hell,” he said.

Castillo is the only one of 16 defendants indicted in the alleged conspiracy to go to trial. The others reached plea agreements, keeping testimony and evidence detailing the cartel’s operation out of the public record. But Castillo’s trial exposed details of the group’s operations in this busy border city, which has been mostly spared the kind of extreme drug violence that has plagued parts of Mexico.

According police recordings, the hit squads planned fear-inducing crimes like those that have involved apparently random attacks in public places in Mexico. The Zetas had stash houses, cars and guns in Laredo but were trying to get eight grenades for an attack on a local restaurant.

“They were going to a restaurant to kill as many people as they could,” said Moreno. “They were going to make a statement about what the cartel could do in the United States.”

An informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration intervened, helping law enforcement thwart the attack.

The hit squads to which Castillo belonged killed at least seven people in 2005 and 2006, prosecutors said.

In one of those attacks, cartel squad leader Gabriel Cardona Ramirez said in a recording made by authorities that he drained the blood of a victim to offer a toast to Santa Muerte, an unofficial saint considered the patron of drug lords. Cardona is serving a lifetime prison term after pleading guilty to state and federal charges.