SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Tex. — It looked like a crab trap floating in the calm waters of Laguna Madre, just off South Padre Island. At least, that’s what the man who spotted it while boating with his two daughters would tell police.
But when he poked the floating mass with a pole, he discovered otherwise. He dialed 911 and told the South Padre Island Police Department what he’d found: “A headless body floating in the bay.”
Blood was still dripping from the neck when Cameron County Sheriff’s Deputy Ulises Martinez arrived, he would later report. It looked to him like the head “had been cut off with one swift motion with a fine sharp cutting instrument.”
The grisly discovery came at a busy time on the island. It was March 16, 2015, the frenzied start of Texas Week, when thousands of college students on spring break descend on Padre to guzzle from beer bongs and get rowdy. Maybe one drank too much, fell in the water and collided with the wrong end of a propeller-driven barge?
That was an early theory, but Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio, with more than a half-century in law enforcement, sensed something more sinister.
“We’re just across the border from Matamoros,” he said. Investigators couldn’t find the man’s head, and there were other suspicious cuts on the body. Mexican drug cartel payback often comes at the end of a fine, sharp cutting instrument, Lucio observed.
“It’s just kind of the way that they handle people,” he said. “They take revenge that way.”
Luckily, the body still had hands. Using a portable fingerprint reader from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, police quickly matched the prints to Jose Francisco Palacios Paz.
Before he was found naked and decapitated days after his 33rd birthday, Palacios Paz — “Franky” to his friends — worked at Veteran’s Tire Shop in Edinburg, one county over. In no time, authorities came to suspect that tire repair wasn’t the only thing going on there. It’s where they think Palacios Paz — about to rat out a drug-trafficking operation with links to the powerful Mexican Gulf Cartel — met his end.
Over the ensuing weeks, the investigation led authorities on a meandering journey through the Gulf Cartel’s internal bloodletting, featuring tales of a supposed double-crossing cartel hit man, a U.S.-born narco turned folk legend and a major mafia capo nicknamed “Commander Pussy” now locked up in a federal prison in Beaumont, Tex. And by last summer, they had arrested four of Palacios Paz’s tire shop associates on murder and drug-trafficking charges.
With fall trials expected, authorities say they have turned up the familiar markings of mafia muscle and hardball tactics experts have come to associate with 21st-century cartel warfare — complete with a severed head supposedly secreted off to Mexico to prove a snitch was dead.
All of which would sound familiar to anyone versed in Gulf Cartel etiquette had it not been for one late-breaking and quite unexpected development: the alleged involvement and eventual arrest of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Joel Luna, a six-year Border Patrol veteran, was supposed to protect the country from drug trafficking and spillover violence. If the indictments are to be believed, he participated in it instead.
Read the Remainder at Washington Post
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