The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - Borderlands | 4. The Door

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Sheriff Thompson tightens his grip on power in Far West Texas, but rumors swirl his reach is even greater than that. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus.

Campsite Media. From almost the very beginning of my journey into the worlds of Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson, I've been trying to get in touch with a guy named Munroe Elms. Munroe seemed like he might be able to offer an inside account. He'd once been Presidio County Judge, meaning he'd worked hand in hand with the Sheriff. And he had grown up in the same world as Chambers, passing back and forth across the border as a young man in the 1970s.

I knew Monroe was still in the area, living somewhere way out in the country, but I just couldn't find him. Then I mentioned my frustrations in passing to one source, Martha Stafford, the school teacher who remembered Martha as the epitome of small-town America, and she gave me an email address. It turned out she was Monroe's ex-wife. Monroe responded to my email right away. He wrote, I believe that I know more than most people about these two men. Then he added with almost a boast, than anyone in West Texas. A few hours later, my field producer Ryan and I arrived at Monroe's small stucco bungalow. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob D'Amico.

Chapter 4, The door. How you doing? Hi, I'm Ryan. Ryan Elm Monroe. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. How's it going? It's going pretty good.

As Presidio County Judge, Monroe Elms used to be the top administrative official in this part of the Big Bend region of Texas. But he's retired now, in his mid-60s. Happily married to his third wife, with a four-year-old son who's really into dinosaurs. They live in an old silver mining town that's mostly been abandoned. But it's full of javelinas. They run up to his porch each night at dusk. Monroe, he feeds them. When I was young, I used to shoot them, and I destroyed too many of them. This is my way of paying back for what I should not have done. I found out they eat rattlesnakes, and they're immune to the venom.

So I'd rather have them here and no Mojave rattlesnakes running around. Eventually, we sat down in a little covered patio area in Monroe's yard and started to talk. Get you a drink. Oh, I'll get you a wild turkey, sure. You want a wild turkey? Okay. You can just sit down there. How did you first meet the sheriff, know of him, et cetera, before becoming county judge? That was the first question I asked Monroe, but he didn't answer directly. Instead, he started unspooling this wild tale about coming of age in the borderlands.

It was a way of life that does not existlands. But this wasn't some tangent. It was a story that took me right to the heart of the cocaine boom and the rise of the most powerful drug cartels in the world. It all started when Monroe was a teenager, and he made friends in the Mexican border town of Ouinaga, including an older businessman named Mr. Rohana. Yeah, he kind of adopted me because I liked to hunt and masculine type things where his sons didn't. They didn't like to go hunting, doing that kind of stuff. And one day in 1974, Mr. Rohana decided that masculine Monroe should make some masculine connections. He invited Monroe, 19 at the time, over to Oenaga, brought him into the back room

of a bar, and took him over to a table where three men were sitting down, all wearing dark sunglasses. Mr. Rojana told the three men in Spanish that I was good with whiskey, guns, and women. And that he expected them, when I came to Mexico, to watch over, protect me, and make sure that I was safe. Wherever I went, they were supposed to send somebody with me. The guy in the middle looked like the leader. He stood up and he stretched his arm out and he said, my name is Amado Carrillo Fuentes. That's Amado Carrillo Fuentes, later to become the famed Lord of the Skies

because of his ability to fly drugs into the U.S. At the time, his feet were still on the ground. He was just the favorite nephew of a powerful Mexican drug lord, very much on his way to becoming a bigger deal. But Monroe didn't know any of that. He just saw a notably well-dressed guy around his age talking with two other guys, one of whom turned out to be Colombian. Even to this day, I've never seen the quality of shirts that this guy had on

and his wraparound sunglasses. He was really decked out in nice clothes. We continued drinking, and the man on the left, I said, you're not from this area. Where are you from? He laughed and he said, no, I'm from Medellin, Colombia. I said, oh, what are you doing here? What the hell are you lost or what? And he said, no, I'm an exchange student. A Colombian exchange student who just happened to be hanging out with the next generation of Mexico's cartel leaders. Monroe was getting a front row seat to narco history,

to the formation of the cocaine routes from Colombia through Mexico that would change the world and eventually transform a young Robert Chambers from a small-time outlaw into a West Texas drug kingpin. And Monroe kept this front row seat for a long time. So after my first introduction with Amado, I basically spent every Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday in Ohinaga partying with those guys.

And that was my life. Monroe insists he was oblivious to what his new friends did for a living, at least at first. But he couldn't avoid the truth for long. There was the time Amato's new bodyguards failed to recognize him at a nightclub. Munroe walked up to greet Amato and... All the guys at this table jumped up with a.45 and were going to shoot us dead.

And everybody in the club is on the ground. The music stops, the lights come on. But then Amato jumps up in front of us and says, No, it's Monroe, don't shoot. And if that hadn't tipped Monroe off on Amato's line of work, there was the night Amato introduced Monroe to his mentor, Pablo Acosta, the Onaga Fox, the biggest drug lord in the area. He had a gold chain with Jesus on the cross, and that was his look.

And he had a Levi jacket that he wore so he he comes up and he sits down next to Amado and I and he says who the hell are you gringo in English and I said oh my name is Monroe he says what are you doing here what are you doing with all these guys?" And I said, well, partying. He said, you like to party? And I said, well, hell yeah, I do. And he said, well, you and me are going to do a lot of partying. I said, good. This whole time, Monroe was still answering my first question. And it was at this point he finally got around to Sheriff Rick Thompson. First thing Pablo said after that was, who do you know in Marfa?

He said, do you know Rick Thompson? I said, well, hell, everybody knows Rick Thompson. Are you his friend? I said, well, yeah. I've never had any trouble with Rick. This was true. In the 1970s, Monroe hadn't never had any trouble with Rick. This was true. In the 1970s, Monroe hadn't yet had any trouble with Rick.

The sheriff had taken over from the murdered Hank Hamilton less than two years prior. But of course, Monroe, like everyone in the Big Bend region, would come to know the sheriff well. The thing is, though, when I started to interject and ask Monroe more directly about the sheriff, his mood suddenly changed. He got fidgety, nervous. For the storytelling from the wild nights of his youth hanging out with notorious drug lords, he opened right up. But when it came to Rick Thompson, his answers became short and guarded, full of caveats. And this is off the record. Okay. Yeah, be sure and say that when you want to do that.

Yeah, yeah. And if he did start to tell a story, he'd interrupt himself with stipulations and conditions. When I became county judge, off the record, Again, can't put this down. There's so many things that I know that I can't come out and say because I'd be liable if they took me to court and sued the shit out of me. But eventually Monroe did open up to me about the sheriff, on the record. And maybe that's because, as we continued to talk about life in the Big Bend during the 1970s and 1980s,

his presence was simply unavoidable. He had such control of so many different things. Like, if you folks were here talking to me now about whatever, he would know it. Anybody came into Marfa, he would run checks on them, see who they were. Undercover people came to town, he knew who they were. So he had a lot of things going his way, I guess, you know. Monroe soon learned about the influence the sheriff had firsthand. It was 1990, and at just 34 years of age, Monroe was running for county judge.

He thought he could bring fresh energy to the job. But as soon as Monroe declared his candidacy, he heard a clear message. There were people who wanted him out of the race entirely. He didn't have proof, but he believed those people were allies of Sheriff Rick Thompson, who was backing Monroe's opponent. I was told they didn't want me around. The best thing I could do would be to leave and don't come back. And I said, well, you know, I'm too far into saying to leave and I'm going to win the election. And so I had several death threats. People would just call me and tell me they wanted me dead and they were going to kill me or whatever. They won't trash talk and hang up. He won his election all the same.

But even after that, Munroe said he was still being targeted. About a month after I was elected and being county judge, came home and my house there was ransacked and my dog was shot, you know? They trashed it out. To be clear, Munroe believes the sheriff and his people were behind this incident. But I had no evidence. So what did I do?

If you can't go to the sheriff and say, somebody trashed my place. So Munroe's plan to end the intimidation campaign against him was to send a plea to Sheriff Thompson by way of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes. And why would that work? Monroe knew the sheriff and the drug lord were linked by one man, Robert Chambers. I went to an attorney and I told the attorney that I knew Chambers was working for Amado and Chambers and Rick were friends. So I figured that therein lied the connection. And Monroe figured if his plea had the backing of his old friend Amado,

then it would get back to the sheriff via Chambers, and the sheriff would take it seriously. And the crazy thing about this convoluted plan is it worked. Monday morning, Rick was in my office saying, let's go get coffee. And the crazy thing about this convoluted plan is it worked. Monday morning, Rick was in my office saying, let's go get coffee. So I knew that he had received some type of call from Juarez. Amado had contacted him through Chambers or through some way, because his attitude changed like that.

You know, it was, we need to work together. But what working together meant for Sheriff Rick Thompson turned out to be something that Monroe, even with his connections, was not prepared for. That's coming up after the break. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. From the award-winning creators of the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead comes the stunning new true crime series In the Shadow of Princeton.

In 1989, a prominent woman was found stabbed to death in her Princeton home. With no clear motive, it's a chilling mystery that vexed investigators for years. Was the culprit a young outsider the police said was a serial attacker? Or someone in her family, or even well-heeled students at the renowned Princeton University? He had a ski mask in his possession and a knife. She was familiar enough with them and trusted them enough that she turned her back on, and that was her mistake.

One investigator sees a conspiracy. Is he way off base? Or does privilege help you get away with murder? In the Shadow of Princeton is available wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can binge it ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. When I went back and read old newspaper stories on Sheriff Thompson, there was another law enforcement officer whose name kept popping up. A lead investigator for the DEA named Dale Stinson. When I started asking about him, people like Rod Ponton, Robert Chambers' old lawyer, made it clear that Dale had a specific reputation. Some federal law enforcement guys like that realize that they're there to hold the line

and sort of make a presence and do what they can. And some people think they can win the war on drugs. And at the time, I think he was one of those. He was a true believer he was going to keep fighting the war on drugs. I wanted to meet that true believer. And eventually, I did. All right. So, Dale, one thing I noticed, who is that behind you?

That's Clint Eastwood. You don't recognize him? That's a Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world. Dale, like Rod Ponton, is one of those guys whose office walls are kind of a monument to their lives. Lined with memorabilia, photographs, tchotchkes. And in Dale's office, Clint Eastwood was one of the hardest things to ignore. He's grimacing at you while sticking a pistol in your face. On a poster for a Dirty Harry movie.

The series about a vigilante cop pursuing his own brand of justice when wimpy bureaucrats and weak laws aren't up to the task. Do you feel lucky? Why do you have a picture of Dirty Harry on your wall? Just for old time's sake, I've got a picture of Kiki Camarena on the wall up there, too in the story of Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson, because his life and death had a colossal impact on the whole story of the war on drugs. Dale and Kiki met in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1984, when they were both DEA agents working with the Mexican Federal Police on drug enforcement.

We had an operation going on that where we were trying to identify the heroin labs and the marijuana grows. We used to travel around Mexico and try and find organizations and labs and grow fields and things like that. Together they saw firsthand how drug trafficking from Mexico into the U.S. was booming. They were making this big change. They were not only being a transportation company for the Colombian cocaine cartels, they were actually owning a part of that. And it was in 1985, shortly after Dale headed back to work in the U.S., that Kiki disappeared.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent Enrique Camarena disappeared two weeks ago in Guadalajara. According to U.S. officials, there are indications that he was investigating Mexican officials on the take from drug traffickers. Despite close cooperation with Mexico in the past to combat drug trafficking, U.S. officials say in this case, the Mexican government should have moved more... Mexican police found Kiki's body wrapped in a plastic bag. He'd been brutally tortured, then murdered. The death rocked America. It was like the politicians had suddenly woken up

to just how brazen and violent Mexican cartels had become. Dale was assigned to Operation Leyenda, which would eventually discover that corrupt Mexican officials and police at the direction of cartel bosses were behind Kiki's murder. The Reagan administration started to put serious pressure on the Mexican government to clean up their act. And they demanded arrests. Infighting erupted between the cartels. Drug lords like Pablo Acosta and Monroe's old friend Amado Carrillo Fuentes. They had multiple targets on their backs. So did their deputies.

So did a lot of Mexicans in the drug trade. But of course the drug trade wasn't controlled exclusively by Mexicans. And what those on the ground like Dale knew all too well was that that violent business made so visible by the torture and murder of Kiki was being facilitated by American citizens. I'm not just talking about the users driving the demand for drugs,

nor those small-time fixers and borderland smugglers. I'm talking about the individuals with power, pulling all the strings. And unlike most higher-profile Mexican drug lords, those American individuals, they could often operate without arousing suspicion. Back when Dale was working in Mexico, he used to hear rumors about someone in America called La Puerta, which means the door. This person, this door, they decided which drugs entered through their stretch of the U.S. border and which drugs didn't. I'd heard little snatches of conversation about La Puerta in Guadalajara. There was a guy, one of the comandantes, Jose Benavides, comandante of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police,

and he joked around about La Puerta. But who was La Puerta? Dale didn't know. Maybe it was all kind of a myth, a personification of a complex process, not a real person. Or maybe it was one person, a powerful person. That was about all Dale really knew.

And he wasn't the only one hearing about this character. In the Big Bend region of Texas, other people were hearing about La Puerta too, except there was no ambiguity about who they were talking about. Jack McNamara, the local gadfly journalist who published the NIMBY News, he'd heard the stories. I knew one person who worked in Brewster County, was a native of Presidio, and she said that in school, the kids called the sheriff, La Puerta.

The door. The sheriff of Presidio County, Rick Thompson, was La Puerta. That's exactly what Thompson was. Thompson had connections in the U.S., and he had connections in Mexico. And Rod Ponton, Robert Chambers' lawyer, he was hearing the same things. Well, they called him La Puerta. That was the nickname for him among the Mexican population on the border, which means the door, which means that smuggling had to go through him or you got in trouble.

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Nobody knew what happened to her. Even the police, they didn't have no idea. I'm the only one that knew exactly what happened. The man who says he murdered Denise Velasca. And I find out what really happened that terrible night. The only two people that know what happened that night is Denise and him. He is the one that has answers, believable or not. Now, one of the top series on Apple Podcasts, Denise Didn't Come Home.

In another week, you can listen to all the episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. Denise didn't come home. In another week, you can listen to all the episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. This call is from an inmate at the New Jersey State Prison. Hey, I have some pretty important questions for you. I can't wait. When I spoke with former Presidio County Judge Monroe Elms, his initial hesitation to talk about Sheriff Rick Thompson was pretty understandable. The sheriff had been Monroe's colleague.

They'd worked together. They'd come to like each other. It hit close to home. But Monroe had another reason as well. A lot of his insight wasn't first-hand. And many of his stories came from his conversations with one specific, very well-placed source. A secretary that used to work for Rick. She quit Rick. She was afraid of Rick. And so I knew all the inside stories from Rick's office. Her name was Catherine, worked there.

She lives in Austin now. And that's why I worked so hard to track down this Catherine in Austin. I had to if I was ever going to understand how the sheriff really operated, away from his law and order persona. Because Catherine, who went by the name Kitten Love back then, was the sheriff's secretary in 1991, the most fateful year of his career,

when he was at the peak of his powers. And soon I would find out this Catherine remembered everything. Hello? Hi, may I speak to Catherine's number, I was excited, in reporter mode, chasing down yet another possible lead in a story where there were seemingly infinite leads to chase down. But hearing her voice, suddenly it dawned on me. I already knew Catherine. Hey Rob? Rob, are you Rebecca's ex-husband? I am.

I'm Catherine from Nannies from Art. Oh, yeah. This is so funny. Long story short, my ex-wife used to run a nanny agency in Austin, and Catherine was one of her best nannies. In fact, she used to babysit my own kids. When I was babysitting your daughter, Piper, I told her this whole juicy story. She was going, really? So we started talking again. My name is Catherine Palmyra and I live in Austin. I have 200 plants, over 200 and seven kitty cats. What I'm about to tell you today is one of my stories. I have a few others. Catherine lives a pretty quiet life now, but her first few decades were an adventure. She protested the Vietnam War in Washington, organized benefit concerts with Willie Nelson in Austin, rubbed elbows with rock stars in San Francisco, even stumbled into the middle of a coup in Fiji.

So in the summer of 1988, she decided she was ready for something slower. Aged 35, with a young daughter, she moved back to remote, small-town Marfa. It was somewhere she'd lived before. Her mother's family were longtime ranchers. She didn't have a job lined up, so to make ends meet, she did temp work, substitute teacher, cashier at a feed store. Then one afternoon at a local festival, she was approached by the sheriff. And he was sitting at a picnic table, and he motioned for me to come over.

And I sit down, and I did, and he said, how are you doing, dear? And I said, well, not wonderful, not great. I can't find a job. Nobody will hire me. And he said, well, and he looked at me and he said, let's see what we can do about that. Thompson hired her to be his secretary. And although Catherine was initially grateful for the work, her experience at the sheriff's office meant any positive feelings didn't last too long.

From the very first moment that I walked in, the prank started. And the first one was I got to my desk, and I looked down, and there was a set of pictures. And there had been a terrible, terrible car accident. It was a head-on collision, and it killed an entire family. And the pictures were really, really, really gruesome. And I sat in a very tiny room with all these men, and I think they expected me to scream and cry and run out the door. And I didn't. I just asked, do you want me to start a file on this. Catherine says this kind of bullying continued throughout her time in the sheriff's office. It could be anything from the deputies accusing her of stealing office supplies to graphically discussing their sex lives in front of her to get a reaction. But Catherine says the sheriff didn't engage in this kind of behavior himself. He had a different troubling personality trait. He seemed to crave information and the need

to control it. It started from the ground up. I mean, all the way down to a marriage that was in trouble and who were the partners seeing and that sort of thing, because that could lead to something else. So he knew everything. But he really wanted to know, you know, who was coming and going, who was saying what, where people were going. This went well beyond law enforcement intelligence gathering. Like, Katherine remembers how once there was a new deputy in the department, a guy she thought was an honest, hardworking, and savvy cop. He would go into detail and do a whole investigation, a proper investigation, and he saw things,

and he would put them in his report, and they'd come up, and Rick would edit it, and I was to rewrite it and retype it before it went to the district attorney. So Rick wasn't just monitoring what was going on when he found something he didn't like. He'd make it bend to his will. In this case, he'd rewrite reports because, Catherine alleges, he wanted them to be totally clean. No outstanding questions. No ambiguity. Every last fact wrapped with a bow, saying what he wanted it to say. And Catherine alleges the sheriff manipulated information in other ways, too. When he wanted something disseminated, or he wanted to start a rumor, or he wanted something disputed, or he wanted a

distraction of some sort. There were three women in town. And these three women were gossipers. They were his friends, and he would go and visit with them. And he'd sit down and he would leave the office and say, Well, I'm just going to go take care of that. I got to know what he was doing and he would go and visit them and drink a cup of coffee and sit down and he'd plant whatever he wanted to into these women's ears and he knew it would be rolling in the streets like wildfire in a matter of hours. It was like Twitter, early Twitter. And if controlling the gossip of small-town America sounds kind of innocent,

well, in Catherine's telling, the sheriff's apparent manipulation of truth took more sinister and serious forms down at the sheriff's office. I got into this evidence room with Rick and he was shaking these papers, you know, just shaking them. And he said, okay, here's what we gotta do. I gotta find something that matches this description. It was marijuana.

And he said, we gotta put something together that matches this description. What Katherine is alleging here, just to make it perfectly clear, is that Sheriff Thompson was staging his evidence. One of his deputies had written a report saying someone had been arrested with a certain type and quantity of marijuana, but the sheriff couldn't find the physical evidence that matched the report. Maybe his deputies had misfiled it. Maybe it hadn't existed like they said it did.

But instead of saying that, instead of admitting his department had made a mistake or worse, the sheriff just went into the evidence vault and told Catherine they were going to find some evidence, any evidence, that matched the report. And so I looked at it, and you know, marijuana's all different. Some has stems, some has seeds, and some is yellow. It comes from Colombia. And he said, okay, let's put this together. So we opened several bags and put together what looked like the description.

And while I was doing it, I thought, it was some man that was on appeal. And I thought, gosh, what am I doing? This man is probably going to go back to the pen because I'm helping Rick put this evidence together that isn't even the evidence. So that really bothered me. Catherine's stories about working for Rick, they seem to me to amount to one overarching story. Of Sheriff Rick Thompson doing everything to maintain the image Martha Stafford,

Martha from Marfa, the ex-wife of Monroe Elms, remembered so clearly from her childhood. Of a perfect cop running the perfect department, where the evidence always matched the reports, and the reports were always tidy and clear for Thompson's account of things. So the word on the street was always about how lucky Presidio County was to have a lawman like Rick Thompson. And why?

It made Presidio County and its sheriffs seem like they were above reproach. The drug war was swirling around them on all sides. Violence, corruption, opportunity. But somehow this vast area was still just small-town America, law-abiding to a T. And Catherine saw something else behind this facade. She didn't just see how the sheriff's office really operated. Like Presidio County Judge Cindy Guevara,

who remembered hearing rumors about Rick's spending habits when she was still in high school. Catherine thought Rick seemed to be living too large. He was investing in real estate. He had bought his son a premier roping horse. But his salary was only $21,000 a year. He was a small-town sheriff of a very poor county, one of the poorest counties in the country, so you don't make a lot.

And, yeah, things didn't add up. Monroe heard murmurings about Rick's apparent unexplained affluence, too. I never pay attention to cowboy hats. I grew up with them all my life, and a cowboy hat was a cowboy hat. And so Rick and I came here to have coffee. My ex-wife, she said, have you ever seen Rick's hat? And I said, every day, on his head or whenever.

She said, I looked at it, it's a 100X Stetson. Do you know what a 100X Stetson cost? They're very expensive hats. And so everything he had was very expensive. And so I guess he was subsidizing it in a different way than I was, you know. But how was Rick Thompson getting all this extra money? Well, during her time working at the sheriff's office, Catherine got a pretty big clue, only she didn't realize it at the time. But in retrospect, it's impossible to ignore. You see, when I mentioned earlier that Catherine had lived in Marfa earlier in her life, I was talking about back in the late 1970s. And during this period, she'd made friends

with a charismatic local bad boy, a self-proclaimed outlaw, Robert Chambers. They would party together back in his wild Marfa days. And he'd come into Marfa and bring his mountain lion. Yes, Robert's pet mountain lion again, Miko. And we'd sneak him in on the bottom floor hotel room, and we'd sneak him in, and there'd be a bunch of us in there. One night, I guess we were all making too much noise, and somebody complained, and the management came, and we had to hide the mountain lion in the bathroom. Of course, by 1991, this friendship might have seemed to some like ancient history. But Rick Thompson, the sheriff who knew every last thing that was happening in his county, he hadn't forgotten about Catherine's connection to Robert. And so a top deputy made one thing very clear to Catherine when she started working there. I was told not to have anything to do with him.

I wasn't allowed to see him or go out with him or hang around or whatever. And I was restricted. I was very, very restricted. I'm sure my phone was tapped the entire time. Why was the sheriff so skittish about Catherine talking with Robert? Well, Robert was an informant for law enforcement, including the sheriff, but this seemed to go beyond controlling contact with a key source. It was almost like Catherine might learn something if she got talking to Robert, a different connection the sheriff desperately wanted to keep hidden. Catherine quit her job after eight months in August 1991.

She hated what she saw as the constant harassment, and she was creeped out by the seeming paranoia of the place. So she never had a fuller picture of what was going on. But someone else did, Monroe Elms. By the fall of 1991, Monroe had won his election and was sitting as a county judge. By now, Sheriff Thompson had decided that actually he could work with him. And maybe because of that, the sheriff felt like it was time for Monroe to learn how power in the borderlands really worked. Because one day, the two of them were alone in Thompson's truck, talking about their jobs and families. And then... Rick told me in our conversation,

look, Monroe, don't you understand that the good guys need to be in control of the drugs? I just want to repeat that. The good guys need to be in control of the drugs. What Monroe is saying here, what he's alleging, what he claims to remember verbatim, is that the sheriff was implying, well, really flat out saying that law enforcement needed to be involved in drug smuggling. And I feel like it's worth reminding you here, Monroe Elms is the former top administrative official in the county. He has a good reputation in the area to this day.

He's never had a run-in with the law. But when Monroe says he heard this, he tried to kind of take the sheriff's remark in stride. And he said, well, they should be on his side and join their organization or have a mentality that there are certain people that are going to get drugs and there are certain people that are going to supply drugs and shouldn't the good guys, and that's what he said, the good guys supply them. And I told him I don't care who supplies them, I don't want to have anything to do with it. Period. That wasn't my forte in life. Monroe, though, he wasn't going to report Thompson.

He wasn't going to stand in his way. And I told him, if that's what you want to do, make money, and that makes you happy, go for it, Rick. I'm not here to stop you. It's not my job to stop you. You know? And that's the way I felt about it. Monroe, friend to cartel leaders, wasn't going to go after a corrupt sheriff. After all, it would have been his word against Rick's, with no proof.

But there was someone whose job it was to go after smugglers, no matter where they lived and how powerful they were. Someone who tracked drug traffickers in Mexico and lost a friend and colleague to them only a few years before. Someone now paying very close attention to what was happening in Presidio County. We were drowning in drugs at the time, and were ramping up and we were trying to do what we could. That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob D'Amico. And written by me, Eric Benson, and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer.

David Waters is our executive producer. At Campside, the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. Our field producers are Ryan Katz and Travis Bubenik. Our associate producers are Leo Katz and Travis Bubenik. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith. Fact-checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley Ann Krigbaum.

Scoring and sound design by Ian Chambers and Rod Sherwood is our engineer. Original music by Julian Lynch. If you enjoyed Borderlands, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. And make sure to subscribe or follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.