The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Borderlands | 2. The Outlaw

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

As law enforcement starts to sniff around, Robert steps into the shoes of a legendary drug lord. 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

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Campsite Media In the Big Bend, a lot of smugglers didn't seem too concerned about the feds watching them. People did what they wanted to do, and it was kind of like, we're here, if you can catch us, catch us. It was that kind of deal. Dan Dobbs is a retired U.S. Customs agent. As I started to look into the story of Robert Chambers and Sheriff Rick Thompson, it wasn't long before he came up on my radar. He had arrived in the Big Bend region in April 1987, a huge moment in the war on drugs. Violence was escalating on both sides of the border. Billions of dollars in cash was flowing into U.S. law enforcement. And the borderlands could feel like a combat zone.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Dobbs is because he'd seen it all. Yeah, I stopped some guys that had stolen a car and one of them put a hole in me. He hit me in the upper arm. I hit him twice in the chest. He didn't even die. I mean, I wasn't near death or anything. I just hurt like a son of a bitch. But mostly, Dan's job wasn't shootouts with felons.

He worked big drug investigations. These larger cases could take a long time to crack. And whether he liked it or not, often that meant working in partnership with other law enforcement agencies, like the DEA. I say whether he liked it or not because, in reporting this story, some people who knew Dan back in the day have told me that he could be a bit of a loner in his work, a kind of maverick. But to be fair to Dan, it probably wasn't always his choice to work solo. Because when you're parachuted into an area like Big Bend, where already everybody knows each other, it's not easy to immediately get along with everybody. It's a hard mix when

you're coming in and you work for the federal government. nobody wants to have too much anything to do with you. People are very, very closed mouth and some of them are okay, some of them weren't so okay. As he settled into Alpine life, Dan quickly learned that while townsfolk might not be sharing information with him, they were probably sharing it with each other. So you better watch your back. After all, the sparsely populated border towns of the Big Bend can be a small world. I got a tire cut out on my car and I rolled the car over about eight times and they put a helicopter in to get me out of there and they

took pretty good care of me at the hospital, but then it turned out that the nurse was doing the most taking care of me. I had a file open on her husband, which, you know, which makes you think when you're lying down looking up, you know. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob D'Amico, Chapter 2, The Outlaw. Getting shot, rolling his car, having the nurse charged with his care be the wife of a suspect, it didn't deter Dan. He was going to make a mark in far west Texas. He was going to crack big cases. And he didn't need a sharp eye for detail to be alerted to the presence of a potential

target, Robert Chambers. People were looking at Robert long before he ever got there, because it's the kind of town, everybody knows everybody. I mean, he'd probably been out with every single woman in the town, and probably more than five or ten married ones. Dan quickly noticed where Chambers was living, a ranch of sorts just south of Alpine. And even from the highway, you could see that Robert was making some pretty expensive additions to his land. The word around town was that Robert had grand plans

for a huge horse barn, then a racetrack, plus a nice house to top it all off. He was going to build a house shaped like a pyramid, flattened off the top of a hill out there. A house shaped like a pyramid? Compared to ranches struggling just to get hay feed to their cattle, this stuck out big time. You know, you'd question anything like that because the guy didn't have a job, so the money's coming from somewhere. By the time Dan Dobbs first arrived in town, 1987, it was a full seven years since Nancy Burton had first seen Robert go toe-to-toe with the drug lord

Pablo Acosta, the Onaga Fox. And since then, Robert had only become more notorious. As Dan continued to show his face around Alpine, he started to hear lots of those stories about Robert's past. And they were both bad and good. You know, they liked him, they respected him, or stayed away from him. It's like in the town of Terlingua, down there on the river. At the bar down there, I mean, some of the police crossed the border down there onto our side, and they were in the bar, and they started giving the gal that worked at the bar a hard time. They forced her to get up on the bar and take her clothes off and dance for him.

He walked in one day when that was going on, and he put a big stop to that. All the locals that were in there and the gal kind of was a good thing. You know, you need to come around here more often. They liked him. You know, he also, he rescued some people from flaming wreckage, but I don't know. Rescuing some people from flaming wreckage? That was a story I started hearing whispers about early on. Something that suggested there was another side to Chambers and his instinct, his compulsion, to run toward trouble. The first time I heard it, like a lot of things people would say about Chambers, I didn't know if it was true. It sounded a little too cinematic.

But then I looked into it. I remember kind of a big guy in an old pickup truck picking us up out of the desert and taking us down to the Badlands Motel. That's Steve Hassenmiller. He was one of the 10 people on a small twin-engine airplane that crashed on an airstrip in Lajitas. I called him up on the phone to see if he could remember anything about Chambers' involvement. It was Easter Sunday, 1981. Rocky just fired up the left engine and he just blasted off. Steve and the other passengers were being flown home by their pilot, Rocky, following a horseback tour along the border.

And when we got about 30 feet off the ground the left engine malfunctioned we went through a telephone pole and it tore off the left-winged engine right outside my window went through the power lines rocky told us that we're going down. And then it went down and we hit nose first is all I know. The next thing I remember is waking up. Turns out Robert Chambers had actually been their guide on the horseback trip. He had, for a short time, served as a lead cowboy of sorts for these tourist expeditions. Riding groups through canyons and into small Mexican towns for beers, tequila, and enchiladas. He just dropped off the group when their plane smashed into a rocky hillside.

Robert jumped in his truck and rushed to the crash site. He saw the smoke and the flames. And it was weird because we didn't notice him driving up or anything. He just appeared. Steve Hassan Miller remembers this figure helping most of the passengers out of the plane. Then he and Robert worked frantically to free the pilot and a passenger in the co-pilot seat. Well, we took rocks and broke the windows out. And Rocky was pinned in from the waist down,

and we couldn't get him out because the back of the plane was on fire. And so we broke those windows out in the cockpit, and we literally tried to rip him out of the seat. We couldn't get him out. He couldn't reach the fire extinguisher. Smoke was now billowing out of the plane, and the only thing to do at that point was run. We got about 50 feet away from the plane, and it just incinerated. The whole plane just went up in an inferno and Rocky burned to death in front of us, screaming. That is awful.

It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. Chambers loaded the survivors, some of them severely injured, into his truck. He took them to the Badlands Hotel in Lajitas. They went and got sheets and pillows out of the hotel. And there were so many of us, they laid us down on the barroom floor,

and the EMT showed up about an hour later. Robert's actions were heroic that day. There's really no other way to think about it. He put his life on the line to save what were basically strangers. And as I was trying to sort through my thoughts on Robert, I kept coming back to this event, to this guy, who did a kind of wildly selfless and brave thing. But Robert's bravery, even when he seemed to be in the service of good, wasn't always so straightforward. Back in October 1985, a Mexican national named Refurio Gardea Gonzalez broke into the home of

a 38-year-old woman who served as the Terlingua postmistress. She was kidnapped and tortured by a man from Ohinaga. That's Susan Woodward Spriggs, one of Robert's former girlfriends. They'd split up by the time of this particular event, but the woman, the victim, would later become the wife of her brother, Trey. Referio Gardea Gonzalez held the woman at knife point, raped her, threatened to kill her over the course of a night. Eventually, the woman got away from her attacker, fled to a nearby highway, and flagged down a car to help her. And her attacker, he headed across the border into Mexico. The man, he escaped to Ohinaga, and they captured him in Ohininaga and he was in the OJ jail. So Gonzales was caught

but by the Mexican police and right or wrong those who knew the victim didn't trust the Mexican law to reach a just verdict. Robert Chambers as Big Ben legend has it was one of the doubters or at least he saw an opportunity for a vigilante adventure. On January 22nd, 1986, three months after the horrific rape and assault, three men crossed into Mexico from Texas and drove to the jail in Onaga, where Gonzalez was being held. They were wearing masks, carrying semi-automatic rifles, and they overpowered the guards. Moving quickly through the jail,

they found Gonzalez and grabbed him and took him to their side of the border, back to face their kind of justice in America. It was kind of an Old West extradition, and it didn't take long before rumors started to spread. Robert was one of the men responsible. Robert, he brought him over, wrapped him in wire to a tree, and then called the sheriff to come pick him up after he beat the shit out of him. The story goes that Robert and his partners were gone when officers arrived.

Gonzalez was thrown into an American jail to face multiple charges. The authorities at the time told reporters they had an idea who might have done the jailbreak, but they didn't have any proof, which I interpret as pretty much, why should we care how it happened? After all, they had their man. But was Robert really one of the men behind the jailbreak? Susan heard the story herself secondhand. This story was told, you know, by my brothers. And brought, and it was in the papers everywhere. So you can look that up.

I figured if anyone would know for sure, it would be one of Chambers' friends. There was a guy I'd heard about named Jack Waters. Apparently he and Robert had been close back then. They'd spent some wild times together on the border. You know the kind of friend. One you'd trust in dicey situations. We were celebrating New Year's Eve and shooting up some automatic weapons. He shot one in the ground and the bullet bounced back and hit him in the head. So I got a pair of pliers out and pulled it out.

Oh my God. It was about a half a bullet. Anyway, during a call with Jack, he revealed both a certainty that Robert was involved in the jailbreak and that local cops knew about it as well. But he wouldn't give me any names on anyone else involved. Do you remember who, if anyone, might have gone with him? Yeah, I know who went with him, but I'm not going to mention his name. I can't. I'm forever denied that. I know who went with him. Okay.

I was left with that same question. Was Robert, the guy who rescued people from burning planes and brought rapists to justice, but who also was in the thick of international drug smuggling. A force for good or a force for bad? I mean, he certainly seemed to take the law into his own hands, live by his own rules. But his brand of courage, his vigilante justice, it seemed to fit in fine with some folks. People who knew just how lawless West Texas could be. At least as long as that vigilante justice was working for them. More after the break.

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast Dinner's On Me.

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and be sure to use promo code JESSE20 to receive 20% off your order today. That's jesse20 for 20% off. Dan Dobbs heard the folklore on Robert Chambers, but when it came to his investigation, he stuck to the hard facts. Where Robert Chambers might be getting his money, what he was doing with it. But tracking Robert's activities through a paper trail was one thing. Trying to get good intelligence from people who knew Robert was another. Dan kept coming up against an unavoidable fact.

In Alpine, Texas, like any small town, if you're a cop or a customs agent, and yeah, even a journalist, if you ask questions about someone, well, word gets out. This was the kind of thing, if you went in a hardware store and you were talking to the hardware guy and you said something about him, he would have heard about it that afternoon, you know. But Dan kept on with his investigation, and a picture started to emerge.

Robert was taking his mysteriously acquired cash and using it to invest in legitimate businesses, like a funeral home in Dallas. Dan had seen stuff like this before. It was money laundering, when you take dirty money, put it into clean businesses, and make it harder for the government to trace. I knew he was trying to acquire assets and put money out of the way. Because at one point, he had purchased a pretty good-sized boat in the United States and had it hauled down to Mexico. And while Dan was digging into Robert's dealings on paper, he also had some rather interesting encounters with him in person. Of course, he knew who I was. I mean, everybody knew our cars, you know. You know, everybody knew where everybody lived.

Hell, there were probably clips on the phone, for all I know. One time, I ran into him down there on the river, and he said, come here, I want to show you something. But we went to this overlook over the river, and he pointed out some tracks down there. He said they moved about a ton and a half of marijuana through there, probably about four or five o'clock this morning. That was hours earlier. Dan didn't have a chance to catch whoever was bringing that marijuana across. Robert knew that. Do you think he was telling you, why do you think he was telling you that information? Well, Robert's kind of a strange guy because he was a documented informant for the Border Patrol.

He was, Weimers documented him for the Border Patrol. Dan is referring to Wayne Weimers, the head of the Marfa Border Patrol Station. And what Dan is saying here, it's significant. Because in doing some low-level snitching for the Border Patrol, Chambers may very well have been trying to protect his own enterprises. And I don't have a clue what, if anything, he did for the Border Patrol, but it was probably insurance. Because that way, you know, if something happened, Weimers could get on a stand in court and a judge could force him to admit that they had the guy documented. What Dan means by insurance policy is this. If Robert got busted, he and his lawyers could claim he was just gathering intelligence

as a cooperating informant for the federal government, doing some kind of sting, and they could get a guy like Wayne Weimers to corroborate. The bottom line? Chambers was staying out of jail, and all the while, he was becoming a bigger, more sophisticated criminal. And then there were more expensive purchases. He bought an airplane, and he had been taking lessons, but he never registered the plane in his name, which to me meant he's probably fixing

to head south and then come back and put the real tail numbers back on the plane, you know. So, Dan, he seized the plane, had it confiscated for being improperly registered. If I did anything for the government, I paid my salary for a whole lot of years in advance because I was known for taking airplanes away from people. Taking his plane might have seemed like a victory at the time, but it was a small one. By this point in the late 1980s, Robert Chambers was way too big to be hurt by the loss of one small aircraft.

Because he'd spent a decade making powerful connections on both sides of the law. He's wearing lineman boots, black, laced up to here. Black pants stuck in the legs, and then a black trench coat, long, and a black hat. He had this briefcase, and he kept carrying the briefcase. Well, I mean, he stood out like a motherfucker. That's Mimi Webb Miller, describing the first time she laid eyes on Robert Chambers. Mimi is kind of a Texas blue blood. She's the niece of former U.S. Senator John Tower, and she became Pablo Acosta's

girlfriend. That's right, a powerful U.S. Senator from Texas. His niece was a drug lord's lover. Mimi first met Acosta shortly after that first encounter with Chambers. It was the early 80s, and Robert and Mimi ended up on a crazy road trip after she'd been persuaded to give him a lift in her car. And so I'm in the car with Robert, and it's an 11 and a half hour drive. And so we're driving out here, and by the time we got to Wimberley, he's like, do you want to do a line? I went, okay. So he opens this briefcase and it's got a block of cocaine in it. I, you know, literally see it. God, I've only seen it in those little tiny things. And then you don't stop. And it was so pure. It was coming off a great big block. They were driving all day, hundreds and hundreds of miles, doing lines. By the time

they got back to the borderlands, Mimi said she needed to wind down. I was like chewing my back teeth. And, you know, I had the marijuana, which got me off that cocaine. Robert said he knew a guy. As night fell, he drove his truck across the Rio Grande to a pull-off by a dam on the river. And there, approaching their truck, was Pablo Acosta. Every tooth was outlined in gold. So in the dark, with the car lights on the end, it was like, wow. Mimi was smitten. She didn't think Acosta was handsome, but he was powerful, charismatic, and Acosta was smitten too. Mimi was young, beautiful, and from a background that was so utterly different from Pablo's. So they were an odd couple. But it worked. They started

to see each other. But Robert still made it clear he was interested in Mimi. In the early days, I think Pablo liked him because he speaks Spanish to the point that it's phenomenal. And we were friends and would hang together and he certainly tried to be a boyfriend. And I just, you couldn't fuck around like that in Mexico. But Pablo pretty quick was like, I don't want you to be around him. But you couldn't get away from him. I had to wonder if Robert was bold or just incredibly stupid to hit on a drug lord's girlfriend. Not only was Pablo Acosta basically Robert's boss at this point, he was also a major drug lord. And more than that, Pablo might have been possessive of Mimi,

but Robert, he was possessive of Pablo. He was Robert's find, Robert's connect. Nobody else should have any connection to him except Robert. Chambers used his connections with Acosta for more than just smuggling. He once testified in court that he had worked with federal officials and the Texas Rangers, an elite state police force, to set up a meeting with Acosta. The goal of the meeting, he said, was to stop smuggling of heroin into the U.S.

And while that might sound outlandish, there's plenty of reason to believe it was true. Dan Dobbs, the customs agent, had confirmed that Robert was an informant working with law enforcement. And he was smuggling at the same time. For Robert, that was a win-win. Not only did he have that insurance policy if he was ever caught,

he also had another tool to get ahead in his business. He could tip off the government to drug shipments his rivals were making, meaning he could kneecap the competition. And talking to American cops, giving them the good intel, it also let Robert gather his own. He would learn a little bit about how law enforcement patrolled the border,

so when it was his turn to bring drugs across, he'd have a much better chance of getting his own shipments through. But in the drug world, alliances are fleeting, and Robert would see up close just how badly things could turn out when they ended. In 1986, in the middle of his relationship with Mimi, at the time he was starting to eye Robert a little warily, Pablo Acosta did something really bizarre. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, perhaps fame, reputation, a simple desire to tell a story, he sat down with an American journalist. The result was three front-page articles in the El Paso Herald Post, articles that bluntly outlined facts about corruption and violence

associated with the Mexican drug trade. You know, Pablo knew that he was going to die, but he didn't know when it was, but he knew it was coming. And he talked like that, like kind of calm. But despite Acosta's calm, people weren't happy. Acosta might have been the big boss of Owainaga, but even a big boss has bosses. And those bosses, they decided it was time for new management in the borderlands.

Yeah, I remember that day. I remember the sounds of the helicopters in the canyon and the gunfire. It was April 24th, 1987, a Friday. Nancy Burton was working as a waitress in the Texas town of Lajitas. The helicopters landed in Lajitas, and we watched them take off, and we watched them go down the canyon, and the next thing we just heard a barrage of gunfire. It was so loud. We were frightened. None of us knew what it was.

None of us knew what it was. When Nancy found out what happened, that Pablo Acosta, a brutal drug lord, had been assassinated, she didn't breathe a sigh of relief. She was horrified. I had no idea that this could take place. But to hear the gun, just the gunfire, the sound that came out of that canyon, it just ricocheted out of that canyon. It just ricocheted out of that canyon.

It was like, I imagine it was probably close to a war sound that I'll ever hear. Poor Mimi. More after the break. Robert Chambers always had a temper, was frequently violent, but the deeper Robert got involved in the world of major drug smuggling operations, the worse he seemed. He was always a, he would always kick your ass. And I've seen Robert hit a lot of women but he got meaner and I never figured out why

I never figured out why I look back at us we were good friends I look back, you know, at us. I... We were good friends, but he changed. After Nancy Burton dated Robert Chambers, there'd been her marriage to another member of his outlaw crew. That marriage, it didn't last long. Nancy's husband died one night in a car wreck.

But from time to time, she would still meet up with Chambers. Robert and I kind of maintained a friendship, I thought, until that one fateful day that he pulled a gun on me. That fateful day Nancy is talking about was later, when Nancy was in another relationship with a guy named Charles Maxwell. And for some reason, Robert didn't like that. He called and he said, hey, you want to go take a drive and smoke a joint?

And I said, sure. So he came over and he picked me up, and we drove around, and he started asking me questions about Charles, and he told me I needed to stay away from Charles. And I told him, Robert, can't do that. You know, we're involved. And the next thing I know, he pulled a gun on me and told me you better stay away from him or you're going to be dead.

I know it's emotional for you now, even telling it now, but what did you do at the time? How did you feel when he did that? I laughed. I just laughed at him because Robert was crazy. I mean, he constantly pulled guns on people. And I basically laughed and told him, well, if you feel like you need to shoot me,

go ahead and shoot me, motherfucker. Stories like this, of Robert getting violent, of Robert threatening to kill a woman, I didn't just hear them from Nancy. Multiple women have told me about their experiences of being violently abused by Robert. Mimi Webb Miller, Pablo Acosta's girlfriend, she told me that Chambers beat her several times.

It was horrifying. A rock thrown through a truck window, a beating outside a motel. She told me about one occasion when she needed to see a doctor. He severed an optic nerve and broke my collarbone, and I went in to get help. And the doctor and his wife said, you know, I know exactly who did this, and he'll do it again. This was all happening around the same time that Lico Miller remembers seeing Robert holding his dad hostage in Paso Lajitas, shooting around his head to freak him out,

then chasing after him with guns blazing through the Mexican desert. Lico's dad got away, but in the days after, Robert would show up on the other side of the river across from Lico's house, which was in a compound they shared with a woman and her children. So you'd see a nice brown 87 Ford diesel pickup, extra cab, all fancied up, and you'd see him get out, and he'd stand across there, and he'd run a clip or two off into the area around our house. And he did that for a month, at least. With one of these shooting sprees, several of the children had to run for cover as Robert's bullets whizzed around them. Shortly after these incidents, Lico ran into Robert again. Lico was in his truck, waiting outside a convenience store. He spotted Robert in a phone booth outside, making a call.

All the while, watching us in the truck and it was a blazer and we were like man this guy is gonna kill us. He's calling somebody he's gonna kill us. We were all packed up and headed to Mexico and I had a I think it was a 22 pistol or something but I had it in the back you know it was just just a rat gun you know had it in the back and I said maybe I can get to it in time I think I even had it in like an ammo can I mean the chances of this working were not very good but I was scared to death so I was sitting there and that old blazer had lap seat beltsts and I had my seatbelt on. I was a law-abiding feller. And here comes Robert Chambers walking toward us in his trench coat and he had about probably 25 feet to cover. He's walking towards us and things are getting tense and I

click that seat belt loose because I'm going to make a dive into the back seat and it's a blaze we got to get over the bucket seat and then over the back seat and into the cargo area and that seat belt comes loose and it has a spring in it and it slams up against the door. It hits the door in such a way that it sounds just like I've run a 12 gauge shotgun shell up and I've racked around. Robert, he froze. He stopped dead in his tracks, turned right around, walked off and went into the store. And we wiped a huge bead of sweat off and got out of there.

But it was really, really frightening. When word got round to Nancy about some of these stories, she was appalled. It was like it was confirming all those changes she had noticed in Robert. Robert terrorizing 15-year-old Liko, shooting at his house, and at the house of a mother and her four children that lived next door to him. I wanted, I wanted to find Robert and ask him why, and ask him what the fuck are you doing around these kids. Within a couple months, Robert's violent behavior would finally get him in legal trouble. In June of 1987, just two months after Acosta's death, around the same time Dan Dobbs was

beginning his investigation, Robert was indicted for aggravated assault. The story around the Big Ben was that he shot his rifle at one of his friends while they were partying on the river. A friend of Robert's said he, quote, shot him in the ass. This wasn't the only shooting Robert was linked to. Several local residents had gone to the police to allege that on a few occasions, Robert had fired shots at them from his vehicle. And a member of the local drug task force said someone had fired three shots at him from a truck that matched a description of Robert's pickup. On March 5th of 1989, Robert shot another man,

a Mexican national in a confrontation on the river near Candelaria. Robert reported the shooting to law enforcement himself, said it was self-defense in a gun battle with a drug smuggler. Then in June of 1989, Robert was arrested and thrown in jail for an illegal firearm purchase. He wasn't supposed to buy guns while still under that previous indictment for shooting his friend in the ass down on the river. The judge for Robert's bond hearing had heard testimony on about a dozen violent incidents tied to Chambers, including information that Robert had made a number of statements to a confidential informant that seemed to tie him to a murder in another county to the north. Dan Dobbs was hearing about all those same violent incidents because Dan believed there was a lot to those stories.

But he'd never quite been able to put together the definitive proof. And then before he was able to find that proof, his investigation was up. Not because of lack of evidence, but it was time for Dan to leave the scene for a new posting in Dallas. For Dan Dobbs, the consummate Maverick agent, it's still something he thinks about. Like that possible murder in the county to the north. Dan isn't ready to close the book on it. Rob, I can't talk about that one.

Okay. Is it sensitive? Can you tell me why it's sensitive? Well, the source is still out there, so the source is still at risk on that one. After Dan left the scene, his file on Robert Chambers sat there at the U.S. Customs office in Alpine, the dust settling as it waited for the right agent to pick it up. And as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, maybe that right time was starting to draw near. Because Robert Chambers wasn't done. Those allegations about Robert's pattern of out-of-control behavior, the assault charge, the shootout on the river,

the claims he committed drive-by shootings from his truck, if they felt like they were building towards something, there was a reason. And one day Robert Chambers told his lawyer Rod Ponton exactly what that was. Robert told me that I own the plaza, Rod, I own the plaza. He was all pumped up and excited and happy about it. And I told him, Robert, that's great, that's wonderful, but please explain to me what that meant. I didn't know at the time.

So what did it mean? To own the plaza is to be the drug lord of Owinaga. For many years, Pablo Acosta owned the plaza, which meant he had the right to deal with the drugs there, and if anybody else wanted to do it, they had to do it through him or face death. I said, well, that's great, just be careful. But it meant that he was stepping into the shoes of Pablo Acosta. How was Robert able to rise to these heights, and so quickly?

Why, despite all the accusations against him, was he so rarely charged? And when he was charged, why did he basically walk free every time, allowing him to take over the drug trade in Oenaga and the Big Bend. Well, in my investigation into this story, there was one case I heard about where it all started to make sense. It goes like this. On June 15, 1987, a man driving a pickup truck owned by Robert Chambers was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint in the middle of the high Chihuahuan Desert between Marfa and the bustling border cities

of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. This was just a routine stop, no reason for suspicion. But when the agents searched the truck, they found guns, lots of them, an AR-15, two shotguns, a couple other rifles, all loaded. And they found something else too. Cash, $54,000 in bills. What was this guy doing with those guns and that money? The man told them he was delivering them. The guns were going to Robert Chambers, the owner of the truck.

And the money was going to someone else. To Sheriff Rick Thompson. Mr. Thompson was their county sheriff. He, you know, He asked for our votes. He put his hands around our shoulders. And yet nobody knows that he was one of the greatest threats to the United States as far as his activities and whoever else worked with him. 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 Bubinik. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith. Fact-checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajiv Gulla 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 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.