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| Cartel snitch to be released from prison |
| By Dane Schiller |
| Published: 04/08/2009 |
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HOUSTON — When the gate rolls open at a federal penitentiary in West Texas today, a man reputedly once a lieutenant for a top Mexican drug cartel will be free. If his old friends don't find him. Nearly eight years ago, Jose Manuel Garza Rendon walked across a bridge spanning the Rio Grande, surrendered to U.S. border guards and handed federal agents a golden opportunity. He snitched. “Basically, he is going from a safe, secure environment to being a hunted rabbit,” said Mike Vigil, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's former chief of international operations and now a vice president at SOS International. “Unless he does a good job of staying on the run or going to an area where nobody knows him, they'll kill him.” Authorities won't say if he will be deported to Mexico. Until today, prisoner 11277-179 was just one of dozens of drug cartel members in U.S. custody. But Garza, now 56, was unique: He had rank and experience and a road map of one of Mexico's most powerful criminal syndicates, the Gulf Cartel. Before his surrender, the U.S. government offered up to $2 million for his capture. Hitmen from his own cartel were looking for him too: They wanted to kill him for botching business while addicted to cocaine. Fearing for his life, Garza gave up and became the first person captured as part of an indictment developed from an investigation the Justice Department had been working on for years. Also wanted, and later captured in that case, was Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the cartel's alleged kingpin, who is to be tried in federal court in Houston in September. One of the biggest drug bosses ever to be extradited to the United States from Mexico, he is accused of a host of drug-trafficking crimes as well as money laundering and threatening to kill two U.S. agents and an undercover sheriff's deputy. Court documents indicate the FBI and DEA debriefed Garza about his 13 years with the Gulf Cartel, including an incident in which gangsters surrounded and threatened to shoot two U.S. federal agents caught driving through the border city of Matamoros searching for cartel leaders' homes. A confidential informant had to duck down in the back seat. Although a U.S. federal agent described what Garza revealed behind closed doors as “substantial,” there is nothing in the public record to indicate what he said. There is also nothing to indicate he's willing to testify against anyone, or if he even told the truth. Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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