“Drive-Thru”

If you were wondering how to transport about 150 pounds of marijuana from Mexico to Denver, the Jefferson County District Attorney recently had an answer: the gas tank.

I know this because I was working as an investigator side by side with a defense attorney on a case where the district attorney charged our client with driving a Ford pickup across the border containing three sealed, metal cases of marijuana inside the gas tank. The client, a Mexican national, claimed he was nothing more than a farmer trying to earn a few extra bucks. He thought he was being paid by a friend of his cousin to drive the pickup and a trailer to retrieve some washing machines to sell back in Mexico.

Now he was sitting in Jefferson County Jail, ensnared in a fairly massive Colorado Organized Crime Control Act (COCCA) drug case. A metro drug squad had confiscated the truck and said they found the marijuana. (In a twist, the police actually let our client go, and only arrested him months later when he tried to obtain another visa to the United States.)

The client was begging to be deported back to Mexico and agreed to never step foot again on U.S. soil. The district attorney was offering a plea bargain that would put him in prison for about five years, depending on the judge’s final decision. A loss at trial would send him to prison for 12 to 48 years.

The attorney and I began casually, sitting down with the client and chatting about who he was and what happened to build rapport. I translated between English for the attorney and Spanish for the client. The attorney and I then set out on two different tracks. She checked for wiretaps involving our client and reviewed the other sentences that had been handed down to gauge what our client might get. (I don’t think anyone disputed that our guy was a small fry; the COCCA case counted maybe two dozen defendants with various charges given their levels of involvement. The case was also winding down and many had been sentenced.)

I set about contacting family members in Mexico – namely the client’s brother, who the client said was a vice-chancellor at a Mexican university. I did some checks, Googling the brother and finding a LinkedIn page for him (yes, LinkedIn has Spanish language profiles for other countries). The LinkedIn mentioned the stated university. The client had given me a cell number for his brother, but I wanted to keep double checking the story. I called the main number at the university (via Skype, which was super cheap) and asked for the brother. I got connected to him, and thus began a correspondence with the brother via phone and email to obtain letters of reference from him and other family members (the client had a wife and two young children).

What still bothered me was the alleged marijuana in the gas tank. I wondered if you could really drive such a truck. I looked up a local Ford dealership with a service station, and headed over carrying police photos of the gas tank they had apparently removed and split open to display the boxes of marijuana. I was in search of an expert witness.

The service manager didn’t flinch when I explained myself. Eyeballing the photos, he quickly deduced that the gas tank was 36-gallon capacity and the marijuana would displace 20 gallons. The truck would get 16 miles per gallon, so even with the marijuana, the truck could go 256 miles on what passed for a “full” tank. The gas gauge would move normally, and the truck would operate without any hitches. If you didn’t know the marijuana was there – as our client claimed – nothing would seem amiss. (Unless you thought a Ford pickup got the same mileage as a Toyota Prius.)

The attorney, meantime, had a problem because some defendants with charges similar to our client’s got relatively light sentences only after providing information about the alleged drug ring. Our client maintained he was duped, so didn’t have any inside track. All he had was his life story. That’s where the attorney came in with the brilliant move I call the “personal proffer.” She simply retold his story – how he was close to his family in Mexico and worked on the family farm, how he otherwise innocently came to know the alleged owner of the truck, and how well a pickup would drive with 156 pounds of marijuana in the gas tank.

After consulting with the lead detective, the assistant district attorney agreed to the deal we wanted: Deportation and a suspended sentence as long as the client never returned to the United States. The judge signed off on it.

It was now holiday season, and half-jokingly, the attorney wondered whether the client made it home for Christmas. She figured we would never know because clients don’t usually keep in touch. But on December 28, I got an email from the client’s brother regarding Christmas: “On December 25 at 2:30 am [the client] came home, and on behalf of him and myself we want to thank you once again for all you did for him, and the attorney who handled the case. I also hope you have spent a great Christmas and that 2012 is full of opportunities, successes and enjoying good health.”

Igualmente, as we say in Spanish. Same to you.

Jeff Kass is principal of the Kass Research Group, a Denver-based bilingual investigative agency. He is also a longtime newspaper reporter, and author of Columbine: A True Crime Story. He may be reached at jeffkass@thekassgroup.com or 303-518-9905.

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