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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Credit Due in Aragon Case

By Mike Gallagher
Journal Investigative Reporter
      I watched Manny Aragon walk away from the federal courthouse last week into the shadows of history and a federal jail cell where he belongs.
       I have spent a lot of time documenting Aragon's business associations with convicted drug dealers and his other indiscretions political and personal. I thought of all the newsprint and ink I have spent on this case and the politics that almost derailed it — the bad decisions by a former U.S. attorney, the telephone calls from elected officials who should have known better, and the politicians who got away because the statute of limitations ran out.
       I could rehash all that, but I don't want to waste time talking about the dark side of all that went into Aragon's guilty plea.
       Instead I prefer to concentrate on the bright spots, the people who did their jobs and served the people of New Mexico. The people who worked through the bad times in the three years it took to get to last week's historic moment.
       They are the people who tend to get lost in the press conferences.
       Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathon Gerson has been criticized by just about every lawyer in town for how he handled the two biggest political corruption cases in state history. The prosecutors who worked with him, Steve Yarbrough and Paula Burnett, also took some hits.
       At the end of the day, Gerson and company sent former state treasurers Michael Montoya and Robert Vigil to federal prison. Manny Aragon is going to federal prison.
       Where I come from, prosecutions that end in the defendants going to prison are considered successes. That's the end of that debate.
       Then there is the FBI. I've been known to knock “The Bureau” over the years. But there's no question it did its job on this one. Special Agents Leroy Chavez and Drew McCandless were the point of the spear on the Aragon case. They are members of the same squad that locked up Montoya and Vigil. The courtroom at Aragon's guilty plea was filled with the secretaries, paralegals and analysts who worked on the case in anonymity.
       Chavez and McCandless have their names in the newspaper today and they will have to buy donuts for the rest of the squad. It is part of the price for getting your name in the paper.
       Finally there is the civilian in this case — Judith Wagner. The state of New Mexico ought to give her a medal.
       Wagner is a forensic accountant. She was brought into a lawsuit between two partners who couldn't agree on how to split their company. District Judge Geraldine Rivera assigned Wagner to figure out what was going on with the company finances.
       What Wagner found was the genesis for the entire federal case. One of the engineering firm's owners was making some very suspicious payments to Aragon.
       Wagner took her findings to Rivera.
       Now people may not want to read this, but there are a lot of judges in New Mexico who would have put Wagner's report in their desk drawer and forgotten about it. Rivera ordered Wagner to share her findings with Richard Bosson, then chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Bosson told her to share her findings with law enforcement.
       Wagner took her report to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI. She spent hours explaining what she found.
       The rest is history — some of it good and some of it bad.
       It is a history written by the people who did the right thing.
       

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