Jury convicts 2 men who tracked down a cartel chief's lawyer, leading to his killing
A federal court jury in Texas found two Mexican men guilty on Friday of stalking and conspiracy charges for their part in a Dallas-area lawyer’s assassination.
The victim, attorney Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa, 43, was fatally shot by an unknown assailant in front of his wife in the parking lot of a suburban Dallas shopping mall in 2013. He was targeted for assassination after his client, Gulf cartel chief Osiel Cardenas Guillen, took a U.S. plea deal, reports the Dallas Morning News’ Crime Blog. Guerrero Chapa was a U.S. informant at the time.
Prosecutors said private investigator Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Cepeda, 59, and his cousin, retired South Texas phone company worker Jose Luis Cepeda-Cortes, 60, helped rival drug traffickers track down Guerrero Chapa. The jury was unpersuaded by defense claims that the two defendants either didn’t know about a murder plot or that they had been forced to track down Guerrero Chapa because he was serving as the de facto chief of a drug cartel.
The two defendants were convicted of interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Cepeda-Cortes, a legal U.S. resident with a green card, was also convicted of evidence tampering. They face as much as life in prison when they are sentenced in September.
The assassination, along with a spate of other drug-related violence, was sparked by a plea deal between Guerrero Chapa’s client Cardenas Guillen and the U.S., the Dallas Morning News (sub. req.) reported earlier in a lengthy story that relies in part on information from unidentified sources.
After Friday’s verdict was announced, lawyers for both defendants pointed to the difficulty of overcoming the aura of drug violence that permeated the Fort Worth trial.
Attorney Wes Ball, who represents Ledezma-Cepeda, said his client had been threatened into the job of tracking down Guerrero Chapa, reports WFAA.
Ball said his client was taken to a tire shop in Monterrey, Mexico, and intimidated into complying. “Hanging on the wall was a chainsaw with blood on it,” Ball told the station. “And the last time I cut down a tree with a chainsaw, it did not bleed.”
However, the defense of duress asserted by Ledezma-Cepeda is not easy to prove at the best of times, observers told the Dallas Morning News’ Crime Blog in an earlier post. One Dallas attorney, who is not involved in the trial, called it “sort of a Hail Mary defense.”
Cepeda-Cortes’ attorney Robert Rogers said Cepeda-Cortes should have been tried separately, although a federal judge denied a motion to sever the case. Counsel for Cepeda-Cortes argued at trial that he had no idea a murder was planned and simply thought he was helping his cousin with a private investigation.
Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Campano, 32, who is the son of Ledezma-Cepeda, took a plea earlier and testified for the government at trial. He is also scheduled for sentencing in September.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “GPS tracker put assassin on lawyer’s trail, but also helped catch the suspects, feds testify”
