Mexico Probes Ex-Official’s Alleged $7-Million Nest Egg : Corruption: Ruiz Massieu reportedly opened account last year. He is charged with cover-up in brother’s death.

Federal investigators Tuesday started tracing almost $7 million that they said U.S. Customs officials had discovered in a Texas bank account under the name of Mario Ruiz Massieu, as accusations against the notorious Mexican accuser continued to mount.

Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano announced that Ruiz Massieu--a former special prosecutor now charged in the United States with currency violations and in Mexico with covering up the role of the former president’s family in the slaying of Ruiz Massieu’s own brother last year--opened the account in March, 1994, at Texas Commerce Bank in Houston. Within eight months, prosecutors said, the balance reached $6,941,115.

“The attorney general has opened a new case (against Ruiz Massieu) to conduct the necessary investigations,” Mexico’s top law enforcement agency declared in a statement, one day after President Ernesto Zedillo’s government started formal extradition proceedings against Ruiz Massieu.

He is being held without bail in federal prison in New York and is wanted on Mexican charges of shielding Raul Salinas de Gortari, the elder brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Raul Salinas was formally charged Monday with masterminding the Sept. 28 slaying of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 official of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in Mexico City.

U.S. Customs officials clearly were taken off guard by the Mexican government’s announcement of the Texas bank deposits--the latest in a series of accusations leveled against Mario Ruiz Massieu since he left Mexico for Houston after six hours of questioning by the Mexican attorney general’s investigators here Thursday.

“We have an ongoing investigation into matters involving Mr. Ruiz Massieu,” said Steve Duchesne, spokesman for U.S. Customs in Washington. He said he could not confirm or deny the Mexican government announcement, stressing that the agency, by policy, does not comment on pending investigations.

Customs arrested Ruiz Massieu at Newark International Airport on Friday for failing to declare the full $40,000 he was carrying as he tried to board a plane for Madrid. His arrest, followed by formal obstruction of justice charges against him in connection with his investigation of his brother’s slaying--and then the allegation of a foreign bank account worth millions--sent additional shock waves through Mexico’s unraveling political system.

The upheaval continued to batter Mexico’s financial markets. The peso closed Tuesday at a record low 6.8 to the dollar--exactly half what the currency was worth when the nation’s worst economic crisis in more than a decade began Dec. 20.

The Mexican Stock Exchange fell 5%, then steadied to close within two points of the opening mark at 1,524.20 on extremely low volume as national attention focused on the most elaborate political scandal in decades.

In the absence of more details--from either U.S. or Mexican law enforcement officials--speculation ran wild after the assertion that Ruiz Massieu amassed nearly $7 million in eight months on the meager salary of a Mexican bureaucrat.

The Houston account was allegedly opened the same month that Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party’s presidential candidate, was assassinated in Tijuana.

Deposits reportedly stopped flowing in November--the same month that Ruiz Massieu resigned in spectacular fashion from the investigation into his brother’s slaying. That Nov. 23 resignation, in which he alleged that his brother’s killing was being covered up by the top two officials of the PRI then, was the most open attack from within in decades on the system that has ruled Mexico continuously since 1929.

The reputed timing of such large deposits fueled new speculation that the Colosio assassination may have been linked to the killing six months later of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the secretary general of the PRI.

The speed with which Mexican authorities released the information about the Texas account hinted to some political insiders that Mario Ruiz Massieu--who was not only Mexico’s second-highest law enforcement official but also headed drug enforcement operations--may have been the subject of a previous money-laundering investigation.

As the rumors flew, the political ramifications of one of Mexico’s most celebrated murder cases also continued to expand.

Ruiz Massieu’s family requested support from the political left, which claimed to sense a broad political conspiracy behind the case--a conspiracy hatched by the political right.

After meeting with Ruiz Massieu’s sister and brother, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, leader of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), suggested that Atty. Gen. Lozano--a member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN)--is moving against Ruiz Massieu “out of spite.”

Ruiz Massieu incurred the PAN’s wrath when he rejected a public invitation to join that party after resigning from the PRI, Munoz Ledo asserted. His resignation made Ruiz Massieu an overnight sensation, bolstered just two weeks ago with the release of his book on his brother’s killing, “I Accuse.”

Other Ruiz Massieu supporters saw a darker plot in government moves against him.

They said it appears Zedillo is using the former prosecutor to utterly discredit his predecessor and his predecessor’s government in order to strengthen his own. Zedillo has said he permitted the arrest last week of Raul Salinas--an unprecedented move against a member of a former president’s family--as a demonstration of his policy of equal justice for all.