U.S. Lawbreakers No Longer Finding Safe Haven South of the Border

Like generations of fugitives before them, they came to Mexico running from the law. And, like an increasing number of Americans looking for freedom south of the border, they quickly got caught.

Donald Rainey and Paul Parker piled into a battered Mustang with their girlfriends, aiming to leave behind the string of robberies and parole violations in Missouri that police say would have sent them to prison.

They headed south, in a dream imbued in American culture: “I’m going way down south, down Mexico way, where I can be free,” as Jimi Hendrix sang in “Hey Joe.”

Rainey and Parker, who now sit in a northern Mexican prison on trial for robbery and murder, didn’t find that dream. They felt only heat, thanks to more aggressive and effective Mexican police, who also are working in closer cooperation with their American counterparts.

Quietly and with little attention in the news media, U.S. marshals began working out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last year, with the blessing of the Mexican government, to track Americans trying to escape the law.

“They solved more cases in their first eight months than we had in the previous eight years,” James Carney, head of the marshals’ international division, said of the new office.

That office is bolstered by increased cooperation with Mexican police, who are much more willing to share information than ever before, law enforcement officials say.

Yet Americans continue to come. In part, it’s an almost mystical belief that making it over the border will set them free.

“Americans come down here all the time to do their dirty business. They think the law is lax down here,” said Ricardo Montes, a prosecutor in Sonoyta, across the border from Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Park.

Fugitives go just about everywhere, from small Mexican villages to well-known resorts like Ensenada, Mazatlan and the colonial town of San Miguel Allende.

Some try to blend in, but that doesn’t often work, even for those who speak Spanish.

“The majority of the fugitives, the Anglos, they’re just not going to fit in rural Mexico,” Carney said. “Some discomfort themselves to avoid getting caught. Some of them don’t use any subterfuge; they just sit down there waiting.”

Many get caught because they can’t leave their pasts behind. Rainey and Parker, who had convictions in the States for embezzlement and assaulting a police officer, respectively, didn’t even try.

Heading south through New Mexico in December, they stole a Winnebago and grabbed an arsenal of pistols and rifles from a friend’s home. They were headed for a resort on Mexico’s western Pacific coast, much like the one where the jailbreaker portrayed in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” finds a new life under blue Mexican skies.

Rainey stands at the bars of a prison in this old cattle town on the U.S. border and talks about his crimes without passion or remorse. Asked why he came to Mexico, he says: “I don’t really know the answer to that. It wasn’t my idea.”

He says he started off on the wild ride at Parker’s suggestion and still calls it “a vacation.”

Chief Deputy Sheriff Rick Fejan of the men’s hometown in Benton County, Mo., calls it something else. “They were on the run,” he says. “They were problem kids from the start.”

Their crime spree hit its peak barely 50 miles into Mexico, when they fatally shot a Canadian couple on a lonely Sonora roadside just to steal their motor home. After that, authorities say, they beat up their girlfriends and stayed in a string of hotels using stolen credit cards.

They got caught after an incredibly clumsy robbery. They emptied the register at a jewelry store while trying to distract the clerks. The store owner called police, who arrested all four, found the guns, traced the credit cards and found the Canadians’ bodies.

There are more and more arrests of fugitives as U.S. marshals swing into full operation, Mexican police get better at investigative techniques and communication, and cooperation between forces improves.

Increased media penetration in Mexico is also helping. Law enforcement authorities say at least two suspects have been located thanks to Mexicans who identified fugitives from pictures on the FBI’s Internet page or TV shows like “America’s Most Wanted.”

In February, Texas became the first state to post an Internet site seeking information on local fugitives believed to have fled to Mexico.

The marshals’ office in Mexico City, opened in February 1999, passes on tips and surveillance information about fugitives to Mexican police, who make any arrests.

The coordination went like clockwork early this year, when the marshals got a tip about Mao Ali Lainez, a Salvadoran citizen who allegedly killed a man in Texas on New Year’s Eve.

Marshals passed information to police that Lainez was stranded at Mexico City’s international airport without money or a plane ticket. Officers found him hanging out at a taco stand near the airport, and he is now awaiting extradition to Texas.

About 700 American fugitives are currently being sought in Mexico, Carney said. But those are only the most serious cases--people wanted for murder, kidnapping, rape or big-time drug dealing--and only recent crimes, ones police in the United States haven’t given up on yet.

“If you don’t catch somebody in the first year, you’re not likely to get them,” said one Justice Department official, who agreed to talk about the situation only if not quoted by name. “They get more time to go underground.”

The official estimate includes only cases in which prosecutors have evidence or tips that a suspect has fled to Mexico.

Add to that people who committed lesser crimes, or who slipped unnoticed across the border, and the total could be in the thousands, among them spouses who take their kids to Mexico to avoid losing custody, tax evaders, fraud operators.

Many fugitives are captured because police trace the phone calls they make to family or friends in the States. Others are picked up cashing money orders sent from home or crossing back over the border for visits.

In October 1997, David Lanier, a former Tennessee judge convicted of sexually assaulting women in his courtroom, fled to the northern beach town of Ensenada.

“He had given some mail to Mexican citizens to take to the United States, and he paid them about $30 to do that,” a U.S. law enforcement source said. “They wanted to do a very good job so he would continue to contract their services, so they had the mail certified.

“From the return address--it was one we had under surveillance--the name was one of the aliases we knew he used. The day he [Lanier] picked up the package at the post office, the Mexican federal police were waiting for him.”

One thing fugitives don’t have to worry about as much anymore is U.S. bounty hunters, who used to cross the border freely, kidnap fugitives and take them back to face justice in the United States.

The extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico was revised in 1993 after a public outcry about a Mexican physician who was snatched by Mexican bounty hunters on behalf of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Now no one can be sent back without the Mexican government’s consent. Mexican police are barred from cooperating with bounty hunters, and at least 12 people-- Americans and Mexicans--are serving sentences or facing charges for alleged bounty hunting in northern Mexico.

Three San Diego men are serving 15 years in La Mesa State Penitentiary in Tijuana after trying to snatch an alleged drug smuggler who fled to Mexico. Law enforcement sources said the suspect’s sister--enraged because she had lent him money for the bail bond he skipped--egged the men on to attempt the kidnapping.

“We actively discourage bail bondsmen and bounty hunters,” said the Justice Department official. “We have placed public letters in their trade magazines telling them that if they go to Mexico and violate laws, and then come back here and we are asked to extradite them, we will send them back.”

Tightened regulations don’t mean the end of traditional methods of turning over fugitives, especially if Mexican police are in a cooperative mood.

In the 1950s, Mexican policemen would put a fugitive in a patrol car, park it on the border line and shove the fugitive out of the vehicle onto the U.S. side--and say he hadn’t left Mexican soil.

That kind of cooperation still happens in twin border cities where U.S. and Mexican prosecutors have good relationships.

Fugitives without proper immigration documents are routinely “deported” into the hands of U.S. marshals or local police who just happen to be waiting at the border.

“We would never discourage that kind of thing, as long as it’s not illegal,” the Justice Department official said.

But even when fugitives are found, it doesn’t guarantee they will go back to the United States to face justice.

Take Dr. Ricardo Asch. A California fertility specialist who allegedly used women’s eggs without their permission to impregnate others and for experiments, Asch left the United States in 1995. He became a fugitive when a federal grand jury indicted him two years later on charges of mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud patients of their genetic material.

Asch now openly practices medicine at one of the most prestigious hospitals in Mexico City, researches and writes for academic publications. He has denied any intentional wrongdoing.

His presence is no secret, and U.S. prosecutors say they are drawing up a request for his extradition. But that’s a long, slow process, made even harder by the fact that “defrauding patients of genetic material” is not classified as a crime in Mexico--and hence is not an extraditable offense.

The place to go if you are a fugitive facing extradition is the plush, wood-paneled office of lawyer Enrique Fuentes Ladron in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood. Fuentes Ladron brags that he’s handled 18 appeals against extradition--and lost only one.

Even in that case--that of Joey del Toro, who allegedly shot and slashed to death a mother of quadruplets in Florida--he managed to delay extradition for months, angering the U.S. Congress.

Fuentes Ladron persuaded a Mexican judge that a U.S. request for Del Toro’s extradition was invalid because it bore a seal instead of a signature, when in fact diplomatic protocol requires a seal, not a signature.

Although U.S. marshals don’t get directly involved in arrests here, they go to great lengths in serious cases.

The 1998 search for Angel Maturino Resendiz, the prime suspect in nine U.S. murders known as the “railroad killings,” centered in Mexico. At the height of the manhunt, an FBI agent--accompanied by Mexican police--interviewed relatives and staked out their home in southern Puebla state.

“That was a unique occurrence,” Carney said.

The Justice Department official added: “That was a big case. The Mexicans didn’t want him there either.”

Resendiz was convicted of capital murder in Houston this month and was sentenced to death.

*

On the Net:

U.S. Marshals most wanted:

https://www.usdoj.gov/marshals/wanted/wanted.html

FBI’s most wanted:

https://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/topten/fugitives/fugitives.htm

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Going Into Hiding

Some Americans who have sought refuge in Mexico:

* James Kopp, 44. Anti-abortion activist driven to Mexico by female friend after allegedly shooting doctor to death in 1998 sniper attack in Buffalo, N.Y. FBI Director Louis Freeh reportedly asked Mexican government for help in locating Kopp last year.

* Vincent Legrend Walters, 34. Investigators believe he killed woman in El Cajon, Calif. Also charged with intent to distribute 888 pounds of methamphetamine and possession of sawed-off shotgun. Last seen several years ago in northern Mexico when police almost caught him.

* Jesse McAllister, 21, and Bradley Price, 22. Convicted in random 1997 murder of couple waiting for sunrise on Portland, Ore., beach. After more than a year on the run, McAllister arrested in July 1998 while trying to cross border into Brownsville, Texas. Price nabbed days later at Mexico City nightclub. Both serving life sentences in U.S. prisons.

* Philip Noel Johnson, 35. Armored-car driver charged with stealing $18.8 million in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1997. Was biggest armored-car heist in U.S. history. Caught trying to cross border into Brownsville on bus later that year.

* Leon Eugene Morris, 50. Convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering 2-year-old boy in 1987. Escaped from San Diego jail two years later and lived for almost nine years as fugitive. Arrested in Monterrey and sent back to serve prison sentence of 28 years to life.