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 veggie
Registered: 07/26/04
Posts: 13,985
Loc: 
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 Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking 
#10518730 - 06/16/09 08:08 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking
June 16, 2009 - seattlepi.com
 HOUSTON -- A classic drug lord she was not.
For starters, Elisa Castillo, a 53-year-old grandmother, had no prior criminal record and was so poor she pawned her jewelry to pay the rent on her southwest Houston shack. A son used his credit card to pay her electric bill.
All she wanted, she claims, was a bus to run and a man to love. She got both. And that's when the trouble started.
She was sentenced in May for her role in a major drug conspiracy and sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole.
Castillo's downfall shows that in the high-stakes world of borderland drug trafficking, unlikely players are lured and the U.S. government will pull no punches in putting them away.
In this case, it was Castillo, who got the harshest penalty among the approximately 68 Houston-area traffickers who were arrested and convicted as part of a recent federal probe.
"It was so crazy, like a movie," Castillo's daughter, 24-year-old Nidia Cano, said as she recalled the day a caravan of federal agents and police, supported by a helicopter, swooped in and arrested her mother.
It was at the urging of her boyfriend that Castillo become partners with a smooth-talking Gulf Cartel-connected gangster in Mexico who wanted to set up a Houston-based bus company that would cater to immigrants. Everything, including the buses, which were bought in cash, was kept in her name.
But instead of being filled with passengers, the three buses were outfitted with secret compartments used to shuttle thousands of pounds of cocaine north into the United States and millions of dollars in profits back to Mexico. Castillo claims she didn't know it was a clandestine drug operation.
Federal agents didn't buy it. At the very least, authorities said, she should have known something was wrong when bulk money and drugs were repeatedly found on the company's coaches.
"We understand that just because you never saw any dope -- smelled it, touched it or tasted it -- doesn't mean you weren't involved in the conspiracy," said Violet Szeleczky, spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration's regional office in Houston. "She thought she was so insulated that nobody would catch her."
For Castillo, it all began eight years ago when she fell for Martin Ovalle, a married bus driver six years her junior, whom she got to know while taking regular bus trips from Dallas to Monterrey to visit her sickly mother.
Both were immigrants from Mexico who came from poor families.
Ovalle made it to the sixth grade. Castillo dropped out when she was 14.
She later became a bus-station ticket taker but dreamed of more. She wanted a bus of her own, even though she couldn't afford one.
"God, I ask you to please help me to buy a bus, I want a bus," she scrawled in a handwritten spiral notebook back in 2005.
Her true passion was Ovalle, whose name is tattooed on her lower back and shoulder.
"Martin Ovalle, you have to love me … because I am more powerful than you and I order it," she wrote in her notebook, confiscated by the DEA. Castillo's attorney, Charles Banker, sought leniency in part by contending she was naive, easily duped and hung on Ovalle's every word.
Ovalle, in fact, introduced Castillo to Patricio Reynoso Galaviz, who supposedly had a bus company in Mexico and wanted to expand north of the border but needed a partner who legally resided in the United States to help him secure permits.
Reynoso, who remains a fugitive, would deposit money in Castillo's bank account to cover company expenses, but prosecutors concede she never once got the $14,000 monthly salary she was promised.
Castillo's attorney acknowledges most people would have had a clue.
"The warning bells which should have sounded in the head of a reasonable, prudent, normal person simply were not triggered for Elisa Castillo when the government seizures of drugs and money began to transpire," he wrote in court papers.
In a DEA recording of a phone conversation between Castillo and one of Castillo's drivers, who called her after he'd been busted with drugs, she was strangely unemotional.
She didn't blow her top or ask him what drugs he was talking about. She asked him if he could find a ride back to Houston.
As U.S. District Judge Sim Lake prepared to sentence her last month for the conspiracy that involved drugs and money laundering, a shackled Castillo stood her ground.
"I am not guilty of this," she told Lake. "I didn't know anything."
The judge, based on her being a manager in the conspiracy, followed federal guidelines for how much time she'd receive.
Looking on was the so-called love of her life, Ovalle, who moments later was sentenced to just 25 years.
The two are forbidden to have any contact and probably will never see each other again.
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 pftek
1337
Registered: 08/18/08
Posts: 832
Last seen: 2 years, 7 months
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Re: Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking [Re: veggie]
#10519508 - 06/16/09 10:24 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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"The two are forbidden to have any contact and probably will never see each other again."
Ouch. Ouch.
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Corrie
Alice in Vudervand
Registered: 03/09/09
Posts: 405
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Re: Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking [Re: pftek]
#10519733 - 06/16/09 11:08 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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FTP. 
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Experimental Paradise
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ToiletDuk
Give me Librium or give me Meth!
Registered: 05/17/03
Posts: 81,259
Loc: Earthfarm 1
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Re: Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking [Re: veggie]
#10520129 - 06/17/09 12:30 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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They should have have given her some leniency for having no priors. Life without the possibilty of parole - harsh!
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pasucks
Stranger
Registered: 03/15/09
Posts: 255
Loc: pennsyltuckey
Last seen: 3 years, 6 months
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Re: Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking [Re: ToiletDuk]
#10522164 - 06/17/09 08:18 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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See you in hell judge.
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dwpineal
Psychedelic Artist
Registered: 07/20/06
Posts: 4,438
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Re: Love led a Texas grandmother to prison for drug trafficking [Re: veggie]
#16208942 - 05/10/12 10:11 AM (1 year, 12 days ago) |
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UPDATE:
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Drug-crime-sends-first-time-offender-grandmom-to-3547226.php
Drug crime sends first-time offender grandmom to prison for life
Houstonian, who has no secrets to trade, is doing more time than drug lords
FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn't offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime.
But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole.
"It is ridiculous," said Castillo, who is a generation older than her cell mates, and is known as "grandma" at the prison here. "I am no one."
Convicted of being a manager in the conspiracy, she is serving a longer sentence than some of the hemisphere's most notorious crime bosses - men who had multimillion-dollar prices on their heads before their capture.
The drug capos had something to trade: the secrets of criminal organizations. The biggest drug lords have pleaded guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences.
Castillo said she has nothing to offer in a system rife with inconsistencies and behind-the-scenes scrambling that amounts to a judicial game of Let's Make A Deal.
"Our criminal justice system is broke; it needs to be completely revamped," declared Terry Nelson, who was a federal agent for over 30 years and is on the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "They have the power, and if you don't play the game, they'll throw the book at you."
Castillo maintains her innocence, saying she was tricked into unknowingly helping transport drugs and money for a big trafficker in Mexico. But she refused to plead guilty and went to trial.
In 2010, of 1,766 defendants prosecuted for federal drug offenses in the Southern District of Texas - a region that reaches from Houston to the border - 93.2 percent pleaded guilty rather than face trial, according to the U.S. government. Just 10 defendants were acquitted at trial, and 82 saw their cases dismissed.
The statistics are similar nationwide.
The latest case in point came this week with the negotiated surrender of a Colombian drug boss Javier Calle Serna, whom the United States accuses of shipping at least 30 tons of cocaine.
While how much time Calle will face is not known publicly, he likely studied other former players, including former Gulf Cartel lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
Cardenas once led one of Mexico's most powerful syndicates and created the Zetas gang. He pleaded guilty in Houston and is to be released by 2025. He'll be 57.
As the federal prison system has no parole, Castillo has no prospect of ever going home.
"Any reasonable person would look at this and say, 'God, are you kidding?' " said attorney David Bires, who represented Castillo on an unsuccessful appeal. "It is not right."
Castillo's elderly mother in Mexico has not been told she's serving life, and her toddler grandson thinks she's in the hospital when he comes to visit her in prison.
Castillo is adamant about her innocence.
"Put yourself in my shoes. When you are innocent, you are innocent," she said. "I don't say I am perfect. I am not … but I can guarantee you 100 percent that I am innocent of this."
At the urging of her boyfriend, Martin Ovalle, Castillo became partners with a smooth-talking Mexican resident who said he wanted to set up a Houston-based bus company.
But the buses were light on passengers and shuttled thousands of pounds of cocaine into the United States and millions of dollars back to Mexico. Her lawyers argued she was naive.
Castillo claims she didn't know about the drug operation, but agents said she should have known something was wrong when quantities of money and drugs were repeatedly found on the coaches.
"After hearing all the evidence as presented from both the government and defense in this case, the jury found her guilty … ," said Kenneth Magidson, chief prosecutor here.
Former federal prosecutor Mark W. White III said if Castillo had something to share, she might have benefited from a sentence reduction for cooperating.
"Information is a cooperating defendant's stock in trade," White said, "and if you don't have any, … the chances are you won't get a good deal."
Castillo has faith that she'll somehow, some day, go free. Her daily routine doesn't vary: when she eats breakfast, when she works, when she exercises, and when she brushes her hair, which has gone from red-blond to black and gray. The gray gets respect in prison.
"I will leave here one day with my head held high," she said. "I don't feel like a bug or a cockroach. I am a human being, with my feet firmly on the ground."
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