419. Texas [redacted]

The great medical journalist and commentator Atul Gawande published an eye-opening piece about health care costs in McAllen, Texas, last June.  He reported that health costs were twice as high in McAllen, in Hidalgo County down near the Gulf, than in demographically-similar El Paso.  

Although Gawande didn't use the kind of recklessly intemperate language one might expect from, for instance, a blogger, I know for a fact that at least one reader came away from his article believing the explanation was that McAllen's medical establishment was comprehensively corrupt.

It may not have been only the medical establishment.  From today's McAllen Monitor:

Thousands of criminal cases in one of Hidalgo County’s misdemeanor courts were called into question Wednesday with the arrest of two of its employees on bribery charges.

Daniel Vega, the court coordinator in County Court-at-law No. 5, and his assistant Javier Mireles were caught on video offering to dismiss a case in exchange for a $4,000 payment, Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said.

And while their arrests are tied to one specific payment that came from an undercover investigator, authorities believe similar behavior may have been going on for years, affecting hundreds of criminal defendants.

“I don’t believe that this was their first time at bat,” the sheriff said.

Four thousand for a misdemeanor??

But exactly how the pair allegedly engineered the dismissal of the case in question remained unclear Wednesday afternoon. Charging documents — including the probable cause affidavits filed for both their arrests — were sealed to protect the ongoing investigation, [District Attorney Rene] Guerra said. ...

All filings pertaining to the bribery scheme will likely remain barred from public review for the considerable future, said Guerra.

“To be honest, I want to seal them for as long as possible,” he said. “I want to protect the investigation right now.”

Investigating corruption in secrecy seems to be a new Texas tradition.  El Paso as spent five years with a political corruption investigation carefully hidden from the voters. 

One of the accused in the El Paso case is a former Texas district court judge, the wider-than-he-is-tall Manuel Barraza, who was indicted just three months after taking the bench, apparently based on his alleged pre-swearing-in plans to work out a private and mutually-beneficial deal with an alleged drug dealer.

We'll be hearing more about El Paso in coming months.  (Or will we?)  But in the meantime, see if you notice any consistent threads running through the headlines of the most-viewed stories on the El Paso Times website for the past 12 hours:

# Man accused in wife's killing was from El Paso
# Kidnapper testifies Texan was killed in Mexico
# Man allegedly runs former wife off road
# Mexican prison brawl leaves 23 dead
# Student sex case against former Andress coach dismissed
# 3 alleged gang members charged in death of Texas man
# Three teenagers charged in Adam Espinoza murder
# No decisions yet for Marmolejo
# Deaths may be murder-suicide
# Barraza trial: Sheriff's detective initiated investigation of ousted...

Man, I tell you, El Paso belongs in New Mexico, which is where it was administratively lodged for the first couple of centuries of its existence.

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