WEBB DEALINGS ON TAPE

LAREDO - In tape recorded conversation submitted as evidence Thursday, a
district attorney investigator said local bail bondsmen skimmed extra money
from clients in exchange for lowering or reducing criminal charges.

"It's part of your job," Webb County investigator Juan Alfonso Rodriguez is
heard telling a bail bondswoman. "Everybody does this."

The evidence, played aloud in the courtroom, began to move the focus in the
federal case-fixing trial from people simply linked to the district
attorney's office to those actually working inside.

Previous testimony against the five accused men mainly has focused on the .,
the 75-year-old father of the sitting district attorney.

Federal prosecutors say Castaneda and Rubio used their connections to
solicit bribes from people charged with drug, weapons and drunken driving
crimes.

In addition, the U.S. government maintains Rodriguez and another county
investigator, Agustin Mendoza, helped lower or dismiss charges in 40 cases
in return for a cut of the $200,000 in bribe money.

Defendant Carlos Manuel Rubio, brother of District Attorney Joe Rubio,
scarcely has been mentioned during this trial.

With local bail bondswoman Maria Fasci on the stand, government lawyers
played audio tapes of two conversations between Fasci and Rodriguez held in
early spring 1998.

Fasci testified that since 1989, she had been complaining to almost anyone
who would listen that county jailers, in exchange for cash, would refer
accused criminals to certain lawyers and bail bondsmen. In 1996, she said,
she met with FBI agents who began to look into those allegations.

Two years later, the FBI recorded Fasci's conversations in hopes she could
record evidence of illicit payoffs at a higher level in the district
attorney's office.

According to Thursday's tapes, Fasci, then with 13 years experience in bail
bonds, plays the role of a naive woman in a man's world.

She asks Rodriguez, a portly, silver-haired gentleman with a neatly groomed
moustache, to educate her about the inner-workings of the district
attorney's office.

Fasci is heard telling Rodriguez that clients constantly ask if she can help
them avoid going to court to face their charges. She says she always has
said no.

The district attorney investigator explains another approach: "If he doesn't
want to come back to court, tell him to give you the money for you to pay
the fine. You charge him whatever you need to charge him, aside from the
bail.

"You tell me the name. I'll flag it." Rodriguez adds. "When it arrives, I'll
write out a disposition."

"So I charge him for the fine and then for my trouble?" Fasci asks.

"Ondale (right)," he replies.

"Now I'm learning," she says.

Later, Rodriguez is heard saying: "Charge him about $700 to $750. You take
the bond out, and the fine. The rest is for you."

"All the bondsmen do that?" she asks.

"Yeah," Rodriguez replies.

Fasci twice suggests passing the money on to Rodriguez, but he said no.
"It's yours, girl."

However, Rodriguez's offers of help never turned to action, Fasci testified,
because federal agents raided the district attorney's office just a few
weeks later.

Luis Antonio Figueroa, Rodriguez's lawyer, worked through the afternoon to
paint the blond, attractive Fasci as a woman who used her feminine charms to
trap Rodriguez.

"Your lies and deceit, you made him feel comfortable. He began trusting
you," Figueroa said. "You'd flirt with him."

"I guess you could call it that," she said, later adding: "I did not set out
to entice Mr. Rodriguez. It just so happened in the process."

Fasci said they would kiss hello and hug goodbye.

"Really, it was him hugging me," Fasci said.

"And you let him hug you," Figueroa replied. "Did the FBI teach you how to
do that?"

"No sir. I learned that all by myself."

The trial is expected to last for at least two more weeks. Federal
prosecutors are expected to continue calling witnesses today.