DRUG DEALER MAY BE FIRST EXECUTED BY FEDS SINCE '63

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - A marijuana smuggler sentenced to die for the murders of
three men who betrayed him stands to become the first person executed by the
federal government since 1963.

Juan Raul Garza also is first in line to die by injection at the new federal
death house outside Terre Haute. He's one of 20 men, including Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh, awaiting federal execution at the U.S. prison here.

In July, Garza filed his final possible appeal, a step none of the other
prisoners has yet taken. The Supreme Court is expected to consider the
appeal within the next month.

If the high court rejects his pleas and President Clinton grants no
clemency, he could be executed soon after. The last federal execution was 36
years ago, when Victor Feguer was hanged in Iowa for kidnapping and killing
a doctor.

Garza, 42, declined to be interviewed. But in a 1994 interview with The
Associated Press, the native of Brownsville, Texas, proclaimed his innocence.

"I didn't kill any of those people," he said, then the lone federal inmate
on death row in Huntsville. "I'm not responsible."

Garza was convicted under a 1988 federal drug-kingpin law, which imposes a
death sentence for murder resulting from large-scale illegal drug dealing.

But he insisted in the interview that he was no tycoon. Authorities, Garza
then said, "never found a red cent. They even went into my backyard with
backhoes. They were under the impression I had money."

Gregory Wiercioch, Garza's appeals lawyer at the Texas Defender Service in
Houston, declined to talk about the case before the Supreme Court acts.

In his appeal, Garza argues that prosecutors at his sentencing improperly
linked him to four unsolved murders in Mexico using testimony from
accomplices who were promised lighter sentences. His right to due process
also was violated, he says, because it was hard to defend against foreign
unsolved crimes.

An intense, muscular man, Garza came from a family of farm workers. He was
picking fruit by age 5 and never finished high school, said his defense
attorney, Philip Hilder. As an adult, he was a railroad brakeman and built
houses. His second wife is a preacher's daughter and her family spoke well
of Garza before he was sentenced.

The criminal case against Garza told another story -- and caused a sensation
in Brownsville, a city bordering Mexico that is so popular with smugglers
it's called "Marijuana Boulevard."

At his 1993 federal trial, prosecutors portrayed Garza as a vicious drug
boss who controlled underlings by killing those -- even a son-in-law -- who
got out of line. The prosecution's 66 witnesses included one of Garza's nephews.

In closing arguments, Hilder called his client "less than an angel" but no
drug baron. After all, he said, Garza lived in a mobile home on two acres.
Hilder also protested against testimony "bought and paid for."

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Jose Angel Moreno called Garza a drug lord who
"thought he was so far above the law that killing was just a matter of
business." He praised witnesses who risked their lives to come forward.

Garza was convicted of ordering two men killed in 1990 and personally
murdering a third in 1991, all in Brownsville. He also was convicted of
money-laundering and running a marijuana pipeline that, from 1982 to 1992,
brought tons of pot from Mexico for shipment to Louisiana and Michigan.

The mix of charges enabled prosecutors to apply the federal Anti-Drug Abuse
Act. Garza could be the first to die under this drug-kingpin law.