Cover Story: SIN OF OMISSION

A Family Affair

Roland Garcia has the political backing to be the U.S. Attorney for South
Texas. He also has a brother imprisoned for murder and drug trafficking
a fact he somehow forgot to tell his congressional sponsors. That may not
be enough to disqualify him, but it should cause Texas Democrats to
reconsider the system they use to pick federal appointees.

By RICHARD CONNELLY

Roland Garcia Jr. is, by all accounts, a nice guy.

He has an earnest, sincere manner, a taste for hard work and an ability for
quiet but determined selfpromotion that have served him well as he's
climbed the rungs of the Texas legal and political establishment.

A Corpus Christi native, the first of his immediate family to graduate from
college, Garcia came into Houston as an outsider, a Hispanic who worked his
way though the unglamorous South Texas College of Law; by the age of 38 he
had landed a lucrative partnership at an elite downtown firm, the
presidency of the Texas Young Lawyers Association, the friendship of many
key Democratic politicians and he thought a shot at the prestigious
position of United States Attorney for Houston and the Southern District of
Texas.

November 8 was a big day for Roland Garcia Jr: There he was on the front
page of the paper, pictured bustling about his office answering calls
congratulating him for being recommended for the U.S. Attorney's job by the
five Democratic members of the Southern District's congressional delegation.

His family, he says, was bursting with pride that day. But one member of
that family probably took a little longer to get the news Garcia's
younger brother, Edgar Arnold Garcia, was sitting in a federal prison,
serving time for running a huge marijuanasmuggling operation and brutally
killing a onetime colleague who crossed him.

Roland Garcia somehow never saw fit to mention to his congressional
sponsors or their staffs that he had a younger brother in prison he's
given a series of startlingly disingenuous reasons for not bothering to do
so and the disclosure has darkened his chances for getting approval from
the White House and the Republicancontrolled Senate for the job. The flap
has also raised questions about the comically chaotic methods used to pick
a candidate for the critical post, methods that, critics say, were only
window dressing for a pick that came down to a political calculus that was
surprisingly cynical even for these times.

Roland Garcia may yet become U.S. Attorney the five members of Congress
from South Texas still back him as their recommendation, at least publicly
but the story of his choice is one of a family's heartbreak over drugs,
of political ambition and power, and, seemingly, of a respected lawyer's
belief that he could make a dark family episode go away simply by not
mentioning it.

Talking about his brother is still not one of Roland Garcia's favorite
things to do. Resigned to performing damage control, he'll sit for an
interview but only on the phone. And he doesn't want the rest of the
family getting involved.

"My parents are just devastated," he says of the initial wave of publicity
about his brother. "My mother cried for days. We all love my brother. It's
a tragic thing drugs have victimized a lot of families."

Garcia is the oldest of five; he says he's not sure how old his brother is
("36 or 37..."). The family grew up in Corpus Christi's Country Club
Estates, an older enclave of wealth that is now overshadowed by newer, more
modern neighborhoods of the city's elite.

His father dabbled in real estate and owned half of Hacienda Records, a
respected independent Tejano recording label run mostly by Garcia's uncle.

The family has turned out well one of Garcia's siblings is a lawyer,
another an investment banker.

There was little indication Edgar would end up any differently. "Growing
up, we were very close we were in Boy Scouts together, we played Little
League together," Garcia says. "The family all went to church, we were
Catholic.... But families, sometimes even with loving parents, can be
impacted by the evils of drugs. It's unfortunate, but my younger brother
got seduced."

Edgar began working as a sound engineer at the family's recording studio,
according to one of the prosecutors who handled his conviction. He met
bands, began traveling with them on tour "and learned very quickly he could
make contacts in the drug world," says Greg McMahon, chief of special
prosecutions for Florida's Eighth Judicial Circuit. "He started in Texas,
moved to Louisiana and eventually came east to the rural areas of our
circuit."

None of the other members of the family were ever implicated in any part of
the operation, but eventually Edgar controlled one of the larger South
Texas drug operations.

Part of the operation involved fronting large amounts of drugs, almost
exclusively marijuana, to local dealers, including his man in Florida, a
sad sack named Marty Cryer. Cryer was eventually fronted over a hundred
pounds of dope, worth about $100,000 on the street, and was evading
attempts to pay up.

Edgar Garcia sent word out to Cryer through the drug network that it was
time to settle his accounts; when that failed, Garcia, in February 1991,
went to Florida with some lieutenants to take matters into his own hands.

They rented cars and started looking, eventually finding Cryer's car parked
in the lot of a cheap motel in tiny Chiefland, Florida. When they stormed
Cryer's room, their guns drawn, they found him with his wife, a
fouryearold daughter and his motherinlaw.

After moving the women and child to an adjoining room, Garcia pumped nine
shots into Cryer's body, enough to kill him several times over.

"Garcia said, 'I was afraid he was going to go for a gun,' " says
prosecutor McMahon. "But another guy who was there said that [Cryer] was so
doped up he couldn't respond to Garcia, and that Garcia just got frustrated."

Garcia fled the scene, briefly taking the dead man's family with him (the
motherinlaw, at least, was deeply involved in the drug operation, McMahon
says). He hid out for a while in the Corpus area and then moved to Boston,
where he found a church organization and posed as an illegal alien escaping
political persecution in his native land.

From there, Garcia moved to Madonna House, a Catholic religious retreat
near Ottawa, Canada. Officials there described him as a conscientious,
quiet worker, and were shocked when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came
and arrested him in June 1991 (Phone records had given him away, McMahon
says).

Years of legal wrangling followed, but eventually Garcia was extradited to
the U.S. when Florida agreed to waive the death penalty. Garcia pleaded
guilty this year to federal drugtrafficking and state murder charges. He
is serving 30 years in federal prison.

By the time the younger Garcia's troubles began, his older brother Roland
had begun moving in a totally different sphere. He graduated from Baylor in
1981 and, five years later, while working for Shell Oil to finance himself,
he got his law degree from South Texas.

"I went off to college," Roland Garcia says. "And I really haven't been
back to Corpus Christi except for the holidays. I never really kept up with
[my brother] I knew he dropped out of high school, and eventually got
his GED, but no one in the family knew about the things he was apparently
getting into. We were all shocked by it."

Roland testified on his brother's behalf, asking the judge for leniency in
sentencing. "I was surprised at the contrast," prosecutor McMahon says.
"Here was this very successful young lawyer, versus the brother who had
obviously taken the other path."

Garcia hugged his brother on the way up to the witness stand momentarily
startling court officials who frown on such contact with inmates and
tried to convince the judge that his brother should be released for time
served, because he regretted his mistakes and because his father was ill.

"It was heartfelt and sincere he said that [Edgar] was a member of the
family, that he loved him but it was kind of naive," McMahon says.

Roland Garcia's efforts failed to sway the judge. The extended family
pitched in to help raise Edgar's three preteen children and, except for the
occasional phone call from prison, his brother's life began to have even
less to do with Roland's fast track to success.

Roland got hired by Vinson & Elkins, and almost immediately plunged into a
crushing work schedule. He also played an active role helping thenCity
Councilman Vince Ryan, who was pushing law firms who did business with the
city to recruit and hire more minorities. The pair, and others, pressed
management at the city's largest firms to open up their recruiting
procedures beyond chasing the top students from the University of Texas and
the nation's elite law schools.

Results have been mixed, at best, but Ryan says he appreciated Garcia's
willingness to try.

"He was very helpful," Ryan says. "As a relatively young associate in a big
firm, he would do it, and that's a time when it is not necessarily the way
to move up, rocking the boat.... We were trying to get firms to attract and
retain minority attorneys. It took a little guts on his part: In those
cultures, working 60 hours a week and keeping your head low is the way to
get ahead, and he definitely wasn't keeping his head low."

On the other hand, it was a chance for a juniorlevel associate to come in
contact with key players at the city's top firms. Garcia was no radical
when it came to pushing Ryan's project cooperation rather than
confrontation is definitely his method ("He has a very pleasant style, very
easygoing," Ryan says) and he soon grabbed the notice of former state
Supreme Court justice John Hill, a name partner in Houston's Liddell, Sapp,
Zivley, Hill & LaBoon.

Hill recruited Garcia to his firm, where he has specialized in civil
litigation and mergers of healthcare companies. Along the way, Garcia has
nurtured ties to the Democratic Party, working on campaigns for city
controllerelect Sylvia Garcia and becoming fast friends with state
Senators Mario Gallegos and John Whitmire.

It was the intercession of those last two politicians, Garcia says, that
first turned him on the road to the U.S. Attorney's office. Applying for
the job had not even crossed his mind, he says, when incumbent Gaynelle
Griffin Jones announced in October that she was leaving. That's perhaps not
surprising, given Garcia's neartotal inexperience with criminal law.

"The day Gaynelle Griffin Jones announced her resignation, I got a call,"
says Garcia. "Immediately, people were asking me to consider the position.
Senator Gallegos was the first he said, 'Roland, I want to send your
name to the White House.' I think they wanted a Hispanic trial attorney to
consider the position."

Another key player was Whitmire, newly ensconced at Liddell, Sapp (as a
thankyou, some critics grumble, for his yeoman work in the last session
pushing the baseballstadium bill on behalf of firm client Drayton McLane).
Whitmire is tight with Congressman Gene Green, who represents a largely
Hispanic district in Houston and was all but guaranteed to be lobbying for
a Hispanic nominee.

Neither Whitmire nor Gallegos returned calls about Garcia, but by the day
after Jones's resignation announcement, the civil attorney had become a
leading candidate for the post.

"I thought it was a good opportunity, something that I would enjoy and be
good at," Garcia says. "It wasn't something I had thought about I've got
a lucrative law practice, and this will be a tremendous pay cut.... It's a
twoandahalf year appointment, so I'll probably be using most of my
savings to hold me over."

(The Texas Lawyer, a weekly legal publication, reported in its most recent
survey of lawfirm finances that Liddell, Sapp's "profits per partner,"
roughly analogous to salary, were $348,000. The U.S. Attorney in Houston
makes $115,700 a year.)

Despite the financial concerns and a professed feeling that "I wouldn't get
it and that it was just an honor to be considered," Garcia activated one of
the most aggressive campaigns for a patronage job that Southern District
congressional staffers can remember.

"You wouldn't believe the number of letters and calls we got, and the
caliber of people doing it," one staffer says. Among those acting on
Garcia's behalf were Metro Chairman Holcomb Crosswell, former Metro chair
Billy Burge, Port of Houston Chairman Ned Holmes, state Representatives
Garnett Coleman and Domingo Garcia, and prominent attorneys such as Richard
Trevathan and Lynne Liberato.

"I joked with him I said, 'You knocked down a forest with all these
letters,' " Green says.

Garcia paints the letterwriting effort as a spontaneous outpouring of
support on his behalf. "I had people calling me and writing, saying,
'Roland, how can I help you, I know you'd be great in the job,' " he says.
"Essentially it was a collaborative effort between both the minority
community and the business community they came together in an active,
joint effort to help out."

Spontaneous or not, Garcia's campaign was just about the only thing that
was organized in the selection process. With no Texas Democrat in the U.S.
Senate, and with the state's Democratic House delegation lacking a dominant
leader, the five members of Congress charged with making the choice
stumbled through a comedy of errors.

Applicants for the job filled out a brief questionnaire asking for such
rudimentary information as name, address and educational history; they then
waited for further instructions. The next thing they knew, nine
semifinalists were told to fly up to Washington with only a few days
notice forking out $1,300 or so for lastminute airfare.

When they got there, they were greeted not by a poised staff ready with a
precise schedule of interviews with the congressional delegation, but with
a collective shrug of the shoulders.

No interviews were scheduled, the applicants were told; if they wanted to
meet the representatives, well, they were all scattered around Capitol
Hill, frantically trying to wrap up the session and deal with the
politically charged vote on extending President Clinton's fasttrack
negotiating authority.

Almost immediately, candidates realized their trips would be wasted unless
they started scouring the halls for the harried representatives.

"It was just bizarre," one applicant says.

Another agrees. "I think the congressmen were kind of embarrassed by the
lack of planning," the applicant says. "They were just kind of squeezing us
in, in between votes. We were meeting them in caucus rooms, in committee
rooms, in their offices, wherever we could track them down."

The actual voting by the delegation was also a hurried affair, with the
discussion lasting less than an hour (well less, according to some sources)
in a meeting conducted on the fly between floor votes.

In the end, all the rushing around had little effect. Filling plum
political jobs in the Southern District has become a matter of math, with
Gene Green joining with the two congressmen from Corpus and the Valley to
have a Hispanic appointed.

That, critics say, is how journeyman state judge Ruben Guerrero got chosen
earlier this year over Keith Ellison, an Anglo with an Ivy League
education, a Rhodes Scholarship and a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship on his
r‚sum‚. And that, they say, is how Garcia got the nod.

The two South Texas representatives wanted Carlos Valdez, Corpus Christi's
popular district attorney; Green insisted on a Houstonian, so his South
Texas counterparts went along provided Valdez was named as an alternate
choice, which he was. Garcia's being a Corpus native also helped his chances.

Green had, for a time, pushed for Houston City Councilwoman Gracie Saenz,
but her boomlet was shortlived because of her antiabortion views. ("You
can't imagine the amount of letters you receive if you're a Democrat
thinking of appointing someone the prochoice and Planned Parenthood people
don't want," one congressional staffer groaned.)

Another candidate pushed by Green and Gallegos was Berta Mejia, an
assistant city attorney and former state district judge. The candidates of
the two other Houstonarea Democrats also showed just how blatantly the
ethnic factor played into the choice: Representative Ken Bentsen pushed for
two fellow Anglos, former federal prosecutors Phil Hilder and Tom Hagemann,
and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee's candidates were two fellow
AfricanAmericans, U.S. Magistrate Calvin Botley and Assistant U.S.
Attorney Cedric Joubert.

One losing candidate says the method for filling the slot was "so
constituencydriven" because the state no longer has a dominant Democrat. A
senator from the same party as the president typically makes the choice for
such a job; until he was ousted in 1994, powerful Democratic Congressman
Jack Brooks dominated the process during the Clinton administration. The
Southern District's current delegation is made up of relative newcomers to
the House and so, critics say, the jobfilling process has degenerated.

"The difficulty stems from not having a Democratic senator," says one
losing candidate who claims to be completely disillusioned by the
experience. "When it comes down to a level of people who are so
constituencydriven, you don't get a search for the most qualified person."

In fact, when filling the federal judge position that eventually went to
Guerrero, the five representatives at first threw up their hands and sent a
list of four names from which the White House could choose. Baffled
administration officials rejected the unusual method and told the group to
compromise on a single name.

Knowing the White House wouldn't accept a multiplechoice for the U.S.
Attorney's job, the delegation voted 32 for Garcia. The pick was made
unanimous for public consumption, and Garcia's name was announced November 7.

Garcia's campaign didn't end there: "Within minutes of the vote," one
surprised congressional staffer says, "he was out there giving TV
interviews and press conferences. Typically, the nominee plays it pretty
lowkey and puts himself in the White House's hands, but he jumped out
himself. I guess if you live by the sword, you die by the sword."

Ten days after he was recommended for the post, events began to turn sour
for Garcia. Someone the popular theory is that it was one of the jilted
applicants leaked word to the Houston Chronicle about Garcia's brother,
and the putative nominee's asking for leniency for a convicted murderer.

Garcia's luck held for a while: The Chronicle, displaying the
aggressiveness that comes with being a monopoly daily, sat on the story for
days. Garcia scrambled in the interim to call the representatives in a
belated effort to warn them of the situation. But KTRH/740 AM radio broke
the news on Wednesday, November 19, and it ended up on the Chronicle's
front page the next day.

"I did get a call from the reporter, and right after that I called every
member of the congressional delegation," Garcia says. "I didn't want the
Congress members to be caught without any information [the media] had. I
told them I'd be happy to answer any questions and I wanted to see what
they thought."

What they thought, according to staff members, was that they had been burned.

"It's just amazing that he didn't think it would come out at some point,"
one staff member says. "Why he didn't inoculate himself, it just shows no
political common sense."

"This kind of laundry, you've got to come in waving it in front of you,"
says another. "You just put it on the table and deal with it."

Just why Garcia chose not to, of course, only he can answer. And he's given
a series of answers, none of them all that convincing. "I said to him
'Roland, in a case like this, the way to go is full disclosure up front,' "
Green says. "He told me he thought it was common knowledge. I know I didn't
know about it, and none of the five members knew about it. He just said he
thought it was fairly common knowledge and that it was a family affair."

Garcia told the Chronicle his brother's conviction "has been a matter of
public record."

In an interview with the Press, Garcia maintained he "never tried to hide
anything. None of that [asking about any potential embarrassments] was in
the questionnaire or on the interviews."

He offered a threepronged argument: Most convincingly, he said he should
not be judged on his brother's actions; less convincingly, he said, "It
never occurred to me that my brother being in jail would have an affect on
the nomination"; and, least convincingly, the political veteran claims he
didn't consider that Republican senators might make an issue out of the
affair.

"I am new to any of the inner workings or the procedures used in the
national confirmation process," he said. "I just didn't know about it. At
the time, I had no clue about those procedures."

Such a view is either incredibly naive or aggressively disingenuous,
congressional staffers say.

"People appointed by Bill Clinton, even for lowerlevel positions than
this, it's amazing the things they will have to explain [to
investigators]," one staffer says. "I mean, stuff like fallouts with high
school girlfriends, temperamental behavior when you're 19 years old and
your hormones are raging."

A blueribbon screening committee, such as those used by Republicans in the
ReaganBush era and by Democratic Senator Bob Krueger, would have asked,
somewhere along the line, whether a potential nominee had anything
embarrassing in his past. But in the frenzied interviewing process that
resulted in Garcia's pick, the question was never asked.

"It's not our job to vet candidates," a staffer offers by way of a defense.
"That's the FBI's and the White House's job."

Such "vetting" is becoming increasingly important as national partisan
politics plays an everwidening role in filling federal jobs. The Clinton
administration says Senate Republicans have intentionally delayed approving
nominees, noting that some judicial candidates have been waiting for a
Senate vote for more than two years.

And Republican Senator Phil Gramm has made national headlines by blocking
one of Clinton's judicial choices, Michael Schattman of Fort Worth, because
he found Schattman to be too political. Neither Gramm nor Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison have commented on Garcia's recommendation.

Without being directly asked by anyone about potential embarrassments,
Garcia saw no need to volunteer information. "For our family's sake and for
my brother's children's sake, we've tried to keep my brother's life
private," he says. "I've never felt it was relevant to my professional
career. When I try a suit, when I'm interviewed for a job, when I ran for
president [of the young lawyers' group], I never felt the need to say, 'By
the way, my brother's in prison.' It's not a normal reaction, to go into
details like that."

The congressmen and their staffs were clearly upset when they learned the
news. "I've told him, 'You should've told us,' " Green says. "But I've
gotten past that. He's still a quality candidate."

Green's affirmation of the choice has been publicly echoed by the other
four members of the delegation partly due to another campaign by Garcia.

Within days of the news hitting the media, the representatives again began
receiving faxes and calls, this time urging them not to dump Garcia.

Once he ascertained that his sponsors would be sticking with him, Garcia
moved on to the media. He said he got a call from U.S. Representative
Solomon Ortiz of Corpus Christi, the dean of the delegation, on November
21, informing him that Ortiz "had spoken to all the members and they had
reaffirmed their unanimous support."

"That day I called the Chronicle and said, 'Hey, you guys ran a piece that
this [controversy] was casting doubt on my nomination, but it's been
reaffirmed, so why not run a piece saying so?' I complained, and then some
of my friends called and complained, and luckily they finally did run a
story that explained the actual status," Garcia says.

The Chronicle's story, on the front page of the November 27 issue, was
headlined "Garcia still Democrats' top choice."

While he may remain the official top choice of the delegation, whether he
will make it through the White House, much less the Senate, is debatable.

"I think the nomination probably is in trouble, not because it's fair but
because the White House has so much trouble getting anyone through the
Senate these days," says Green, who nonetheless maintains he would have
voted for Garcia even if he had learned about Garcia's brother at the
interview stage.

"It's gonna take a huge amount of effort to get him through," says a
staffer. "It's gonna take not just a Virgin Mary, but a Republican Virgin
Mary, to get through the Senate, much less someone who's been in the paper
with something like this."

Privately, some staffers expect the White House to deliver the bad news to
Garcia after the FBI investigations of both him and runnerup Carlos Valdez.

Garcia adamantly insists that isn't so, and he rails against anonymous
sources who call into question his chances.

"If anyone felt I should not go forward I'd have thought I'd have heard
that by now," he says. "But I've heard nothing but support and
encouragement. I'm getting letters from people I don't even know. There's
been an incredible amount of support communitywide. You'd be surprised how
many people have a cousin, or a sister, or somebody who has problems."

That's true, of course, and even Garcia's critics say that his brother's
actions should not play a role in whether he wins the post. But the way the
situation came out, with an air of coverup, only serves to give
Republicans ammunition to block Garcia until so late in Clinton's term that
the process would be a moot point.

If that scenario occurs, Garcia will have paid a high price for family
loyalty and, some would say, for trying to keep that act of loyalty
private while still ambitiously trying to climb in the political world.

While he says he could have better handled the manner in which the story
came out, Garcia quietly insists he wouldn't change anything he did for his
family.

"We all have brothers and we all have families," he says softly. "We all
have we don't get to pick who our family is. I abhor what he did, but I
still love my brother."

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