Judging Mexican Judge Curiel

Unlike Pete Hegseth, Gonzalo Curiel did not fight drug trafficking from a desk deep within the Pentagon, ordering the most powerful military in history to attack helpless people in little boats.

Before he became a federal district judge, Gonzalo Curiel fought to bring down, and was marked for death by, some of the scariest people on the planet.

Like some comic book superhero, he went underground, surfacing only to surprise, battle, and bring down the most vicious drug cartels imaginable.

To grasp the danger that was involved, we can go back in history that I can remember from my youth, when that history was still defined as current events.

Very few of those with whom I have worked or associated with after working hours remembered the television program I’ve Got a Secret. It was a panel show in which a group of semi-celebrities asked questions of a guest and tried to guess some secret that only the guest and the television host knew. A couple of those episodes bore some historical significance beyond the show itself.

One, aired in 1956, reminds me even today of how close we remain to the history we learned from textbooks as kids. The secret of a 95-year-old guest, Samuel J. Seymour, was that he had been in the theater audience when President Lincoln had been shot in 1865. Samuel had been 5 years old. He lived to tell about it on national television.

The other segment became part of a different side of history. It resulted in two murders involving organized crime.

The guest on that half hour in 1952 was Arnold Schuster, a clothing salesman from New York. His secret was that, while riding on a subway from work, he had recognized a wanted criminal. The fugitive was the famous Willie Sutton. Sutton is famous for his answer to a simple question: Why do you rob banks? His answer was simple, “That’s where the money is.”

Willie Sutton had escaped from prison. Arnold Schuster saw him, ran to find a police officer, and pointed him out.

When the secret was finally revealed to the television celebrity panel, the audience applauded, and a few days later Arnold Schuster was murdered on a New York City street.

There was never enough evidence to charge crime boss Albert Anastasia. But one informant told authorities the mobster had happened to be watching the popular television show and had experienced a Donald Trump level of anger.

“I can’t stand squealers!” he reportedly shouted. “Hit that guy!”

Public anger was intense and sustained. Nobody knows how much crime figures lost, but the crackdown on revenue centers was severe. The financial cost had to have been substantial enough to hurt a lot. Crime bosses had good reason to get really angry at Albert Anastasia for killing that civilian.

When Anastasia was himself assassinated a few years later, that lost income was thought to have been the main reason. He should not have had Arnold Schuster killed.

In those days, crime families did not allow the killing of innocent civilians. The cost was too high. The only curb on violence that was stronger than that against killing a civilian was that against killing any member of law enforcement. Public retribution would have been high and profits would go way down for a long, long time.

When other crime figures discovered in 1935 that Dutch Schultz had put a contract on the life of New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey, Lucky Luciano and others ordered the execution of Dutch Schultz, very probably saving the life of Thomas Dewey.

Those were the days, weren’t they?

Times change, and so do the practical calculations of criminal ethics.

For some public figures, the possibility of murder has been more distinct and less distant. Harry Reid was chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission when he refused to back down to organized crime. His outburst became legend when one figure offered him $12,000 for casino licenses. He yelled, “You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me!” as he tried to choke the life out of the culprit. Reid was wearing a wire and had federal authorities hiding in an adjoining room. FBI agents pulled Reid off, and the suspect was convicted and sent to prison.

When Harry’s wife Landra experienced car trouble a while after that, mechanics found a bomb that was improperly grounded and had failed to explode. Even family station wagons, and the families inside, were no longer out of bounds. That was 1981.

Harry Reid eventually became a United States Senator.

20 years later, the trajectory of danger had continued upward. The Chief of the United States Narcotics Enforcement Division had decided to go further than most investigators had gone. He did not simply cooperate with Mexican authorities in attacking drug cartels. He did not stop at assigning investigators to work on cases in Mexico. He traveled there himself and sat across from thugs with some of the biggest reputations in violent crime.

Although he was born and bred in Indiana, his parents had come to the United States from Mexico more than 50 years before. He was familiar with Mexico, the language, the customs, the nuances of culture. He used that knowledge to hit drug kingpins where it hurt.

And he made progress.

Some of those on his side of the table, Mexican law enforcement officials, were marked for assassination. Some died. With each death, Mexican public opinion turned angrily against the drug trade.

As he and his Mexican law enforcement allies destroyed most of the infrastructure of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana and closed in on the leaders, a wiretap picked up a key conversation. It was startling. Gonzalo Curiel had personally been targeted for assassination.

This was no longer just business. It was personal, angry, and direct. The United States Chief of the Narcotics Enforcement Division had been marked for murder by the enraged leaders of the Mexican drug cartel.

That is how Gonzalo Curiel began operating the United States side of the anti-cartel campaign from hiding. Nobody knew where he was, or when he would briefly show up. His orders were consistent. His surprise appearances kept the criminal enterprise off-balance.

At times, he would come out of hiding to personally argue cases against the cartel in Federal Appeals Court.

In the end, he survived and the Tijuana cartel died, it’s leaders in prison.

Gonzalo Curiel now presides as Senior Judge over the United States District Court for the Southern District of California.

One case became the focus of national interest. A class action against Donald Trump’s Trump University did not go well for Mr. Trump. Donald Trump and his lawyers had demanded that most documentary evidence be kept sealed in order to protect trade secrets. Judge Curiel instead ordered that documents in the case be made public.

It was difficult to see any trade secrets, because there were none. In fact, the documents demonstrated multiple instances of deceptive practice that overlapped into fraud. The victims ranged from ordinary middle-class people to those on the ragged edge of financial desperation.

Those sneaky tactics were the only trade secrets.

A furious Donald Trump went ballistic. The judge had no right to issue those rulings. Trump could not argue against the evidence or Judge Curiel’s legal reasoning. Instead, he based his rage on ethnicity.

Gonzalo Curiel was not a true American.

Curiel was born and raised in Indiana. But because his parents came from Mexico in 1946, he should be considered a Mexican. Because he is a Mexican, he should have been prohibited from judging any aspect of the fraud case against Donald Trump. Trump, after all, was a real American.

Gonzalo Curiel was a hands-on leader in the fight against a major drug cartel, a group famous for the ruthless murder of law enforcement officials. He was not intimidated by the cartel or its orders to assassinate him.

It turned out the seasoned veteran of that dangerous law enforcement battlefield could not be intimidated by the angry bluster of what then was a Presidential contender, a contender guilty merely of the mean and petty crime of massive fraud against the financially vulnerable.

When President Trump graduates to the status of Citizen Trump, supposedly stripped of pre-Presidential immunities, we can hope that the multiple cases, redacted files and all, end up in courts presided over by those possessing judicial courage approaching that of the very American hero, Gonzalo Curiel.