The bribery and wire fraud case against Daniel J. Garcia, an attorney and former Rio Grande City school board trustee, will no longer move forward after federal prosecutors announced their intentions to drop the charges against him.
The announcement came during a status conference before U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez Tuesday morning.
“We intend to file a motion to dismiss charges against Mr. Danny Garcia, your honor,” said Marco A. Palmieri, a prosecutor with the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice.
“That approval was received after close of business yesterday, so we have not yet had an opportunity to formally file, but we wanted to make that announcement and do so orally,” Palmieri said.
Court records show the motion was formally filed shortly after the status conference ended; however, the two-page motion makes no mention of what led prosecutors to drop the charges against Garcia.
Reached by phone afterward, Garcia declined to comment, citing the advice of his attorneys, who have urged caution until the judge approves the motion to dismiss the charges.
But his attorneys were able to offer some comments on his behalf.
“Mr. Garcia is very relieved to be able to put this case behind him,” McAllen attorney Christopher Sully said. “He’s maintained his innocence throughout this process, and we were looking forward to demonstrating his innocence at trial, but we’re happy that the government decided to ask for the charges to be dropped.”
Oscar Vega, another attorney on Garcia’s defense team, echoed those sentiments.
“We’re grateful for what happened in Mr. Garcia’s case today. I know his parents went to church right after (prosecutors) announced that they were gonna dismiss it,” Vega said. “Mr. Garcia is glad that it’s all over, this nightmare is over.”
Though pleased with the outcome of their client’s case, both attorneys said they were somewhat surprised by the government’s announcement Tuesday morning. Both attorneys had been prepared to push forward with trial, despite the prosecution’s hesitations about holding a multi-defendant trial just as the omicron variant of COVID-19 surges across the nation.
In fact, it was the variant which had precipitated Tuesday morning’s status conference. Prosecutors wanted the judge to weigh in on how — or if — the trial could continue with its January timeline for jury selection and opening arguments and had requested Tuesday’s meeting as a result.
But before that discussion could get underway, Palmieri, the prosecutor, said he had a “housekeeping matter” he wanted to start with.
That matter was dismissing the charges against Garcia.
“The usual process is they (prosecutors) send us an email or they call us and they say, ‘Hey, are you opposed to our motion to dismiss?’ and that didn’t happen this time,” Vega said afterward.
“I didn’t find out that they were planning to request a dismissal or even seriously considering it until it was announced today,” Sully added.
So sudden was the government’s decision that Vega said he had received discovery materials — portions of the government’s evidence in the case — as recently as Christmas Eve.
Garcia was originally charged with seven counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering after a grand jury in April 2019 handed up a 74-count superseding indictment in connection with the multimillion dollar bribery scheme allegedly at the center of a project to rehabilitate Weslaco’s water treatment facilities.
The indictment alleged that Garcia used his attorney trust account, also known as an IOLTA account, to launder bribes from the alleged scheme while keeping some of the proceeds for himself.
But from the beginning, Garcia — through his defense team — has alleged that the government’s case against him was not only weak, but completely deficient.
Over the course of numerous status conferences in the two years since, Garcia has maintained that little — if any — of the evidence turned over in discovery has applied to him.
“Our position has been pretty consistent and straightforward throughout the whole process, which was that Mr. Garcia is innocent. There was no point in even considering any kind of plea agreement. We were just going to proceed with trial unless something like this happened,” Sully said.
Three other men were originally named in the indictment along with Garcia, including former Hidalgo County Precinct 1 Commissioner Arturo “A.C.” Cuellar, former Weslaco City Commissioner John Cuellar, and Weslaco businessman Ricardo Quintanilla. The two Cuellars are cousins.
John Cuellar has since reached a plea deal with prosecutors.
Cuellar, who had been charged with the bulk of the counts in the indictment at 61, agreed to plead guilty to count one in August 2019. In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against him.
Just days before the indictment was unsealed, two other men — former Weslaco commissioner Gerardo “Jerry” Tafolla and former Rio Grande City judge Leo Lopez Jr. — pleaded guilty to federal programs bribery in relation to the alleged scheme.
Both were expected to testify; however, Lopez, who was slated to be one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, died of cancer in November 2020. He died just days after the court denied an emergency request from prosecutors to memorialize his testimony via deposition.
Meanwhile, Tuesday’s related conversations regarding the pandemic yielded yet another delay in the trial against the remaining two defendants.
Between the continuing pandemic and scheduling conflicts, the court reset jury selection for June 17 with opening statements to begin June 21.
