Write a new simple attractive title based on the title from Slippery slope of crime is mapped in Valley and dont use quote marks

It started with a political donation and a request for a small favor in return.

That simple exchange gradually would lead James Phil “J.P.” Flores into a relationship with narcotics traffickers, the former Hidalgo County sheriff’s deputy said as he testified last week in the trial of a colleague accused in a wide-ranging drug conspiracy.

A local smuggler with deep pockets knew Flores faced pressure to raise money for his boss’ campaigns. He offered the deputy cash.

When the trafficker later asked him to check a few license plates, the request seemed harmless enough. It was the least he could do, said Flores, who pleaded guilty to his own role in the conspiracy earlier this year.

“We were using him,” he said. “But he was using us, too.”

That relationship, detailed in testimony at the ongoing trial of former sheriff’s Deputy Jorge Garza, lays bare a frequently overlooked aspect of how corruption often takes root in Rio Grande Valley law enforcement.

In a region where sheriffs, prosecutors and local officials fall with disturbing regularity to federal charges, the descent from upstanding public citizen to corrupt official rarely occurs in one giant leap.

More often, said Anthony Knopp, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas-Brownsville, that slide occurs at a creep.

“There’s a susceptibility there to accommodate people that are compadres or family and who may be doing something on the questionable side of the law,” he said. “But once you start down that path, each new favor tends to push the line a little further.”

In Flores’ case, requests to scan license plates became plots to guard drug loads and schemes to rip off competing traffickers, the former deputy said.

Eventually, Flores, Garza and seven other law officers, many of them members of a multi-department narcotics task force known as the Panama Unit, found themselves in handcuffs.

All but Garza, a retired warrant officer and a man prosecutors have described as a bit player, pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and guarding drug shipments and stash houses.

And as witness after witness took the stand at his trial last week, their testimony detailed tight family connections, pressures at work and longstanding personal relationships that led them to the wrong sort of people. Their stories described a line between the law-abiding and law-breaking that’s often frustratingly hazy.

Garza’s own sister, Alma, is a prominent local defense attorney and perennial candidate for district attorney on county ballots.

And testifying Wednesday, Fernando Guerra Sr., Flores’ smuggler contact, said he often stored cocaine stolen by the deputies at the home of a colleague’s girlfriend.

The woman, Aida Palacios, had once worked as an investigator for the county’s district attorney. And her aunt, Mary Alice Palacios, a one-time justice of the peace, often stopped by to visit.

Asked whether the ex-judge had ever seen the cocaine her niece allegedly stored, Guerra testified that she did. Mary Alice Palacios’ attorney later declined to answer questions about Guerra’s statements.

Nowhere, though, have those family bonds cast deeper shadows than with Jonathan Treviño, one of Garza’s co-defendants and the son of Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño.

The younger man has admitted his guilt; the elder has not been charged and repeatedly has denied any knowledge of the Panama Unit’s illegal activities.

Since his son’s arrest, the sheriff has walked a tightrope expressing personal support for his son while loudly condemning his bad acts.

“The actions of those deputies — including the actions of my son — are just despicable,” he said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just something you don’t do as a law enforcement officer.”

But those denials haven’t convinced the sheriff’s critics, who question how he could be unaware of the corruption rooted within his own department and family.

That suspicion, said Knopp, is born out of the prominence that family bonds and small favors have played in the recent history of the region’s fallen lawmen.

A bribery scandal involving a drug trafficker and conjugal jail visits ended the career of Trevino’s tough-talking predecessor, Brig Marmolejo, in 1994.

Federal prosecutors charged Sheriff Gene Falcon in neighboring Starr County four years later for taking bribes.

And a decade later, another Starr County sheriff, Reymundo Guerra, found himself in the unwelcome spotlight.

Federal prosecutors alleged in 2008 that Guerra struck up a relationship with a Gulf Cartel operative in the neighboring Mexican city of Miguel Aleman.

The sheriff later admitted in court that it began with small requests for information delivered over family barbecues and eventually grew to more.

But Alonzo Alvarez, a longtime friend and retired schoolteacher, testified at one of the sheriff’s court hearings that year that he had little trouble reconciling the family man and career law enforcer with the corrupt cop who helped bungle ongoing drug investigations and gave up the names of informants working with police.

Alvarez told the court that growing up, he and many of his friends, relatives and neighbors turned to smuggling or knew others who had as a way to make a living.

Asked by the judge whether he was admitting on the stand to involvement in drug trafficking, Alvarez shrugged and replied: “If that’s what you want to call it, then, I guess so.”

Aaron Nelson of the Rio Grande Valley Bureau contributed to this report.

jroebuck@express-news.net