Death of a Bad Man

I took the family to see Batman: The Dark Knight yesterday. This is a dark, disturbing movie. The movie cheats its way into a PG-13 rating by omitting the profanity and leaving much of the graphic violence to the imagination. However, on a psychological level, the terror and depravity is on a par with Silence of the Lambs. One aspect of the movie involved killing public officials who stood up to organized crime. Today’s paper contained a reminder of an incident where this actually occurred.

On May 29, 1979, U.S. District Judge John Wood, Jr. was assassinated as he was about to preside over the trial of El Paso drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra. There was also an unsuccessful plot to kill the prosecutor in the case as well. The hit man, Charles Harrelson, was caught and later died in prison. Jimmy Chagra was acquitted of most of the charges brought against him. However, the fact that his wife was convicted for delivering the payoff to the gunman should leave no doubt that he was behind the assassination. In the end, Chagra was convicted of obstruction of justice in the Wood killing, attempted murder of the Assistant U.S. Attorney and drug trafficking. For these crimes, he received sentences of 10 years, life in prison and 30 years respectively. Given the gravity of the charges, it seemed unlikely that he would ever see the outside world again. However, he was released on parole in 2003. He died Friday at the age of 63.

We frequently hear about killings of judges in places like Iraq, the Philippines, Mexico and Colombia. However, they are extremely rare in the United States. There were three federal judges killed in the line of duty during the 20th century, as well as one case where members of a judge’s family were killed. Most were the work of mentally unbalanced litigants. The Judge Wood assassination stands alone as the only case of organized crime carrying out an assassination of a federal judge. Despite his infamous place in U.S. history, Jimmy Chagra served only 23 years and lived the last five years of his life as a free man. Now that is disturbing.