RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — A Texas border cop is believed to have helped dispose of weapons and vests used for kidnappings and murder on behalf of a Mexican cartel-linked criminal organization.
The cop has also been accused of helping drug smugglers rip off the Gulf Cartel and providing them with police radios.
On Friday, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations arrested Ramon “Ramey” De La Cruz Jr., a police officer with Rio Grande City Police, former deputy with Starr County Sheriff’s Office and son of local Justice of the Peace Ramon De La Cruz.
After spending the weekend in federal custody on September 19, the younger De La Cruz went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dorina Ramos who ordered he be held without bond pending a detention hearing later this week.
Federal authorities charges De La Cruz with one count of possession of more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of marijuana with intent to distribute. While De La Cruz was directly charged, documents in his case point to him being part of a larger indictment against a criminal organization from Rio Grande City.
Court documents obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed that De La Cruz is believed to have been part of a drug smuggling and “rip crew” led by Ramiro Beltran and his family–referred to as the Beltran drug trafficking organization. Court documents do not show a relationship between the Beltran group from Rio Grande City and the much larger Beltran-Leyva Drug Cartel in Mexico.
Government informants revealed to authorities that, in one case, a Gulf Cartel commander known as El Puma ordered that rifles and vests which had been used in a kidnapping and murder be placed in a box and buried in a property belonging to the Beltran family. The Beltran group had De La Cruz get rid of the weapons, which he did by taking them to a local gun store to be sold off.
The local Beltran Group has been tied to smuggling-for-hire activities with Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. However, the group would allegedly use De La Cruz to steal drugs from the cartel while making it seem like the drugs had been seized. In order to fool the leaders of the Gulf Cartel, the Beltran group would use De La Cruz and other cops to reportedly provide false police reports showing that a drug load had been seized. The documents were doctored to reveal a larger seizures in order to allow the smugglers to claim that the whole load had been seized when in reality only a fraction was left behind for authorities.
De La Cruz has also been accused of providing his bosses in the Beltran group with police radios so that cartel-linked smugglers could listen to law enforcement operations. The former deputy and current cop has also been accused of performing surveillance for the group’s smuggling attempts where they would pick up drugs at the banks of the Rio Grande and take them to a local stash house.
Cartel Linked Texas Border Cop
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project and you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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