The 800lb Gorilla in the Room

One of my readers has been prodding me to say what everyone knows, but the politeness of social fiction prevents from being verbalized in public. It isn’t pretty, but it is very ‘South Texas’ and I wish I wasn’t the one to have to say it.

In order to clarify where I am coming from, here is the logic I employ for most social problem solving.

From Wikipedia, not an authoritative source, but adequate for our purposes:
Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Now we get on to the meat of the matter.
The 9.2 million that Dannenbaum paid out was indeed stolen money, but it wasn’t stolen from us. I’ll give you a moment’s pause to let that outrageous idea sink in. Now that everyone has their normal skin tone back, I’ll explain.

Bribing Mexican officials is something that we don’t talk about openly anymore. It is not polite, nor politically correct. We like to think that those levels of corruption are a part of a distant, forgotten past and not a part of the “New, Modern Mexico”. Because we in the Valley share such close ties with Mexico, we try hard to ignore it the same way we ignore a close family member’s vices. We are ashamed of it and do not discuss it.

In 1988 the Congress passed Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This act’s anti-bribery provisions are quite explicit and the penalties are stiff. More about it can be read here.
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

It used to be commonly known that to do business in Mexico, you had to know who to pay off. Just because our law changed did not make the situation in Mexico change. Our rosy eyed social view of the “New, Modern Mexico” didn’t change this situation, either. So we still have the ugly, dirty fact that bribery was part and parcel of doing business with Mexico.

The Port Bridge, now commonly known as “The Bridge to Nowhere” was no different in any respect than any other business with Mexico. To make it happen, bribes needed to be paid. This fact was not lost on a single person or entity involved with the project. Not a one. As a matter of fact, the amounts needed were so large for a project of this size that it was impossible to simply pay it as a lump sum and disguise it as “fees and licensing” and because of the law in the US, it was impossible to pay it at all, yet it had to be paid.

Corruption only continues because it works, people are paid off because they can deliver. It is ironic that the amount that can be demanded for a bribe is contingent on the ability of the corrupt official to keep their word and deliver the goods. So if the money was sent out, and the unwritten terms and conditions were complied with, why isn’t the bridge built?

"All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one."

The money never got into the hands of the people it was intended for. Had it done so, construction would be underway, everyone would be happy, Dannenbaum’s name would not be mud, Eddie Lucio would not look like he was part of an orchestrated theft, Lencho Rendon wouldn’t look like a criminal mastermind, and there would have been no public uproar. All of this because it would have been business as usual with Mexico.

So what went so terribly wrong? At this point all I have to offer is conjecture, but it fits the facts as we know them.

Dannebaum was “the intermediary for the intermediaries” in the payoff. The three interlocked Mexican consulting firms were the bagmen for the payoff. It took three companies because the amount of the bribe was so large that it had to be broken up to try to keep it under the radar. Knowing what the money was really for, the BND board went along. The money was paid to the bagmen. This is the point where something went terribly wrong.

One of two things happened, and I’ll opt for the “greed” scenario. They simply kept the money. Pure and simple. Who could complain? It was now dirty money. The amount that the three companies could skim for their part as bagmen in the deal wasn’t enough, or the temptation for the whole $9.2 million was just too great. So there you are.

The other scenario is a touch more complicated, but still fits well with the facts. For some reason the bribe could not be accepted at this time and the bagmen were stuck with the money for a while at least. During the time they were stuck with the cash, the BND stupidly decides to toot their own horn by having a ground breaking ceremony for the new Port Bridge. There was only one small problem. There were no Mexican officials of any kind in attendance and the Brownsville Herald was right there covering the event and noticed this. With the light of day on this seemingly odd fact, the Mexican officials who were supposed to eventually get their bribe money could not touch it, because the house lights were on and they would be spotted.
This all explains things as they stand. I am afraid they offer no way out, other than a lot of jail time and very heavy fines for everyone involved, because the law is quite clear on that. I could go on for several more pages about nowhere investigations and all the piddly details of each and every irregularity, but they all fall neatly into the scenario that I have laid out.

I should feel triumphant at this point, but I do not. The Port board, Dannenbaum, Mr. B., and everyone involved were just doing business as usual with Mexico.

“Of course I know. It is my business to know” -The Merovingian