The Bermudez Triangle

David Alan Dick, a former prosecutor for Community Legal Services now practicing in Mesa, tried several of the cases against Bermudez. He says Community Legal Services filed many class-action suits against farmers and labor brokers between 1989 and 1994.

Take, for example, the case of Rafael Durazo, Javier Luna, and Carlos Ponce. In 1989, the three men were recruited by Centro de Progresso to work at Beaver Creek Nursery in Virginia. According to affidavits filed in United States District Court, they were told they'd find up to three months of work, that they'd work at least 10 hours a day, six days a week and receive $4.50 per hour for their labor. They were also promised transportation to and from the work site and free housing. None of the promises were realized. The men rarely worked, were paid only about $1.50 an hour when they did work, and found themselves stranded when they wanted to go home.

According to Durazo, Bermudez was not sympathetic.

"I called Elias Bermudez to tell him Jose Carlos Ponce, Jesus Javier Luna, and myself wanted to go home because we had not been paid wages, we had no food and the working conditions were not as promised," he says in an affidavit. "Elias Bermudez told us there was nothing he could do for us."

This case is typical of the others filed against Bermudez.

But Bermudez says he was the victim in these cases.

"Politically, they were getting $5,000 from the federal government [for each person they represented] so they began suing the hell out of me," he says.

Similar claims were filed against Bermudez, Centro de Progresso and various employers five times in U.S. District Court. Of the five cases brought against him by Community Legal Services, one was dismissed, one was settled, one awarded compensation to the plaintiff and the others resulted in default judgments (meaning he failed to answer or appear in court) against Bermudez.

Maria Elena Badilla, a San Luis native, worked as Dick's paralegal at Community Legal Services. She says Bermudez was notorious for exploitation in San Luis. Attempts to locate the migrants who filed suits against Bermudez were unsuccessful.

"He's [only] interested in making money," she says.

Farm workers are not the only commodity along the border in San Luis. Like many border towns, the drug trade flourishes there — a fact that would have serious ramifications for Bermudez's future.

Behind the wheel of his car, driving between his radio station and his mortgage broker's office in Phoenix, Bermudez recalls what it was like to face kingpins and drug dealers every day. He acknowledges that he knew who they were, even stopped in occasionally for a drink at a nightclub owned by the local drug lord.

"Being from San Luis, I knew everybody. The drug cartels, you run into them on a daily basis. The only way to demonstrate to these people that you are not afraid is to be courageous enough to say I don't want any dealings with you," he says.

Bermudez says this attitude won the drug runners' respect. He tells a story that, if it's true, is just one more scene of high drama in the life of a man who is a magnet for controversy and danger.

"One of the stories in San Luis was that one of them tried to kill me," he says. "He tried to scare me by shooting at my feet. I put the gun on my chest and said, 'You are not going to scare me. This is where you need to shoot.' He had to pull the trigger; he was compromised. The bullet didn't explode, so I said, 'I'm leaving. You have bad luck.' The story carried out that I was very daring. Well, you have no choice."

But Bermudez's connection to the border drug rings was more personal than that. His former brother-in-law, Rene Wong, was deep in the trade, and this relationship would eventually land Bermudez in federal prison. Bermudez hasn't kept his time in prison a secret, though he's done his best to paint it as a positive thing, while once again positioning himself as a martyr.

He contends that his conviction was a setup by his political opponents. At the time of his arrest, Bermudez had just begun to consider running for the state Senate.

"I went to jail for doing what I'm doing. I can guarantee you if I had not been the mayor, if I was not seeking higher office, whatever happened to put me in jail would not have mattered," he says.

Actually, there was a set of very specific circumstances that led to his indictment, along with four other men, on nine counts of conspiracy to distribute drugs and conspiracy to launder money. It's all documented in U.S. District Court files.

In 1993, the IRS began to investigate Bermudez for preparing false tax returns at Centro de Progresso.