Texas Sniper

The charge: murdering a judge

Even in El Paso, a rough Texas border town with a history of renegades and easy money, the Chagra family stood out. Lee, the eldest, was a flamboyant lawyer with a taste for cocaine who specialized in defending drug dealers. He carried thousands of dollars in his cowboy boots and handed out gold bracelets engraved with his motto, FREEDOM. When he bought a limousine equipped with a bar and television, he also ordered a special nook for the gun he always carried. In December 1978, the night after he picked up the car from the dealer, he was shot to death during a robbery in his fortress-like office. He was 41. Lee's brother Jamiel ("Jimmy") was a professional gambler who was known to win or lose a million dollars in a single night in Las Vegas. But his gambling was financed by a more deadly game. In 1979 Jimmy,described by federal prosecutors as the kingpin of a narcotics empire in the Southwest, was indicted for drug smuggling. Now the Chagras, sons of a Lebanese merchant, are embroiled in one of the most publicized trials in Texas history. The proceedings began last week.

Jimmy Chagra, 39, is accused of hiring a hitman in May 1979 to murder John H. Wood Jr., the federal judge who had been scheduled to preside over his narcotics trial. Wood, 63, had earned the sobriquet "Maximum John" for his draconian sentences to drug dealers. Wood was shot in the back with a high-powered rifle in the driveway of his San Antonio home on May 29, the day originally set for Jimmy Chagra's trial. (Chagra was subsequently convicted on the drug charges and sentenced to 30 years in prison.)

With U.S. District Judge William Sessions presiding over the trial for his colleague's murder, three defendants face charges: Charles V. Harrelson, 44, a convicted contract killer accused of shooting Wood for a payment of $250,000 from Jimmy Chagra; Harrelson's wife Jo Ann, 42, who allegedly bought the murder rifle; and Jimmy's wife Elizabeth, 28, who is charged with covering up the crime. Jimmy will be tried separately later. The final defendant was to have been the youngest Chagra brother, Joseph, 35, an El Paso lawyer. But last month he agreed to plead guilty to the murder-conspiracy charge and testify against Harrelson in return for a ten-year maximum sentence and the right not to testify against his brother.

U.S. Government Prosecutor Ray Jahn argues that Jimmy Chagra was "greatly fearful of Judge Wood." He points out that Chagra's own lawyer had requested that Wood excuse himself from the case, citing bias, but Wood refused. According to the prosecution's scenario, Jimmy and Joseph then agreed to have the judge murdered, and in the spring of 1979 Jimmy met Charles Harrelson in Las Vegas and offered him the job. Jahn plans to introduce tape recordings made secretly by the FBI when Joseph visited Jimmy in 1980 in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kans. On those tapes, says Jahn, the brothers discuss the murder.

The most damaging witness for the prosecution so far has been a tearful Kathryn Wood, the judge's widow, who read the court a five-page handwritten letter she received last September from Elizabeth Chagra. In the letter, Elizabeth apologized for her involvement in the murder. "One day in March three years ago, I was in the kitchen cooking fried chicken when my husband came home and said, 'I'm going to kill Judge Wood,' " she wrote, adding that she did not take the threat seriously. That summer, she wrote, her husband asked her to deliver some money to Las Vegas. "He said that this was for the payoff for your husband's murder." Harrelson's attorney, Thomas G. Sharpe Jr., says he will prove that the Harrelsons were 270 miles away in Dallas when Wood was killed.

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