House of Death informant linked to murder of U.S. citizen

A U.S. government informant who was overseen by Homeland Security agents and a U.S. prosecutor in El Paso appears to now be implicated in yet another murder.

This homicide, allegedly involving an El Paso man, predates the dozen murders the informant helped carry out, with the knowledge of U.S. law enforcers, between August 2003 and January 2004.

Those murders, which took place in a home in Ciudad Juárez (dubbed the House of Death) have become the subject of a major cover-up within Homeland Security and the Department of Justice — a cover-up hatched to conceal the complicity of U.S. law enforcers, who allegedly allowed the murders to occur in order to make a drug case. This past summer, Narco News was tipped off to another line of investigation into the informant’s murderous activities. However, only recently has evidence surfaced that corroborates the lead.

In August, Raul Loya, a Dallas civil rights attorney representing the families of House of Death murder victims Luis Padilla and Fernando Reyes, told this reporter that he was looking into charges that the informant, codenamed Jesus Contreras, was involved in the kidnapping and murder of an El Paso resident in the fall of 2002.

Loya claims the family of the man asked him to investigate the case.

Essentially, Loya told Narco News, the family contends the man, David Castro, was abducted, with the participation of the informant Contreras, after going to an auto dealership lot in El Paso. A demand was then made for ransom, which the family could not afford to pay. At some point, the man was transported across the border to Mexico where he was later murdered, the family alleges, according to Loya.

The FBI supposedly did get involved with the case; however, Loya said the family claims the FBI was not able to do much because the victim had already been taken across the border.

Loya stressed that the alleged victim was a U.S. citizen.

To date, no lawsuit has been filed in the case.

Loya’s allegations are serious, but, at the time, all leads seemed to come to a dead end.

Several law enforcement sources contacted by Narco News said they were not aware of the allegations against the informant in the Castro case.

However, if true, the charges raise even more serious questions about what Homeland Security agents and U.S. prosecutors knew and when they knew it.

But why share this story with you now?

From the horse’s mouth

Well, an independent source has surfaced who appears to back up Loya’s claims. That source is the informant himself.

Recently, Narco News obtained a critical document that brings you inside the House of Death, from the point of view of Contreras. The document is a debriefing of the informant carried out on Feb. 12, 2004, by an assistant legal attaché for the Attorney General’s Office of Mexico.

In that debriefing, the informant describes the kidnapping and murder of an individual named David Castro.

(The informant alleges that Castro was linked to a drug deal, which is why he became a target. However, the only evidence supporting that claim is the word of the informant, who makes his living dealing in duplicity and subterfuge. Still, the informant does confirm that Castro was kidnapped, whatever the real reason, and later murdered.)

From the document:

… Regarding David [Castro] in the year 2002, David and I were seeing about a transaction and we went to Ciudad Juarez to check out some merchandise….

… We met Chito on the Avenue of the Americas. … Chito asked him if he remembered that he owed him some money from a drug load which he had given him to sell and which he had agreed to pay for. Later he tried to collect but David did not want to pay. When they met David began to argue. Chito was with six (6) other guys and he told me, “Go to hell. This is none of your business.” So David asked me to tell his wife so I left and later spoke with the wife and the next day she came with her father and asked me my opinion.

I later found out that she went to the FBI to report the kidnapping. Fifteen (15) days to three (3) weeks later after the incident on the Avenue of the Americas I went to the “Al 16” Bar to meet with “El Chito” who explained to me that he could not cross over to the United States and David Castro had not wanted to pay the debt even though he had the money to do so that that was why he had kidnapped him.

Several days later I found out that the FBI went to visit the wife and children of Chito in El Paso and they alerted Chito and that is why he decided to kill David….

Based on that description, the informant implicates himself as a conspirator, at a minimum after the fact, in Castro’s murder.  

And if this Castro is the same El Paso man attorney Loya claims was kidnapped and murdered in the fall of 2002 (which is not an unreasonable assumption), then that crime would have occurred at a time when Contrereas was actively engaged as an informant for the U.S. government, according to law enforcement sources.

From Narco News' original House of Death story, published in April 2004:

The informant had been on the payroll of [Homeland Security agency] ICE (and its predecessor agency, U.S. Customs) since the late 1990s. The informant also worked for DEA for a short time, but was “deactivated” by the agency in July 2003 - after he was caught trying to run 200 kilos of grass across the border. That bust never showed up on his record, though, as drug trafficking charges were conveniently not pursued by U.S. prosecutors, allowing the informant to continue working for ICE.

Even before the (House of Death) murders came to light, the informant allegedly influenced the U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso to delay the indictment of Abraham in the cigarette smuggling case. The investigation in that case was launched in 2000 and was wrapped up by the winter of 2003. However, according to law enforcement sources, the decision was made to delay the indictment because it was feared the identity of the informant would surface in a trial, thereby jeopardizing the informant's sting of the Santillan [narco-trafficking] organization.

So now the trail of blood in the House of Death appears to touch yet another soul. Still, the cover-up within the Justice Department and Homeland Security continues.

Ironically, if the informant’s account of Castro’s murder is accurate, Castro’s body was buried at a house on Parsioneros Street in Juárez – on the same street, and likely at the same house, now known as the House of Death. For that deed, the gravedigger received “as payment a Ford one-and-a-half cabin pickup from approximately 1995,” Contreras says in his debriefing statement.

That’s the price of a life in the business of narco-trafficking. It appears, based on the ongoing cover-up, that it’s also the price of a life in the U.S. Justice System.

Stay tuned…..