McALLEN, Texas — In this palm-studded city at the southern tip of Texas — “floor zero” in the border disaster between the USA and Mexico — there’s a brand new Maserati dealership and ads for Rolex and Cartier watches at the airport.
There are also dozens of plush rings stores, in which one dealer advised The Post that she regularly imports African diamonds for custom engagement earrings.
In a few of the gated groups within the place, terra cotta-roofed mansions sit empty at the back of concrete walls.
On Saturday, the McAllen Polo Club held its annual Hot Air Balloon Festival and Polo Match at Springfest Park, a sprawling, immaculately manicured green space for the clever set and their horses.
At the upscale La Plaza Mall, buyers and their youngsters covered up to meet the Easter Bunny, and nicely-dressed young professionals tucked into steaks on the Texas de Brazil grill.
McAllen lies eight miles from the Mexican border, in one of the 30 poorest enclaves within the US. S, Hidalgo County, in which 34 percent of residents live in poverty, according to US Census statistics.
So who is spending all this cash?
In addition to move-border shoppers, who local keep owners stated make up 30 percent of McAllen’s $3.2 billion in annual retail income, the town is a fave vacation spot for drug traffickers.
“It’s all approximately smuggling here,” said a federal law enforcement official. “Whether it’s pills or human beings smuggling, the cartels are laundering their cash properly right here.”
Some of that cash even makes its way into political campaigns in this traditionally Democratic stronghold.
In 2014, Guadelupe “Lupe” Trevino, the former county sheriff and one of the maximum powerful lawmen in the nation, was convicted of laundering cash. He confessed to taking coins from a Texas drug trafficker who had a trucking business that he used as a front to smuggle capsules.
Prosecutors stated the sheriff took up to $120,000 from convicted kingpin Tomas “El Gallo” Gonzalez. Some of that money went to his re-election campaign, prosecutors said.
Trevino was sentenced to five years in federal prison and was released in January.
His son, Jonathan Trevino, wasn’t as fortunate with a light sentence. A former cop and commander of an elite anti-narcotics squad, who said without delay to his father, the younger Trevinowase was convicted in 2014 of drug trafficking and is presently serving a 14-12 months sentence in federal jail, at the side of 4 different former members of his project force, known as the Panama Unit.
The squad had links to the Gulf Cartel, one of the oldest crook syndicates in Mexico, acknowledged by its Spanish-language acronym, CDG. In addition to drug trafficking, the Mexican cartels have made billions of dollars from the large influx of undocumented migrants into the Rio Grande Valley region near towns like McAllen, consistent with the USA Customs and Border Protection.
