A Guilty Plea Implicates 'Almost the Entire' Albuquerque DWI Unit in Longstanding Police Corruption

Federal prosecutors say the city's police department was the main focus of a 15-year bribery scheme that also involved the sheriff's office and the state police.

From 2008 to through 2023, federal prosecutors in New Mexico say, Albuquerque police officers conspired with a local defense attorney, Thomas Clear, and his investigator, Ricardo Mendez, to make DWI cases disappear in exchange for bribes. Mendez pleaded guilty on Friday to eight federal charges in connection with the long-running scheme, which prosecutors say mainly involved officers assigned to the Albuquerque Police Department's DWI unit but also included employees of the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) and the New Mexico State Police (NMSP).

The details of this massive corruption scandal have been slowly emerging since January 2024, when FBI agents searched Clear's office. The federal investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD), which also involved searches of officers' homes, resulted in the dismissal of some 200 DWI cases and an internal probe. So far, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports, "at least a dozen Albuquerque police officers have been placed on leave," and many of them have dodged interviews with internal investigators by resigning. But Mendez's guilty plea is the first public confirmation of criminal charges in the case, and it reveals more extensive corruption than the initial press reports suggested.

According to the charges against Mendez, which include racketeering, bribery, and "interference with commerce by extortion," he and his boss, Clear, had a mutually beneficial arrangement with Albuquerque cops who specialized in nabbing drunk drivers. The officers would generate business for Clear by referring arrestees to his office. Those clients, who typically paid Clear in cash, were amazed and delighted at his ability to make their cases go away, sparing them prosecution and revocation of their driver's licenses. But federal prosecutors say that impressive track record was not due to Clear's legal skills so much as his payoffs to the cops, who conveniently failed to show up at pretrial interviews or court hearings, allowing the aptly named Clear to seek dismissal of the charges on the grounds that the crucial witnesses against his clients were absent.

Initially, those no-shows involved pretrial interviews (PTIs) of witnesses that defendants were entitled to arrange. After March 24, 2022, when the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended PTIs for cases filed in Bernalillo County Municipal Court, the must-miss events were motion hearings and trials. As a reward for their poor attendance record, prosecutors say, officers "were often paid in cash but, at times, also received other benefits and things of value," including "free legal services, gift cards, hotel rooms, and other gifts."

According to prosecutors, Albuquerque officers sometimes would, contrary to department policy, refrain from charging DWI suspects and instead provide their contact information or their driver's licenses to Mendez. Those drivers "were asked to pay several thousand dollars in U.S. currency in exchange for the APD officer not filing charges against the DWI Offenders."

To preserve and expand this "DWI Enterprise," prosecutors say, Albuquerque officers "who had worked in the DWI unit and were part of the scheme helped recruit and train
the next generation" of corrupt cops. The more experienced officers would introduce the recruits to Mendez and give him their cell phone numbers, which "in recent years" earned them a "referral fee." They also helped Mendez by telling him "which officers the DWI Enterprise should avoid"—"meaning which officers were likely to report the DWI Enterprise's criminal activity to internal affairs or other law enforcement authorities."

When meeting with a new recruit, Mendez "often discussed many of the other Officers Members who had been and were part of the DWI Enterprise from the different law enforcement agencies (APD, NMSP, and BCSO)," which "allowed the recruit to feel more comfortable joining the DWI Enterprise because of the number of senior, and often high-ranking, officers" who were already involved in it, prosecutors say. "This generational participation, particularly within APD, allowed the DWI Enterprise to take root amongst almost the entire APD DWI unit over a lengthy period of time."

That description confirms what Joshua Montaño, one of the Albuquerque officers who was placed on administrative leave, said when he resigned in March 2024. "The issues I let myself get caught up in within the DWI Unit were generational," he wrote in a letter to Police Reform Superintendent Eric Garcia. Montaño complained that he had been made "the City's scapegoat for its own failures" and that Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina "has made it seem like there are just a few bad officers acting on their own," which was "far from the truth."

Medina had promised to "make sure that we get to the bottom of this," a commitment that he reiterated on Friday. "As I've said many times over the past year, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to exposing this conspiracy," he said. "We have fully cooperated with the FBI's investigation, while aggressively pursuing our own internal investigation that produced immediate results and helped us identify changes we needed to make to ensure accountability within the department. Through our investigation, we believe this conspiracy goes back as far as two decades, which the U.S. Attorney indicated in its plea agreement today. It is disappointing on so many levels because it appears police officers from several agencies conspired with at least two lawyers and a paralegal to manipulate the criminal justice system, at the expense of victims of DWI."

Medina's commitment to transparency seems doubtful in light of his own personal scandal. Last February, he ran a red light and slammed his department-issued pickup truck into the side of a sports car, severely injuring the driver. Medina, who said he was fleeing from a fight between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire, blamed "gun violence" for his reckless driving, which eventually resulted in two official reprimands. One of those reprimands involved operating his truck "in an unsafe manner." The other involved his failure to activate his body camera, as required by department policy and state law, while he was talking to witnesses after the crash.

Medina bizarrely defended that decision by claiming "spousal privilege," saying the camera might have recorded his exchanges with his wife, who was riding with him in the truck. More alarmingly, he claimed he had a Fifth Amendment right to avoid incriminating himself by recording his interactions with the public—a position that would give cops a license to keep their cameras off in any situation where their conduct might look bad. Needless to say, that legal theory is inconsistent with the main rationale for requiring body cameras in the first place.

Medina's credibility is also open to question in light of his avowed obliviousness to what was happening in the DWI unit. Medina, who began working for the APD in 1995, was an APD officer for 20 years before retiring as a commander in 2014, six years after prosecutors say the "DWI Enterprise" got started. After a few years as police chief of Laguna, New Mexico, Medina returned to the APD as deputy chief in December 2017. Three years later, he became interim chief, a position that was made permanent in March 2021. All told, Medina's tenure at the APD overlapped with the DWI unit's corruption for more than a decade. Yet he apparently had no clue about it until the FBI briefed him on its investigation.

Worse, the APD received a tip about the bribery scheme in December 2022. The tipster specifically mentioned Honorio Alba, one of the officers who would later resign amid the corruption scandal. An internal investigation by Acting Sgt. Jon O'Guin found no evidence to substantiate the tip. If O'Guin had looked more closely at DWI cases, he might have noticed the same curious pattern of dismissals that federal prosecutors described last week.

Prosecutors say the APD was the main locus of corruption. But the federal investigation also implicated the sheriff's office and the state police.

"Upon learning of the involvement of BCSO personnel, the deputy in question"—Jeff Hammerel—"was immediately placed on administrative leave last night," BCSO spokeswoman Jayme Fuller-Gonzales said on Friday. "Sheriff [John] Allen has consistently demonstrated zero tolerance for misconduct, particularly corruption, and remains committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity within the Sheriff's Office."

The NMSP, by contrast, still seems unsure why it was mentioned in the charges against Mendez. "At this time, we do not have information to believe any of our officers were involved in this criminal conduct," NMSP spokesman Ricardo Brecedo said on Friday. "The New Mexico State Police has been and will continue to cooperate with investigators."