Pervasive Police Corruption in Albuquerque Explains Why a Teetotaler Was Arrested for DWI
A driver who was acquitted of drunk driving joins a class action lawsuit provoked by a bribery scheme that went undetected for decades.
A couple of weeks ago, Jose Vasquez learned that former Albuquerque police officer Honorio Alba Jr. had pleaded guilty to taking bribes from a local defense attorney in exchange for making DWI cases disappear. "I almost fell out of my bed because I was watching the news that day, and I just, I couldn't believe it," Vasquez told KRQE, the CBS affiliate in Albuquerque. "I was like, there it is. This is it. It did have to do with money."
Alexander M.M. Uballez, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico, says Alba was just one of "many officers" who participated in a bribery scheme that began decades ago and eventually involved nearly every cop assigned to the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) unit charged with apprehending drunk drivers. For Vasquez, one of 14 plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit provoked by the corruption scandal, the news of Alba's guilty plea definitively solved a mystery that began more than four years ago.
On a Sunday in September 2020, Alba stopped Vasquez for speeding on Paseo Del Norte Road in northeast Albuquerque. But instead of simply writing him a ticket, Alba alleged that Vasquez was driving while intoxicated. Vasquez was dismayed by the accusation, since he had not been drinking and in fact had given up alcohol for health reasons.
Alba claimed he could smell alcohol on Vasquez's breath, which was also strange, because both men were wearing face masks as a precaution against COVID-19. "I knew that I hadn't been drinking," Vasquez told KRQE. "And I was like, 'I have a mask on. How can you smell? You have a mask on, like what? How are you going to be smelling the smell of alcohol?'"
Sensing that something was amiss, Vasquez's wife began recording the encounter on her cellphone. "Do I look like a drunk person?" Vasquez asked Alba and Sgt. Nelson Ortiz, another officer who would later be implicated in the corruption scandal. "You can all tell he's not," his wife added. But after Vasquez refused to undergo field sobriety tests, Alba and Ortiz arrested him. And even though a breath test confirmed that Vasquez was not under the influence, they charged him with DWI, along with speeding, obstructing or evading an officer, and negligent use of a deadly weapon.
Compounding the puzzle, the officers advised Vasquez to contact Thomas Clear, a lawyer they said could arrange for the charges to be dismissed. Vasquez hired a different lawyer, and in 2021 a judge found him not guilty of all charges except for speeding.
Carlos Sandoval-Smith had a similar run-in with Officer Joshua Montaño in June 2023.* According to a lawsuit that Sandoval-Smith filed last October, Montaño stopped him for speeding, then "unlawfully expanded the scope of the stop by initiating a DUI investigation without reasonable suspicion that [Sandoval-Smith] was driving under the influence." Montaño charged Sandoval-Smith with DWI even though he "performed very well" on field sobriety tests and a breath test put his blood alcohol concentration well below the legal limit. Like Alba, Montaño recommended Clear as a lawyer who could get DWI charges dismissed.
The motivation for these strange encounters became clear after the federal corruption investigation became public in January 2024, when the FBI searched Clear's office and the homes of several officers. Last month, Clear's investigator, Ricardo Mendez, pleaded guilty to federal bribery, extortion, and racketeering charges. Montaño and Alba pleaded guilty to similar charges on February 7, followed by Clear himself last week.
"Since at least the late 1990s," Clear said in his plea agreement, he had been running what prosecutors call the "DWI Enterprise," a scheme that involved "almost the entire APD DWI unit over a lengthy period of time." In exchange for cash, "discounted legal services, gift cards, hotel rooms, and other gifts," officers would either refrain from filing charges against DWI suspects or deliberately miss pretrial interviews, motion hearings, trials, or administrative driver's license hearings. Based on those prearranged absences, Clear would move for dismissal, allowing his clients to avoid prosecution and keep their licenses.
The lawsuit that Vasquez joined, which aims to represent people victimized by the "DWI Enterprise" as a class, describes how all of this worked from the perspective of drivers who were pulled over by Alba and his colleagues. The plaintiffs include three other drivers who declined to hire Clear, all of whom say they were arrested for DWI without probable cause.
In August 2023, for example, Pedro Gonzales ran out of gas while driving from Socorro, New Mexico, to his home in Albuquqerque. Montaño stopped and approached Gonzales, who said he had drunk "two beers" in Socorro. Unsatisfied by Gonzales' performance on roadside sobriety tests, Montaño arrested him for DWI. But according to the complaint, Montaño "never planned on actually prosecuting" Gonzales. Instead, Montaño took Gonzales home, retained his driver's license, and gave it to Mendez, who called Gonzales the next day.
For $8,000 up front or $10,000 later, Mendez said, Gonzales would get his license back and his case would be dismissed. Gonzales "decided to inform federal law enforcement of the extortion." His DWI charge was ultimately dismissed in January 2024, around the time that news of the FBI investigation broke.
The other named plaintiffs tell similar stories. Officers would retain their licenses or other personal effects and give them to Mendez as an incentive to hire Clear. Mendez would offer Clear's help in exchange for a cash fee of $6,000 to $10,000. While those drivers all turned Mendez down, the plaintiffs also include 10 unnamed individuals who accepted his offer.
Clear and Mendez kept the racket going with the help of senior APD officers, who recruited new participants and agreed to make sure that no one interfered with the "DWI Enterprise." As they moved up in the ranks, former members of the DWI unit—including the commander of the department's internal affairs division, his deputy, a lieutenant who likewise was supposed to be rooting out abuse and corruption, and two other lieutenants—were in a position to deliver on that promise.
The lawsuit, which alleges multiple violations of state and federal law, argues that none of this could have happened if the city had properly trained and supervised its officers. In addition to the city, the defendants include Clear, Mendez, Alba, 13 other current or former cops, and Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina. The lawsuit also names the Bernalillo County Board of Supervisors and the New Mexico Department of Public Safety because Clear and Mendez have said they bribed employees of the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office and the New Mexico State Police as well as the APD.
"On information and belief," the complaint says, the city and Medina "knew of the agreement between Defendant Officers and Defendants Clear and Mendez." It is not clear whether that is true. But it is fair to say that Medina should have known what was going on. He joined the APD in 1995, shortly before Clear says the "DWI Enterprise" got started. Medina has held senior positions for more than a decade and has run or helped run the department since 2017. As chief, he assigned former DWI officers to internal affairs, putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.
According to the lawsuit, the APD's Court Services Unit was supposed to keep track of officers' appearances at criminal and administrative proceedings but manifestly failed to do so. It says the city and Medina "ratified the conduct of Defendant Officers by failing to intervene after receiving multiple notices that Defendant Officers were violating the law." In December 2022, for example, the APD got a tip that DWI officers, including Alba, were getting paid to make sure that cases were dismissed.
The fact that several drivers reported their disturbing encounters with cops and Mendez to the FBI rather than the APD suggests they did not trust local authorities to look into the situation. With good reason, says the lawsuit, which alleges that Medina "did not adequately investigate" evidence of irregularities until an FBI probe forced him to do so. According to Medina, who has repeatedly promised to "make sure that we get to the bottom of this," he had no clue that anything was amiss until he was briefed on the FBI investigation in October 2023.
The city and Medina have declined to comment on the lawsuit. But it raises serious questions about the policies and practices that allowed such pervasive corruption to go unnoticed for as long as it did.
"The way that the city has responded to date is more or less taking a victory lap, saying we stopped it, but not saying why it happened," Taylor Smith, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, told KRQE. "And that's the problem. And if our own leadership is not willing to take accountability and make sure that the change happens, then we need new leadership."
* CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated Montaño's first name.
