U.S. prosecutors were after Ruiz Massieu too. He was to fly to Houston last week to be arraigned on charges that he had laundered $9 million in drug money. But two days before the court appearance, in what investigators, his wife, Maria, and his lawyers are calling a suicide, he died from an overdose of antidepressants, derailing a trial that was likely to touch the highest echelons of power in Mexico and further tangle U.S.-Mexican relations.
The story starts on Sept. 28, 1994, on a crowded street in Mexico City. A hired assassin fired one shot into the chest of Mario’s brother, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, head of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The president tapped Mario, the deputy attorney general and the country’s top drug-enforcement official, to lead the probe. But two months later Ruiz Massieu quit his job and the PRI, accusing party officials of trying to block his investigation. “A bullet murdered two Ruiz Massieus,” he said at the time. “It took one’s life, and it took the other’s faith and hope that the government of the PRI could deliver justice. The demons wander loose, and they have triumphed.”
Early the next year, under President Ernesto Zedillo’s new administration, Raul Salinas was arrested and charged as the mastermind of the killing. Then came even more shocking news: Mexican prosecutors accused Mario Ruiz Massieu of torturing witnesses to ensure that they left Raul’s name out of their testimony.
In the face of those charges, Ruiz Massieu fled for Spain. But before he could change planes at the airport in Newark, customs officials arrested him for not declaring $46,000 in cash that they found in his briefcase. U.S. officials soon discovered that he had deposited more than $9 million into a Texas bank account–money that was seized in 1997 after prosecutors presented evidence linking it to drug trafficking. Meanwhile, the Mexican government this year convicted Raul Salinas of murdering Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu and continued its attempts to bring Ruiz Massieu back home to face charges of obstruction of justice, money laundering and drug trafficking.
U.S. prosecutors say their case against Ruiz Massieu, 48, relied heavily on a former Mexican police chief. The cop reportedly told the grand jury that he had collected nearly $2 million in payoffs from drug dealers and delivered the money to Ruiz Massieu. According to officials familiar with the evidence, between 1993 and 1995, Ruiz Massieu sent his top aide to Houston 25 times to deposit a total of $9 million in cash into an account there. U.S. officials would like to talk with the aide, but he disappeared in 1995.
American prosecutors had hoped that Ruiz Massieu would eventually spill information about other top Mexican officials’ ties to drug trafficking. His suicide note only deepened the mystery. “To find the killers of my brother, an investigation must be undertaken that starts with Zedillo,” it says, referring to the Mexican president. The Mexican attorney general dismissed the note as “the expression of a psychopath.” If Ruiz Massieu had evidence against Zedillo, he took it to his grave–along with all his other secrets.
