If he hadn’t stalked Southlake cartel lawyer, defendant testifies, ‘I’d be dead’

Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Cepeda said an obsessive Mexican drug lord forced him to find and track a cartel lawyer living in Southlake. If he didn’t, Ledezma-Cepeda said, the drug lord — a Beltran Leyva cartel leader known as El Gato — would kill him and his family “immediately.”

“I wouldn’t be here,” Ledezma-Cepeda, 59, testified in federal court Thursday. “I’d be dead.”

On Thursday, the seventh day of what is expected to be a monthlong trial, prosecutors rested their case, and defense attorneys opened their case by calling Ledezma-Cepeda as their first witness.

Ledezma-Cepeda, wearing a green suit jacket with his thin black hair slicked back, testified in Spanish through an interpreter for more than two hours.

He and his cousin Jose Luis Cepeda-Cortes, 59, have been on trial since last week, each charged with interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit murder for hire in the 2013 killing of Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa.

Prosecutors dropped the conspiracy charge against Ledezma-Cepeda’s son, Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Campano, 32, in exchange for his pleading guilty to stalking.

Ledezma-Campano testified against his relatives last week.

Guerrero, the personal lawyer for the leader of the Gulf cartel, was fatally shot at Southlake Town Square. The shooter and getaway driver have not been named or arrested.

$1 million obsession

“It was never my free will” to search for Guerrero, Ledezma-Cepeda said.

Instead, he was ordered by Rodolfo Villareal Hernandez, the Beltran Leyva “plaza boss” known as El Gato, who believed that Guerrero was responsible for his father’s death.

“He was obsessed with that,” Ledezema-Cepeda said.

El Gato, according to previous trial testimony, ordered the three defendants to carry GPS trackers with them at all times, so he would know they were doing their job. Last week, Ledezma-Campano said that El Gato spent almost $1 million to find and kill Guerrero, and that the cartel leader celebrated the lawyer’s death with boxes of Michelob beer.

But El Gato “was never generous or excessive,” Ledezma-Cepeda said.

“He would handle his finances with a magnifying glass,” Ledezma-Cepeda said.

Worried that someone would betray him, El Gato leveraged his dangerous reputation into ensuring that Ledezma-Cepeda and others did what they were told. He told them where to look for Guerrero, Ledezma-Cepeda said, and demanded they stay close to him.

“It was as if he had a remote control car,” he said. “My family was the guarantee that I would” keep searching for Guerrero.

Family involvement

Ledezma-Cepeda’s testimony contradicted parts of his son’s testimony last week. The father said the detail about the Michelob beer was misunderstood: El Gato’s brother, not El Gato, requested the alcohol.

El Gato did host a monthslong hunting trip, but it was sporadic, Ledezma-Cepeda said, and he participated because “I couldn’t turn him down at all.”

Ledezma-Cepeda also said he never met a Beltran Leyva leader ranked higher than El Gato. His son said Ledezma-Cepeda was close friends with one of the cartel’s founders.

Ledezma-Cepeda’s testimony, though, did align with what Cepeda-Cortes’ attorneys have suggested — that Cepeda-Cortes didn’t know that the investigation of Guerrero would turn deadly.

Cepeda-Cortes, his attorneys have said, was just curious about private investigations and wanted to help his Spanish-speaking cousin with a job in the United States.

Ledezma-Cepeda framed his cousin’s involvement in a similar way.

“He is very enthusiastic, and he wanted to learn about investigations,” Ledezma-Cepeda said. “I told him he should get a [private investigator] license and learn about it.”

He said he took his cousin to New York City, where he was working a private investigation job at an upscale Manhattan hotel. Cepeda-Cortes was “excited and wowed” during the trip, Ledezma-Cepeda said.

For the Guerrero job, Ledezma-Cepeda said he wanted someone who could speak “100 percent” English to handle duties like renting cars and apartments. Ledezma-Cepeda also used the computer at Cepeda-Cortes’ business in Edinburg to research Guerrero and scan documents.

“I never told him” about El Gato, Ledezma-Cepeda said.

Demanding boss

El Gato told the men where to look for Guerrero, tipping them off to addresses in North Texas, Ledezma-Cepeda said. When they found Guerrero, he demanded that they keep him in sight.

“El Gato wanted us to get as close as possible to [Guerrero’s] vehicles,” Ledezma-Cepeda said. “He always wanted to know who was in the vehicle.”

Ledezma-Cepeda said he wasn’t part of the conspiracy to kill Guerrero — he was just doing what he was told.

His attorney, Warren St. John, asked him if he feared that El Gato would kill him if he contacted U.S. authorities about the operation.

“The whole time, all the time,” he said, “even right now.”

Cepeda-Cortes’ attorney and prosecutors are scheduled to cross-examine Ledezma-Cepeda today.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 8:30 AM with the headline "If he hadn’t stalked Southlake cartel lawyer, defendant testifies, ‘I’d be dead’."