There’s a New Sheriff in Town

LUPE’S LAW: She triumphed over abject poverty to become a successful federal agent. Today she runs a troubled department with a budget of $92.7 million.

JIM BOWLES LIKED TO THINK OF HIMSELF as God’s sheriff in Dallas County. The Republican was first elected in 1985, and over time Bowles didn’t just see himself merely running the department; he was the department. But in March 2003, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Association surveyed its members and found that they had begun to resent his rule. Later that year, Bowles was wounded by a scandal involving a questionable contract with a questionable businessman. Even the good Lord couldn’t save him. Bowles’ own party scrambled to oust him in the March 2004 primary. By then, he was such a weak candidate that his own nephew had joined the field.

The winner of the primary, however, was a respected veteran named Danny Chandler, a former chief deputy under Bowles who believed that his old boss had to go. History suggested that the general election would be Chandler’s victory lap. This was, after all, conservative Dallas County, the place George W. Bush had called home before switching careers and where the Republicans had held the office since 1977. Chandler’s Democratic opponent, a diminutive Hispanic woman named Lupe Valdez, had no name recognition and no connections to the department. Valdez did boast more than two decades of federal law enforcement work, most recently as a senior agent for the Department of Homeland Security, but she had little management experience.

On election night, however, something amazing happened. As the Republicans gathered at the Radisson Hotel off Central Expressway and began checking off their long list of winners, Chandler came up short by nearly 18,000 votes. His supporters were blindsided. “We were the guys with the long faces over in the corner,” one officer says.

At Valdez’s election party at the downtown restaurant Iron Cactus, a diverse crowd sipped nervously on margaritas and munched on chips and salsa. When the early returns came in, Valdez was further behind than she had hoped. But as each hour passed, the gap grew tighter and tighter. When the final result came in—marking the biggest upset in Dallas County—she huddled with campaign manager Amy Ward. At the age of 26, Ward had already worked on losing campaigns for Al Gore and Tony Sanchez. “People asked me what we were supposed to do next,” Ward says, “and I told them, ’I don’t know. I’ve never won before.’”

Valdez was immediately swamped with requests from media outlets across the country—and from parts of the world not normally associated with law and order. The headlines weren’t just that she had busted nearly three decades of Republican dominance. Valdez is the first woman to hold the office. She is the first minority. Oh, and then there’s the little matter of her sexual orientation, which, depending on whom you ask, the media talked about too much or too little. Dallas County had indeed voted for a fresh face, and a lesbian Hispanic Democrat had toppled enough barriers to qualify as a one-woman civil rights movement.

In mid-November, a month and half before she would be sworn into office, I visited Valdez at the Frank Crowley Courts Building, which houses the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. The entrance to the office is as cheerless as its surroundings: a small, stark room greets visitors where a young woman buzzes people through the secured doors. To pass the time, I asked her if she enjoyed her job. She shrugged her shoulders. “When anything opens up with more pay,” she said, “you can bet I’m taking it.” That mood describes the outlook of the department’s nearly 1,800 employees, who have suffered from low morale, poor pay, sluggish promotions, and most devastating of all, rotten leadership.

After I was escorted into the main offices, I waited in a large open room filled with workers going about their daily routines. A group of uniformed officers walked past me—all white, all at least 6 feet tall, all shaped like teardrops from the waist up. They chewed on toothpicks and talked about lunch plans in accents that sounded more Longview than Dallas.

A moment later, Valdez appeared in the doorway of a nearby office and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene. She was wearing a simple teal skirt suit that came to her knees, accented with gold hoop earrings and a gold necklace. Even in her black heels she stood no more then 5 feet 3, but her most noticeable feature was the heavy bluish-purple eye shadow. The new sheriff of Dallas County, I thought, looked exactly like a middle school principal.

She then turned and walked toward a far wall, but after a few steps, she stopped to talk with an employee. “Oh, turn back around and go that way,” the woman said, pointing in my direction. Valdez nodded and smiled. I thought she was asking about her next appointment. I was wrong. She was asking for directions to the women’s bathroom.

VALDEZ WON THE ELECTION because she convinced 51 percent of the voters that her status as an outsider made her the best candidate for change. On the campaign trail, she took a page out of Karl Rove’s playbook and focused on her résumé and her integrity. “What was important was that we got back to the issues,” the 57-year-old Valdez says as we settle into a temporary office. “It just seemed that law enforcement was getting a bad image.”

She speaks plainly, and her tone remains steady, as if she’s dictating. There is no bluster, no dramatic flourishes. She is direct, but not too direct. She is stern, but not too stern. She projects the confidence to manage a prison population that is larger than most state penitentiary systems, but she knows one area in which she needs to improve. “I love being a public servant, but I hate being a politician,” she says. “I’ll have to learn how to be a decent politician to do a good job.”

Whether she likes it or not, though, Valdez has become the face of the Democratic Party in Dallas County. This was not her first shot at public office—she got whipped in a race for a seat on the County School Board in 2003—but her victory was so unexpected that it caused some Republicans to hit the panic button. Analysts from both parties agree that the 2004 election signals a Democratic resurgence in Dallas County, fueled largely by a booming Hispanic population. In 2002, the Democrats won only a single countywide race. In 2004, the party won three countywide races in addition to the sheriff’s office. The shift in support appeared in the presidential election as well. In 2000, George W. Bush carried Dallas County 52.6 percent to 44.9 percent. He won the county again in November—but by a much smaller margin. He beat John Kerry by only 50.3 percent to 48.9 percent. Royal Masset, a former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, argued in the influential online newsletter the Quorum Report that Republicans could lose control of Dallas County as early as 2008. “[F]or the first time Democrats have a lit road ahead if they are smart enough to follow it,” he wrote.

Though Valdez claims that being the standard-bearer for the Democrats doesn’t distract her (“I consider it just another part of being in the glass house,” she says), she also knows that her day-to-day political skills will determine much of her success. Her department’s budget is set by the Commissioners Court, which is dominated by Republicans. She will have extensive contact with the district attorney’s office, a seat held by a Republican. It will push the limits of Valdez’s political imagination to solve her biggest problem: getting along with the opposition while still defining her goals as a Democrat.

And that’s the thing that has some department veterans on edge: they are scared of the unknown. I ask Valdez to name the most important problems she needs to address, and her answer surprises me. “There are several things, but before we make any decisions, we need to look at the overall situation,” she says. “It’s not wise to make a decision without having clear facts. So my goals right now may totally shift in three months.” I find it difficult to believe that she won’t identify any specific plans, but when I press her, she doesn’t seem worried. “We need to go from top to bottom and see how we can improve, see what we’re doing right, see what we’re not doing that needs to be done,” she says. “That’s what I need to do now.”

She is careful, however, to deflect concerns that she will try to rule with an iron fist or make radical changes. She often uses the phrases “do what is right for the majority” or “do what’s best for the whole” while talking about her vision for the department. “I’m not going to do something because I’m a Democrat,” she says. “I’m not going to do something because I’m Hispanic, or any other reason. I’m going to do it because it’s the right thing to do for Dallas County.”

That talk doesn’t calm the nerves of some officers. “We didn’t support her during the campaign,” says Ben Roberts, president of the Dallas Sheriff’s Fraternal Order of Police. “But she’d have to put herself in our position. We didn’t know her, and we knew Danny Chandler.” Roberts, an eight-year veteran, insists that his group didn’t endorse Valdez because of her outsider status, not her sexual orientation. “This is America,” Roberts says. “What you do in your bedroom is your own business, as long as you don’t bring it into the department.” He also believes that the department wants to support her—if she can solve thorny problems with salaries and staffing levels.

The officers might be more at ease, they say, if they knew more about Valdez. By all accounts she was a stellar agent, doing undercover work on cases ranging from money laundering to drug dealing across the country and in Central and South America. But a certain mystery surrounds her career because she hasn’t released her records. “That’s a very sensitive subject,” she says, “because when we retire from the federal government, we sign a statement that says we won’t discuss cases. You’re a good undercover agent because you know how to keep your mouth shut, and it stays that way.”

Some officers worry that her experience doesn’t connect with the department. “She’s never made a traffic stop, she’s never answered a domestic disturbance, and as far as I know, she’s never been in a car chase or foot pursuit,” says Scott Guiselman, an eight-year veteran who is vice president of the Fraternal Order. “That’s our business, and is her lack of understanding going to cause us problems?”

If these officers are worried about what they don’t know, they are downright terrified about what they have already seen. In late November, Valdez appointed a transition team to help her prepare to take control of the department. Former Mayor Ron Kirk headed the list, bringing his star power to Valdez’s camp. But his selection angered the rank and file. “It is documented in many, many a City Council meeting minute that Ron Kirk is totally against labor,” Roberts says. “You know they quoted him the other day on the radio that when he was mayor he told the DPD, ’You think you’re going to be driving Lexuses, and you’ll be lucky to be driving Yugos,’ when they were trying to get their pay raise. That’s not what this department wants to hear right now.”

But putting Kirk on her transition team was a small problem compared to Valdez’s first political stumble. Roberts says that his organization, along with the two other main labor groups, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Association and the Dallas County Peace Officer’s Association, asked to send representatives to meet with Valdez after her victory. She refused. Guiselman says, “Everyone has their own agendas, and I thought it was great that the labor groups put those agendas aside—for maybe the first time ever—and came together. But we never got in the door.”

Valdez says that she wants to meet with the officers on an individual basis instead of collectively. But the damage is done. Members of the Fraternal Order have asked Roberts why he hasn’t talked with Valdez. The lack of answers only hurts morale, regardless of her intentions. “The ball is in her court,” Roberts says. “We want to get along, but right now it’s looking pretty bleak.”

MODEST BEGINNING: Lupe and her brother Ramiro.

THERE ARE A LOT OF REASONS to believe that Lupe Valdez will fail, that the sheriff’s job will wear this woman down and leave her wishing she’d never run for office. It would be easy to write her off. But then there’s the little matter of what she’s already overcome.

Valdez grew up in choking poverty at a time when her options were limited to working in the fields and taking orders from men. She was born in San Antonio in 1947 to a family of migrant farm workers. Her father Plinio didn’t make it past the second grade; her mother Teresa never attended school. Lupe was the youngest of seven children—and the only girl. (Another brother died at a young age.) A big age difference between her family’s two youngest, Lupe and Ramiro, and the older boys meant the Valdezes were like two families. “I literally had five brothers who were old enough to be my father,” Lupe says.

The Valdezes had no running water, and the family had to use an outhouse. They relied on a wood-burning stove to cook and to heat their home. During the harvest season, the entire family would travel as far north as Michigan, picking beans to make money. Lupe worked in the fields until she was 7 or 8, and then Teresa made a decision that changed her life. “This was in the early ’50s, when women didn’t have a lot of rights,” her brother Ramiro says. “When my mother took a stand, she knew it was a big risk. I could see her hands trembling. ’I want these kids to go to school,’ she told my father. ’I want them to have a better life.’”

Plinio was furious, but Teresa held firm. To teach Teresa a lesson, Plinio took the five older boys and headed north for another season of labor. He didn’t even leave Teresa extra money. The neighborhood was dangerous, particularly at night when rival gangs prowled the streets. Ramiro remembers one evening when a drunken neighbor came over and tried to take advantage of his mother.

After just five weeks on the road, Plinio returned home and gave in to Teresa’s demands. He had found life without his wife to be too difficult. Lupe started school and became a member of the safety patrol, helping out at crosswalks and school activities. The job came with a badge, and she wore it everywhere she went. As Lupe got older, Teresa wanted her to enroll at the nicest school in San Antonio at the time, Thomas Jefferson High. Ramiro walked to nearby Burbank High School, and Plinio thought that was good enough for Lupe. Besides, Jefferson was across town, and he didn’t think the family could afford the daily 10-cent bus fare. But Teresa scrimped to find the money. Lupe attended Jefferson.

After high school, she followed Ramiro to Bethany Nazarene College (now Southern Nazarene University) in Oklahoma. “We didn’t go there for the quality of the education,” Ramiro says. “We went there because of its connections to the church.” She worked various jobs to put herself through school. Ramiro earned a degree in English, and Lupe earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Ramiro went on to earn a Ph.D. from Brandeis University, just outside of Boston, in social welfare policy. He now lives in Denton and works for a private company that oversees dialysis and organ transplant centers across the state.

Lupe followed a different path. She spent time in the U.S. Army Reserves, earning the rank of captain and working with both the military police and military intelligence. A career in law enforcement seemed natural, but Lupe in fact hadn’t planned for it. “I got into law enforcement by accident,” she says. “I went to the unemployment office and said I needed a job.” Because of her military service, the clerk told her that she would have benefits for 18 months, but Valdez insisted on taking anything available. That turned out to be a position in a county jail in Kansas.

Still, despite Lupe’s accomplishments, Plinio wasn’t pleased. He believed that women had certain roles, and they didn’t involve a career in law enforcement. “My father and my brothers basically did everything but throw me out the door to discourage me,” she says. “But they lived at a time when law enforcement was for the privileged and abuse was part of the job. My brothers and my dad were both abused by law enforcement just for being poor.” But she stood up to her father, just like her mother did. “None of the boys would talk back to him,” Ramiro says. “But Lupe did. If you can stand up to your overbearing, authoritarian father, you can stand up to anyone.”

Life, though, for a female officer was not easy. The men were often hostile, and Valdez had few people to turn to for support. “I think there were constant moments when I wished things were different,” she says. “Many times I’d go home and cry—and then go right back to work the next day. I’d pray for advice, saying, ’I don’t know how to do this.’”

But she continued to climb the ranks. She came back to Texas to work as a jailer in the federal prison system, then became a federal agent, working for agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Customs Service before taking early retirement to run for sheriff.

As for the private side of her life, the one that so many people have talked about, she told Ramiro that she was a lesbian only after her parents had died. “She called me in July 1982,” Ramiro says. “I was shocked. I knew that she had had a few boyfriends, and I initially refused to accept it.” The revelation also upset her remaining brothers, who still live in San Antonio. Eventually, they came to accept the truth. As Ramiro says of his sister’s political and social identity: “She knew that she was Hispanic long before she knew she was a lesbian.”

When I ask her if her private life is any of the media’s business, she politely tells me that it isn’t but then says it’s only natural for her to seek out a caring relationship. But she isn’t seeing anyone now. “When is there time?” she asks, shrugging her shoulders.

Today she rarely sees her brothers, except for holidays. But the family’s pride is clear. “Teresa had all of her dreams in this little girl,” Ramiro says. “She wanted us not to work in the fields. She wanted us to wear clean shirts and work indoors. Lupe is the dream of the migrant worker.”

AT A BREAKFAST MEETING in early December at El Ranchito, an Oak Cliff fixture, a crowd of 50 people shows up to support their newly elected sheriff. The room is filled with leaders of the Hispanic community, and Valdez mingles easily, slipping between Spanish and English. I ask her how she is doing, and she replies: “I’m always good. And if I’m not good, I get that way.”

As the crowd sits down to steaming bowls of menudo, Valdez takes the microphone and thanks her supporters. She places her hand on her lips and then moves it down and away from her face. “That means ’thank you’ in sign language,” she says, “but mine’s a little crooked because it has an accent.” The crowd roars with laughter.

But the story she tells next doesn’t fit the occasion. She has not come to rally the troops. Instead, she talks about a trip to Guatemala she took with a church group during the ’60s. She volunteered at a remote village hospital with a friend who didn’t speak Spanish. Lupe helped translate a doctor’s instructions, who asked if they would assist him with a pregnant woman. They went to her room, and the doctor disappeared. But it was too late to ask questions: the baby was coming, and Lupe and her friend made the best of it. Together they delivered a healthy baby boy. Afterward, Valdez approached the doctor to find out where he had gone, and he told them that he had asked them to assist the woman, not the doctor.

If the crowd at El Ranchito wonders where the story was headed, Valdez finally makes it clear. “Even though we speak the same language, we don’t always understand each other,” she says. “Be patient with me as I’m working in this new job.”

The story falls flat. Valdez lowered expectations among her most supportive fans, and the puzzled looks show that I am not the only person who is confused. Despite all of the media’s attention, she continues to be a great mystery to me. With so many problems to solve in such a hostile environment, good intentions won’t be enough, and I’m tempted to dismiss her prospects. But in the back of my mind, I can’t shake something that Ramiro told me: “Lupe’s attitude is that she can accomplish anything. And she always has—all the way back to safety patrol.”