Pervasive Police Corruption in Albuquerque Explains Why a Teetotaler Was Arrested for DWI
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 Daniel 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 i
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