Thomas Clear, the defense attorney at the center of Albuquerque's police corruption scandal, pleaded guilty this week to federal bribery, extortion, and racketeering charges. Clear's plea agreement indicates that his long-running arrangement with local police officers, who took bribes in exchange for making DWI cases disappear, goes back further and involves more people than was previously reported.
Ricardo Mendez, an investigator and paralegal who began working for Clear in 2007, pleaded guilty to similar charges last month. At that point, federal prosecutors said the bribery scheme, which they call the "DWI Enterprise," had begun by 2008. But Clear says he had been running the racket "since at least the late 1990s," meaning it operated for at least two dozen years before an FBI investigation shut it down in January 2024.
Since Clear also says the scheme eventually encompassed "almost the entire" Albuquerque Police Department (APD) unit charged with apprehending drunk drivers, we are talking about a lot of corrupt cops. As of 2022, seven officers were assigned to the APD's DWI unit. Judging from the histories of the Albuquerque officers who have been implicated so far, including two who pleaded guilty last week, another who pleaded guilty the same day as Clear, and 10 more who were placed on administrative leave and/or resigned, they typically served in the DWI unit for three to six years. Given the turnover, dozens of cops may have received payoffs from Clear.
