Man Who Alerted FBI to Possible Corruption in APD’s DWI Unit Speaks Out

Published June 19th, 2024 at 12:03 am

By Elise Kaplan, City Desk ABQ

In the early morning hours of April 22, 2022, Jaden Brown was driving home from Bar Uno in Downtown Albuquerque — 100 mph on Interstate 25 — when he was pulled over. 

The Albuquerque police officer, Joshua Montaño, gave the 21-year-old University of New Mexico student a field sobriety test and then took him to the prisoner transport center where he blew a .16, according to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court. That’s twice the legal limit.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, Brown said Montaño told him he wasn’t going to charge him for having a bag of mushrooms in his car and that a friend who was a lawyer would call him. Then days later, he said, that friend — Thomas Clear III’s paralegal Rick Mendez — did call and ended up telling him he could pay $10,000 to guarantee the charges would go away and if he didn’t pay he could be charged with having a controlled substance, a fourth-degree felony in addition to the DWI. 

Brown, along with attorney Daymon Ely, reported the encounter to the FBI that same week. 

It is unclear whether the FBI had already heard about the scheme, but Brown’s tip appears to be the first to make it from the federal agency to APD. The investigation burst into public view in January 2024 when agents raided Montaño’s home — along with the homes of his colleagues Harvey Johnson and Honorio Alba, and Clear’s office. The men are at the center of a federal investigation into allegations that they were working together to make DWI cases disappear if the defendant paid a hefty fee. 

For Brown, news of the raids was vindication that he had been right to feel suspicious of his interactions with the officer, lawyer and paralegal. He had met with FBI agents to tell his story in late summer of 2023.

“When I was telling people that this was happening, I had nothing to show for it,” Brown told City Desk ABQ in his first interview with the media. “It was just kind of like it was validating, to show I wasn’t making this up.” 

No charges have been filed in connection with the investigation. The three officers whose homes were raided, along with Lt. Justin Hunt and Officer Nelson Ortiz, have resigned while under internal investigation. Daren DeAguero, a former DWI officer, has also resigned while under internal investigation. Three others who are still with the department are also being investigated internally. 

Emails obtained by City Desk ABQ, meanwhile, show that Brown’s tip to the FBI made its way to Cmdr. Mark Landavazo in the Internal Affairs Department about two months after he reported it. Landavazo suggested the special agent contact the Civilian Police Oversight Agency.

It’s unclear if Landavazo investigated the complaint, but APD spokesperson Gilbert Gallegos said the “information was not shared with Chief [Harold] Medina.”

“Chief’s Office learned details of the initial tip to the FBI sometime after the FBI executed search warrants in January 2024,” Gallegos said. “Those details are being scrutinized as part of APD’s ongoing, internal investigation.”

Landavazo has been on administrative leave and under internal investigation since Feb. 13. 

In December 2022 — six months after APD received Brown’s tip from the FBI — APD got a tip about another officer in the DWI unit getting paid “to get a case dismissed.” The investigation into that tip did not turn up any evidence of wrongdoing. 

Montaño declined to comment and Clear did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the FBI said the agency receives many complaints of criminal activity and “how we handle them is a confidential process.”

“Similarly, to protect the privacy of people who contact the FBI, we cannot confirm or deny any particular contact,” said spokesperson Margot Cravens in an email. “As a general matter, allegations of criminal conduct are reviewed by the FBI for their merit, with consideration of any applicable federal laws. As this is still an ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further.”

‘Someone’s gonna call you’

Brown remembers being quite drunk when he was taken to APD’s prisoner transport center on that April night. He had a bag of mushrooms — which he swears were not actually his — in his car. 

At the prisoner transport center, Brown said Montaño took his driver’s license and followed him into the bathroom, telling him that he was not going to be charged for having mushrooms.

“Then he said, basically, ‘I’m sympathetic to your cause. You’ll probably get out tomorrow, I have a lawyer or a friend’ — I don’t exactly know how he said it — but it was like ‘someone’s gonna call you,’” Brown said. 

A couple days later, Clear’s paralegal Mendez called him.

Brown said his dad drove him to Clear’s office — a house in a quiet residential Northeast Albuquerque neighborhood that had a “big old truck in his front yard with big nuts hanging from a chain on the back.” As he entered, a young man of about 19 was on his way out, looking upset. He thinks he was probably a client.

Brown said Mendez — who was “casual looking” wearing a button up instead of a suit — did most of the talking while Clear — a “stuffy older white dude with a big ring on his finger” — hung back. 

“It was really simple. I screwed up, I got caught red handed, I’m gonna get in trouble. It is what it is,” Brown said he remembered thinking. “But he tells me ‘no, this is going to go away and you’re not gonna deal with it. It’s going to completely disappear.’”

Brown said Mendez then pulled out the driver’s license that had been confiscated by Montaño and said he could pay $10,000 or $5,000 up front with a monthly payment plan.

Then, Brown said, Mendez and Clear brought up the fact that he hadn’t been charged for having mushrooms in his car.

“He basically was like, ‘you have to do this because you don’t want to get charged with the mushrooms found in your car,’” Brown said. “That’s when Tom Clear’s the one that points out to me that ‘you haven’t been charged with it yet — but you can be. It’s a fourth-degree felony to have mushrooms in New Mexico.’”

Brown told the men he would think about it and then he left. After discussing the encounter with his father and his sister — who reached out to a retired officer she knew — Brown decided to go with another lawyer. He paid $5,000.

“It was kind of reminding me of the show Better Call Saul — crooked lawyers and stuff,” he said. “There was a part of me that was kind of like, this is probably just how it is. Like, it’s a crooked business.” 

A dismissal and then charges refiled

Brown’s new lawyer referred him to Ely, a legal malpractice lawyer, and the two made the report to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center that same week. 

Two months later, emails show the complaint was sent from an FBI special agent to Landavazo, with APD’s Internal Affairs Professional Standards Division. 

As for Brown, he graduated from UNM with a bachelor’s degree in business and got a paid internship with Sandia National Laboratories. He stopped drinking and is hoping to move to Colorado. His probation is up at the end of the month.

Coincidentally, Brown’s DWI charge did end up getting dismissed because Montaño wasn’t able to testify after he was seriously injured in a crash with a drunken driver while heading home from his shift. 

Then, in May 2023, the charges against Brown were refiled. He pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor, and received a deferred sentence. The case kicked off a cascade of setbacks, including an arrest for having a revoked license and the denial of a security clearance for a job at the labs. 

Brown said after initially hearing nothing from the FBI for over a year, he and Ely assumed the tip wasn’t going to go anywhere. Then in late summer 2023, Ely called with an update and the two met with agents and the agency’s lawyers.

“I was in a room full of people with pencils and papers and notepads and everything I’m saying is being written down,” Brown said. “I didn’t want to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing, or remembering something wrong.”

He said over the course of three hours he could tell they were taking it seriously as they asked questions and wrote down names and dates.

“I was like ‘I’m gonna see this in the news. It’s gonna happen,’” Brown recalled. “And then I did.”