Shortly after his arrest in early October, Little Village construction worker Juan Espinoza Martínez was led by three federal agents into a windowless interview room, still dressed in a green work T-shirt and carrying a small bottle of water.
“You’re probably a little confused about what’s going on today, so I’m gonna try to explain it all to you,” Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Christopher Perugini told Espinoza Martínez at the outset of the Oct. 6 videotaped interview, which was played for a federal jury Wednesday. “Feel free to ask me any questions you want.”
Then, the agents laid it on the 37-year-old father of three why he was there.
“Murder for hire?” Espinoza Martínez responded, holding up his hands questioningly.
“Correct, so that’s what the charge you’re charged with,” Perugini said. “I’ll explain it to you as we’re going.”
The agents then confronted Espinoza Martínez with text messages he’d sent an acquaintance that included a photo of Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, who was then the face of Operation Midway Blitz, along with what agents characterized as cash bounties for Bovino’s kidnapping and murder.
Over the course of the interview, the agents pressed Espinoza Martínez repeatedly on how he thought the messages looked, including references to the Latin Kings street gang backing the offer.
He said over and over he meant nothing by it, that they were nothing more than social media chatter, and that he had no intention of making any actual offer for Bovino’s killing.
“I’m really confused about this,” Espinoza Martínez said at one point. “I’m not nowhere around there. I work for a living every day. I’m a union worker. I work concrete, so I don’t know.”
Portions of the videotaped interview were played for jurors in court Wednesday at the lightning-fast trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in downtown Chicago.
Over the course of about five hours, including a 45-minute lunch break, jurors heard opening statements and testimony from four witnesses. Though Espinoza Martínez’s lawyer had told the jury in opening statements they would hear testimony from his client, he was not called to the witness stand.
Both sides had rested their cases by shortly after 3 p.m., and U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow told the jury to return for closing arguments and then deliberations Thursday morning.
Espinoza Martínez, who has lived in Chicago for years but is not a U.S. citizen, is charged in an indictment with a single count of solicitation of murder for hire, which carries up to 10 years in prison.
According to prosecutors, Espinoza Martínez sent Snapchat messages to an acquaintance from the construction business, Adrian Jiménez, calling for Bovino’s killing after an immigration agent shot a woman in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood on Oct. 4.
Jiménez, who had worked as a government informant on and off for years, shared the messages with Homeland Security Investigations, including one that had a screenshot of a Chicago Tribune photo of Bovino with the words, “2k on information when you get him” and “10k if u take him down.”
Espinoza Martínez’s trial is the first criminal case to stem from Operation Midway Blitz to go to trial and has garnered national headlines since it was first charged, with Trump administration officials holding it up as an example of the threats and violence faced by immigration officials during their deportation push.
Though limited in scope, the case is an important litmus test as immigration-enforcement operations continue to roil Chicago and other Democrat-led cities long targeted by President Donald Trump, including Minneapolis, where the killing of a U.S. citizen by an immigration agent earlier this month has sparked nationwide protests.
When the charges were first brought, authorities accused Espinoza Martínez of being a high-ranking member of the Latin Kings. But evidence of any gang membership never materialized, and much of the testimony about the Latin Kings wound up being toned down or stripped from the trial completely.
In his opening statement to the jury, Assistant U.S. Attorney Minje Shin said the case was not about someone charged with “expressing strong, even angry, views about immigration enforcement policy” or a hatred of Bovino.
“Make no mistake — the evidence in this case will show that what the defendant did was not a joke, not just mouthing off, not just him blowing off steam behind a keyboard, not political discourse. .. what the defendant did was a solicitation of murder,” Shin said.
Shin said Espinoza Martínez was “fixated” on Bovino, who was “the face of the threat” to arrest, detain and deport members of his community in the Little Village neighborhood, a threat that “hit close to home.”
Espinoza Martínez’s attorney, Jonathan Bedi, told jurors in his opening remarks that the case was “riddled” with reasonable doubt because “the government cannot point to anything that shows Juan’s intent.”
“When you cut through all of their words … all they have is their guesses and speculation,” Bedi said.
Bedi noted what he said were huge gaps in the prosecution’s case: no bags of money in the offing, no follow-up on any threats, no discussion of any plans, location scouting, escape route, surveillance, or communication saying, “Bovino’s here — now would be a good time to act.”
“Repeating neighborhood gossip is not a federal crime,” Bedi said.
Before Espinoza Martínez’s taped interview was played, jurors heard testimony from the informant, Jiménez, who walked slowly into court with a pronounced limp due to a back issue he’s been suffering.
Dressed in a blue suit, with a salt-and-pepper beard, Jiménez testified in a low and quiet voice, telling the jury he’s been in construction for decades and recently started his own construction business. Though he’s not a U.S. citizen, he was granted permanent residency in 2017, he said.
He also said he was convicted in 2000 of a felony and spent several years in prison. Though the jury did not hear details of that case, court records show Jiménez’s conviction was for an armed robbery and home invasion in Franklin Park that was charged in 2000. He was later sentenced to six years behind bars, records show.
Jiménez told the jury he’d first met Espinoza Martínez about a year ago after he reached out to him on Snapchat, looking for construction work.
Jiménez testified he had conversations about immigration with Espinoza Martínez “more than a few times.” But when Shin attempted to ask what they talked about specifically, the defense repeatedly objected and the judge sustained it.
Jiménez testified he took Bovino-related photos of the Snapchat messages received from Espinoza Martínez on Oct. 2 and “almost immediately” contacted agents with HSI about them.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Dena Singer asked Jiménez a series of questions: You have a family, right? You work? You want to continue working and you want to continue staying in the U.S.? And you take care of your kids?
Jiménez answered “Yes” to all of them.
“And you’re not somebody who commits murder for hire, right?” Singer asked,
“No,” Jiménez said.
Singer also got Jiménez to acknowledge that Espinoza Martínez never asked him to take any action against Bovino or share the message with any wider audience.
Did he ever say, “Here’s where Bovino is going to be next?” Singer asked.
“No,” Jiménez replied.
“Did he ever say, “Here’s a picture of cash,” or “I have someone who can pay you all this cash?'”
Jiménez said he had not.
Espinoza Martínez was arrested four days after their text exchange. In his videotaped interview, agents confronted him with the specific words and asked what “LK” meant.
“I said, ‘Latin Kings are on him.’ That’s what I said,” Espinoza Martínez responded.
And how would he know that, he was asked.
“Because I hear the talks,” Espinoza Martínez told the agents, gesturing to his side as though someone were sitting there. “I mean, they are talking right there.”
Espinoza Martínez said when he gets off work he often sits down with his phone to relax and drink, when he scrolls through social media and chats with people about what he sees.
He repeatedly denied knowing anything about the “numbers” on the alleged bounty, telling agents, “I have no money” and that he hasn’t “even kept up with the guy,” meaning Bovino.
“I understand how that looks, yes,” Espinoza Martínez said. “I don’t have no gun … I have nothing to hide. I’m not hiring anybody. I don’t know anybody that does that. I never done any of the stuff like that. I don’t roll around with them.”
The prosecution’s final witness was Donald Adams, another special agent with HSI who reviewed other text exchanges gleaned from a search of Espinoza Martínez’s phone.
One included the same Tribune photo of Bovino and reference to the $10,000 offer, saying, “Dead or alive … (expletive) serious.
In Spanish, Espinoza added: “They’re on fire with the top pig.”
That exchange also included a photo of a handgun with an engraved handle advertised for sale for $1,500.
Jurors were also shown a number of other text strings showing Espinoza Martínez, like a lot of people in Little Village, was angry about Operation Midway Blitz.
After the shooting of Marimar Martínez by an immigration agent in Brighton Park on Oct. 4, he texted: “Damn mfs tried … tired of them,” according to one message shown to the jury.
After prosecutors rested, the defense called as its only witness Oscar Espinoza, the defendant’s younger brother who had attended every single court hearing for Juan Espinoza Martínez since his arrest 3½ months ago.
Oscar Espinoza testified he was the one messaging with his brother when the message about Bovino and the “top pig” came in. He said he’d already seen the same thing on Facebook an hour or so earlier.
“I took it as a joke,” the brother testified.
Oscar Espinoza testified after the initial part about Bovino, he and his brother exchanged lots of messages that had nothing to do with him.
“So it was just those couple of lines with him telling you what was already on Facebook?” Bedi asked.
Oscar Espinoza responded, “Yes.”
Regarding the photo of a handgun his brother had forwarded to him, Oscar Espinoza said he was looking for a gun at the time with the design of their patron saint, St. Jude, engraved on the handle, explaining that the saint had been pivotal for the family as their father went through a kidney transplant.
Oscar Espinoza said he has a firearm owner’s identification card and concealed carry license.
On cross-examination, Shin asked Oscar Espinoza about the wording of the texts his brother sent, including the one where he said, “(expletive) serious.”
“He didn’t say it was a joke, did he?” Shin asked.
“No.”
Shin also asked a response where Oscar Espinoza texted his brother: “Not worth 10k.”
“You were trying to talk your brother out of it, right?” Shin asked.
Espinoza denied that was the case.
