In the late 1970s, a man named Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra was one of the most successful drug traffickers operating in the southwestern United States. Chagra had grown up in El Paso and had built an operation that moved marijuana and cocaine from Mexico and Colombia into the United States. At its peak, his wealth was estimated at approximately $100 million, and he lived a life that mixed the specific aesthetics of the 1970s drug trade — Las Vegas gambling, large amounts of cash, the social world of professional gamblers and criminal entrepreneurs — with the El Paso community in which he had been raised.
In February 1979, Chagra was arrested on trafficking charges. His pending trial was assigned to Judge Wood’s court. This was, from Chagra’s perspective, the worst possible assignment: a judge with a documented practice of imposing maximum sentences, presiding over a case that carried the potential for a life sentence.
Chagra’s older brother, Lee, had been a prominent El Paso defense attorney who had died in December 1978, shot in his own office. The killing of Lee Chagra remained unsolved. Jimmy Chagra, already facing a life sentence before Maximum John, reportedly concluded that having Wood killed was preferable to facing his judgment.
On May 29, 1979, Judge John H. Wood Jr. walked out of his townhouse in the Windmill Lane area of San Antonio, on his way to federal court. He was shot once in the back with a high-velocity rifle. He died before reaching a hospital. He was sixty-three years old.