TIJUANA This city's most controversial figure was apparently whisked to Mexico City on Saturday afternoon after the military raided his house before dawn and detained him and 10 other men and seized a cache of weapons.
Mexico's Attorney General's Office, known as the PGR, had issued a statement earlier in the day detailing how Jorge Hank Rhon, the president of Caliente Casino, had been detained.
However, two people close to him disputed that version and one of them, his attorney, said that he would file an injunction against the detention.
The PGR statement said that an anonymous tip led the military around dawn Saturday to detain three armed men, who revealed that more weapons were hidden at a house in the upscale neighborhood of Hipódromo. The house turned out to be the home of Hank Rhon, 55, a former Tijuana mayor.
The soldiers went to the house and detected armed individuals, who entered the house, with the military in pursuit. The military detained eight other people, among them Hank Rhon.
And they seized 40 rifles, 48 guns, 9,298 rounds of ammunition, 70 chargers and one gas grenade, the statement said.
However, that official version was refuted by Baja California's Human Rights prosecutor, Heriberto García, and by his attorney, Óscar Téllez.
Speaking in the early afternoon outside the PGR's building, in the Río zone, they said Hank Rhon was being held in isolation.
Soldiers and federal police officers had busted into Hank Rhon's bedroom around 3 a.m., said García, who was given access to some of those detained on Saturday morning.
They kept Hank Rhon sitting in a large room and at 5:12 a.m. took him to the PGR building, he added.
"His security detail cooperated at all times with the soldiers; they showed them their permits to carry weapons," García said, "but they were stripped of their weapons and subdued by the soldiers, despite the fact that they did not resist."
García said that a federal agent had told him that Hank Rhon was being accused of violating the Federal Weapons and Explosives Law, even though they had not informed Hank Rhon.
Téllez said that federal authorities had denied him access to his client.
"He's in isolation They have not told me what he's been accused of," said Téllez, who said he would seek an injunction.
Outside the PGR's office, about 100 people who had been brought there by Hank's friends or were former municipal officials who had worked for his administration, protested his detention.
Around 12:30 p.m., two convoys made up of eight Federal Police patrol cars left the PGR building, apparently with several of those detained on board and headed for the airport, said García and Téllez.
By late afternoon, authorities had not officially confirmed the transfer of those detained to the Mexico City headquarters of Siedo, the federal agency that investigates organized crime. However, both García and Téllez were treating it as a fact that all the detained had been flown there.
The PGR identified the other people detained as Marco Antonio Trinidad Gómez, Luis Alfonso Sánchez Solís, Rubén Muñoz Nava , Víctor Manuel de la Torre Horta, Javier Marco Polo Ayala Roldán, Rigoberto González López, César Pérez Guerrero, Carlos Gonzalo Pérez Contreras or Carlos Gonzalo Rizo Pérez, Ramón López Apodaca and Juan Ignacio Parra Santos.
Hank Rhon, president of the Grupo Caliente casino, was Tijuana mayor from 2004 to 2007. He did not finish his term so he could be the PRI's candidate for governor, a race he lost to José Guadalupe Osuna, the current governor.
The powerful businesman has recently been in the news because the professional soccer team he owns, the Xolitzcuintles de Tijuana, reached Mexico's premier soccer league.
Hank Rhon is the son of Carlos Hank González, nicknamed "El Profesor," a legendary figure in the PRI party, who amassed an enormous fortune during his terms as governor of the State of Mexico, mayor of Mexico City, and secretary of Tourism and Agriculture.
Before Hank González died in 2001, Forbes magazine calcultated his fortune at $1.3 billion.
With his father's help, Hank Rhon obtained the Tijuana racetrack concession in the mid-1980s. Over the years he and his staff have had brushes with the law but he's never been convicted of a crime. He was suspected of being involved in the murder of Héctor "El Gato" Félix, coeditor of the Zeta weekly newspaper.
A security worker for Hank Rhon was convicted in the killing and is serving a prison term. His son heads Hank Rhon's security detail.
Ever since Félix's murder, every edition of Zeta publishes a page addressed to the Baja California governor asking him to investigate the "intellectual authors" of the murder, whose trail "point to the racetrack."
Omar.millan@sandiegored.com
