Apr. 13—At the age of 21, Jaden Brown found himself in the home office of a lawyer he didn’t know, with a legal assistant pressuring him to pay $10,000 to ensure his DWI case was thrown out.
“You can pretend this never happened,” Brown recalled the assistant, Ricardo “Rick” Mendez, telling him back in April 2022. It was days after Albuquerque Police Department DWI officer Joshua Montaño arrested him and told him a lawyer would contact him.
So when Mendez called, Brown showed up but quickly became suspicious. And then Mendez pulled out Brown’s driver’s license, which had been seized by Montaño.
“I was really weirded out then,” Brown told the Journal in a recent phone interview. “It (the license) should have been in police custody, not with some random lawyer I hadn’t even hired. I thought, ‘This is some real-life Breaking Bad stuff.'”
Then Clear walked into the room holding a bag of psilocybin mushrooms that Brown said he had in his car when he was arrested. The mushrooms were never listed as seized in the police complaint, nor was he charged with drug possession.
Brown said Clear, a prominent attorney, held out the bag of drugs and told him he “could still be charged” for them.
Brown was one of the first, if not the first, DWI suspects to make a formal complaint about Clear and Mendez to authorities. And he may have been among the first to complain that his property was seized by law enforcement as an inducement to hire Clear.
Clear, Mendez and Montaño have since pleaded guilty to federal racketeering, bribery and extortion in relation to the scheme.
Clear has admitted to federal authorities that the racketeering enterprise went undetected for nearly 30 years as DWI officers from the APD, New Mexico State Police and the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office were paid to withhold evidence or miss pretrial interviews and court hearings to ensure their own DWI cases were dismissed.
APD Chief Harold Medina said the investigation has shown that, in recent years, a suspect’s property, including driver’s licenses and jewelry, were improperly confiscated from DWI suspects as part of the scheme to steer clients to Mendez and Clear.
During the 2022 meeting, Brown said Mendez told him he’d get his license back after he paid the$10,000 and his DWI charge was dismissed. But Brown’s father was waiting outside in the car, so he left and never went back.
Brown hired another attorney to defend him on the DWI charge. After hearing what happened in Clear’s office, the defense attorney put him in touch with Albuquerque lawyer Daymon Ely, who referred Brown’s complaint to the FBI.
“I did something wrong, but two wrongs don’t make a right,” Brown said. “I thought what those guys were doing was sketchy and illegal.”
Brown said he didn’t hear from the FBI for another 17 months.
“We kind of just let it go,” he said. “It didn’t seem like they were going to take an interest.” Brown said he wasn’t aware the FBI gave the tip to APD Internal Affairs to look into, or that the complaint went uninvestigated once there.
The FBI called in September 2023, asking for an interview and an affidavit. It wasn’t clear what had triggered the interest in the case after so long, Brown said.
Brown eventually pleaded guilty to the April 2022 DWI offense and said he ended up losing his chance to work as an intern for Sandia National Laboratories. He received a deferred sentence for going to a DWI first offender program but estimates that he spent more than $14,000 before the ordeal was over.
He said he wonders about those DWI suspects who did pay Clear the $10,000 and had their charges dismissed. If guilty, he said, did they drink and drive again with impunity?
“I was in no way, shape, or form trying to get out of justice for what I did, which was wrong,” Brown said. “At the end of the day, I paid the consequences for making a bad decision.”
Brown added that he no longer drinks alcohol and has landed a job with a tech firm in Colorado.
As for the driver’s license he last saw in Clear’s office, Brown said he never did get it back.