| Sczcurki/FlickrCommons |
Sammy Flores Jr. was born in 1971 and given the name of his father, Samuel Flores Sr., who happened to be one of the largest marijuana trafficking kingpins in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Junior was quick to follow in his father’s shady footsteps.
After his father was riddled with bullets by Mexican police at a dusty roadside checkpoint in Guadalajara in the fall of 1985, Flores fell into a life of crime of his own. Just three months after his old man was gunned down, Flores was arrested at the Pittsburgh airport carrying $17,000 in cash and a silenced .22 caliber pistol after having just completed a 205 pound weed sale in the city.
He somehow pled all of that down to probation back in his home of San Antonio.
In 1993, he was busted with some bud, and was again given probation – which he skipped on, without consequence.
In 1994, his own mother was busted selling two pounds of cocaine to a confidential informant, and she immediately turned snitch to save her own skin, and it wasn’t long before Flores was back in police custody.
He pled guilty to distributing more than five pounds of coke and two pounds of pot throughout Pittsburgh in ’93 and ’94, and admitted that he was using his own mother as a mule.
In 1995, Flores was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on the drug charges. But, in what would become a pattern he would continue to repeat throughout his adult life, he found a way to weasel – or rat – his way out of it.
While serving his time, he was asked by the FBI to rat on the various Mexican drug gangs and cartels operating in the prison. A deal was struck, Flores did his duty as a confidential informant and as a reward, he was released from prison several years early.
Once back out on the streets, Flores still preferred to skirt the norms of society. He opened what authorities believed to be a massive prostitution ring, thinly veiled as a quasi-legal escort service, by the name of Executive Playmates.
The San Antonio Police Department investigated the business between 2005-2007, a time period in which they say Flores raked in $150,000 each month.
Executive Playmates, at its height, had over 300 women employed as “escorts”, and a client list over 2000 names long. They were advertising in the Yellow Pages and all across the internet, for fuck’s sake. Yet, even after a culminating raid by the SAPD VICE squad on Executive Playmates’ headquarters, nothing ever came of the investigations.
As Guillermo Contreras reported for MySanAntonio.com, “Records show the prostitution case bounced around from the U.S. attorney’s office in San Antonio to the Bexar County district attorney’s office, but ultimately, no one prosecuted Flores for it.”
Law enforcement officials deny that Flores evaded prosecution regarding the prostitution based on any sort of past service or relationships as an admitted informant for the FBI.
So, addicted to dirty money, and seemingly untouchable by the local law, Flores kept pushing the limits.
In October of 2012, a 49 year old woman named Catalina Davis got busted with two ounces of crystal meth, and in an ironic, but hardly shocking, turn of events, Sammy Flores got ratted on. Davis told the cops it was Flores who pushed her the meth, and he was arrested yet again.
Hell, it was probably like Norm walking into Cheers when he arrived at the police station for his latest lack of lawlessness.
Yesterday Flores pled guilty to the latest set of charges, which carried a potential maximum sentence of 27 years in prison. But in a cunning display of gaming the system, Flores was actually allowed to plead guilty to “aiding and abetting the possession of amphetamines” – knocking his maximum sentence down to five to eight years.
Many people in San Antonio are wondering how Flores got off so easy, again. It makes no sense that the prosecution would cave to Flores’ demands when their case was so strong against the man and his sordid history with the law.
They say that the alleged prostitution ring that Flores ran under the Executive Playmates banner was the largest such operation in 30 years – since Theresa Brown’s sex ring was busted up by San Antonio police in 1981.
Authorities never released her client list which was said to be 3000 names long. In fact, they literally torched the thing. One can only imagine the embarrassingly prominent names that may have been on that list so many years ago.
Flores had such a list as well, and his too was confiscated by local law enforcement officials during the 2007 raid. Since the investigation and raid went nowhere, so did the list, and it seems that the powers that be in San Antonio are just fine with keeping it that way.