“He knew she was married, and he knew she was married to Greg Leon. “He took advantage of Rachel Leon,” Swerling told jurors. The defense attorney described Bravo in his opening arguments as a “gigolo” who essentially turned Rachel into a concubine. Murder” for representing hundreds of accused killers over his 50-year career. When Leon’s trial finally began in June, he had another South Carolina legal legend on his side: Jack Swerling, nicknamed “Mr. “The arms and tentacles that shoot out of this restaurant in San Jose,” Bland told a judge in 2017, “are extraordinary.” In a preliminary hearing, Leon’s personal attorney Eric Bland – who played a major role in bringing down Murdaugh by exposing his financial wrongdoings – hailed his client’s charitable actions as vital to hundreds of Mexicans in South Carolina and San Jose de la Paz. Dick Harpootlian, who recently represented Palmetto State attorney Alex Murdaugh in a murder trial that garnered national attention, filed pretrial motions on Leon’s behalf claiming Bravo was a member of the Zetas cartel, which wanted to assassinate Leon. Some of South Carolina’s most prominent defense attorneys have vouched for Leon. In exchange, Sierra said, she went to a restaurant in San Jose and received $500. Meanwhile, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division charged him with perjury in 2022 after a San Jose employee was filmed ordering Ruby Sierra, Bravo’s roommate and former lover, to tell authorities that Bravo was a gang leader, rapist and child molester. Photos on Facebook showed him attending his children’s high school graduations and cooking playfully in his restaurants. Released on bail and confined to his home and running his restaurants in San Jose after serving six months in federal prison for violating his probation in the bribery case, Leon nonetheless acted like nothing had happened. He wouldn’t face a jury for killing Bravo until June. Greg would testify in court that he said to the half-naked Rachel “What did you do?” before leaving her at the scene to toss the gun into the woods, then meeting her personal attorney at a gas station before turning herself in to law enforcement. 357 Smith and Wesson revolver, killing the construction worker. The restaurateur was on probation for the crime when he found his wife, Rachel, and her lover, Arturo Bravo, without clothes in the Toyota Tundra she had purchased for Bravo three days earlier. Leon was able to avoid a harsher sentence in that case because he admitted to state prosecutors that he bribed Lexington County Sheriff James Metts, who was the longest-serving sheriff in South Carolina history, to free the San Jose employees that deputies had arrested. In life, Leon was involved in a cockfighting ring that brought down a South Carolina agriculture commissioner, saw his family’s restaurants in San Jose pay nearly $400,000 in back wages to their employees, and paid a $180,000 federal fine for hiring undocumented workers. It was a cautionary tale of the American dream, of someone who got rich exploiting his peasants and flouting the law – but continued to get passes from his community again and again. I wrote about Leon’s sordid saga in 2020, as his murder trial kept getting delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And now Leon is dead – found hanged in his jail cell after a jury found him guilty a week earlier of murdering his wife’s lover after catching them both in the backseat of a truck on Valentine’s Day 2016. across the southern United States and defined Mexican cuisine in the region for decades.īut Leon’s rise was not a feel-good story. He went by “Greg” and became a regional icon for Latinos, a regular at South Carolina Gamecocks football games and a hero in his hometown of San Jose de la Paz, a pueblo in the state of Jalisco whose residents run more than 700 Mexican restaurants. The Mexican immigrant became a multimillionaire thanks to San Jose, a Mexican restaurant chain with nine locations in South Carolina’s Midlands region, the type of places where encyclopedic menus feature massive margaritas and combo plates awash in cheese sauce. There are falls from grace, and then there is the story of Gregorio Leon.
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