Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre

Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre was a prominent Mexico City lawyer whose name emerged in the investigation of money traced from Mexico to a Watergate burglar’s bank account. Accounts relayed by investigators and Texas lawyer Richard Haynes cast him as a financial intermediary: Robert H. Allen supplied checks and notes, and Ogarrio converted them into dollars. His reported role made the Mexican route more than a geographical clue, linking an identifiable lawyer and bank transactions to the flow of campaign funds, though the evidence here does not include Ogarrio’s own explanation or testimony.

Identification and emergence in the investigation

When Bernstein asked where the money had come from, Martin Dardis answered that it came from Mexico City and identified the source only as a businessman and a lawyer. Dardis withheld the lawyer’s name, saying he would discuss it if Bernstein came to Florida. Their meeting was arranged for July 31, but before Bernstein could get there, The New York Times published a report tracing cash from the Watergate raid to Mexico. Its account identified four cashier’s checks issued at the Banco Internacional to Ogarrio, describing him as a prominent Mexico City lawyer. The checks offered a concrete link between money found in Bernard Barker’s bank account and a named recipient in Mexico.

The timing shaped Bernstein’s pursuit of the story. He read the headline while flying to Miami, suspected the competing reporter had obtained information there, and called Barry Sussman after landing to ask whether he should go on to Mexico City. Sussman advised him to remain in Miami at least that day. Bernstein then checked into the Sheraton Four Ambassadors and asked for the other reporter’s room number. Ogarrio himself was not present in this reporting scene; his significance arrived first as the answer to a question about where the money had gone, and then as a name already circulating in the press.

The reported Mexican money route

A later account connected Ogarrio to Allen through an inquiry into the Texas campaign organization. In Houston, committee treasurer Emmett Moore told Bernstein that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had questioned him about money transmitted to Mexico. Moore emphasized that the agents’ interest concerned Allen, the Texas committee chairman and president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Co., rather than Moore’s own conduct. They had asked particularly about Allen’s relationship with Ogarrio, who represented Gulf Resources’ interests in Mexico. This placed Ogarrio in two reported capacities: as a lawyer for a Houston corporation and as a contact associated with the movement of campaign funds. Moore said he knew nothing about why the money crossed the border.

Dardis subsequently described the arrangement to Bernstein as money laundering, explaining that a chain of transactions could make the original source difficult to trace. He attributed the account to Richard Haynes, Allen’s Texas lawyer. In Haynes’s version, Maurice Stans had made a final fundraising tour of the Southwest shortly before April 7, the effective date of the new campaign-finance law and the last day anonymous contributions could legally be accepted. Haynes said donors had been assured that anonymity could be protected by moving contributions through a Mexican intermediary, whose bank records, he claimed, were beyond the reach of U.S. investigators. He described the arrangement as a means of concealing a donation’s origin; the account also connected it to corporate contributions prohibited by campaign law and to money from business, labor, special-interest, and other sources. These are allegations reported through Haynes and Dardis, not a statement by Ogarrio.

Ogarrio as financial intermediary

Haynes’s account assigned Ogarrio a specific transactional function. Allen, he said, was the conduit for money going to Mexico, including the $89,000 later found in Barker’s account. Ogarrio was the money-changer: he converted checks and notes Allen gave him into American dollars, sometimes as cash and sometimes as dollar drafts drawn on Ogarrio’s account at the Banco Internacional. The description makes the bank and the forms of payment central to the alleged process. The four cashier’s checks reported by The New York Times and Haynes’s account of cash and drafts are related pieces of a money trail, but the evidence does not establish that every transaction Haynes described was one of those four checks.

Haynes estimated that $750,000 raised by Stans and two principal Texas fund-raisers had moved through Mexico during the final weeks before April 7. That figure describes the scale of the alleged Texas operation, not an amount individually attributed to Ogarrio. The distinction matters: Haynes identified Allen as the person routing funds and Ogarrio as the converter, while the estimate covered money raised by several people. The report therefore places Ogarrio at a consequential point in the chain without making him the organizer of the fundraising effort or establishing that he controlled its total proceeds.

Evidence, attribution, and narrative role

The account of Ogarrio develops through a succession of intermediaries. Bernstein first receives a partial identification from Dardis; a newspaper report independently places Ogarrio’s name on the trail of four checks; Moore recounts the FBI’s interest in Allen’s relationship with him; and Haynes supplies the fuller description of his alleged financial role. The convergence makes Ogarrio’s name important to the investigation, while the layered sourcing also sets a limit on what can be stated about his actions and knowledge. None of these passages records an interview with him, his account of the transactions, or his understanding of the money’s purpose.

In the narrative, Ogarrio is less a developed personal portrait than a point where separate strands meet: corporate legal representation, Texas campaign fundraising, Mexican banking, and the funds found in Barker’s account. His importance lies in the mechanism attributed to him. The reported conversion of checks and notes into cash or dollar drafts helps explain how money could cross a border and become harder to trace, while the named bank transactions give the broader allegation documentary specificity. The resulting portrait is precise about the role attributed to him and guarded about what the evidence can prove.