N.M. attorney with Latino clients receives threatening package after turkey giveaway
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DORAL, FL - NOVEMBER 13: Jessica Lopez walks away with the turkeys she received at a turkey give-a-way, as people prepare for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday on November 13, 2012 in Doral, Florida. The event was put on by the City of Sweetwater and the Miami Dade League of Cities to distribute 1000 turkeys and non-perishable items to four municipalities located throughout Miami-Dade County. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) (2012 Getty Images)
What started with a nice holiday giveaway ended in harassment and a veiled threat Monday, Albuquerque-based attorney David Elias Indinopulos said after receiving a suspicious package in the mail.
The attorney, who estimates that about 80 percent of his firm's clients are Latino, gave away 500 turkeys to the needy over the weekend, an event that was covered by local TV news media.
Indinopulos says that a few days after the giveaway that his office, Elias Law, received a disturbing priority mail package.
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Inside the package were five "Most Wanted Offenders" pages, which run in the newspaper monthly. The sender had gone through each set of wanted criminals and circled in red all the people with Hispanic surnames.
At the top of each page, the correspondent noted the number of Latinos, along with the comments, “Your customers,” and “loosing customers [sic].”
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"I don't think this was an overt threat, but someone is sending us a message, and maybe this guy's expressing his outrage about what he feels this country has become," Indinopulos told Fox News Latino. He added, "We're one of the few offices located in this part of town – in 'the hood.' We chose to put our office here, and we choose to represent these people. I don't ask who's documented or undocumented."
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“I hasten to add that none of these people in here are our clients. And there's no way to know just by looking at these if these people are Mexican, if they're New Mexican, if they're from Arizona, Nevada or wherever. They just have Hispanic last names,” he told KOB4 News.
Indinopulos reported the suspicious package to the FBI, which did include a return address, but he was informed that the sender did not technically commit a crime.
The attorney added that the package isn't an entirely isolated incident.
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"We’ve received several phone calls over the last few months from disgruntled people complaining about the fact that we represent Mexicans," he told FNL.
"In general, because of the presidential election, it’s obvious that people feel much more free to abandon what holds us together as a polite society ... From our perspective, we're doing the right thing," Indinopulos told FNL. "As a Spanish-speaking Jew, the tenor of this incident and others resonates with me. And in the Mexican community, they're reacting much like Jews have in the past. 'We'll get through this, and we're not going to let anyone push us out.'"