Victor Hugo De La Cruz
Introduction
Victor Hugo De La Cruz Jr. is a 58-year-old Weslaco, Texas, resident and longtime Rio Grande Valley media figure who served as city manager of Edcouch, Texas, until a federal bribery investigation ended his career in local government. De La Cruz admitted soliciting two $1,000 kickbacks from a marketing consultant his city had hired — a consultant who turned out to be working for the FBI as an informant — pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States, and was sentenced on July 10, 2025, to one year and one day in federal prison by Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane. He was released from prison in March 2026 to a halfway house and remains subject to three years of federal supervision. Edcouch fired him after the federal indictment.
Background Information
De La Cruz was well known in Hidalgo County before the case: he hosted a high school football call-in show, served on the Edcouch-Elsa school board, and presided over the Progreso Municipal Court, along with unsuccessful campaigns for justice of the peace and the Weslaco school board. When Edcouch needed a city manager in 2018, he applied, pitching his marketing background in a cover letter the city later released under the Texas Public Information Act: “I enjoy dealing with people and work well under pressure. I know the area of the Rio Grande Valley and understand the community as it pertains to administration.” Edcouch hired him on January 9, 2019.
The consultant at the center of the case was Pink Ape Media Consulting, a Brownsville company created in 2013 by Rodrigo Moreno Fernandez, a graphic designer from Matamoros who had no legal status in the United States. The FBI offered Moreno a deal: help with investigations in exchange for deferred action protecting him from deportation. Moreno, who later testified against a Brownsville school board trustee in 2020 under that arrangement, became a federal informant — and De La Cruz apparently did not know his eventual boss worked for the FBI. Less than a month after De La Cruz’s hiring, Edcouch hired Pink Ape for $7,500 to build the city a website, set up email accounts, and take photos.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Pleaded guilty and sentenced. De La Cruz pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison. The guilty plea is a court-record admission of the conduct.
According to the indictment, the scheme began in July 2019, when De La Cruz and Edcouch Mayor Pro-Tem Rene Flores met with the owner of Pink Ape — identified in court documents only as “Person 1,” but clearly Moreno — and agreed the city would award business to the company in exchange for kickbacks. Pink Ape billed Edcouch $3,000 for “Marketing Consulting”; four days after the city cut the check, De La Cruz told Person 1 that Flores was “expecting his payment,” and $1,000 was paid to Flores. A second $3,000 city bill in September 2019 produced a second $1,000 kickback to Flores. Court filings and sentencing coverage describe the two $1,000 payments as kickbacks De La Cruz solicited.
The FBI did not arrest De La Cruz and Flores until September 2024 — nearly five years after the second kickback. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Johnson linked the delay to other investigations the case was tied to, which he said remained ongoing, and federal agents who questioned De La Cruz about those other matters did not think he was completely truthful, Johnson said. Flores pleaded guilty, cooperated against De La Cruz, and received the same sentence of one year and one day. Edcouch’s board fired De La Cruz after the federal indictment.
De La Cruz pleaded guilty on May 1, 2025. At his July 10, 2025 sentencing he told the court: “I’m here to assume and accept responsibility. And be accountable for this situation.” He said he had taken the City Hall job to get away from politics, described a workplace where other city officials showed up at his office daily, and said, “I’m embarrassed that I allowed myself to be bullied. Or fall into peer pressure.” His attorney, Santos Maldonado, argued his client never kept any of the money. Judge Crane was unmoved: “This is, to me, just a classic pay-to-play scheme,” he said, adding, “But he’s the city person. Without him, there is no corruption.” Johnson countered that even without keeping the cash, De La Cruz benefited from the arrangement — he was “happy to keep his job.”
Public Reaction and Consequences
The case drew wide Valley attention precisely because of De La Cruz’s local profile — a football call-in show host and former school board member who had held a judgeship in a neighboring city’s municipal court, convicted in a small-city shakedown that a federal informant happened to be sitting inside of. Crane’s conclusion that Flores, the mayor pro-tem, was the bigger player in the conspiracy did not spare the city manager: the court order removing both men from public life was the consequence. Flores was released from prison in February 2026.
The Bureau of Prisons records showed De La Cruz released on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, transferred from the satellite camp at the federal prison in Seagoville to a halfway house, with the next three years to be spent under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office.
Current Status
De La Cruz has served his custodial sentence and is completing three years of supervised release through a halfway house placement. His guilty plea and conviction stand; the “other investigations” federal prosecutors said his case was linked to remained ongoing at the time of his sentencing, and no further public charges against him were reported. He holds no public office and, after the firing that followed his indictment, no role in Edcouch’s government.
Impact on Their Career/Life
A federal bribery conspiracy conviction ended a résumé that had spanned school boards, municipal courts, and broadcast media across the Rio Grande Valley. The court’s own framing — that the city manager, not the mayor pro-tem, was the person without whom “there is no corruption” — is now the permanent record of how his City Hall tenure operated, and the sentence, brief as it was, put him in federal prison and then under three years of supervised release that any violation can convert back into custody. For Edcouch, the case documented in public records how its own hiring paperwork and invoices became the evidence chain in a federal pay-to-play prosecution.