Dynasty

He is pictured in a black-and-white photograph that hangs in the Eldridge lobby. The 35 staff members stand in line on the sidewalk beneath a striped awning; eight are black and a few are Latino-looking. Jesse wears a suit and tie, but most striking are his fierce eyebrows, black hair and widow's peak.

Severina's mother was a housekeeper at the hotel and had put in a good word for Jesse. But it was up to the hotel manager, Mike Getto, to decide whether to hire the young Mexican who spoke no English.

Jesse, now 76, says that without Getto, he might not have obtained his green card. "I could never forget him. He was so good to me," Jesse says.

Getto tells the Pitch that Jesse was a model employee, that he delivered room service to Getto's mother, who lay bedridden with multiple sclerosis. Getto went on to hold top positions with Ramada and other hotel chains, and he contributed a story about Jesse to an industry publication called Oops! I Thought This Room Was Vacant. The story involves Getto's one salacious memory of Jesse.

"He didn't get along with Mohammed, who was a gay, black staff member. Jesus [Jesse] said something in Spanish — however you say queer nigger." But Mohammed had studied Spanish at KU, and he poured coffee onto Jesse's head. The story goes that Jesse then ran into the Crystal Room, unscrewed a leg from a fine dining table and went after the man.

Getto, 72, still works in the hotel industry and now lives in Santa Barbara, California. He tells the Pitch that during last spring's immigration rallies, he marched there with 30,000 others, holding a sign that read "We're all immigrants."

Jesse says that, in those days when Getto befriended him, Lawrence had few new immigrants. He found immediate friends among Americans, he says, because he worked hard, putting in 16- to 18-hour days at the Eldridge for 85 cents an hour.

Jesse stayed with the Eldridge for more than three years, finally leaving for a construction job with much better pay: $2.85 an hour.

Severina's grandfather Tomas Garcia sold La Tropicana to her and Jesse in 1965. By then, she and Jesse had three more children: Charlie, Kathy and Victor.

After four years running the bar, Severina thought business might pick up if she turned the place into a restaurant. Drunk patrons needed to eat, and she missed cooking at Casa del Tacos.

"She loved the kitchen," Maggie says of her mother.

Laura now does most of the cooking at the restaurant with Kathy, 42, and Severina. (Only two of the seven children left Lawrence and the family business: Alma, who married a Fort Riley soldier and raised her children in California, and Victor, who works at a casino in Wisconsin.)

"We would've had a good business if all us girls were dancers and the boys were pimp daddies," Maggie jokes of the family work ethic.

She has heard the drug rumors but shrugs them off.

"It's mostly people talking shit," she says. "People are jealous. Everything we have worked for has been hard. Why can't our friend have what we have? Because they don't work like we work. They have eight-hour jobs, and that's it. If we were drug lords, we wouldn't be working like we do. I wish we were — then I wouldn't have to do anything."

Criminal records support the family's version of the Del Campo history. Its members have racked up a few drunken-driving arrests but no drug-related convictions.

Jesse Jr. does have four battery convictions, including a felony that briefly landed him in prison, and a Club 508 scuffle in which he aimed a gun, he says, to protect himself and others from an armed patron.

Now that he's in his mid-40s, Jesse Jr. says he doesn't "get so worked up" over life anymore and has outgrown the quick temper and tumultuous relationships that landed him in jail.

The longest criminal record in the family, it turns out, belongs to grandma Severina. As legal owner of Club 508, she has pleaded guilty or no contest to 24 minor-in-possession charges in the past 10 years. The family recently paid a settlement of $12,000 in fines and, at the end of 2005, was among the five Kansas bar owners with the most violations. (That's not unusual for Lawrence, where two other bars also made last year's top five: The Hawk and Quinton's Bar and Deli, both favorites among white fraternity members.)

Criminal records reveal convictions, not investigations. Regarding would-be surveillance of Del Campo businesses in the 1970s and '80s — when cops supposedly watched cartel mules come and go with drugs and weapons under floorboards — Chris Mulvenon, assistant to the chief of police in Lawrence, says he's unaware of any such files. (Criminal investigations conducted by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation are not covered by the state's Open Records Act, and applicable Federal Bureau of Investigation files are protected by the Privacy Act.)