After 60 Years, Heirs Win Payoff to Padre Island Deal

BROWNSVILLE, Texas —  Six decades after a New York lawyer bought Padre Island from a Mexican American border family, a jury determined Wednesday that he swindled the family’s impoverished descendants out of $1.1 million in oil and gas royalties.

On Monday, the same jury will decide how much Gilbert Kerlin, now 90, must pay to make up for decades of malice and fraud against the Balli family. Three hundred Balli heirs are asking for $11 million.

Padre Island was little more than an abandoned fishing shack and Coast Guard station when Kerlin arrived in 1938, a young lawyer with orders to buy the Ballis’ 61,000 acres and the ribbon of water separating Padre Island from the mainland.

None of the Balli heirs know why the descendants of the island’s namesake, Padre Nicolas Balli, sold the island or how much Kerlin paid, though Kerlin lawyer M. Steve Smith has said the Ballis were paid sums so large that one buried her share in her yard.

The deed agreement reads: “The sum of ten dollars, cash in hand to us paid.”

There also was one condition: Kerlin agreed to pay the heirs a share of any mineral riches pumped from beneath the island and lagoon.

Over the years, Kerlin sold the land--which has since been developed, with resort hotels and condominiums dotting the island--and he has been collecting ever since on the drilling rights he leased to developers.

According to the Ballis, the heirs carefully copied down their addresses for Kerlin and awaited their checks from the oil drilling.

They never heard from him.

Kerlin’s lawyers argued that documents indicate the Ballis actually no longer owned Padre Island when he bought it from them and for that reason they have no claim to the oil profits.

A gag order barred Kerlin and his lawyers from saying whether he will appeal.

In a county courtroom Wednesday, Balli descendants from Florida, Arizona and Mexico piled onto wooden benches, lined the back walls and squatted in the aisle to hear the jury’s decision.

Afterward, they exploded from the courtroom, hugging, crying and slapping one another on the back.

“This is going to open the doors,” Pearl Balli said. “This is not an isolated case. This happened to a lot of people.”

After four days of deliberations, the all-Latino jury determined that Kerlin had been committing fraud and conspiring against the Ballis since the day he set foot on the island.

The decision lends credence to the generations-old Balli complaint: That the powerful border dynasty slipped into poverty after white settlers stripped them of land and social status.

“We worked so hard for this, so hard,” a trembling and tearful Alma Torres, 55, said after Judge Pat McDowell read the jury’s verdict. “My mom and my dad died hoping for this to happen.”

The Balli decision is revolutionary, said Armando C. Alonzo, associate professor of history at Texas A&M; University and author of “Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas.”

“It serves as a model. It sets a precedent for other Hispanics in other parts of the Southwest to look seriously into the possibility of obtaining equity in the courts,” Alonzo said.

The history of Padre Island is blurred before 1765, when Padre Nicolas Balli, a Mexican priest, received it as a grant from King Carlos III of Spain. The priest willed the island to his nephew.