Pancho Villa's purported finger on sale in El Paso

[peejay 327]

Pancho Villa's purported finger on sale in El Paso

By WILL WEISSERT

2011 The Associated Press

April 16, 2011, 9:23AM

EL PASO, Texas — Pancho Villa's fingerprints are all over this dusty border city known for its tangy green chiles and striking views of the yucca-dotted Franklin Mountains.

There's the site of the old smelter on West Paisano Street where the famed Mexican revolutionary once worked as an hourly laborer, the spot along the Rio Grande where he liked to slip into U.S. territory for a picnic and cigar, and the mission-style mansion in the Sunset Heights district where he had a meeting with a U.S. general in 1915.

Then there's Villa's actual finger — or at least a severed and mummified appendage claiming to have been his — on sale for $9,500 at Dave's Pawn Shop downtown.

Grayish-black, shriveled and curved slightly, the finger still retains a chuck of nail, the middle of which features an eerily jagged gash — as if it dug its way out of the grave.

Store manager David Delgadillo said that in 2004, a man came in offering to pawn on-the-cheap the right trigger finger Villa supposedly used to fire many a pistol. The seller wouldn't admit where he got it, however, and Delgadillo won't say how much the store paid to acquire it.

"We don't know if it's real or not, but it's still a nice piece," he said.

Historians are less equivocal.

"No way," said Louis Ray Sadler, a Villa expert and history professor emeritus at New Mexico State University. "I'm not aware of anything where somebody cut off his finger. It's just crazy."

Trinidad Garcia, a 59-year-old retiree who lives two blocks away from Dave's, stops to peak at the finger a couple of times a week.

"I don't know if it's his finger, but I do know it's really ugly," he said on a recent afternoon. As he gawked, a woman in a car waiting at a stoplight called out in Spanish, "How much do they want for it?" When Garcia replied $9,500, she shrieked, "Tell them I'll give them $3,000!" and sped off.

Encased in cotton inside an aging metal frame, the finger is displayed in the store's front window, where Delgadillo says it has remained virtually untouched for seven years. He said upwards of 20 customers per day inquire about it, and nearly all want it taken out for a closer look. But the staff never removes it — not even while cleaning the front window — afraid that doing so could offend Villa's spirit and bring bad luck.

The finger sits near a life-sized, molded-plastic statue of Elvis Presley and his hits play on a loop from overhead speakers. Attached to Elvis' microphone stand is a sign that reads, "We buy gold" in English and Spanish.

"We get some strange things here. We have a reputation, especially in Mexico," said store owner Larry Baron, whose father Dave opened the pawn shop in 1950.

The finger isn't even the only body part for sale in the front window. A severed human ear of unknown origin goes for $695.

Part of the same display is a gray, prune-sized orb identified as a "true and actual heart of a baby vampire" selling for $7,500. A note attached says that in the "Olde Country," newborns suspected of being vampires had their still-beating hearts removed and driven with spikes fashioned into a cross, thus prohibiting resurrection.

Inside the store, things get even stranger. A mummy with haunting brown teeth was recently marked down to $14,995 and stands near the fossilized remains of a $695 "Devil Fish," an especially ugly mollusk with a misshapen head whose mouth is fashioned into a grimace.

A skeleton with the body of a man, the head of a bird and the tail of a fish can be yours for $995, while $1,295 fetches the remains of a "chupacabra," or "goat sucker," a big-eared animal that, according to Mexican myth, sucks blood.

Asked how he arrived at a price for Villa's finger among such other choice oddities, Baron shrugged: "It seemed like a shot in the dark."

Born in 1878, Villa's real name was Doroteo Arango Arambula. He led an army of horse-backed raiders through much of Mexico during the blood-soaked 1910-1917 revolution, looting posh haciendas. When President Wilson recognized the rival revolutionary army of Venustiano Carranza as Mexico's government, Villa raided the border city of Columbus, New Mexico, west of El Paso, in 1916, killing 18 residents.

The U.S. sent an expedition into Mexico, but never nabbed Villa. Mexico's government eventually co-opted him, paying Villa to retire to the northern town of Parral — but men with machine guns shot him dead in 1923. Three years later, someone dug up Villa's remains and severed his head.

Delgadillo said a customer recently claimed to have Villa's head stashed in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. He promised to smuggle it over the border and sell it to the shop at a bargain, but has yet to return.

Manuel Urbina, a history professor at the College of the Mainland in Texas City, peered at the finger displayed behind glass at Dave's while in El Paso for a recent conference.

He has interviewed two of Villa's wives and taped testimonials with three revolutionaries who rode with him, but said, "the finger never came up."

Urbina has created an unofficial museum celebrating Villa and the Mexican revolution. It features a set of the bills Villa issued as a revolutionary commander when armies from each side of the revolution produced currencies, and a version of Villa's desk mask. After he was assassinated, someone applied plaster to Villa's face, creating an impression that has been frequently copied.

But even a collector of all things Villa like Urbina isn't interested in owning the trigger finger.

"I wouldn't put any cash on it," he said with a deep chuckle.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7524608.html

[Ban Hammer 14,301]

sounds like the buyer is gonna get the middle finger.

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

It's his index finger but I don't think it's been fumigated so someone's going to get an itchy trigger finger, si man. If you buy it and give it to your sweetheart as a present does that mean that you're fingering the wife?

Edited April 18, 2011 by IR5FORMUMSIE