"I am the Chinese Exclusion Officer. I don't deal in Mexicans. Ten dollars and fifteen cents (per Chinese person). That includes tracking them down and deporting them. The problem with Mexicans, as I'm sure you are aware, is that they don't appear on the Census. This makes them difficult to exclude."
—John Behan, Chinese Exclusion Officer

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Jesse Lee Pacheco is an actor and performance artist from Denver, Colorado. He's a founding member of the Atlantic City arts collective, a group dedicated to exploring new artistic spaces and forms. Although he considers himself a multidisciplinary artist, poetry has a special place in his heart. He uses poetry to turn himself inside out, bringing his deepest parts to the surface. He also self-publishes an art zine called 'SHARKWATER.'

Jesse said before the shooting of this film: "Alex Cox is like a 70-year old brother to me. I love him with all my heart. It's an honor to share that I'll be filming his latest and greatest Western this Fall. Reprising my role of Johnny Behan on the Sheriff's continuing exploits! A true punk legend in his own time, making the cowboy movie for the ages! And I'm in it! Dreams come true! Don't give up! DIY OR DIE!"

Jesse has performed in three films for Cox, starting with Bill, the Galactic Hero. Then he appeared in another two Cox films, Tombstone Rashomon, and Dead Souls, playing the same character: John Harris "Johnny" Behan, a law enforcement officer and politician who served as Sheriff of Cochise County in the Arizona Territory, and was known for his opposition to Wyatt Earp and his family. "Johnny, you may recall, was the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, who crossed swords with Wyatt Earp prior to the Gunfight at the OK Corral," notes Alex Cox. "In films he is generally depicted as a villain, though the historical reality is more complex. In Tombstone Rashomon I treated Johnny as a sympathetic, if corrupt, figure who attempted to mediate and prevent three unnecessary deaths."


Pacheco as the same character in the film Tombstone Rashoman.

Behan was married and had two children, but his wife divorced him, accusing him of consorting with prostitutes. In 1881, Wyatt Earp served for about five months as undersheriff of the eastern half of Pima County. When Wyatt resigned, Behan was appointed to fill his place, which included the mining boomtown Tombstone. After the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881 (as seen in Tombstone Rashomon), Behan testified at length against the Earps. After the Earps were exonerated, Behan was arrested for graft and later failed to win re-election as sheriff. He then moved to El Paso, Texas... where we find him in this movie.

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Dead Souls picks up with the real John's life sometime after March 12, 1894, when he was promoted from the position of 'Inspector at Port of Customs' in El Paso to become a "Chinese Exclusion Inspector" enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first major federal law ever implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States. (Behan was all for this law, as he had been a founding member of the "Anti-Chinese League" in Tombstone). For the next several years, Behan traveled throughout the southwest arresting illegal Chinese immigrants.

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Behan volunteered for and became corral-master or quartermaster at Tampa, Florida. When that conflict ended, he resumed his favorite hobby of fighting Chinese people when he served overseas during the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising in North China, between 1899 and 1901.³

Behan died at St. Mary's Catholic Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, on June 7, 1912. His funeral was conducted by the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, and their eulogy declared, "he held positions of public trust, and in all was active, faithful, and honest." The cause of death was arterial sclerosis... and secondarily syphilis, which he had contracted thirty years earlier while he was the sheriff in Tombstone.

Ten years after first playing the character, Pacheco and designer Leonardo Giménez Martín, update Behan's look.

¹—Facebook, July 7, 2004.

²—"Update 16: Our Spanish Shoot is Done" by Alex Cox, 10/18/2024.

³—When Behan sailed to China, he was replaced in the customs office in El Paso by an ex-sheriff from New Mexico named Pat Garrett, known for killing Billy the Kid.