Customs Inspector Indicted in U.S. Probe

In a widening investigation of corruption in the U.S. Customs Service, a veteran customs inspector was indicted on charges he conspired to smuggle more than 15,000 pounds of marijuana into the San Diego area, it was disclosed Thursday.

Richard P. Sullivan, 34, pleaded not guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court to a 20-count felony indictment charging that he schemed with a Customs Service station chief in Key Largo, Fla., to provide drug traffickers with confidential law enforcement information.

A federal jury in New Orleans acquitted the Florida official, Charles F. Jordan, in February on drug charges involving a separate smuggling incident last summer. Two high-ranking customs supervisors from Louisiana were convicted in that case, but a mistrial was declared and the men face a new trial in June.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip L. B. Halpern said prosecutors are seeking an indictment of Jordan in the San Diego case. Jordan is named as a co-conspirator in Sullivan’s indictment.

Meanwhile, customs internal investigators in South Florida--where Sullivan and Jordan worked together on a presidential anti-drug task force--are examining evidence that more customs agents have engaged in the smuggling of marijuana and other illicit drugs, said Gary Peterson, special agent in charge of the agency’s internal affairs office in Miami.

“We have indications that we have a couple of different loose-knit, loosely affiliated groups, with maybe a common member in one group and the other,” Peterson said in a telephone interview Thursday. “To say it’s a well-organized internal conspiracy would be going too far.”

Officials said the cases in New Orleans and San Diego represent the most serious instances of alleged corruption in recent Customs Service history. But the problem with possibly “dirty” officers in an agency that plays a front-line role in the nation’s defense against drug trafficking does not appear to be widespread, they said.

“This investigation is managing to root out all of the people involved,” Halpern said.

The indictment, issued secretly in San Diego Tuesday and unsealed Thursday, alleges that Sullivan plotted last summer with Jordan, former Customs Service pilot Samuel Edwards and drug trafficker Randy Fink to fly 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of marijuana into San Diego on a DC-6. The plan was never carried out, Halpern said.

Sullivan is accused of abusing his post as a customs special agent by passing along to his co-conspirators several aeronautical charts showing safe smuggling routes into the United States.

He also is charged with laundering $160,000 in cash that Jordan sent him by investing it in a residential lot in Bonita, an unincorporated area southeast of San Diego. In mid-February, federal prosecutors seized the lot, valued at $168,500, and a nearly completed $250,000 house Sullivan was building nearby, according to federal court records.

The indictment says Sullivan lied about his assets to two San Diego-area banks where he sought construction loans and failed to list assets on customs financial disclosure forms. He also is charged with lying in January to a customs agent investigating the case--telling him, among other statements, that the only thing Jordan had ever sent him was smoked fish.

Arrested at In-Laws’ Home

Customs agents arrested Sullivan, a tall man with dark blond hair and a bushy mustache, at his in-laws’ home in Los Molinos, Calif., near Red Bluff, on Wednesday. McCue ordered him held until he could post a $100,000 bond and surrender his Customs Service badge and credentials, which Sullivan insists are missing.

Sullivan has served as a customs agent since 1978, following five years as a Border Patrol officer, and was promoted to special agent in 1982. He has been stationed in San Diego for about two years and was assigned to investigating smuggling activities unrelated to narcotics, according to Kenneth Ingleby, special agent in charge of the Customs Service enforcement office in San Diego.

There is no evidence to indicate Sullivan’s investigative work was compromised by his alleged drug activities, Halpern said. Sullivan was suspended without pay effective Thursday.

Edwards and Fink, two of Sullivan’s alleged co-conspirators, pleaded guilty to drug charges in the New Orleans smuggling case and are awaiting sentencing. They were the key witnesses against Jordan and the other customs defendants, Frank Kinney, director of patrol for the southeast United States, and Keith Deerman, director of marine patrol in the Louisiana case. The mistrial was declared after two jurors expressed misgivings about the guilty verdicts against Kinney and Deerman.