Customs Agent Gets 8 Years in Corruption Case

A federal judge Monday sentenced a veteran U.S. Customs investigator to eight years in prison for his conviction on official corruption charges, saying the agent not only was guilty but also had “lied and lied and lied” on the witness stand.

Despite his attorney’s concerns about his safety among other federal convicts, Richard P. Sullivan of Bonita was immediately taken into custody.

Sullivan, a 10-year veteran of the Customs Service and a former Border Patrol officer, was the first agent convicted in an ongoing investigation of alleged drug smuggling and corruption by agency officials in Florida, Louisiana and San Diego.

A jury found him guilty last month of taking payoffs, lying to federal investigators and falsifying credit applications, all to further a scheme prosecutors said was hatched by other corrupt Customs officials to launder their proceeds from marijuana smuggling.

Sullivan was acquitted on charges of participating in a drug-running conspiracy.

On Monday, defense attorney Sheldon Sherman asked U.S. District Judge Leland Nielsen to dismiss several of the charges against Sullivan, arguing that there was insufficient evidence to convict him and that the jury had been inconsistent in its verdicts. But Nielsen summarily rejected the request.

Arguing next about a proper sentence for the suspended agent--whose firing now becomes automatic--Sherman said a two-year prison term would suffice for a man who had lost his career and home because of “poor judgment.”

Sullivan’s prosecution, he said, was the result of a government campaign to make up for the Justice Department’s failure to convict his alleged co-conspirator--Charles Jordan, former Customs station chief in Key Largo, Fla.--on drug-smuggling charges. Jordan was acquitted by a New Orleans jury in February but remains under investigation, according to federal prosecutors.

Prosecutors wanted Sullivan to testify against Jordan, but Sullivan could not cooperate, Sherman said, because he had no information to provide investigators about alleged drug-smuggling rings within the Customs Service.

“How many years do we have to give him so he’ll cooperate with the government?” Sherman asked. “He doesn’t know anything.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip Halpern, though, insisted that Sullivan deserved the stiffest possible punishment.

“Mr. Sullivan has been a traitor to his friends, his family, his job and his country,” Halpern said. “His behavior was despicable, and was all the more so because he knew full well, by the training he’d had with the government, that what he was doing was wrong.”

Recommending a 13-year prison term, Halpern told Nielsen that a stern sentence for Sullivan would serve as a warning to other federal agents. “He is a disgrace to the entire Customs Service,” Halpern said, “and I can assure you your verdict here will be watched throughout the Customs Service.”

Nielsen, who had questioned Sullivan’s veracity at the end of his trial, again criticized the agent’s testimony. Sullivan claimed at the trial that he obtained the money to buy two lots in Bonita from legitimate sources, not from his participation in a drug conspiracy or money laundering.

“Not only was I convinced by the evidence that he was guilty of the things he was convicted of,” Nielsen said, “but I’m totally convinced he sat in the witness stand and lied and lied and lied. For a government official to do that in this courtroom I just can’t take lightly.”

Sherman asked Nielsen to delay Sullivan’s surrender so that arrangements could be made for him to be jailed in a setting where his history as a law enforcement agent would not expose him to danger. But Nielsen refused, saying the issue could be brought to an appellate court.