Customs Man Charged With Letting Pot Cross Border

A San Diego city parks manager used his part-time job as a U.S. Customs inspector at the San Ysidro border crossing for more than a year to wave through cars and trucks loaded with thousands of pounds of marijuana, federal investigators charged Tuesday.

The graft and drug-smuggling charges against Jose Angel Barron, 40, of San Ysidro are part of a nationwide crackdown--called “Operation Clean Sweep”--aimed at rooting out corruption among U.S. Customs Service agents and officers, Customs officials said.

Customs internal affairs investigators arrested Barron Monday night as he worked in the primary inspection lanes at the border crossing.

The agents--who had conducted on-the-job surveillance of Barron on at least nine other occasions since late February--watched him wave two pickup trucks with camper shells and blacked-out windows through the border gate and into the United States without inspecting them or talking to the drivers, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court.

Drugs Discovered

Agents who followed the trucks to two houses in Chula Vista found that each contained more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana, the affidavit says. Assisted by the Chula Vista Police Department, agents arrested six men and a woman--most of them Mexican citizens--on drug-smuggling charges.

A search late Monday found that Barron had $70,000 in cash in his home and “hundreds of thousands of dollars” more at his parents’ home in San Ysidro, Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip L.B. Halpern said.

Barron, a 21-year city employee, earns about $28,000 annually as an area manager for the city Park and Recreation Department and about $13,000 annually in his part-time Customs job, officials said. He had worked since 1981 as one of a small number of temporary employees used by Customs to help staff border crossings during peak hours and seasons.

According to the affidavit, investigators secretly photographed the alleged head of the drug ring--Angel Garcia Gutierrez, 32, the owner of a Tijuana karate studio who was among those arrested--entering Barron’s house seven times in the last three months.

‘Major Conduit’

Halpern said Barron had served as a “major conduit for drugs entering the U.S.” and that the drug-smuggling network he allegedly worked with was “a major, major organization.” Investigators were uncertain, however, how much marijuana the alleged smuggling ring had brought into the country or for how long it had operated.

Barron was one of a small number of targets of Operation Clean Sweep, which has been under way for about a year, according to Joseph Cunha, acting regional director of Customs’ office of internal affairs in San Diego.

Cunha declined to describe the operation in detail, but said its goal is “to ferret out the small amount of corruption in the Customs Service.”

A succession of drug-related corruption cases, either alleged or proven, has dogged the agency over the last several years, even as top Customs officials have helped lead the U.S. government’s verbal campaign against official corruption in Mexico and Latin America.

Ex-Inspector Pleads Guilty

In San Diego, former Customs inspector Victor Lopez pleaded guilty last week to charges of drug smuggling, receiving gratuities and filing a false income-tax return. Lopez was charged with taking payoffs to wave vehicles loaded with drugs and contraband cheese through the San Ysidro port of entry.

In December, veteran Customs Special Agent Richard P. Sullivan of Bonita was sentenced to eight years in prison after his conviction by a federal jury on charges of taking payoffs, lying to federal investigators and falsifying credit applications.

The corruption charges against Sullivan were tied to an ongoing investigation of drug smuggling by high-level Customs officials in Florida and Louisiana.

Customs officials insist that there is no evidence of widespread corruption in the agency, which serves on the front line of the battle to keep drugs and other contraband out of this country. But they acknowledge increasing concern about the agency’s vulnerability.

“There is a concern, and there is more of a concern now than there was 5 or 10 years ago,” said Allan Rappaport, district director in San Diego. “It’s just a fact of life there is so much money involved in the narcotics business that there is a great deal of money that can be thrown at people.”