Probe Exposes Corruption Among Customs Agents

A sweeping, yearlong crackdown on corruption in the U.S. Customs Service has uncovered serious--though not widespread--drug-related improprieties among border and port inspectors nationwide, a top customs officer said Monday.

Code-named “Operation Clean Sweep,” the campaign was launched last June on the heels of a widely publicized attack by Customs Commissioner William von Raab on the integrity of law enforcement officials in Mexico.

The operation has resulted in 16 criminal prosecutions of customs inspectors in a dozen cities and the filing of charges against 58 others accused of corrupting agency employees, according to William Green, associate customs commissioner for internal affairs. Almost all the cases involved bribery, he said, and most were related to the illicit drug trade.

“The amount of money involved, especially with drugs, is a recognized problem throughout the whole law enforcement society,” Green said in an interview from Washington, explaining the susceptibility of customs inspectors to corruption. “We can finally say we’ve addressed our problems. I don’t know how many other agencies can say that.”

Corruption in Recruiting

In the past, corruption problems in the Customs Service centered on the bribery of officers at seaports and airports, where inspectors and supervisors succumbed to payoffs to lower duties or admit contraband. But with the expansion of the drug trade, wrongdoing increasingly has involved the recruiting of customs officers to aid drug smugglers by ignoring illicit shipments, compromising investigations or helping plan smuggling operations.

Such cases dogged the agency even as Von Raab began a year ago to lash out publicly at Mexican law enforcement. In remarks that infuriated the Mexican government and necessitated fence-mending efforts by top Reagan Administration officials, Von Raab charged in May, 1986, that “ingrained corruption” in Mexico’s criminal justice system had handcuffed bilateral drug interdiction activities.

It was only a few weeks later that the Customs Service decided to launch Operation Clean Sweep, Green said Monday. Though a holier-than-thou image was not the operation’s objective, Von Raab’s attacks on Mexico “augmented” the momentum within the agency for an anti-corruption drive, Green said.

“At the time, the information or allegations or horror stories were still coming in as fast or faster than we could address them,” he said.

About 35 investigators from other Customs Service divisions were assigned to work with 15 of Green’s internal affairs agents. Eight teams fanned out across the country, culling through accumulated tips and intelligence reports to develop cases in a “full-scale, full-press” campaign against graft, according to Green.

Agents interviewed informants, gathered information from corrupt inspectors’ co-workers and went undercover in the course of the investigations, officials said.

“Some people started thinking we had some kind of severe problem in Customs,” Green said, insisting that the probe demonstrates that the agency is generally clean. “It was just the other way around. Out of 15,000 people, we took a relatively small number of problems and did an aggressive attack.”

Most of the cases developed in the crackdown targeted front-line inspectors--the customs officials of most use to smugglers if they can be compromised, investigators said.

In San Diego, for instance, two inspectors were charged with closing their eyes to illicit drug shipments from Mexico.

Inspector Indicted

A federal grand jury last month indicted Jose Angel Barron, a City of San Diego park manager and a part-time customs inspector at the San Ysidro border crossing, on charges of taking bribes to help a Mexican drug ring smuggle thousands of pounds of marijuana into the United States. Federal agents seized more than $650,000 in cash from Barron, whose reported income was between $14,000 and $29,000 in the last three years, according to court records.

“If we have one inspector like Inspector Barron down in San Ysidro, that can cause a lot of damage to the system,” Green said.

The other San Diego inspector, Victor Lopez, pleaded guilty in April 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 Baltimore, agents arrested Customs Inspector David S. Steinkamp last month as part of a continuing investigation of chemical smuggling along the U.S.-Canada border. An informant told customs agents that he paid Steinkamp $40,000 to drive a van containing a chemical used in the manufacture of methamphetamine across the border near Buffalo, N.Y., the agency said.

Higher-level customs officers also have been accused of drug-related corruption, though the charges fell outside the one-year time frame of Clean Sweep.

In what prosecutors describe as the agency’s most serious instance of drug-related graft, three ranking customs officials in the Southeast--Frank Kinney and Keith Deerman, two New Orleans-based patrol directors, and Charles Jordan, the station chief in Key Largo, Fla.--are awaiting retrial on drug smuggling charges after a mistrial was declared in their case last year.

A San Diego man linked to the three, former Customs Special Agent Richard P. Sullivan, is serving an eight-year prison term after his conviction last year on charges of taking payoffs and lying to investigators. Prosecutors said he was engaged in a scheme to launder profits from Jordan’s alleged smuggling activities.

Like most law enforcement agencies, the Customs Service tries to fight corruption from the moment it begins recruiting a potential agent, according to Green. Pre-employment background checks are followed by extensive training in integrity and ethics. Ongoing audits and investigations by internal affairs officers--along with the publicity given to criminal charges, disciplinary action and campaigns such as Clean Sweep--have a deterrent intent as well, he said.

Employee groups have battled customs over its fixation on drugs, accusing the agency of assuming that workers are guilty and forcing them to prove their innocence. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents Customs Service employees, is challenging a federal appeals court decision that rejected the union’s objections to mandatory drug testing for agency employees.

Though union officials said Monday they were unaware of the existence of Operation Clean Sweep, union officials said customs has often accused employees of drug-related wrongdoing and then failed to prove the charges in disciplinary proceedings.

“There are many more allegations--scores more allegations--than are proven in our grievance and arbitration procedures,” said George King, a spokesman for the 120,000-member union.

Not all of the alleged corruption identified by Clean Sweep involved drugs, however.

Several inspectors in San Francisco are suspected of trafficking in visa stamps, taking sizable payoffs to illegally extend visitors’ stays in the United States, Green said.

In Boston, meanwhile, a grand jury last week handed down an 11-count indictment charging Customs Inspector Joseph O’Hare with a more old-fashioned form of wrongdoing. O’Hare is accused of using a Boston barroom to conduct a large-scale bookmaking operation.