Customs Service Cleans House in a Drive on Drug Corruption

A 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 after 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 U.S. customs inspectors in a dozen cities and the filing of charges against 58 others accused of corrupting agency employees, said 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.

‘We’ve Addressed Our Problems’

“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. “We can finally say we’ve addressed our problems. I don’t know how many other agencies can say that.”

In the past, corruption problems in customs 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.

Operation Is Launched

It was only a few weeks later that Customs 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 for an anti-corruption drive in the service, 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 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.

“Some people started thinking we had some kind of severe problem in customs,” Green said, insisting the probe had demonstrated that the agency was 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 that were developed in the crackdown targeted front-line inspectors--the customs officials most useful 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 coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.

A federal grand jury last month indicted Jose Angel Barron, a city parks manager and 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 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 like Clean Sweep--have a deterrent intent as well, he said.

Employee groups have battled the service over its drug-testing program, accusing the agency of assuming that workers are guilty and forcing them to prove their innocence.

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents customs 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, the union said Customs has often accused employees of drug-related wrongdoing and then failed to prove the charges in disciplinary proceedings.