Labs Can Detect Content, Country of Origin : Customs Service Keeps Imports Honest

At first glance, the cargo looked just like an average load of Turkish pistachio nuts. The shipment, weighing several tons and valued at more than $164,000, arrived at the U.S. Customs station in El Paso last July with its papers in order.

Pistachios from Turkey are quite commonly imported into the United States, and the duty on them is low. However, nuts from neighboring Iran have not been permitted into the United States for almost two years. But who can tell the difference between Iranian and Turkish pistachios?

The Customs Service can, it turns out.

Its laboratory research division stands guardian to America’s often obscure and contradictory international trade laws. With 18 mobile laboratories and 150 chemists, metallurgists, electronics experts and textile designers, the service attempts to guarantee that any item imported into the United States is what it purports to be.

Researchers at the six major Customs Service labs, using the most advanced scientific instruments, make sure that perfume not only smells right but is chemically the real stuff and that everything from bridge bolts to pinball machines and textiles are made properly.

It determines also whether goods have been imported and exported by persons and countries that have permission to do so.

Sometimes that can be a tricky task. Clothes are often taxed on entry based on how much cotton or silk they contain. If a manufacturer lies even a little, the U.S. Treasury can suffer.

Some of the problems turn out to be easy. Two years ago, for example, Customs agents discovered fake Cabbage Patch dolls by examining their insides. Instead of having clean textile interiors, they were filled with hospital waste such as rags and bandages.

When it was first reported that olive oil appeared to have properties that protected people against heart disease, importers immediately began shipping other oils and calling them olive oil.

Importing Iranian nuts hurts California growers. But it turns out that triglycerides, key fats contained in the nuts, differ prominently depending on where the nuts are grown.

Essentially, the researchers melt the nuts to separate their most basic parts and then study the combination of fats in them. That yields a pattern of data that is as distinct in its way as dental records are for humans.

When Customs researchers in El Paso analyzed a few dozen of those “Turkish” pistachios, they were able to prove beyond doubt that the nuts were from Iran.

The resources of the research lab are eclectic because tariff laws change so frequently. A substance that one day is legal to import in bulk could be banned the next day.

“It can happen in a flash,” Lyle Hood, director of the research division, said. “So we have to have a lot of flexibility about what we are able to analyze.”

The research division has machines that can reduce most manufactured items to their basic molecules. Machines called gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers can distinguish among vapors, thus analyzing the exact scents of perfumes to make sure that nobody is importing a bogus brand of Chloe or Opium. The devices sift through imported drugs, dozens of types of petroleum and every imported flavor from plain vanilla to exotic persimmon.

But the researchers’ most difficult chores involve intellectual property. Every day, some company slightly alters a pinball machine, computer program or microchip and attempts to export it (usually in large quantities) to the United States without paying duty or any attention to copyright laws.

That’s why it is not unusual to see scientists in a computer-analysis room in the Customs Service’s Washington headquarters hunched over games labeled Nintendo or tapping away at the keys of an Apple computer. The quickest way to spot phony electronic games is sometimes simply to play them and see if they work the same as the real thing.

“It’s a high-level sin,” Hood said. “Intellectual property is knowledge, and for somebody to steal it, copy it and then try to sell it back to us is hitting pretty far below the belt.”