Bank Clerk on Run Trips at Border : Money: Fugitive Austrian’s international odyssey ends at the San Ysidro crossing as he is arrested with nearly $500,000.

The fugitive Austrian bank clerk wandered through Rio de Janeiro, Miami, El Paso, Mexico City and Tijuana, authorities say, a 24-year-old with a duffel bag full of stolen cash, on the run and living large.

Ernst Josef Linder’s wild ride ended Tuesday night when the taxicab in which he was riding pulled up to an inspection booth at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

It could have been just another quick stop at the smog-shrouded, assembly line-style inspection port, where inspectors peer into a river of cars looking for the stuff that dreams are made of: contraband, smuggled loot, international desperadoes.

As he questioned the increasingly nervous, bearded passenger with the German accent, who claimed to be a U.S citizen from Miami, INS Inspector Stephen Niles did not expect a big-time bust.

But, after Niles got suspicious and pronounced the dreaded words “secondary inspection,” that was what he got.

A specially trained INS dog sniffed out about half a million dollars in foreign currency--French, Swiss, Belgian, Austrian and German--in Linder’s suitcase.

After a couple of hours of defiance, a cigarette and a cup of coffee, inspectors say, Linder admitted that he had stolen the money from his former employer, Private Investment Bank of Salzburg, Austria.

And now Linder sits in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of transporting stolen money, possessing false documents, failing to report currency upon entering the United States, falsely claiming to be a citizen and money laundering.

He is also wanted by Austrian authorities in connection with the theft, U.S. officials said.

“It was pretty exciting,” Niles said Wednesday, as he recalled how Linder described spending about $40,000 during 3 1/2 months of intercontinental wandering.

“I got the impression he didn’t know where he was going,” said Niles, 33. “Basically he was a 23-year-old with 500 grand.”

If INS inspectors dream of nabbing smuggled caches of drugs and cash, imagine the reveries of a bank clerk who shuffles, stacks and counts other peoples’ fortunes every day. Authorities said Linder supervised the foreign currency section of the Salzburg bank until Christmas.

“He said one night he just set the money aside, picked it up and hopped a plane,” Niles said.

Linder flew to Rio de Janeiro on Dec. 27, according to George McCubbin, deputy director of the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Two days later, Linder flew to Miami. He entered the United States using his Austrian passport by virtue of a visa waiver program that allows Austrian citizens to spend 90 days in the country without a visa.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Niles said. “He stayed at different hotels. The first hotel was the Hilton.”

At the end of February, Linder left Miami and took a bus to El Paso, Tex., officials said. Then he took another bus to Mexico City, where he celebrated his 24th birthday March 6. He stayed there until Tuesday, when he caught a flight to Tijuana.

Finally, fatefully, Linder hailed a cab for San Diego at Tijuana’s Abelardo Rodriguez International Airport Tuesday night. It arrived at Niles’ border inspection booth about 10:30 p.m.

Inspectors do not see a lot of cabs coming through the port of entry, McCubbin said.

“It kind of arouses our suspicion,” he said.

Most Tijuana cabs drop off their passengers at the international line and the passengers cross on foot. Only a few cabs are licensed to cross the border, and those usually carry businessmen in suits and ties who ride in the back seat.

Linder was a curly-haired, casually dressed young man wearing a warm-up jacket. He sat next to the driver.

“He looked like a kid who had been down in Mexico bumming around,” said Niles.

Linder’s gamble started to misfire as Niles questioned him. Compounding the suspicion provoked by his accent was his “check-cashing type” identification card from Florida, Niles said.

Once in the secondary inspection area, Linder presented a U.S. passport, which was genuine but bore someone else’s name and photo, officials said.

An INS dog was brought in and reacted with keen enthusiasm to Linder’s luggage, officials said. In addition to drugs, the dogs detect the odor of large amounts of currency, said INS spokesman Rudy Murillo.

Linder watched impassively as inspectors opened the suitcase and found bundles of money wrapped in copies of USA Today, Niles said. They also found $10,000 in Canadian and U.S. bills in a fanny pack. He was carrying a total of $462,781 in foreign and domestic currency, officials said.