Corruption Probe Focuses on Ex-Customs Official : Border: San Diego district chief abruptly retired. He denies tampering with computer files on smuggling.

It was the largest cocaine seizure ever made along the U.S.-Mexico border--almost four tons, or 7,702 pounds, of the powdery drug found hidden inside a Hidro Gas de Juarez propane tanker Oct. 3, 1990.

But the record haul at the Otay port of entry was quickly engulfed in controversy as embarrassed U.S. Customs officials tried to explain how the driver was released before inspectors managed to extract the drugs hours later from a hidden compartment inside the tanker.

As was routine, the U.S. Customs inspectors at the border had checked the tanker’s license plate number in a computer that flags suspected drug smugglers and their vehicles. Nothing came up--even though a drug-sniffing dog had excitedly alerted its handler to contraband inside the truck.

Later it would become evident that a U.S. Customs intelligence memo identifying the driver, Ruben Sanchez Tapia, as a probable drug smuggler had never been entered in the agency’s computer files.

It was not the first time such data failed to be entered into the computer system, which was designed to aid the war on drugs by halting the flow of narcotics from Mexico, government documents and interviews indicate.

Moreover, the previous fiscal year had recorded a 92% drop in the volume of cocaine that inspectors seized at the border. In the 1990 fiscal year--the last full year that Allan J. Rappoport served as U.S. Customs district director--203 pounds of cocaine were confiscated, compared to 2,599 pounds the previous year.

The year after Rappoport’s departure, cocaine seizures at the border soared to 15,823 pounds--and stayed above 15,000 pounds in the 1992 fiscal year.

Rappoport, 62, headed the five ports of entry along California’s southern border for eight years. Customs sources said he abruptly retired in November, 1990, one day after he was confronted with damaging documents provided to government investigators by a Customs inspector.

Central to the accusations against Rappoport are charges that he was behind an effort to block, alter or exclude intelligence reports about suspected drug haulers and smuggling vehicles from the U.S. Customs computer system he designed and controlled.

Those charges, along with allegations of a whitewash during a thwarted 1990 federal probe and accusations that Rappoport engaged in a conspiracy, are the focus of an investigation by the House subcommittee on commerce, consumer and monetary affairs.

Congressional investigators are also looking into broader charges of corruption among U.S. Customs inspectors and officials in the San Diego district, but a subcommittee source said its main focus is Rappoport.

Informants and U.S. Customs insiders accuse Rappoport of being motivated by bribes and engaging in a conspiracy to allow the smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States, according to a Treasury Department report. He is also criticized for requiring inspectors to reveal the identities of their confidential informants, in some cases endangering their lives.

Now working in San Diego as an import trade consultant, Rappoport vehemently denies any wrongdoing in his former post as head of the regional U.S. Customs district. “What’s ludicrous to me is for people to have a concept that I was aiding and abetting smuggling,” Rappoport said in a recent interview.

Rafael W. Garcia, head of the Treasury Department inspector general’s office in Los Angeles, wrote in a report that investigators “determined that Rappoport socialized with a number of individuals who were identified as convicted criminals.” The memo did not identify the individuals.

Garcia’s report also said that a Justice Department informant had told investigators that Rappoport “got paid for allowing aliens to be smuggled into the United States.”

Rappoport blamed the accusations on former employees who “have an intense dislike for me.”

“I don’t want to get paranoid (because) I’m trying to put all this behind me,” Rappoport said. “But there is a group of people there who hate my guts.”

Rappoport said he has identified two U.S. Customs workers who he believes are behind the allegations. But records obtained by The Times show that various employees, including a former assistant district director and other members of Rappoport’s personal staff, provided information about him to investigators. A U.S. Customs employee in Tokyo also participated.

Before he retired in November, 1990, Rappoport was the target of a brief Treasury Department investigation focusing on charges that he associated with known Mexican organized crime figures and aided and abetted drug and illegal immigrant smugglers--the very forces he was hired to keep at bay along the U.S. Customs district stretching from San Ysidro to Arizona.

Rappoport said that he had no knowledge that an investigation was taking place at the time and that he stepped down to take advantage of a change in the federal government’s retirement program.

Not long after Rappoport retired, critics say, high-ranking officials in the Treasury Department’s inspector general’s office blocked the nascent probe rather than refer evidence to the Justice Department for further review or prosecution. The current congressional investigation grew out of complaints from U.S. Customs inspectors, internal affairs investigators and at least one agent from the inspector general’s office.

The Treasury Department investigation was under way for about two months when it was ordered closed. One agent complained that there had not been time to get the effort off the ground when former Assistant Inspector Gen. Charles D. Fowler ordered it discontinued in early 1991.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Greg Vega, who monitored the investigation in San Diego, “expressed concern . . . regarding the perceived premature closing of this matter,” according to a memo from the inspector general’s Los Angeles office.

And in a letter to President Clinton’s transition team last November, former subcommittee Chairman Rep. Doug Barnard Jr. (D-Ga.), advised the new Administration that “preliminary evidence . . . indicates that Treasury Inspector Gen. Donald Kirkendall and his former Assistant Inspector Gen. for Investigations Charles Fowler prematurely killed uncompleted investigations of senior Customs officials.”

“We are writing to direct the transition board’s attention to serious problems, which have arisen in the Customs Service and Treasury’s office of inspector general . . . and to urge that your team docket the service and inspector general as a high priority area for corrective treatment,” Barnard’s letter said.

Although Fowler declined to comment, the investigating agent’s handwritten notes indicate that she was told the matter was being dropped because it was “too manpower-intensive and to date not a single piece of tangible evidence has been found.”

The agent protested that “plenty of circumstantial evidence” existed to justify allowing the investigation to continue, records show. She also argued that the Internal Revenue Service had offered to assign an agent to help in the investigation.

She noted that cocaine seizures at border ports in the San Diego district had been unusually low and declined dramatically during Rappoport’s last year as director.

In fact, as of Sept. 17, 1990--with only two weeks remaining in the fiscal year--only three pounds of cocaine had been seized at the San Ysidro port of entry, the most heavily trafficked border entrance in the world, an inspector general’s report said.

Rappoport said in the interview that confiscations of the drug dropped “way below what was reasonable” in the 1990 fiscal year.

“I really don’t know (why). We just may not have been dumb lucky. . . . On narcotics seizures, cocaine in particular, you get one or two big seizures and that can make your whole year. We didn’t get those one or two big seizures in 1990,” Rappoport said.

Another reason confiscations had dropped drastically may have been because his inspectors were successful at putting “a lot of pressure on smugglers (to) intimidate them,” Rappoport said.

“If you’re doing a good job, you’re not going to make a lot of seizures because you’re going to intimidate (drug smugglers),” he said.

Rappoport said he never tampered with the U.S. Customs computer system. “It is impossible for a district director to manipulate such a system,” he said, noting that it is too complex for one person to compromise. “No district director is stupid enough to give orders to manipulate even less intensive systems.”

Inspectors use the computer to check the license numbers of every vehicle and some drivers who enter the United States from Mexico. If the vehicle or motorist is suspected of drug or immigrant smuggling, or has been involved in such crimes, the computer warns the agent at the border inspection booth.

The intelligence reports, which were written by U.S. Customs inspectors and often included information gleaned from informants, were submitted to Rappoport’s office for input into the computer.

But in some cases, congressional investigators discovered, information that was critical to helping cut off the flow of drug traffic into the United States never made it to inspectors at the border. In other instances, Rappoport acknowledged, the data was apparently erased from computer files.

In the case of the record four-ton cocaine bust in October, 1990, documents show that the Hidro driver and the tanker should have been flagged by the computer as a suspected drug smuggler and smuggling vehicle. Rappoport was warned in 1988 that seven Hidro tankers and drivers--including Sanchez--were involved in narcotics smuggling, but the information was never entered in the system.

An Aug. 13, 1988, report, written by former Inspector Michael Horner and his partner, Terry Kappella, warned Rappoport and his intelligence chief that informants had tagged Sanchez as a drug smuggler.

“It may be advisable . . . to initiate an intelligence alert regarding the seven Hidro drivers and their vehicles to include alerting any officers contacting these vehicles and discovering suspicious signs, or receiving K-9 (dog) alert,” their report said.

A report written after the bust by an inspector general’s investigator said it was common knowledge among U.S. Customs inspectors that the record cocaine seizure a month earlier from the Hidro tanker was an accident.

According to that report, a drug-sniffing dog handler strolled by the tanker as a U.S. Customs inspector was clearing Sanchez and the Hidro tanker for entry into the United States. When the dog alerted its handler to the scent of cocaine, the handler asked the inspector to detain the tanker. The inspector’s supervisor, however, demanded that the truck be sent on its way, the report said.

Another report of the incident said the supervisor “vehemently protested the detention of the truck and attempted to release the vehicle.” But a second supervisor arrived and overruled the first, the report said.

Although the driver declared no cargo, inspectors found that the tanker weighed almost 8,000 pounds more than an empty tanker.

Nevertheless, despite questions about the truck’s weight and the dog’s reaction, U.S. Customs officials said they did not have probable cause to hold Sanchez, 40, a Mexican citizen. He was released and is a fugitive charged with drug smuggling.

Several border workers have been interviewed by congressional investigators, but only Horner, who co-authored the Hidro memo and recently left his job under a disability retirement, has agreed to publicly reveal criticism of Rappoport.

“We supplied Rappoport and his staff with this intelligence of who the bad guys are and who had (secret) compartments, and it’s not being inputted in the system,” Horner said. “How many times did that Hidro tanker and the six others come through the gate loaded with dope?”

But Rappoport denied knowledge of the August, 1988, memo by Horner and Kappella, and said the two inspectors never informed him about the seven Hidro tankers and drivers. “I tend to believe it never happened,” he said.

Horner charged that Rappoport and his staff members who controlled the district’s intelligence reports frequently failed to enter the names of suspected smugglers and high-risk target vehicles in the computerized intelligence files.

In another example, an inspector at the San Ysidro port of entry ordered a visibly nervous driver of an empty fish truck to pull over for an inspection Sept. 12, 1988. The computer had not scored a “hit” when the inspector entered the truck’s license number. But a search of the vehicle turned up 402 pounds of cocaine stashed in a secret compartment.

An Aug. 19, 1988, memo obtained by The Times showed that Horner had asked Rappoport and the intelligence staff to enter the fish truck’s license number in the computer to alert inspectors. An informant had said the truck was used to smuggle narcotics. The data, however, was never entered.

Again, between September and December, 1988, inspectors searched three other trucks and found narcotics hidden inside. The first truck concealed 1,900 pounds of cocaine, the second was carrying 2,760 pounds of cocaine, and the third carried 5,000 pounds of marijuana.

According to an Oct. 1, 1992, congressional investigator’s report to the subcommittee, Horner and Kappella had submitted memos about each of the three trucks based on information received from informants. But, again, the information was never entered in the computer.

Horner also says that some of his intelligence reports about smugglers and their vehicles were removed from the computer. Rappoport said some of Horner’s records were purged from the computer but he could not remember why.

“I do know some records of his were removed,” Rappoport said. But he said he received so many reports from inspectors in the field that he seldom looked at them all. “The (intelligence) unit reported directly to me, but I didn’t get into looking into individual records,” he said.

Another damaging allegation being investigated by the congressional subcommittee is that Rappoport required inspectors to reveal the identities of their confidential informants. Some informants were beaten or killed after their identities were revealed to Rappoport and his staff.

In an Aug. 3, 1989, memo, Rappoport informed inspectors to “be prepared to fully identify” their informants. The memo went on to say that informants’ identities “will be safeguarded” at his district office “in a secure location.”

A congressional investigator’s report obtained by The Times said that soon after Rappoport’s directive was issued, he ordered Horner to identify two informants who had provided “very helpful and reliable information.” Four days later, one informant was dead and the other had survived a knife attack, the report said.

Rappoport said he could not remember the 1989 memo he issued, but said he recalled “an issue on informants.”

“I remember an incident involving something about informants. I don’t know if it was Horner or someone else,” he said.

Rappoport called the allegations that he was corrupt absurd, but acknowledged that the charges being examined are serious.

“The dilemma is, one investigation they conducted couldn’t find any tangible evidence. On the other hand, you’ve got all these allegations, and all these things that make you say, ‘Well, if there’s smoke there’s got to be some fire.’ I can understand that,” Rappoport said.

In a statement issued to The Times in March, he blamed two Customs employees in particular for generating allegations against him, but he declined to identify them.

He denied ever “knowingly or deliberately having taken or authorized an action to aid and abet smuggling.”

“I know that there are very strong feelings on the parts of some individuals against me,” Rappoport said. “I’ve been told by some people there are some individuals who will never let up.”

Cocaine Seizures

Confiscations of cocaine at ports of entry in the U.S. Customs Service’s San Diego district dropped dramatically in 1990, the last year Allan J. Rappoport served as director. Seizures soared the following year. In pounds, fiscal year ended Sept. 30 1988: 3,661 1989: 2,599 1990: Rappoport’s last year: 203 pounds 1991: 15,823 1992: 15,535

Source: U.S. Customs Service