Mexican Scion Arrested on Smuggling Charges : Elite: Son of ruling party stalwart is stopped at airport. The family is being investigated on both sides of the border.

President Ernesto Zedillo’s government launched another broadside at the onetime impunity of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, arresting the son of one of the PRI’s most powerful Old Guard stalwarts on smuggling charges.

Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano’s office confirmed Tuesday that customs officers jailed Jorge Hank Rhon after he stepped off a Japan Airlines flight here Monday night. He was charged with failing to declare ivory, ocelot furs and statues encrusted with precious stones that agents found in his luggage during a routine customs check.

Officials said Hank, a flamboyant Tijuana millionaire with a penchant for exotic animals and a checkered reputation, had declared goods worth just $1,000. He paid $700 in duties.

But then, as part of a random, mechanized system for determining which passengers will have their luggage scrutinized, Hank’s bags were chosen for a search and officials said they then discovered the extent of his cache.

Hank is a son of former Agriculture Secretary Carlos Hank Gonzalez. His father was a close associate of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and is widely acknowledged as the leader of the conservative PRI faction known as the “dinosaurs.”

Fears that the elder Hank--who is a wealthy man with extensive holdings in public companies--is also the target of government investigators shook Mexico City’s financial markets Tuesday.

Government officials stressed Tuesday that the younger Hank’s arrest was unrelated to any ongoing criminal investigations.

But one official noted that Hank’s detention further illustrates the government’s new policy of enforcing the law equally against all, regardless of family or position.

Independent of Monday night’s arrest, U.S. and Mexican officials confirmed that the Hank family is the target of investigations in both countries. Investigators on both sides of the border suspect that the family has served as a link between the PRI and Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, an alliance blamed for recent political violence in Mexico, according to government officials in both nations.

And a Mexican special prosecutor’s probe of three high-profile killings--last year’s slayings of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and PRI Secretary General Francisco Ruiz Massieu and the 1993 slaying of Guadalajara’s Roman Catholic cardinal--has focused, in part, on the Hanks and their political group, a Mexican official said.

The younger Hank’s arrest came just two months after Lozano jailed Salinas’ older brother on charges of masterminding the Ruiz Massieu killing in September. The detention of Raul Salinas de Gortari shocked a nation accustomed to privileged treatment for ruling party families.

The younger Hank owns a real estate and business empire in Baja California. The centerpiece of that fortune is the historic Agua Caliente racetrack, which U.S. law enforcement has linked with organized crime on both sides of the border.

But the most notorious incident associated with the younger Hank is the 1988 ambush slaying of Hector (Gato) Felix, editor of the respected Tijuana weekly Zeta.

Colleagues of the slain editor have repeatedly accused the younger Hank of ordering the killing as part of a personal vendetta; Hank has publicly denied wrongdoing.

The younger Hank had a brush with U.S. Customs in 1991. He was detained at the San Diego border for trying to illegally transport a white Bengal tiger to Tijuana. The Customs Service fined him $25,000 for possessing an endangered species and confiscated the tiger, which was donated to the San Diego Zoo.

Fineman reported from Mexico City and Rotella from Tijuana.