Hiring on the Border

The various federal agencies charged with stopping drugs at the border have
begun sniping at one another — although few officials are willing to attach
their names to their complaints — over how well they are policing
themselves against corruption. Some of the bitter grousing has ethnic
overtones. "The Customs and Border Patrol recruit along the [Rio Grande]
river, and many are great kids," said a highranking antidrug official in
Texas who asked not to be identified. "The fatal mistake is sending them
right back to their home town, because a percentage have family ties to
people who are corrupt. When a brotherinlaw comes through his lane,
what's he going to do — search him? They wave him through. Some are
corrupt, and some are unknowingly corrupted. They are manipulated."

Many border officials said they find such suspicions insulting and
demeaning to Hispanics, who account for as much as 90 percent of the
population in some border counties. In fact, they say, people hired locally
are often better at detecting smugglers.

"I think it's an insult to insinuate home [local] people are susceptible to
corruption," said Ramon Juarez, the Laredo port director for the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. "The inspectors who are most
successful at detecting violators are from here. They know the people, the
culture, the area. They have a sixth sense about what's going on."

"When I have seen corruption, it's because the system allowed it," he said.
"The guys trying to get things across are desperate. They'll do anything.
And they have intelligence systems. They'll study us and identify our weak
links, and you'll never know why someone is going to be corrupted. But it
doesn't mean everybody is corrupt."

Some U.S. agents are lured into corruption gradually by traffickers in a
process akin to the recruitment of foreign spies by intelligence agencies.
Such was apparently the case with a convicted federal law enforcement
official who is completing a prison sentence for conspiracy to smuggle
narcotics. The man testified recently at a Senate hearing, using the alias
"Joe Daedalus."

Wearing a hood and speaking into a microphone that disguised his voice, the
Vietnam veteran with 15 years of government service testified that he was
slowly "sucked in" by a trafficking ring through Mexican members who
befriended him during the course of his duties.

"I did not know at the time that these people were traffickers, but they
knew who I was," he testified. He visited them at their homes on special
occasions, such as birthdays and baptisms. He received unsolicited gifts,
such as baseball tickets, and on one occasion, after mentioning that he
wanted to do some landscaping, he returned home to find a couple of fully
grown palm trees planted in his lawn. "Before I realized it, they had their
hooks into me," he said.

When the pitch to help them smuggle drugs finally came, he said, he was
"vulnerable" because of his agency's "lack of recognition" for his hard
work and because of "problems with some of my superiors." He said he took
payoffs totaling $50,000 for helping the smugglers on about a dozen
occasions.

Officials say that vulnerable federal employees — for instance, people who
are over their heads in debt — are particularly susceptible to the bribes
offered by drug dealers. The risk of federal employees falling prey to drug
money can be lowered with regular employee background checks of the sort
that are done when they are first hired, but the agencies have not
regularly rechecked longtime employees. An effort is now being made,
however, to submit inspectors to more frequent and thorough checks,
including reviews of their personal finances.

In a September 1995 review of the Border Patrol, the Justice Department's
Office of the Inspector General "found that onethird of the Border Patrol
was overdue for reinvestigation," according to May Senate testimony by
Michael R. Bromwich, head of the office. "INS's neglect of reinvestigations
is historic, as had been true of the department generally," he said.

Thorough background checks and periodic monitoring are particularly
important given the rapid hiring of federal law enforcement personnel in
recent years along the border, officials said. Since 1992, the Border
Patrol and its parent agency, the INS, have increased their border staffing
by more than 80 percent, from 5,863 employees to 10,746 this year.

Better background checking might have warned officials to watch for
potential problems with Thomas Bair, 26. The Border Patrol agent was
discovered by two other agents three months ago close to a border fence in
a rugged area of eastern San Diego County with 11 duffel bags in and near
his patrol van stuffed with 602 pounds of marijuana worth $300,000.

An investigation of the incident revealed that Bair had declared bankruptcy
in 1995 and was working at a paint and body shop in San Diego County when
hired by the Border Patrol, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wheat.

But soon after joining the service, he bought a new Mustang with $100
bills, made $12,000 in payments on another vehicle and paid off $10,000
worth of credit card debt. At the time of his Aug. 5 arrest, he was about
to make a $64,000 down payment on a $193,000 house — all on a salary of
$29,000 a year, Wheat said.

Bair also was found to be residing in the United States only one night a
week, spending the rest of his time across the border in Tecate with his
Mexican girlfriend. He pleaded not guilty, claiming he had seized the drugs
on his own to become the "hero" of his unit, and is being held without bail
pending trial, which is expected early next year.

In May, Jorge Luis Mancha, 43, a Border Patrol agent in Douglas, Ariz., was
convicted on drug smuggling charges stemming from the September 1995
seizure of a vehicle containing 1,200 pounds of cocaine and 28 pounds of
marijuana, a load the Border Patrol said was worth $38.4 million.

Mancha's corruption was discovered after two Border Patrol agents in
Douglas intercepted a teenager with a scanner in his car. The youth, a
suspected scout for a drug trafficking gang, was allowed to go — but only
after one of the agents examined the scanner and wrote down its
frequencies. Agents then started monitoring the channels and eventually
heard Mancha trying to guide a drug load across the border from Mexico.
Later that night, a couple of agents came upon Mancha as he was riding a
bicycle along the border and noticed that he was wearing a headset
transmitter that he tried to conceal. When agents later found the
drugladen vehicle, there were bicycle tracks all around it, a federal
court in Tucson was told.

Evidence presented at his trial showed that Mancha had been involved in
drug trafficking for at least three years, amassing more than $444,000 in
payoffs.

Other probes have revealed even broader conspiracies.