SMUGGLERS OFTEN BETRAY THEMSELVES

Scanners Miss Nervous Drivers, But Inspectors Don't

Patting down a driver at the Nogales port of entry, this is what Inspector
Paul Bland noticed most: The guy's heart was pounding out of his chest, and
he was sweating like crazy.

There were other signs as well.

Brenda Tellez, another U.S. Customs inspector, had noticed the driver's
nervous tics when he pulled his maroon Volkswagen Golf into her lane at the
port of entry. Her computer told her it wasn't his car. Then a drug dog
caught a scent.

Bland yanked up the back seat. Instead of a foam cushion, there were bricks
of pot. Compartments under the carpet and in back of the seat held more
stashes.

Flipping out a pocketknife, Bland dug into an oil-coated brick and ran the
blade slowly under his nose. "Positive!" he said, grinning.

Border warriors treat drug catches like game fish. Bland's, snagged one
morning last spring, weighed in at 67 pounds.

Often, it's the honed instincts of people such as Tellez and Bland, plus
basic, good detective work, that deliver the best payoffs.

These days, it takes technology as well.

The swarms of agents deployed along the border are equipped with enough
gizmos to embarrass the Pentagon.

They roam southern Arizona wearing a new generation of night-vision gear
that turns night into day. Ground sensors and live, low-light cameras
planted along the border tell them when and where people are moving.

Infrared night scopes are posted on hillsides, letting agents spy on
several square miles of desert in the dead of night while staring at
consoles in their truck cabs.

A remote-controlled drone with a videocamera patrols southeastern Arizona
and western New Mexico from the sky, hunting for traffickers while an
operator in a trailer miles away watches the images on a screen.

Sophisticated new radio equipment allows the many federal, state and local
law enforcement agencies chasing drugs to speak to each other on a common
frequency. Encryption gear keeps traffickers from intercepting radio chatter.

Vapor-tracing machines detect the presence of minute particles of drugs or
explosives at ports of entry.

Last year, the Customs Service spent $130 million for new dope-finding
gear. A fair share of it is going into Arizona's busy ports.

Two things explain the evolution. The North American Free Trade Agreement
boosted traffic at major ports along the Southwestern border. At the same
time, the buildup of Border Patrol agents among ports made smuggling
through the ports themselves more attractive.

New enforcement tools

The U.S. Customs Service responded with Operation Hardline, putting new
tactics and gadgets into use at border ports. The idea was to improve
inspections and make them faster at a time when tons of narcotics were
moving through America's ports because smuggling seams elsewhere were being
zipped up.

In Nogales, semi rigs line up two-by-two, deep into Mexico, running a
gantlet of inspection points. Inspectors swipe hand-held density readers
along trailers, looking for drug hollows as the rigs roll by.

Trucks pass through a drug screening building under a catwalk that provides
a bird's-eye view. Eventually, undercarriage cameras will film the chassis.
New databases track every vehicle's crossing history, ownership and cargo
manifest.

If inspectors see something awry or get a hunch, trucks are unloaded,
drilled, tapped and X-rayed. Up to 80 a day get pulled through a long metal
shed that looks like a carwash. Inside, a $3 million scanner sends X-ray
images to four video screens.

Recently, a $1 million mobile gamma ray scanner also was installed to pass
over 150 to 200 trucks daily as they roll into Arizona. Another is planned
over railroad tracks crossing the border into downtown Nogales.

Michael Lovejoy, Customs' anti-smuggling director, says the "non-intrusive"
inspection technology means that vehicles aren't being ripped apart by
inspectors as often and that traffic lines are speeding up.

Marijuana and cocaine seizures are also on the rise. In 1995, there were 54
seizures using imaging equipment. In 1998, there were nearly five times
that many.

It's still a drop in the bucket. At most, only two in five rigs rolling
through Nogales are fully scanned for drugs, even with the new gear in
place. Many inspectors say that high-tech gear is nice but that human eyes
and instinct still make the difference.

"A lot of your good inspectors out on the line, they live for that
seizure," said Jimmy Tong Jr., Douglas' port director. "The big payoff is
just sheer experience and determination."

Details make the difference

For the most part, the job is monotonous. Eight hours on your feet.
Freezing nights in January. Murderous afternoons in August. Perpetual auto
exhaust.

Inspectors watch drivers' nervous twitches or odd looks. Using mirrors,
mallets and electronic scopes, they poke and prod cars to check for fresh
paint, suspicious bulges, new welds, missing screws.

They scour immigrant documents, scan computerized crossing histories and
study regular crossers for unusual patterns.

The watchers rotate every hour or so, moving from primary inspection booths
to secondary stations to the pedestrian lines. Some teams are made up
entirely of rovers. They stay on the move throughout the port, so smugglers
never know how to avoid them or which lanes are safe.

"There's nobody who knows where we're going to be or when," says Rick Gill,
head of the Mobile Port Enforcement Team in Nogales.

Sometimes, a blitz is called, and every lane in the port is stopped cold.
Nobody is waved on. Drug-sniffing dogs dash in and out of the traffic jam,
noses alert for drugs on the move.

In southbound lanes, teams of inspectors eyeball pedestrians and traffic
for contraband - mostly stolen cars, drug money and guns - heading to
Mexico. Portable X-ray machines scan suspicious luggage. The inspectors
once found $102,000 inside a brand new stereo that a man was taking into
Mexico.

During a four-month period last winter, the Nogales southbound team nabbed
more than $500,000 heading into Mexico.

No such thing as average

The inspector's job demands vigilance. It's impossible to anticipate the
next load. It's just as impossible to categorize the average smuggler.

Few would have suspected the old Datsun carrying a Mexican man and his two
daughters through the Nogales port one evening last spring. With a doll in
a pink dress perched in its back window, the car looked every bit like it
was taking an average family to visit relatives.

Yet Inspector John Landers had a hunch. The driver's hands shook slightly,
and the 12-year-old girl was sprawled across the back seat, taking up as
much space as possible.

Landers leaned inside to feel the seat. He got a whiff of sweet-scented
soap. The seat was rock-hard. Underneath were 24 packages of pot wrapped
crudely in cellophane, mustard and soap shavings.

"The question we get is, "Do I look like a coker?' " Douglas Inspector
Nicholas Castillo said. "We don't answer that. Cokers look young, old,
female, male, Hispanic, Anglo."

They look like everyone.