DRUG TRADE TAINTS US LAW OFFICERS

DONNA, Texas -- In November 1997, when Miguel Carreon became police chief of
this small town nine miles from the Mexican border, he vowed to restore
integrity to a force sullied by the indictment of six officers accused of
helping to smuggle marijuana into the United States.

Within months, a local figure approached him and hinted that police should
continue to cooperate with drug smugglers. "He told me that as long as
nobody gets hurt, nobody will know the difference," Carreon recalled. "I
stopped the conversation before he said, `Let's work together.' "

U.S. officials and politicians are blasting the Clinton administration's
decision to certify Mexico as an ally in the war on drugs in the face of
Mexico's endemic drug corruption. But Carreon's encounter suggests that a
growing number of American law enforcement officials are also having trouble
staying clean amid the flood of dirty money and drugs across the 2,000-mile
border.

>From small-town police departments to the expanding ranks of federal
anti-drug agencies, American officials say they are alarmed by their own
vulnerability to the corrupting influence of the drug trade. In a report to
Congress last month, the U.S. Customs Service called drug trafficking "the
undisputed, greatest corruption hazard confronting all federal, state and
local law enforcement agencies today."

The number of state and local law enforcement and other public officials
investigated by the FBI and convicted for drug corruption has increased from
79 in 1997 to 157 last year. Between 1994 and 1997, there were 46
drug-related indictments in the United States of border law-enforcement
officials.

"It's been overwhelming on the Southwest border," said Wayne D. Beaman, the
special agent in charge of the McAllen, Texas, field office for the Justice
Department Inspector General's office, which investigates allegations of
corruption along the Texas-Mexico border. "We are woefully understaffed."

The congressional General Accounting Office is about to release a yearlong
study, which concludes that drug-related corruption along the Southwest
border is a serious and continuing threat, according to a draft of the
report obtained by The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The GAO examined 28 convictions between 1992 and 1997 of U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service and Customs Service officials for drug-related
crimes on the Southwest border, which extends from Brownsville, Texas, to
Imperial Beach, Calif.

A porous border

The cases included U.S. officials waving vehicles carrying drugs through
ports of entry, coordinating the movement of drugs across the Southwest
border, transporting drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints, selling drugs and
disclosing drug intelligence information.

In one case, a Customs inspector in El Paso used a cellular telephone to
send a prearranged code to a drug smuggler's beeper, telling him which lane
to use at a border crossing and when to use it.

In another, an immigration official in Calexico, Calif., agreed to let her
boyfriend, a member of a drug-smuggling family, drive a vehicle loaded with
marijuana through her lane without inspection. On numerous occasions, the
GAO report says, INS detention officers smuggled drugs past Border Patrol
checkpoints in INS vehicles.

The report concludes that both Customs and the INS missed opportunities to
provide in-depth anti-corruption training to employees and failed to conduct
background investigations that are required every five years. In some cases,
the report says, background checks were overdue by as much as three years.

The two agencies also failed to require sufficient financial information
from their employees, or else did not use what was available to sniff out
possible corruption, the GAO found.

An elevated lifestyle

In one case, the INS did not question a Border Patrol agent who owned a
$200,000 house with a five-car garage and an Olympic-size swimming pool
housed in its own building. The agent also had six vehicles, two boats, 100
weapons, $45,000 in Treasury bills and 40 acres of land.

Because neither the INS nor Customs had completed an evaluation of its
policies and procedures or corrected internal weaknesses, the GAO concluded,
"neither agency can be sure that adequate internal controls are in place to
detect and prevent employee corruption."

The Customs Service, which is part of the Treasury Department, conceded in
its report to Congress last month that it may not have adequate internal
controls in place to detect and prevent corruption.

Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told The Star-Telegram that his agency
has begun taking steps to tighten its hiring process, tackle the backlog of
personnel investigations, and hire former federal prosecutor William Keefer
to take over the internal affairs division.

INS spokesman Greg Gagne said he would not comment directly on the GAO
report because it was still in draft form. But he said the agency is
confident that its training practices and background checks are thorough and
rival those of any other agency.

Targets of corruption

Although Gagne said there is no indication of an increase in corruption in
INS ranks, he also said the agency is concerned that its growing number of
employees along the border are being targeted more often by drug smugglers.
By year's end, Gagne said, the INS hopes to have a work force of 29,000,
compared with 10,000 in 1992.

"It has become perfectly evident that drug smuggling and the use of money to
penetrate the border has become a more serious problem," he said.

Mexican officials agree.

"You read a lot about how drugs make it from South America, through Mexico
and to the border," said Juan Rebolledo, the Mexican Foreign Ministry's
undersecretary for North American affairs. "But are the same sources . . .
telling the public how it is that these same drugs make it from the border
to Chicago?

"They don't just magically make it there overnight. Drug dealers spread
their money all along the trail from source to consumption, so it's naive to
think that it is not spread north of the border as well," Rebolledo said.

A sensitive subject

"It's not good public relations to admit that there could be corruption
within law enforcement agencies," said Phil Jordan, a former head of the
Drug Enforcement Administration's El Paso Intelligence Center. Jordan said
he encountered resistance from his superiors when he tried to point out an
increase in the number of corruption allegations in the mid-1990s.

"Unfortunately, because of the increase of the flow of narcotics into the
country and the mind-boggling amount of money that is out there to buy
protection," said Jordan, "there is more exposure for law enforcement
officials to corruption than ever before."

Marisa Taylor is a staff writer for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a Knight
Ridder newspaper. Ricardo Sandoval reports for The Herald's Washington
Bureau from Mexico.