DRUG CORRUPTION ON RISE WITH U.S.BORDER OFFICERS

Report: The GAO says smugglers are making inroads into law enforcement from
Texas to California.

Donna,Texas-In November 1997,when Miguel Carreon was hired as the
police chief of this small town nine miles from the Mexican border, he
vowed to restore the integrity of a force whose reputation had been
sullied by the indictment of six officers accused of helping to
smuggle 1,700 pounds of marijuana into the United States.

Within months, however, a local figure approached Carreon and hinted
that the police should continue to cooperate with drug smugglers. "He
told me that drug smuggling has always been a way of life, and as long
as nobody gets hurt, nobody will know the difference," the 42-year-old
chief recalled. "I stopped the conversation before he said, 'Let's
work together.'"

U.S. officials and politicians are denouncing 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 2,00-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 of drug corruption
increased from 79 in 1997 to 157 last year. From 1994 to 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, special agent in charge of the McAllen, Texas, field office
for the Justice Department's 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 that concludes that drug-related corruption along the
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 border, which extends from Brownsville,
Texas, to Imperial Beach.

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

In one case, a customs inspector in El Paso, Texas, 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 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
occasion, 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 did not use what was available to
sniff out possible corruption, the GAO found.

In one case, the INS did not question a Border Patrol agent who owned
a 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.

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 Grag 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.

Although Gagne said there is no indication of an increase in
corruption in its ranks, he also said the INS is concerned that its
growing ranks 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.