SMUGGLERS CORRUPTING U.S.'S ANTI-DRUG FORCES, STUDY SAYS

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," recalled Carreon, 42. "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
nation's southern 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.

`Overwhelming'

"It's been overwhelming on the Southwest border," said Wayne 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 that 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.

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, 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, Calif., agreed to let her
boyfriend, a member of a drug-smuggling family, drive a vehicle loaded with
marijuana through her lane without inspection. INS detention officers also
smuggled drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints in INS vehicles, the report
says.

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.

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 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."

Controls may not be adequate

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 Kelly said 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.

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 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 to 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," said Rebolledo.

"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.