U.S. CUSTOMS ADMITS TAINT OF CORRUPTION

WASHINGTON -- The front-line role of the Customs Service in the
government's war against illegal drugs has left the agency highly
vulnerable to narcotics-related corruption, Customs officials acknowledged
Tuesday in a report to Congress.

The report, which was sent to a House panel with jurisdiction over the
agency, admitted that the service had failed to aggressively combat
corruption. In an atmosphere of neglect, internal affairs inquiries
languished and were sometimes impeded because of infighting, the report said.

The report is the service's most extensive and critical examination of how
it deals with narcotics-related corruption and other internal affairs
issues after years in which sporadic corruption cases have tarnished the
image of an agency with 12,000 field inspection employees.

``The large amounts of illegal drugs that pass through U.S. Customs land,
sea and air ports of entry and the enormous amount of money at the disposal
of drug traffickers to corrupt law enforcement personnel place Customs and
its employees at great risk to corruption,'' the report concluded.

Once focused on preventing the entry of illegal trade goods and farm
products, the service has been thrust in recent years into broad
responsibilities in interdicting narcotics, as inspectors monitor more than
300 ports of entry through which marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other
illegal drugs flow into the United States.

The report was ordered by lawmakers, but Customs officials said that the
agency had taken the initiative to review its approach to corruption
issues. But the report was sent to Congress at a time when lawmakers in the
House and Senate are expected to critically examine the agency's internal
affairs performance.

The report sought to focus on corrective measures and Customs Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly, who is a former New York City police commissioner, said
in an interview Tuesday that he had introduced a series of changes. He has
elevated Internal Affairs so that it reports directly to him, ordered a
tougher recruit screening system and sought to reduce the years-long
backlog of periodic personnel investigations.

In addition, the agency announced Tuesday the hiring of William A. Keefer,
a former federal prosecutor, to head Internal Affairs. Keefer is replacing
Homer J. Williams, a Customs official who was transferred after he became
the subject of a federal inquiry in California into whether he told a
colleague that she was under scrutiny in a corruption case.

Referring to his experience as police commissioner in New York, Kelly said
in a letter to Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of an appropriations
committee panel that monitors Customs, ``I know that questions of integrity
can erode public confidence in our law enforcement institutions.''

The report by the Customs Service's Office of Professional Responsibility
sidestepped the issue of the extent to which corruption had already damaged
the agency's effectiveness. Although the service opened more than 180
felony or misdemeanor cases against employees in 1997, the last year that
statistics were available, Kelly said the Internal Affairs system was
unable to precisely define the scope of the problem.

The report did not uncover evidence of systematic corruption in its ranks,
but did conclude that ``individual acts of corruption have occurred and
continue to occur'' that placed the agency in danger of being undermined by
its own employees.

In the last decade, eight Customs officers have been convicted of taking
payments from drug traffickers. In one case, in El Paso, Texas, two customs
inspectors tried to shake down an informer posing as a drug smuggler, one
of them demanding more than $1 million to look the other way when
cocaine-laden vehicles crossed Juarez, the Mexican border city, into the
United Sates.

Federal counter-narcotics officials have said the level of corruption might
be higher than the numbers suggest based on the frequency of drug
intelligence reports indicating that federal agents on the border had been
compromised.

Moreover, the officials said the number of cases might be higher because
the corruption often requires little involvement by an officer whose only
overt activity is to turn away when a car carrying drugs pulls up at an
inspection lane.

Such cases are extremely difficult to detect, given the volume of
cross-border traffic. In 1997, the last year statistics were available, the
agency processed more than 400 million passengers and 17 million cargo
shipments and seized about 400 tons of illegal drugs.

One of the most serious issues to emerge in the report was the existence of
bitter animosity between the agency's Internal Affairs unit and the Office
of Investigations, which conducts criminal inquiries into violations of
customs laws.

The report found what it called a ``long history of strife and infighting''
between the two units, an animosity that was based on ``the belief of
agents from Investigations that agents assigned to Internal Affairs are
incompetent, overzealous and spend too much time investigating matters that
are unrelated to corruption.''

Internal Affairs agents who were interviewed during the review said that
the hostility had ``a debilitating effect on their ability to perform their
jobs diligently'' and ``diminished the importance of their work.''

Some agents cited instances in which Investigations agents interfered with
or compromised investigations. The report did not cite specifics but said
that two federal prosecutors had considered excluding Customs agents from
corruption cases because of the conflict which the report said had reached
``critical proportions.''