U.S. CUSTOMS IS HIGHLY VULNERABLE TO CORRUPTION, SAYS REPORT BY AGENCY

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

The report, 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 said.

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 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 backlog of
periodic personnel investigations.

In addition yesterday, the agency announced the hiring of William Keefer, a
former federal prosecutor, to head Internal Affairs. Keefer is replacing
Homer 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 past 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 States.

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.