CUSTOMS OFFICIAL FILES SUIT AGAINST '60 MINUTES'
A U.S. Customs official is suing CBS, "60 Minutes"correspondents Mike
Wallace and Lesley Stahl,and a show producer,Lee Zeidman,for
libel,contending their scathing report on the Customs Service in San Diego
had as its crux a falsified internal memo.

Rudy Camacho,director of the Customs Management Center in San Diego,contends
the memo-which characterizes the border as a sieve through which huge drug
cargoes pass with impunity-was a forgery and that no trace can be found of
it on agency computers.

Camacho is also suing a former customs inspector,Michael Horner,who
provided"60 Minutes"with the disputed memo.

Since he left the Customs Service in 1992,Horner has been a source in
border-corruption reports by at least five news outlets.

Customs officials besides Camacho say there is strong evidence that the
memo,shown on "60 Minutes" on April 20,1997,was forged.They say they can
demonstrate the disputed June 1996 memo is filled with titles and
bureaucratic coding that had been changed and updated the year before.

Checked-by: Don Beck