Airport, Seaport Workers Increasingly Involved in Drug Smuggling

By MIREYA NAVARRO

MIAMI The three wooden cargo crates dropped off by a courier at the
international airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a Delta Air Lines flight
to New York City looked harmless. But when the courier's nervousness raised
suspicions about their contents, lawenforcement officials looked inside, and
found 1,000 pounds of cocaine.

The shipment was part of a scheme that lasted three to four years, in which
federal officials said thousands of pounds of Colombian cocaine were hidden
in suitcases and cargo crates aboard Delta flights from Puerto Rico and
unloaded for nationwide distribution.

What made the operation successful for so long, the government said, was
that it was run with the help of Delta employees who used fake airline tags
and bypassed checkin and security procedures by hauling the illegal loads
through the airport's restaurant and bar.

This episode illustrates what federal lawenforcement officials said has
become an alarming trend across the country: the increasing involvement of
airport and seaport workers in drug smuggling. In the fiscal year starting
last October, figures from the U.S. Customs Service show that 148 commercial
cargo employees at airports and seaports have been arrested nationwide,
accused of helping ship drugs through airplane compartments and cargo
containers.

Although arrest figures for other years were not available for comparison,
officials said such statistics only told part of the story. Insiders are
often able to avoid arrest because they know when customs inspections of
aircraft and containerized cargo will occur, and they can simply not pick up
the drugs.

Although only small numbers of airport and seaport employees participate in
drug smuggling, their impact is great, federal officials said, because the
workers enjoyed another insider's advantage: access to obscure hiding places
in airplane bathrooms, cockpits, or passenger cabins and in cargo containers
on ships.

Officials said the employees who are involved come from virtually every
segment of the work force baggage handlers, caterers, cleaners,
ticketcounter agents, mechanics, and flight crews at airports, and
longshoremen, freight checkers, and ship crews at ports. Helping pass the
contraband can add $3,000 to $5,000 per kilogram to a salary.

Felix Jimenez, the Drug Enforcement Administration's special agent in
charge for the Caribbean in San Juan, said: "A guy who's making $5 an hour
suddenly is making $400,000 a year by doing this."

"It attacks the integrity of the system," Raphael Lopez, the Customs
Service special agent in charge in Miami, said of what lawenforcement
officials call "internal conspiracies." An employee is "someone who is
trusted, and that trust is violated."

The problem has been growing at major ports as aggressive law enforcement
pushes traffickers to find ingenious methods of concealment, Customs Service
officials said.

But, they said, it is particularly acute in San Juan and Miami, major
gateways for illegal drugs because of their proximity to South America.
Airport and seaport workers are suspected in most cases in which drugs are
seized at the Port of Miami and Miami International Airport, officials said.

At the Port of Miami, where customs inspectors seize more drugs in cargo
containers than at any other port in the country, customs officials say part
of the problem is lax security and the lack of criminal background checks of
employees that are standard in some other ports around the country, such as
the Port of New YorkNew Jersey. In a report prepared for Congressional
hearings last month on efforts to stop the flow of drugs into the United
States, Rep. John Mica, a Republican from central Florida, called security at
the port "weak, ineffective, and overburdened."

Dock and warehouse workers have such free rein around the port, Mica and
Customs Service inspectors said, that employees have been known to tamper
with surveillance cameras, drive their cars around the container yard to pick
up a drug load and leave the port with both drugs and handguns in their
trunks, all without fear of being stopped because there are no exit
checkpoints, as there are at other major ports.

But Arthur Coffey, president of the International Longshoremen's
Association Local 1922 here, blamed the flow of illegal drugs on "a shortage
of manpower, budget cuts, and ineffective leadership" at the Customs Service.
He told members of Congress during last month's hearing that the union
supported increased enforcement and surveillance at ports but opposed
background checks, calling efforts to impose them "a witch hunt against
decent working men and women."

Still, a study by the Customs Service earlier this year found that 36 of 50
randomly selected longshoremen at the port had arrest records, most of which
included drug offenses like sale and possession of cocaine, heroin,
marijuana, and crack. A similar pattern was found in neighboring Broward
County, where 19 of 38 workers at Port Everglades also had arrest records,
nine of them for drugrelated offenses.

Customs Service officials in Miami said an arrest here last June was
typical: a longshoreman with two convictions for marijuana possession and
cocaine trafficking in Georgia and Florida allegedly offered $10,000 to two
employees of a shipping line to turn off security cameras in the container
yard and pick up a load of 650 pounds of marijuana and 215 pounds of hashish
oil.

"The figures are so outrageous they just beg for somebody to jump in and
say this is crazy," said Rep. E. Clay Shaw, a South Florida Republican who
requested the study by the Customs Service.

John Hensley, customs special agent in charge in Los Angeles, said the lack
of background checks at the Port of Los AngelesLong Beach is a major
problem. He said that at ports like Los Angeles there is also a need to
tighten and standardize security operations by transferring responsibility
for policing the cargo terminals to the port authorities from individual
shipping companies.

Yet the problem flourishes even at airports, where criminal background
checks of employees with unescorted access to gate and ramp areas are
required by the Federal Aviation Administration. In the San Juan case, 12
people, including nine Delta employees, were indicted last month on federal
drug charges and more arrests are expected. The Delta workers included ramp
workers, cargo handlers, and ticketcounter agents. Around the same time, an
undercover operation here resulted in a federal grand jury indictment this
month that accuses six American Airlines mechanics of unloading cocaine and
heroin from behind passenger cabin walls, ceiling panels and cockpit
compartments on flights from Colombia.

Federal investigators said the defendants minimized their risk of detection
by waiting to retrieve the drugs until the plane returned to Miami
International Airport a second time from a domestic flight, which drew less
scrutiny from the Customs Service.

At Miami International Airport, the country's main hub for Latin American
travel, internal conspiracies were suspected in 57 percent of 1996 cases in
which drugs are seized from the aircraft, up from 17 percent in 1994. At the
Port of Miami, where 80 percent of the cargo originates in countries that
export or serve as transshipment points for drugs, according to a General
Accounting Office study, employee participation is now suspected in 60
percent of cases in which drugs are seized last year, Customs Service figures
show, up from 50 percent in 1993.

More drugs were seized at the port than at the airport 34,000 pounds of
cocaine and marijuana in 1996, compared with 23,000 pounds at the airport
but the trend has been toward smaller loads, reflecting the breakup of major
cartels into smaller trafficking cells each running its own operation. This
in turn has required the participation of more internal conspirators to help
with smuggling, officials said.

To fight the problem, the Dade County Commission is drafting a bill
restricting access to the port and requiring identification cards and
background checks. The commission would ban from employment those with a
felony conviction within the previous 10 years. Lopez, the Customs Service
special agent here, said he also wanted to ban both port and airport
employees from using cellular telephones and pagers.

"That's how they communicate," he said, referring to traffickers who
coordinate the shipments and send workers the location of hidden drugs
shortly before a load arrives.

Federal officials said most air and sea carriers calling at ports in the
United States have signed an agreement to help deter drug smuggling by
beefing up their own security, partly to avoid fines the government can levy
when drugs are found. So far this year, more than 20 percent of cocaine
seized at Miami's airport was found by the airlines themselves, Customs
Service officials here said.

"It's something that requires constant attention," said Al Becker, an
American Airlines spokesman who said the company spends $1 million a month on
antidrug efforts.

Unions representing seaport and airport workers said drug smuggling could
be controlled if airlines did not use so many contract workers who are paid
low wages and given no benefits. But some recognized the financial
temptation.

"We tell our people their careers are not worth a onetime, big bang for a
buck, or a shot," said Ed Darcy, president of the Government Supervisors
Association of Florida, which represents public supervising personnel in
maintenance and other areas at the seaport and airport. "It's always been our
posture that if you get caught for drugs, you're on your own. We won't even
supply a representative for that."

But Hardrick Crawford Jr., the Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant
special agent in charge for organized crime and drugs here, noted that
"nothing will turn a buck like drugs will."

"Honest workers are susceptible to that," he said.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times