N.Y. AIRPORT WORKERS CHARGED IN DRUG STING

NEW YORK - Federal agents Tuesday arrested 20 airport baggage and
cargo handlers and charged them with running a decadelong
drug-smuggling operation that brought hundreds of pounds of cocaine
and marijuana a year through Kennedy International Airport under the
noses of customs officials.

The arrests unveiled a criminal conspiracy of stunning duration,
prosecutors said, in which the baggage handlers moved drug shipments
worth tens of millions of dollars through the airport with virtual
impunity. The smuggling operation also showed what federal officials
called a vulnerability in the nation's airline-security system.

Unlike baggage screeners, who became federal employees subject to more
stringent federal regulations in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, baggage and cargo handlers are often employed by private
contractors working for airlines.

``A network of corrupt airport employees, motivated by greed, might
just as well have been collaborating with terrorists as with drug
smugglers,'' Michael Garcia, the acting assistant secretary of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Tuesday at a news conference
to announce the arrests.

The arrests concluded a 14-month investigation during which federal
agents seized more than 400 kilograms of cocaine and hundreds of
pounds of marijuana arriving at Kennedy on international flights,
almost all of them from Guyana and Jamaica, officials said. One of the
shipments, a 185-kilogram package of cocaine worth $23 million found
in the cargo section of a passenger flight in September, is the
largest ever intercepted at Kennedy, officials said.

The baggage handlers and their supervisors, who had unrestricted
access to the tarmac and airplanes, worked together to unload the drug
shipments, prosecutors said. They would then move them to safe areas
for pickup and distribution, carefully avoiding surveillance cameras
and all forms of border inspection and security, prosecutors said.