cannabisnews.com: Drug Trade Taints U.S. Law Officers!





Drug Trade Taints U.S. Law Officers!
Posted by FoM on March 14, 1999 at 12:41:15 PT

DONNA, Texas In November 1997, when Miguel Carreon became police chief of this small town nine miles from the Mexican border, he vowed to restore integrity to a force sullied by the indictment of six officers accused of helping to smuggle marijuana into the United States.
Within months, a local figure approached him and hinted that police should continue to cooperate with drug smugglers. ``He told me that as long as nobody gets hurt, nobody will know the difference,'' Carreon recalled. ``I stopped the conversation before he said, `Let's work together.' ''U.S. officials and politicians are blasting the Clinton administration's decision to certify Mexico as an ally in the war on drugs in the face of Mexico's endemic drug corruption. But Carreon's encounter suggests that a growing number of American law enforcement officials are also having trouble staying clean amid the flood of dirty money and drugs across the 2,000-mile border.From small-town police departments to the expanding ranks of federal anti-drug agencies, American officials say they are alarmed by their own vulnerability to the corrupting influence of the drug trade. In a report to Congress last month, the U.S. Customs Service called drug trafficking ``the undisputed, greatest corruption hazard confronting all federal, state and local law enforcement agencies today.''The number of state and local law enforcement and other public officials investigated by the FBI and convicted for drug corruption has increased from 79 in 1997 to 157 last year. Between 1994 and 1997, there were 46 drug-related indictments in the United States of border law-enforcement officials.``It's been overwhelming on the Southwest border,'' said Wayne D. Beaman, the special agent in charge of the McAllen, Texas, field office for the Justice Department Inspector General's office, which investigates allegations of corruption along the Texas-Mexico border. ``We are woefully understaffed.''The congressional General Accounting Office is about to release a yearlong study, which concludes that drug-related corruption along the Southwest border is a serious and continuing threat, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.The GAO examined 28 convictions between 1992 and 1997 of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service officials for drug-related crimes on the Southwest border, which extends from Brownsville, Texas, to Imperial Beach, Calif.A porous border The cases included U.S. officials waving vehicles carrying drugs through ports of entry, coordinating the movement of drugs across the Southwest border, transporting drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints, selling drugs and disclosing drug intelligence information.In one case, a Customs inspector in El Paso used a cellular telephone to send a prearranged code to a drug smuggler's beeper, telling him which lane to use at a border crossing and when to use it.In another, an immigration official in Calexico, Calif., agreed to let her boyfriend, a member of a drug-smuggling family, drive a vehicle loaded with marijuana through her lane without inspection. On numerous occasions, the GAO report says, INS detention officers smuggled drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints in INS vehicles.The report concludes that both Customs and the INS missed opportunities to provide in-depth anti-corruption training to employees and failed to conduct background investigations that are required every five years. In some cases, the report says, background checks were overdue by as much as three years.The two agencies also failed to require sufficient financial information from their employees, or else did not use what was available to sniff out possible corruption, the GAO found.An elevated lifestyle In one case, the INS did not question a Border Patrol agent who owned a $200,000 house with a five-car garage and an Olympic-size swimming pool housed in its own building. The agent also had six vehicles, two boats, 100 weapons, $45,000 in Treasury bills and 40 acres of land.Because neither the INS nor Customs had completed an evaluation of its policies and procedures or corrected internal weaknesses, the GAO concluded, ``neither agency can be sure that adequate internal controls are in place to detect and prevent employee corruption.''The Customs Service, which is part of the Treasury Department, conceded in its report to Congress last month that it may not have adequate internal controls in place to detect and prevent corruption.Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told The Star-Telegram that his agency has begun taking steps to tighten its hiring process, tackle the backlog of personnel investigations, and hire former federal prosecutor William Keefer to take over the internal affairs division.INS spokesman Greg Gagne said he would not comment directly on the GAO report because it was still in draft form. But he said the agency is confident that its training practices and background checks are thorough and rival those of any other agency.Targets of corruption Although Gagne said there is no indication of an increase in corruption in INS ranks, he also said the agency is concerned that its growing number of employees along the border are being targeted more often by drug smugglers. By year's end, Gagne said, the INS hopes to have a work force of 29,000, compared with 10,000 in 1992.``It has become perfectly evident that drug smuggling and the use of money to penetrate the border has become a more serious problem,'' he said.Mexican officials agree.``You read a lot about how drugs make it from South America, through Mexico and to the border,'' said Juan Rebolledo, the Mexican Foreign Ministry's undersecretary for North American affairs. ``But are the same sources . . . telling the public how it is that these same drugs make it from the border to Chicago?``They don't just magically make it there overnight. Drug dealers spread their money all along the trail from source to consumption, so it's naive to think that it is not spread north of the border as well,'' Rebolledo said.A sensitive subject ``It's not good public relations to admit that there could be corruption within law enforcement agencies,'' said Phil Jordan, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's El Paso Intelligence Center. Jordan said he encountered resistance from his superiors when he tried to point out an increase in the number of corruption allegations in the mid-1990s.``Unfortunately, because of the increase of the flow of narcotics into the country and the mind-boggling amount of money that is out there to buy protection,'' said Jordan, ``there is more exposure for law enforcement officials to corruption than ever before.''Marisa Taylor is a staff writer for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a Knight Ridder newspaper. Ricardo Sandoval reports for The Herald's Washington Bureau from Mexico.http://www.herald.com/usa/digdocs/053647.htm 
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Comment #1 posted by CINKIM on October 10, 2001 at 10:41:12 PT
CORRUPT OFFICIALS
THE STORYS YOU PRINTED IS NOTHING THAT I REPORTED,I HAVE REPORTED PEOPLE DIRECTLY LINKED TO THE EX GOV OF BAJA SMUGGLING DOPE AND PEOPLE AND ALL INS CUSTOMS DID WAS TRANSFER THE CORRUPT AGENTS AND REFUSE TO INDICT THE RELATIVES OF THE GOV AS WELL AS HIS BROTHER I HAD DIRECT EVVIDENCE,YET THEY SAID THEY COULD NOT DO THEM,WHY POLTICALY INCORRECT,WELL IF YOU RALLY OR THEY REALLY WANTED TO STOP THE DRUGS,WELL GO AFTER ALL CROOKED PEOPLE,WHY GIVE PASSES TO GOV OFFICIALES????THE MEX CONNECTION WOULD NOT EXIST IF MEX COMPLCITY WAS INVOLVED,AND MESSAGE TO CUSTOMS YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE THAT COVERED UP THIS ONE....
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