New York Times
Letters to the Editor may be sent March 24, 1997

U.S. Finds That Drug Trade Is Fueled by Payoffs at Mexican Border

By DAVID JOHNSTON and SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

ALEXICO, Calif.  At this dusty border crossroads east of San Diego, two
federal immigration inspectors helped a Mexican drug ring move hundreds of
pounds of cocaine across the border, simply by waving the smugglers through
the checkpoint without even glancing inside their cars. 

In El Paso, two federal customs inspectors tried to shake down an informant
posing as a drug smuggler, one of them demanding more than $1 million to
look the other way when cocaineladen vehicles crossed from the Mexican
border city of Juarez into the United States. 

And in Zapata County, Texas, a remote stretch of the TexasMexico border,
drug traffickers turned to local lawenforcement officials for protection
in a big way: Most of the county's leaders, including the county judge, the
sheriff and the clerk, were convicted of or pleaded guilty in federal court
to charges of aiding the international drug trade. 

Narcoticsrelated corruption does not stop at the Rio Grande or at a line
in the desert separating the United States and Mexico, which has been
rocked in recent weeks by reports that leading officials helped bigtime
drug traffickers. 

Nothing on that scale has occurred on this side of the border, but
corruption of lawenforcement officials  at the local and now federal
level  has become a corrosive byproduct of the vast river of cocaine,
marijuana and heroin that pours into the United States across the
2,012mile border that reaches from Brownsville, Texas, to Imperial Beach,
Calif. 

Federal authorities have long thought that a few lawenforcement officials
in remote border counties have been lured by the promise of easy money into
leaving Mexican drug gangs alone. 

Now, these same federal authorities say they have mounting evidence of
systemic corruption in some of those counties. These include Zapata, where
the county's leaders were convicted and forced out of office three years
ago, and Starr County, Texas, where 79 people, including a deputy sheriff,
were indicted a few months ago for taking part in a longrunning marijuana
smuggling operation. 

There are signs of growing corruption in the federal ranks as well,
including of customs and immigration inspectors, who had long been viewed
as more stalwart lines of defense against the drug invasion. 

Internal documents shared with The New York Times by current and former
officials at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration highlight the
drugcorruption issue: One 1995 memorandum, from the government's El
Pasobased clearinghouse for drug intelligence to top drug officials in
Washington, warns of "increased and constant receipt" of reports from
informants, government employees and ordinary citizens about "the use of
corrupt and compromised U.S. customs and immigration inspectors" to insure
that drug shipments cross the border. 

Indeed, other documents show that scores of these reports have been passed
on to drug agency administrators or federal prosecutors over the last few
years. 

"The sorry truth is that people in law enforcement do not make a lot of
money, and that's especially true for local officers," said Fred C. Ball,
the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in McAllen, Texas,
who now leads a federal interagency drug intelligence task force covering
the entire Rio Grande Valley of Texas. 

"In some of these counties, somebody will walk up to an officer with
$50,000, $60,000 or more and say, 'All you have to do is just turn your
head the other way tonight.' That's an explanation for why it happens,"
Ball said. "It's not an excuse." 

Growth Industry: Traffickers' Choice Is Often Bribery 

he problem here is limited compared with the scale of the accusations that
been shaking Mexico. 

But by all accounts, narcoticsrelated corruption in the United States is
serious and growing. A review of court records and interviews with state
and federal prosecutors indicate that beyond the informant accounts
described in the internal federal reports, at least 46 federal, state and
local lawenforcement officials have been indicted on or convicted of
drugrelated corruption charges in the last three years in the border
states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. And that includes only
cases in which drugs were transported across the border by land. 

That number is unprecedented, federal lawenforcement officials say, and
yet it represents only a small part of the problem: When corruption often
involves nothing more than passively allowing smugglers to go about their
business, it is extremely difficult to detect and even tougher to prosecute. 

As drug dealers have become more brazen and the volume and value of drugs
moving across the U.S.Mexico border have skyrocketed, many federal
officials openly concede that they fear the problem will grow worse. 

"These organizations are no longer momandpop organizations paying people
to carry drugs across the border in a knapsack," said Stanley Serwatka, the
chief prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in El Paso. "They are
General Motors. To maintain your profit structure you simply have to import
in large quantities," which places a premium on paying off a border official. 

Largescale drug trafficking continues, experts say, despite vows by
successive administrations in Washington to stop it. Traffickers,
responding to America's interdiction efforts in the mid1980s, shifted
routes from Florida to Mexico, increasing their reliance on the Southwest
border as a transit point. 

The Customs Service reported that at five border crossings on the
CaliforniaMexico border, marijuana seizures increased to 3,518 in 1996
from 2,490 in 1995; that is more than 272,000 pounds of marijuana seized
last year. 

The heavy flow of drugs across the border has brought an increased
lawenforcement presence, which has ratcheted up the pressure on
traffickers. In the border area of San Ysidro, south of San Diego, the
construction of a 10foothigh, 14milelong steel fence between border
crossings to deter illegal immigrants has forced narcotics smugglers to
change tactics. 

Instead of trying to bring drugs across at remote border areas, they are
trying to get through at the legal ports of entry, a switch that has
created a further incentive to bribe border officials. 

Rudy M. Camacho, who manages the San Ysidro crossing, reports 10 to 20
multikilogram seizures a day from traffic there that reaches 45,000
vehicles a day. 

"If you have a corrupt inspector, he can make $35,000 to $40,000 with a
flick of the hand," said one investigator who asked not to be identified,
referring to the motion used by border officials to wave vehicles through
checkpoints. "They do it hundreds of times a day. Who can say they knew any
car had a compartment with drugs inside?" 

Court records from border towns offer a glimpse of just how seductive the
lure of money can be, and of the ease with which border patrols and other
government agents can satisfy drug traffickers' needs. The records show,
for example, how border patrol agents and other federal employees are
offered tens of thousands of dollars simply to "take a break" for a few
moments at arranged times. 

Jose de Jesus Ramos, a former El Paso customs inspector who pleaded guilty
to cooperating with traffickers, matteroffactly described how a few years
ago he became corrupted after a fellow inspector appealed to his
dissatisfaction with the Customs Service and the job's low pay. 

"The situation was that if I was willing, there was always ways to make a
little more money," de Jesus Ramos testified at the inspector's trial last
year. 

Soon, he said, he was meeting with traffickers in places like the parking
lot of the Home Depot store in El Paso, collecting $5,000, then $10,000,
then $20,000. With cellular phones and coded beeper messages, he said, it
was easy to let drug couriers know which inspection booth was his. 

Eventually, the two inspectors hatched plans to allow at least 1,000
kilograms of cocaine into the United States over a severalmonth period,
charging informants posing as drug traffickers $1,000 per kilogram  or $1
million in all. The inspectors were arrested before putting the plan into
effect. 

Dozens of government officials interviewed in recent weeks said that
corruption appears to be limited to a small percentage of the thousands of
employees in federal, state and local law enforcement who work along the
border. 

But even these small numbers lend credibility to the longstanding fear
among top government officials that expanded efforts to police the widening
drug trade would inevitably lead to the corruption of people at all levels
of the American criminal justice system. 

So serious are the concerns about corruption that customs and immigration
officials have taken extraordinary steps to make it harder for drug runners
to buy an inspector. 

For example, inspectors do not know where they will work until they arrive
at the job, their rotation changing daily. Drugsniffing dogs are used to
check some vehicles before they arrive at an inspection booth. And
throughout each day, officials carry out unannounced "block blitzes,"
subjecting random groups of 20 to 30 vehicles to intensive searches. 

Quick Cash: Enticing Agents on Federal Level 

awenforcement officials said that corruption typically begins gradually.
Witness the case of Arthur Garcia, for 11 years a federal immigration
inspector assigned to the border crossing here in Calexico. Garcia was
convicted last year of drug smuggling and sentenced to eight years in prison. 

In a federal courtroom in San Diego, Garcia, testifying in the case of a
coworker, described how he was enticed into protecting a drug ring. It
started in the late 1980s when Rafael Ayala, a former employee of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, stopped by Garcia's house for what
seemed like a social visit. 

The men had known each other for years  Ayala had once worked with Garcia
at an immigration detention camp  and had mutual friends and associates
in Mexico and the Southwestern United States whom they would cross the
border to visit as easily as a motorist in the United States might cross a
state line. 

According to Garcia's testimony, Ayala said that he had several businesses
in Mexico, among them an operation that transported fresh shrimp across the
border. 

"He said it wasn't that much," Garcia recalled. " 'I've got a few customers
that I'm bringing shrimp for, it's really not that much, I'd rather not go
through all the red tape, to go through customs and import this stuff, I'd
rather just bring in a little at a time.' " 

Garcia, who was testifying against a customs inspector, Francisco Mejia,
added, "He said I would be helping him a great deal," mainly by "not
searching his car and allowing these to come in." 

San Diego prosecutors said they later determined that there were 600 to 700
pounds of cocaine in each load, wrapped in bundles and carried in the
trunks of cars. They later charged three members of the ring with smuggling
six tons of cocaine in an 18month period. 

For an inspector earning $1,000 a month, the payoff for Garcia was
staggering. After each time that he waved through a shipment without
inspection, Ayala told him, "Stop by the house, I have some shrimp there
left over." But when he got there, Garcia said, he was paid $500 to $2,000.
And he got to the house three to five times a month. 

Garcia's case was typical of druglinked corruption in another way. He and
another officer were caught when drug couriers, snared in a smuggling
investigation and facing prison sentences, testified against the people who
paved their way into the United States. 

In El Paso, similar information from traffickers turned informants led
federal investigators to Eduardo V. Ontiveros and to de Jesus Ramos, the
two customs inspectors who were arrested before their cocainesmuggling
plan could go into effect. 

Ontiveros was convicted of bribery and conspiracy to import drugs on the
testimony of de Jesus Ramos. At the Ontiveros trial last spring, de Jesus
Ramos, who pleaded guilty to bribery charges and agreed to testify for
prosecutors, said he was lured in by the easy money and by Ontiveros'
constant talk about low pay and low morale. 

"He told me stuff like, you know, you know, that customs doesn't take care
of you," de Jesus Ramos said. "I mean, it seemed like I was used and abused
and left out in the cold." And that, he said, made it much easier to start
taking money here and there. After all, he only had to let cars through. 

Smugglers' Targets: Easy to Corrupt, Tough to Punish 

he Garcia and Ontiveros cases are hardly exceptions. At the federal level,
drug traffickers target for corruption the people with whom they have the
most contact, the ones responsible on a daytoday basis for keeping drugs
out of the United States: primarily, employees of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Customs Service and the Border Patrol. 

For example, an immigration service inspector in California, Susan Jane
Gustafson, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import marijuana and in December
1996 was sentenced to 18 months in prison. 

Two months ago four Mexican traffickers were arrested in a case in which
they paid more than $32,000 to an undercover agent posing as a corrupt
immigration inspector. He was supposed to obtain certificates authorizing
them to work in the United States that would be used in the smuggling
operation. 

In September 1995, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona was arrested and
indicted on charges of importing cocaine after the Border Patrol
intercepted a 1,200pound load coming into the state. A trial is pending. 

Investigators say such corruption can be difficult to ferret out because
there are few signs: a dishonest official acts much like an honest official. 

A corrupt employee almost never possesses drugs and never meets with a
supplier. As a result, cases often often come to light through suspicious
fellow workers, the breakup of a drug ring or on the accidental discovery
of a load of drugs that can be traced to a vehicle known to have been waved
through a specific entry point. 

Customs and immigration officials share the responsibility for inspections
at border checkpoints, with the Border Patrol responsible for protecting
areas between the checkpoints. As a car goes through a crossing, an
inspector enters the license plate into a computer and watches the
occupants for any signs of behavior that might indicate they are bringing
in contraband. Officials can send a vehicle to "secondary" inspection,
where other border officials conduct a thorough search. 

More knowledge of the narcotics trade has enhanced the detection of
corruption, according to lawenforcement officials working the border. "We
have a better understanding of the major groups and how they are sending
their loads across," said William J. Esposito, the deputy director of the
FBI and formerly the bureau's top agent in San Diego. 

Sometimes, corrupt inspectors are discovered through sudden unexplained
income or a change in spending habits, which has led corruption units to
incorporate Internal Revenue Service personnel in their ranks. 

How much inspectors earn depends on the length and quality of their
service, but officials said many of them make $30,000 to $35,000 a year. In
some rural areas, the officials said, that is comparable to the local wage
scales. Federal officials recognize that placing protection of the border
in the hands of lowpaid, lowlevel government employees increases the risk
of corruption, but they argue that money is only one factor that draws an
employee into drug trafficking. 

Local Network: 'Big Man' in Texas Takes Hard Fall 

n Hidalgo County, in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, Sheriff Brigido Marmolejo
Jr. was a swaggering figure with a catchy campaign slogan: "A big man for a
big job." He dominated regional law enforcement for 18 years, but he began
attracting the attention of federal lawenforcement officials a few years
ago after they received tips that he might be in the pay of drug lords. 

Suspicions increased when an accused drug trafficker from Mexico escaped
from his jail in April 1993, soon after he was arrested. The escapee, Raul
Valladares, has been described by federal prosecutors as a chief lieutenant
of Juan Garcia Abrego, a former drug kingpin who was convicted in Houston
federal court last year. 

No charges were brought against the sheriff in that incident. "A lot of
people said that Marmolejo was untouchable, that he had insulated himself
to a degree where it was impossible to catch him," said Ball, the leader of
the Rio Grande drug task force. "He was smart enough not to do his deals on
the telephone." 

But using an informant inside the county jail, federal authorities were
finally able to convict Marmolejo and his chief jailer in 1994 on
racketeering, conspiracy and bribery charges. He was sentenced to seven
years in prison for accepting bribes from a drug trafficker. 

The case largely stemmed from the sheriff's involvement with Homero Beltran
Aguirre, a convicted drug dealer who, from behind bars, ran the jail. 

"It was a hotel and brothel for him," said Jose Angel Moreno, the
prosecutor in the case. For a fee of $6,000 a month and $1,000 a visit, the
sheriff allowed Beltran to have conjugal visits in Marmolejo's private
office with his wife and his girlfriend, prosecutors said, and to conduct
drugrelated business from his cell. The bribes totaled at least $151,000. 

The corruption of local lawenforcement officials along the border is a
huge concern. Local officials can often exercise at least as much control
as federal authorities do over the people and goods that cross the border. 

In Texas, at least 21 local lawenforcement officials, including deputy
sheriffs, jailers and constables, have been indicted on federal
narcoticsrelated corruption charges in the last three years. 

Stronger Defense: U.S. Pours Money Into the Battle 

Senior lawenforcement officials say that corruption occurs mainly on the
front line. And they acknowledge that as that work force is expanded in the
Clinton administration's effort to combat drugs and illegal immigration,
the threat of corruption rises. 

So in tandem with that expansion, the FBI recently asked for an increase of
its own: some $3.6 million more in its budget and 20 additional agents to
track corruption cases along the border. 

Several officials involved in anticorruption efforts said they hope that
the visible commitment to vigorously prosecute corruption cases will deter
most government employees from criminal acts. But they acknowledge that
corruption is likely to continue. 

"We've done a lot on the border," said Esposito of the FBI. "We still have
a long way to go."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company