Drug Crazy

How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

by Mike Gray (more about this book and author)

Chapter 8: Mission Impossible

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From the mouth of the Rio Grande at Brownsville on the Texas Gulf, the Mexican Border runs a thousand miles up river to El Paso—“The Pass”—then west for an equal length along five arrow-straight survey lines that slice unbending through the Sonoran desert, across the Continental Divide and a dozen lesser ranges, down to the surf at San Diego.  For much of its vastness, the border is guarded only by the elements—searing heat, howling winds, scorpions and rattlesnakes. But in those places where humans concentrate, the ebb and flow is funneled through two dozen ports of entry ranging from a hand-powered ferry across the Rio Grande at Los Ebaños, to twenty-four lanes of traffic pouring north from Tijuana into San Ysidro, California.

Supervisory Customs Inspector Tom Isbell can look out the broad windows of his office and see the whole sweep of the line at San Ysidro, two dozen men under his command searching the river of vehicles with rapid eyes, waving the drivers through with a flick of the wrist, stopping one here and there with a raised

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hand.  The average passage takes a few seconds, but when something catches the eye, the dogs are called out, everything is taken apart, and once or twice an hour somebody is lead away in handcuffs. “It’s instinct,” says Isbell. “You can’t replace that with computers.” A 26-year veteran of the force with a reputation as a straight shooter, he brags about one of his top men. “Some people look and they don’t see.  He sees everything.  He was having lunch one day and glanced up and through the window he saw a guy driving by who had already cleared primary and was on his way out.  And something struck him—the guy was laughing—and he ran out, stopped the guy, and made a seizure.”[1]  

To the unpracticed eye, the scene outside Tom Isbell’s window looks like a model of border control efficiency, but the Supervisory Inspector sees something else.  On a pedestrian bridge a hundred yards to the south is a man wearing a ski mask, watching him with binoculars and talking on a cell phone.  “They wait until the traffic is backed up,” says Isbell.  “Then they call in their shipments from the side streets.  We have a mandate not to hold up traffic more than twenty minutes and they know we’ve got to open the gates and start waving people through.”  The man in the mask probably also knows each of the inspectors on sight, knows their habits, and knows which one is least likely to check under the seat of your pickup.  So he and Isbell, two professionals in a deadly game, square off on a daily basis in the battle to seal the southern border to the flow of drugs.  Ask him who’s winning and Isbell will tell you.  “We intercept maybe five percent.”[2]  

In truth it may be a lot less than that. For all of Tom Isbell’s considerable diligence, there  is mounting evidence that some of the people around him have not been so vigorous. An investigation of corruption at the highest level of the San Diego office has been underway in fits and starts since 1990. The probe was triggered quite by accident when a Customs Service dog handler unexpectedly showed up for work a little early one day.  His Labrador, “Snag,” freaked out when they passed an empty tanker truck in the lineup.  A supervisor stepped in and said the driver

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had told him some men were smoking marijuana near the truck down in Mexico. That would account for the dog’s reaction, but over the supervisor’s objection, the handler insisted on running the truck over the scales anyway.  The tanker was more than 7000 pounds overweight. Over the next several hours, the canine officer’s boss tried to get him to literally call off the dogs, but he refused. At this point the supervisor let the driver go and he took off for Mexico on foot. When the tanker was finally opened up, they found four tons of cocaine—the largest seizure in the history of the port. It was only the tip of the iceberg.[3]

The truck belonged to Hidro Gaz de Juarez, a company that happened to be under surveillance at that moment by a Customs inspector named Mike Horner. What stunned Horner was the fact that the truck got as far as it did. He had already flagged Hidro Gaz on the Customs computer after an informant tipped him that these tankers—and this driver in particular—were involved in the drug trade. But when Horner checked the computer he found his warning had been erased. So had most of his other warnings.[4]

Horner is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam vintage and you don’t have to explain to him when to cover his ass. There had been a whiff of danger in the air for some time, and he had been secretly copying all of his files.  A few months earlier, he had picked up a tip about a group of major traffickers setting up a new operation out of Tijuana, and when he passed it on, the top man in the region demanded the names of his informants.  Horner was dismayed.  He couldn’t imagine why the District Director wanted this information, but the man insisted and Horner finally gave in. Four days later one informant was found with a tire iron in one ear and out the other, and the second was stabbed sixteen times. After that, Horner began to look at the larger picture, and all the lines were leading to the top of the pyramid.[5]

When the tanker incident was repeated with another truck, Horner called the Inspector General’s office, and the Treasury

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Department launched an internal investigation.  The District Director was confronted with a sample of the evidence, and he decided to take early retirement.  At this point, the inquiry was dropped.  Apparently the Inspector General knew as much as he wanted to know about this business.[6] But Mike Horner—Semper Fi—was not so easily deflected.  Although his files had been confiscated, he had thoughtfully made triplicates, and a copy ultimately fell into the hands of a reporter from the L.A. Times.  A congressional inquiry followed, and the investigators discovered that the situation in San Diego, bad as it may have been, was far from unique.  There were charges of cover-ups and corruption at high levels and low from one end of the Mexican border to the other. Over a hundred individuals had been prosecuted or disciplined in the previous 39 months and a hundred more were under investigation.[7]   Said Tom Isbell, “As lax as we were in San Diego, we looked like an iron wall compared to the rest of the border.”[8]

But anyone who expected this stunning exposé to have an impact on the flow of drugs was ignoring the fundamental equation of the smuggler’s art.  At a given point in space and time, the only thing that separates Mexico from the United States is the up-turned hand of a Customs inspector.  He gets paid about $45,000 a year.  If he decides to augment his annual income, he can literally double it with a single flick of the wrist. In February of 1995 an inspector at Calexico was booked for looking the other way while traffickers brought in six tons of cocaine, and three months later a couple of inspectors in El Paso were charged with helping to move 2200 pounds over the line for a reported slice of the pie worth $1 million—peanuts, after all, since the load itself would have gone for fifteen times that much.[9] By 1996 the pace was picking up. The Justice Department reported 110 new investigations into border corruption involving the I.N.S. alone.[10]

Tom Isbell and Mike Horner would be the first to tell you that the vast majority of border agents are honest, hard-working

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professionals who have never taken a dime in their lives. This is undoubtedly true, but it was also true of the Chicago Police Department in the 1920s.  As Al Capone would say, you don’t have to corrupt everybody.  That’s a waste of money.  You just corrupt the ones you need.  And it’s always cheaper in the long run to pay off a handful of people at the top.

The wide open spaces between the country’s official ports of entry are manned by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and until 1994 they were essentially shoveling sand into the wind. The line of demarcation at San Diego was a rusting chain-link fence so riddled with holes you could see crowds of young men assembling around the gaps every evening at sunset, and down at the shore there was no fence at all. You could simply walk from one country to the other along the beach. But by the end of 1993 the Clinton administration had installed a ten-foot wall of steel landing mat from seaward of the low tide line running east across the mesa to the base of the San Ysidro Mountains.[11] And there it stopped. Since it was still possible to walk around the end of the fence, the lawmen brought to bear high-tech military weapons like electronic motion sensors, aerial surveillance, and night vision goggles.  Stripping agents away from the Canadian border, they were able to increase their presence on the southern frontier by a third.  But as the clamps were tightened around San Diego, the battle lines simply moved east into Imperial County.

“You can see the shift to new routes,” says Sheriff Oren Fox. “We’re inundated with dope. You can’t believe it.” Fox is a big man, oversized and rugged like the vast county he has patrolled for the past 20 years. An easy-going grizzly, he never needs to raise his voice.  His only symbol of authority is the silver star on his belt buckle. “I’ve worked narcotics since ‘59. We’ve never seen this amount of marijuana seizures. It’s amazing. They are just shoving it through in an effort to tie up the Customs, DEA and the Border Patrol.  They’re willing to sacrifice loads of drugs, and people, and cars and trucks.  And they’re getting a lot

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of it through.  Right now they’re doing a lot of backpacking of drugs using illegal aliens.  The drug delivery is the payment for making the trip—part of the cost of getting to America.”[12]

 

In an attempt to level the playing field, Oren Fox recently managed to pull off something down here that nobody thought was possible. In a remarkable display of political skill and old-fashioned back-slapping, he somehow got the Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs, and the Border Patrol to let go of each other’s throats for a minute and join with the six southern county sheriffs in a coordinated effort to seal the border.  The inter-agency turf wars were temporarily set aside and the three-week experiment was so successful that the U.S. Attorney General singled it out as an example of how the job should be done.[13] But Fox himself has no illusion about having any long-term impact on the drug trade.  He’s been at this for 35 years.  “They get more sophisticated all the time—they have our frequencies—we’ve found them with radios that have the Border Patrol frequencies programmed into them.  They have jammers on top of vans to disrupt communications, just like the military.  They’ll set off a series of ground sensors all over the place and you can’t tell where they are. Or sometimes they’ll just climb the antenna tower and cut the power cable so the signals from the sensors aren’t transmitted at all.”

Sitting at his desk beneath a panoramic photo of an old Imperial Valley mining camp, with his legs outstretched and one boot propped on the other, Fox contemplates the mounted head of a longhorn steer on the opposite wall. “There’s no way we can compete with the traffickers. They have hundreds of billions of dollars in resources.  Every time we do something new, so do they.”[14] 

 In the main channel at the port of Los Angeles, the container ship Ever Right, a state-of-the-art steel monolith nearly as long as an aircraft carrier, rides alongside quay 229 at Terminal Island.

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The wheelhouse deck is eleven stories above the waterline, and the bridge is so wide the navigator has to communicate with the helmsman by walkie-talkie. The Ever Right is not so much a ship as a cargo transfer machine.  Operating on a 12-day turnaround between L.A. and the Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung, she was designed to move the amphora of the modern age—steel containers that fit directly onto the frames of semi-trailers and railroad cars.  To maintain this schedule she must be back at sea in less than a day. Hovering over the foredeck, a pair of spider-like gantry cranes pluck forty-foot containers from the hold and drop them onto the line of waiting trucks at the rate of one every fifteen seconds.[15]

The cargo manifest, a foot-thick computer printout, lists the contents... 16 cases, parts for automobiles... 847 packages, parts of compact disc player...  5432 packages, basketware & rattan furniture... In most cases, the paperwork reflects the reality.  The exceptions are the responsibility of Chief Customs Inspector Wayne Kornmann, but like the other lawmen along the border, Kornmann has no illusions.  “We’re able to check about ten to twelve containers per shift,” he says.  “We look at less than two percent.”[16]

Sixteen hours after the first dock line coiled down from the foredeck, the Ever Right slips her moorings and eases back into the main channel bound for the open sea. On the broad tarmac of the terminal island wharf, the cargo she left behind is already on the move—over two thousand containers rolling out through the gates on trucks and railroad cars heading north and east. Not a single container was inspected by U.S. Customs. “This ship is from Taiwan,” says the supervisor. “We barely have time to check the cargo coming straight from South America.”

The Ever Right is only one of a dozen ships to come up this channel in the last 24 hours.  A dozen more are due tomorrow, and out across the Pacific over a hundred others are making for the port of Los Angeles at this moment. At the great harbors that ring the nation, at Boston, Norfolk, Galveston,

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Seattle, and a hundred other ports of entry, two million tons of cargo will cross the dock tomorrow.[17]   Los Angeles alone will land 130,000 containers this month. Customs inspectors will examine 400.  The other 129,600 will pass through without so much as a tip of the hat.  And as this tidal wave of heavy machinery, cameras, car parts and cookoo clocks moves off the wharf on endless lines of semi-trailers and flatcars, it’s worth remembering that the entire annual cocaine supply for the United States would fit in just thirteen of those steel boxes.^  A year’s supply of heroin could be shipped in a single container.[18]

CHAPTER EIGHT—ENDNOTES

[1] Interview, Tom Isbell, Supervisory Inspector, U.S. Customs, San Ysidro CA, May 18, 1996

[2] ibid.

[3] Washington Post, Feb 20, 1996, pA1“Probe of Customs Targets Corruption Along the Border”

[4] Interview, Mike Horner, former Customs Inspector, San Diego CA, May 18, 1996

[5]  Los Angeles Times,Mar 20, 1993, “Corruption Probe Focuses on Ex-Customs Official”;  Washington Post, Feb 20, 1996, pA8, col 6; Reader’s Digest, June 1994, p73 “Trouble on the San Diego Border”;

[6] Interview, Terri Price, former Treasury Dept. investigator, Los Angeles CA, May 28, 1996

[7] Hearings, Commerce Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, 2nd Sess., Mar 26, 27 & Apr 1, 1992, p2, 32-34.

[8] Interview, Tom Isbell, May 26, 1996

[9] Reader’s Digest, Jan 1996, “Our Drug-Plagued Mexican Border” p 57.

[10] Border Corruption, Associated Press, Mar 1, 1997, 1:59pm

[11] U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, “Operation Gatekeeper: Landmark Progress at the Border,” October 1995, p5.

[12] Interview, Sheriff Oren Fox, El Centro CA, May 17, 1996

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Inspection tour, Jan 17, 1994; technical data courtesy of Evergreen America Corp.

[16] Interview, U.S. Customs Chief Inspector Wayne Kornmann, Long Beach, CA, June 7, 1996.

[17] U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Imports for 1996: 612,546,148,000 kilos by vessel; 25,000,975,000 kilos by air.

[18] General Accounting Office, “Observations on Elements of the Federal Druig Control Strategy, Mar 97, GAO/GGD-97-42. An estimated 780 metric tons of cocaine produced worldwide 230 tons siezed in 1995. US Consumption estimated at 300 tons of cocaine per year. 300 metric tons of heroin produced: 32 tons were seized.  US Consumption estimated at 10 to 15 tons per year.