

### Border Tales

by

James Whitesell

PUBLISHED BY:

James Whitesell on Smashwords

Border Tales

Copyright © 2012 by James Whitesell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Shoot 'Em Up In Downtown Nogales

Chapter 2 The Album/Halloween in March/The Goodwins

Chapter 3 The Universe of Drug Interdiction

Chapter 4 The Non-Runner/What Goes On At The Ports

Chapter 5 Wrestling Matches

Chapter 6 Hey, Mom Let's Go For A Ride/The Starter/Backwards/The College Kids

Chapter 7 Pickups

Chapter 8 DUI's/Non-Compliant Drivers And Vehicles.

Chapter 9 Compartments/A Quartet of Crotches/The Birds And The Bees

Chapter 10 Mexican Border Corruption/Bathroom Ethics

Chapter 11 When Things Get Really Serious

Chapter 12 These Shoes Are Made For....Smuggling?

Chapter 13 Bad Guys Or Good Guys/ INS Again/Cocaine

Chapter 14 Genders Bent and Unbent

Chapter 15 Hey Honey, Get The Kids We're Gonna Smuggle Some Dope.

Chapter 16 On The Pedestrian Gate/An Unlucky Day/ Just Going To The Store/

Chapter 17 The Flip-Flopping Load Driver.

Chapter 18 Drug Tunnels/Old News?

Chapter 19 You're Not Paranoid, They Really Are Watching You

Chapter 20 Serious Incidents/The Potato Chip Load/Lisa Stubbs

Chapter 21 On The Ped Gate Again

Chapter 22 Runner/Other Good Folks Gone Bad/The Big Shot

Chapter 23 The Gas Tank That Almost Got Away/The Unlucky Mexican Minister

Chapter 24 The Las Vegas Connection

Chapter 25 Big Ed/Dumb and Dumber/The Day Of The Big Loads

Chapter 26 The Deterrent That Isn't/OxyContin, Etc.

Chapter 27 Operation Lively Green/Special Agent Jovana Deas

Chapter 28 Glossary of Border Terminology

### Dedication

Little is ever heard about the men and women in the trenches of the border war--the foot soldiers who man the ramparts at the ports of entry.

This book is dedicated to them.

### Introduction

I was in Viet Nam. As a civilian. Not as a soldier. Though I was also in the Army. I always regretted not serving there. Twenty years later. Another chance to serve. A Smith and Wesson wheel gun, a .357, is hanging on my hip. On my chest is a shiny new badge. The uniform is not the khaki or the camo or the olive drab of the U.S. Army, but the dark blue rough duty uniform of a U.S. Customs Service line inspector. I'm a cop. Not quite a cop in the conventional street cop meaning. But close. A sworn licensed federal law enforcement officer. And, again, like Viet Nam, I am _there_.

This time I am on the front line. The Mexican border front line. Which is what this book is about. It's not about dramatic law enforcement whoop-it-up actions like wild L. A. police car chases or Kansas City Swat busting down the doors of methamphetamine labs or New York City undercover agents conducting intricate and dangerous investigations into organized crime. This book is about the Mexican border and the crazy juxtaposition of the wearing tedious daily grind and the abrupt Vesuvius moments of adrenalin-fired excitement that characterize the world of the U.S. border inspector. Mostly it's about the two busiest Arizona ports on the Mexican border, Nogales and San Luis, where I was stationed off and on from the 80's into the 00's. But it wouldn't take much elastic extrapolation to stretch it across the whole southern border.

This book is non-fiction. All the incidents are ones that either I personally witnessed or were related to me by credible sources. In some cases that means local newspaper articles, or, more often, government agency press releases, official records and reports and court records. Reputable historical sources were tapped for the snippets of history included in the narrative. The bits of dialogue in this book are meant to enhance readability and are intended to convey the spirit of various situations and are not actual direct quotes.

Introduction to the Second Edition, 2012

This book was first published in 2009 as a paperback. The vast bulk of the book's narrative relates events from the late 1980's to the middle 2000's and remains largely unchanged. The focus is as in the first edition–on the daily working world of a line officer at a Mexican border port of entry–mostly the Arizona ports of San Luis and Nogales. This revised and reedited ebook edition contains a number of corrections and updates, as well as a few modest additions.

James Whitesell Hereford, Arizona Summer, 2012

******

### Border Tales

The trouble with history is that it keeps repeating itself.

Anonymous

### Chapter 1

### Shoot 'Em Up In Downtown Nogales

Border violence. The second decade of the 21st Century. What was once sporadic border violence has metastasized into an endemic pestilence. It seems to be spiraling ever more out of control. And maybe it is. So is there cause for us to be concerned? You bet there is. Yet there's nothing new about violence in the Arizona border country. In the Old West days the ancient visceral hatred between the Mexicans and the Apaches and the late comer Anglos fueled an amaranthine host of merciless clashes and incidences of violence and cruelty all along the border. In the early 20th Century, during the bloodily turbulent times of the Mexican revolution, the border was a boiling cauldron of tension across from the Arizona border towns of Douglas, Naco and Nogales.

Bitter pitched battles between rival factions in the civil war were fought just over the border on the Mexican side, with American soldiers and civilians scrunched down and warily watching from the U.S. Lethal Mexican projectiles regularly came hurtling into the U.S. A number of American troops were killed and wounded, including an unlucky U.S. private, Harry Jones, who was killed in early November of 1915 in Douglas by a stray bullet from the fighting across the border in Agua Prieta. The troops stationed a few miles to the west of Douglas in the town of Naco endured a ten week long siege on the Mexican side that sent so many pieces of flying Mexican metal whistling over the border that the U.S. had to move its camps away from the border. Discipline held the troops back and, almost amazingly, the Americans refrained from retaliating, even though one soldier was killed and nearly twenty others wounded. Tensions stretched to the breaking point when a thirty minute firefight erupted between U.S. troops and Mexican soldiers in Nogales on November 26th, 1915. Another U.S. soldier, Private Stephen Little, was killed. Finally, in August of 1918, the Mexican revolution and WWI-fueled powder keg of border tensions in Nogales exploded into a wild hours long border shootout that left dozens of people dead, including several U.S. soldiers, in what would become known as the Battle of Ambos Nogales. After that the border slowly quieted. But only relatively. Border violence never really went away. It just went from banner front page headlines to the occasional grim snippet of news in the back pages. At least for a while. But it was still there. Always. And so it remains to this day.

### Chapter 2

### The Album

One of the first K-9 officers I met on the Border at Nogales was a big, drawling, ambling-gaited Southern boy named Lonnie. He was a military dog handler who'd come over to Customs. Lonnie was a heck of a lot closer to being a back country good ol' boy than a polished upward bound golden child, but he was an agreeable and affable sort and always was cooperative when I wanted a K-9 to check out a vehicle. He was also darned tolerant, for as a new officer I was mostly clueless and consequently leaned towards asking for K-9 assistance to help counterbalance my own ignorance and inexperience. He never gave me flak about it. There were plenty of other K-9 handlers who were not so cooperative. Some of them were just lazy. But mostly they were just weary of inexperienced new inspectors wearing out their dogs on very low probability vehicles. But not Lonnie. And Lonnie had something else besides an easy-going and cooperative way about him.

He had the album.

The album. The towering Southern boy had a contact on the Mexican side who provided him with some eye-popping vivid graphic photos of drug murders. Lonnie pasted them into the album and kept it in his K-9 van. He probably got a kick out of shocking the new and naïve inspectors like myself with the pictures. If that was his intention, it sure worked with me.

There was a photo of a man who had been stuffed butt-naked into an empty forty gallon metal barrel. His killers had built a fire under the barrel and roasted the man alive. There was another photo of a man who had been murdered by shoving a live blow torch in his mouth (a barbaric torture method used by some of the more brutal insurgents in the Iraq War). Another photo was of a man who had been executed by putting him on a railroad track with his neck on the rail. In the photo the decapitated head lay several feet from the body. In yet another photo a bloodily mutilated young man and woman had been massacred by gunfire in the front seat of a car. The photos grabbed my attention and nailed it to the wall of self doubt. I had an image of myself mentally dangling in a border pillory like some old Pilgrim dude from the history books.

"Good God", I thought. "What in the world have I gotten myself into?

Move eighty years ahead from the battle of Ambos Nogales in 1918. To 1997 .There were likely still some hardy oldsters alive in Nogales in 1997 who'd been there during the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales. They would have seen with their own aging eyes the huge changes that a mere 80 year finger snap of time had brought to Nogales. The old blood feud gringo/Mexican dichotomy was just a memory. The gringos only remained in fading photos and Anglo sounding street names. Typical of most border towns, Mexicans gradually moved into Arizonan Nogales in such overwhelming numbers that the gringos were either assimilated by the Hispanic genetic juggernaut, died off like so many marginalized Neanderthals or just moved away to greener pastures in Tucson or Phoenix or in the Promised Land of California.

By 1997 the Arizona side of Nogales was overwhelmingly Hispanic. And it was also a town dwarfed by its Sonora twin. Nogales, Arizona, at maybe 15,000 or so souls, remained a small town. Its sister city on the Mexican side had ballooned to probably twenty times that size. Both of the formerly sleepy border towns had become centers of a bustling regional international commerce between the two countries. Commerce both legal and illegal. The Nogales Sisters had become convenient centers for the avaricious busthead thugs whose idea of escaping Mexico's hardscrabble poverty was to embrace the murky Machiavellian world of the drug and people smugglers. It was a dark, violent world by its very nature. And, as both the money to be made and the competition made quantum increases, the smuggling related violence of Nogales' gutter capitalism inevitably got worse. It was like Chicago in the Capone days, but in Spanish.

November 23, 1997. A Sunday. Close to Thanksgiving and the holiday season. People's minds were on the season. Thanksgiving might seem to be just an American holiday. Not so in the cultural goulash world of the border. Lots of border Mexicans had picked up the custom of having turkey on Thanksgiving, as well as also tuning in to Halloween and coming over in excited droves with their big eyed costumed little kids to the U.S. to trick or treat. Not so different from the U.S. side, where Cinco de Mayo was widely and enthusiastically celebrated by gringo and Mexican alike. A party is a party no matter what language or culture you're partying in. The people on both sides of the border in Nogales might have lived in a world rife with drug violence, but it didn't much affect the lives of ordinary people. Not on the surface. There was a kind of innocence among the people of Nogales. Even a genial border ambiance. Superficial? Yes. Naïve? Certainly. But there nonetheless.

Until that November day in 1997.

I wasn't at Nogales that day. My duty station then was at the far western edge of Arizona, at the Port of San Luis by the Colorado River and the California border. I'd worked at Nogales in the 1980's and early 1990's and would return in the early 2000's. But in 1997 I was off in heat blasted San Luis. The distance didn't matter. The hair raising news of what happened in Nogales that November day immediately blitzed throughout the Customs Service on the entire Arizona border and far beyond to the desk pilots in Tucson and Hermosillo and even on to D.C and Mexico City.

The Grand Avenue Port of Entry was in downtown Nogales in the same area where the bullets were once flying hot and heavy during the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales. Southbound Grand Avenue had to go through Mexican Customs and Immigration where it crossed the Sonora border. The Mexicans had a red light/green light system that looked similar to U.S. stop lights. When a car pulled up from the U.S. a Mexican officer took a look and hit the light. Got the green light? Off you went into Mexico with a sigh of relief. But if you got the red light? Pull over into Mexican secondary and cross your fingers that things didn't turn nasty. I'd been through there myself with my family a few times and had watched cars pulling into Mexican Customs countless times from the nearby inspection booths on the U.S. side of the border. Nothing ever seemed to happen that was noticeable to any of us on the U.S. side. Whatever the Mexicans did over there, they were quiet about it. But not this time.

It was a little before 6:00 in evening on that eventful November evening. The Grand Avenue border crossing was in the old center of Nogales and was throbbing with activity. Colorful and festive and alive with the pageantry of the border. Spectacularly disfigured beggars worked the car lanes. Cart pushing vendors busily hawked ice cream and candy and gum, curios and trinkets. Tiny Indian women from the Mexican interior worked the crowds selling blankets or asking for money. Plain-dressed Mexican men stood on the sidewalks selling lovebirds and parakeets. Other Mexicans headed off gringo tourists and tried to direct them to their employers' stores or pharmacies. And still others carefully eyed the crowds for likely clients for the whispered sordid side of Nogales.

It had been a busy day with lots of traffic, both on foot and in vehicles. A typical Sunday. The usual long line of cars built up coming north from Mexico. A shorter line piled up going south into Mexico. Many Mexicans were heading back home from a day of shopping or visiting in the U.S. In just a few more hours the quiet of a Sunday evening would descend on the place and it would seem empty and almost forlorn beneath the twinkling lights of the homes that climbed the hills hard by the border. But not yet. And, as this historic evening's events developed, the quietness that eventually would descend on Nogales that evening would be of a whole different order.

It would be a quiet born of fear.

It started with an Arizona plated van driven by a guy named Hector Ley. Ley is Spanish for law, which was something this compadre was about to come face to face with in ways even his ex-mother-in-law wouldn't have wished on him. Ley pulled up to Mexican Customs on southbound Grand Avenue. The van got the red light and pulled over into Mexican secondary. The credulity of information coming out of Mexico is always subject to a healthy skepticism, but the so called 'official' reports said that the Arizona plated red van was searched and Mexican officers found a box with over $123,000 of undeclared U.S. currency hidden in it. The Mexican Customs officers were about to seize the money when another man--according to a DEA summary--showed up and together with driver Ley tried to hotfoot it away with the box of money. Mexican Customs officers were having none of that. They grabbed the guys and subdued them. The money was seized and the pair of would be absconders detained. Whether there was prior information about the money being in the van, or the seizure was just the result of a lucky search, is still stuck in the black hole of Mexican public information. As any Mexican journalist will tell you, facts and even truth are a very malleable commodity in Mexico. But one thing was certain. Mexican Customs wasn't alone in knowing that something was up with box of bucks. Someone else was watching. And that someone probably got on the phone in a hurry. Very likely to the hilly drug plagued nearby tough Buenos Aires district of Nogales, Sonora. Trouble was soon on the way. Big trouble. Real trouble. Just like in the Bad Old Days.

Many of the facts surrounding this incident remain about as clear as the Muddy Missouri in spring flood. But one that is true without a lick of doubt is that there were some people in Nogales who weren't about to lay back and let that amount of cash be seized by Mexican Customs. The DEA later put out a press release on the Nogales shoot out which stated that twenty minutes after the money was seized eight gunmen showed up at the Mexican port. The thugs were armed with AK-47's and 9mm and .45 caliber handguns. A gunfight broke out between them and the Mexican officers. Weapons opened up, including AK-47's, and sprayed the area around Mexican Customs. Panic and utter pandemonium broke out among the nearby pedestrians and car occupants and other denizens of the border, shocking the hell out of the U.S. officers working the northbound traffic on Grand. Some of the bullets slammed into the U.S. port of entry. As the bullets smacked into buildings and ricocheted off concrete and blacktop, a whole bunch of people went unceremoniously scurrying in a terror stricken scramble for cover.

In a few minutes it was over. The gunmen didn't get their money back. Most of them fled back into the troubled dark streets of Buenos Aires. Two of them were wounded and left behind. Luis Enrique Gonzalez and Ismael Pasos both survived and were eventually transferred from a Nogales hospital to a prison. They were charged with first degree murder along with the driver of the van, Hector Ley. Murder? Yes. There were other casualties besides the two wounded gunmen. One Mexican officer was wounded. Another officer's wounds were fatal. Mexican inspector Jose Luis Toledo lay dead in Mexican Customs secondary.

The damage caused by the shootout was more than just to human bodies and property. Those ricocheting bullets in downtown Nogales shattered the illusion of public safety. Like the ephemeral flower of the Sonoran Desert, the Night Blooming Cereus, which blooms just one night a year and fades before the first light of day, Nogales' brief bloom of innocence was gone. The old face of the border had returned.

It was again an openly dangerous and violent place.

Jump forward yet another decade. The waning months of 2008.The dark intimations of the future in the 1997 Nogales Customs Thanksgiving shootout have become daily reality. Nogales is on the list of Mexican cities on the State Department's Travel Advisory List. The Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels are battling on the streets of Nogales over control of the lucrative smuggling corridor into the U.S. Not that innocent civilians are being randomly targeted for lethal violence as in so many places in the world. They aren't. But they are increasingly becoming 'collateral damage' in the widespread public violence that now plagues the city. Chamber of Commerce tourist brochures can't gloss it over any more. A September, 2008, Arizona Daily Star article carried this headline:

Nogales is the prize in drug cartels' war

Rival gangs fight for corridor, with residents in crossfire

The article talked of "....beheadings, execution-style killings, bodies found wrapped in duct tape with messages for rival drug traffickers, shootouts in such public places as bus stops and restaurant parking lots." This is hardly earth shattering. Nothing really new. Not so very different from the violent drug world where the photos in Lonnie's Album of twenty years earlier came from. What is new is the scale and the scope of the violence. It's taken a quantum jump. A frightening quantum jump. The city was unsafe. Violence can happen anywhere. At any time. To anyone. The people of Nogales were scared.

And they damn well should have been. In late October of 2008 a running battle between Mexican law enforcement officers and gun toting traffickers played out on the streets of Nogales not far from the U.S. border. Following the stop of a suspect vehicle by Mexican officers that suddenly erupted into violence, a wild, gunfire filled car chase on the morning streets of Nogales terrified the local citizenry. When it was over, ten thugs were dead and several police and bystanders injured. And the weaponry involved was startling. The thugs had the usual automatic rifles and handguns. But that wasn't all. They also had hand grenades. And they weren't afraid to use them.

Mexico was again at war with itself.

Move ahead a few more years. Mexico is still at war with itself. But not so much in Nogales. The gang wars in Nogales have abated. The reason? Not a very promising one for the future. One of the cartels, the Chapo Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, beat out the others. The relative peace is superficial. The drugs are still there. The smugglers are still there. The violence has greatly declined because the Sinaloa cartel triumphed through a superior use of brute force. A relative quiet has returned to Nogales' streets. For now. But in the future? History hints that violence will return. And in most of the rest of Mexico the drug wars between the cartels and the government have intensified rather than abated.

A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice.

Bill Cosby

### Halloween in March

Five of us trainees went off together from the Port of Nogales to FLETC--the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. We came back a few months later several pounds thinner, the bloom of academy vigor on our cheeks, and with stiff new uniforms and shiny new guns and badges and a cheery naïve eagerness to get about really learning the job. The next step in the training process was for each of us to be assigned to a training officer for a period of weeks while we learned the ins and outs of the job. We finished that up and then we were on our own. And nothing happened. Not to me, anyhow. Try as I might, I couldn't get the hang of finding dope. Every time I thought I'd found something I came up empty handed. It was like trying to close your eyes and catch fish with your bare hands. I was getting pretty frustrated. And beginning to wonder if I would ever be worth a damn at finding dope. Not that it wasn't there. There was dope aplenty. Narcotics smugglers were being caught just about every day. But not by me.

Then came that numinous spring evening. I had an overtime assignment to work at what we called the truck dock, the big commercial vehicle entrance that sprawled adjacent to the car lanes at the Mariposa Port of Entry in the dry amber hued grassy hills just west of Nogales. The truck dock was a noisy, frenetic place of diesel fumes and hollering, and was notorious among us for it's frenzied pace and seemingly infinite stacks of Customs paperwork. I didn't leap in orgiastic enthusiasm when I drew an overtime assignment there. But overtime was double time, no matter were it was pulled. And my family needed the bucks. So I jumped in my zippy little K-car Horizon and drove the few miles from my regular duty assignment on the car lanes in downtown Nogales to the sprawling, cacophonous truck dock on the sparsely peopled west side of the town.

Not long before that I'd had a drug busting epiphany of sorts. Strategy. Strategy might help make up for my lack of experience and knowledge. I knew that a search station just before the exit gate was not manned after the truck dock entrance gates closed at 2000--eight o'clock in the evening. But those were the entrance gates that were closed. There were typically still numerous trucks already in the compound waiting to be cleared to exit. I started putting two and two together. And I was coming up with more than just four. If you were a smuggler, wouldn't you be looking for the weak spots? Like an unmanned search station after 2000? Wasn't this what you would call a window of opportunity? For the smugglers. And now, it was slowly dawning on me, also for Customs. Which in this instance meant me.

The last search station before the exit gate was equipped with electric tools for drilling into the bottoms of the big semi-trailers. The drills could also be used on other parts of trailers. But that practice was officially frowned upon since so many trailers had been drilled with an excess of enthusiasm but a paucity of results. The trailer owners were none too happy with having a bunch of holes in their trucks. Some of the Swiss-cheesed truck sides looked like a flock of giant woodpeckers had been at them. The unhappy owners complained. Successfully. The pressure from the local shippers and Customs brokers worked. No more wildcat drilling in the sides of the trucks. That left the floors. Had Customs' enforcement posture just been blind sided by politics? Not quite. Trailer floors were a favorite spot for the smugglers to conceal contraband. Very large amounts of contraband. OK. So floors it would be.

My regular shift that relatively mild March day was from 0800-1600 on the Grand Avenue car lanes. After that I drew the 1600-2000 overtime shift at the Mariposa truck dock working with a special agent and several National Guardsmen at the exit inspection station. When 2000 came and the others took off I also was free to go. But with that thought about a window of opportunity gestating in my mind, I hunted up the supervisor on duty and asked if I could stay on the exit station until all the trucks had left the compound. The supervisor agreed. Probably wasn't a hard decision, considering that there had already been one loaded truck with well over a half a ton of marijuana caught that day at the truck dock's exit gate. So I returned to the exit station at 2000. An exit station that previously had been unmanned after 2000. Previous enforcement fizzles had pretty much drained my confidence level, but I still had a few crumbs of fading forlorn hope left. I was trying hard to be at least a little bit hopeful. I just might get lucky. Like an Alabama-born acquaintance of mine used to say--"....even a blind hog gets an acorn now and then....."

The events of that night remain as bright in my memory as a Druid's torch on All Hallows' Eve. It was on the edge of brisk, enough for a jacket, but still agreeably mild from my perspective of many a long frozen toed Minnesota winter. Somehow it reminded me of a Halloween evening. And in more ways that one. The subject of intuition in law enforcement can be a slippery slope. But it's there, nonetheless. There was a palpable numinous feeling to the night that struck me as being downright spooky. I knew that there was contraband present. I started drilling the bottoms of the last trucks as they exited the truck dock one by one. I was alone. Only Robert Del Santo, a hoop shootin' tall, gangly blond guy who'd grown up on the Arizona Border, was even within earshot. Del Santo--who, despite his name, was a good time guy who was not especially saintly--was on the exit gate and collecting the paperwork as the trucks departed into the March Nogales darkness. Then it happened. Right smack in the middle of these spooky Halloween-like impressions I was getting, it happened.

I got my first real load.

A thirtyish guy in well worn trucker's clothes named Palezuelos drove up to me in a Kenworth tractor pulling a trailer load of cucumbers and peppers. I at first couldn't see any plates on the vehicle and stopped it. When the big rig noisily stopped, I had the driver dismount while I ducked under the trailer with a drill and bored into the truck bed in several spots. The drill bit into the bottom of the truck and I pulled it back out. What! My mouth dropped open in astonishment. I did a disbelieving double take when something started to dribble out of one the holes. I reached over underneath the hole and caught some of the stuff coming out of the hole. Then I smelled it. Right then that torch waving figurative Druid came racing through my mind and burned the memory forever into my brain. Flash back to the hemp rich streets and back alleys of old Saigon! It was Dope. MJ, cannabis, weed, ganja. Marijuana. And probably lots of it.

Good Lord, I actually had a load! But---now what to do? I had received just about zero training about what the devil to do in a situation like this. I pretty much had to wing it.That numinous feeling that dope was there was still with me. There might be another load behind this one. So I told the driver to get back in the Kenworth and back the tractor-trailer up to an adjacent dock and park the truck there. I watched to make sure he did, then finished drilling the few remaining trucks lined up at the inspection station. I drilled all of them. No more dope. As the last of the big trucks thundered off into the night I hustled over to where the Kenworth was parked.

But...wait a minute. I suddenly realized that I was all alone, in the murkiness of only a scattering of outside lighting in the night, with a truckload of marijuana. This was before we carried personal radios. I tried to get the attention of Del Santo at the exit gate. How the heck was I going to do that without tipping off the driver? If there had been someone there to see me, I probably would have cut a comical figure as my mental gesticulations made the synaptic leap into the rest of my body. Have you ever tried to holler quietly? I eventually had to walk part way to the gate for Robert to notice me. He finally did. I waved at him to come to me. When he did, I told him what I'd found. Together we handcuffed the driver and Del Santo took control of him while I went inside the truck dock with a handful of the marijuana that had dribbled out of the hole in the bottom of the trailer.

The truck dock inner office was in the usual end of day borderline pandemonium of finishing up the obscenely voluminous daily paperwork. No one even seemed to notice me walk in. Then I held up the handful of marijuana and one by one they looked at me almost as though an other worldly alien had just beamed in from a Star Trek set. A second load? There had already been a load that day at the truck dock. The legend-in-the-making Lance Klump had got one earlier in the afternoon. One was unusual enough. But two in one day? Yes. There were now two. The incredulous looks soon faded and pandemonium really did break out when they caught on there really was another truck load of dope.

Del Santo escorted driver Palezuelos into the building where he was searched and then plunked into a holding cell for safe keeping. The Customs special agents were called and showed up at the port a while later where they cooked up a half assed strategy in which driver Palezuelos would be told there had been a misunderstanding and he was free to go. It was what was called a controlled delivery. The plain clothes special agents would follow the truck in unmarked cars as it left to see if they could catch the smugglers who were waiting for the dope. Like something out of the movies or TV.

But not out of reality. We all knew the truck dock's non-Customs employees almost certainly included people who were covert spotters for the smugglers. The smugglers very likely knew about the load being busted even before our own Customs agents knew about it. True to expectations, nothing came of the controlled delivery. A while later the now empty truck was brought back to the port, its cargo of cucumbers and peppers left behind at a nearby warehouse. Because of the late night hour the bosses opted to sit on the dope until morning and start the search at first light. A half dozen of us were detailed to break out the shotguns and stand guard over the truck for the rest of the night. The tractor-trailer was backed up to the cargo dock for the night and we began our sleepy eyed, shotgun toting all night vigil. I wasn't so sure that all this semi-paranoid precaution was necessary. But the Bosses did. And that was that.

The long, sleepless night finally passed. In the wan March early morning twilight we traipsed tiredly out on the cargo dock to the hulking semi-trailer and peered inside. The trailer's floor looked old and battered. No obvious signs of recent removal. We knew there was dope underneath, so, led by the gregarious Viking descended drug busting senior inspector Colin Christianson, we grabbed pry bars and hammers and whatever else was within reach and eventually muscled up the trailer's entire floor. Below the flooring, in the spaces between the 2x4 wood framing where there originally had been insulation packets, were hundreds of brown tape-wrapped packages sized to fit into the irregularly shaped factory spaces under the floor. Altogether we removed 277 packages of marijuana for a total of 786 pounds. And that was it. I had my first real load. And a darned good one. It should have been a 110% Hoorah Moment.

But then the rains came and the Mighty Missouri turned muddy again.

The head of the special agents--an arrogant strutter of a pufferbelly who was openly contemptuous of Customs inspectors--who responded to the port to handle the load had no compliments for me or any of the rest of us. All he did was bitch about us not catching the smugglers who had orchestrated this load. That surprised me. But I was absolutely astonished when he let the driver go back to Mexico. The driver claimed he knew nothing about the truck being loaded. I had been in close contact with the guy and I was pretty certain he knew what he was doing. But the guy still walked. I went home that day feeling kind of confused. Only later would I realize that it was typical of the abstruse world of working on the border. Rarely, it seemed, were things either simple or clear cut. The water was more often muddy than not.

A Zen master would have loved it and dived right in.

The Customs Service eventually presented me with an award for the seizure of the big rig tractor-trailer worth many thousands of dollars and nearly 800 pounds of marijuana. The award? A belt buckle. What? For a seizure like this? At the time it struck me as pretty cheesy. But times change. And time brings a sense of perspective. Now I treasure it, even though in later years I pocketed a bunch of cash awards and received a handful of written commendations for the inevitable seizures any border officer worth his or her salt will make in their career. But there was only one Customs belt buckle.It was after all my first real load.

And the wham bam dramatic end of my involuntary border virginity.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Diogenes

### The Goodwins and the Bronco Apaches

I was working a car lane at Nogales. Late 1980's. A weathered looking Anglo man pulled up to my lane in an aging pickup that looked as about as boondocks battered as he did. The guy was out of place. Different. Almost like a man from another time. Though it was very much frowned upon by the Bosses, I sometimes got into conversations with interesting-appearing people on the car lanes that had nothing at all to do with Customs work. This was one of those times. I asked the guy what he was doing in Mexico. His answer was so wildly unexpected that I was just about dumbfounded.

"Trying to track down Apaches", he said.

Tracking down Apaches? In the twilight of the 20th Century? The Apaches were supposed to have disappeared from the main flow of history in this part of the Southwest after Geronimo's last surrender at Skeleton Canyon in far southeast Cochise County in 1886. But I wasn't completely taken aback by what this man said. After moving to Arizona in the early 1980's, I started reading up on the local history. One of the books I read was called They Never Surrendered, The Bronco Apaches by Douglas Meed.It was about a group of Apaches--Nde--who stayed in the rugged mountains of Mexico rather than surrender with Geronimo. This fragment of the Nde nation persisted for another half century in Mexico, still living in the old way. It wasn't until the middle '30's that they finally disappeared, supposedly hunted to extinction by vengeance consumed Mexican ranchers.

I didn't know it until years later, but the weathered oddly anachronistic Anglo man I was talking to must have been Neil Goodwin, the son of the legendary self taught anthropologist, Grenville Goodwin. Neil's Dad--who died just before Neil was born--had moved to the big Apache reservations in east central Arizona in the 1920's, learned the language, and been accepted into their world by many of them. There were still numerous Nde alive who remembered the old ways, and among the many tales Grenville Goodwin heard was the riveting one of the small band of Nde who had continued to live wild and free in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico well into the 20th Century. The Sierra Madre Apache sometimes appeared on the Arizona Nde reservations looking for women and hoping to recruit fresh blood. They were said to have kidnapped women to take them back to their Sierra Madre fastnesses. The Mexican based Nde continued low level raiding in both Mexico and just over the border in Arizona and New Mexico for many years after the Geronimo surrender. Their continued presence went unnoticed in the awareness of a American nation busting loose from its frontier past as it galloped mightily in the American Century. Not so to the rural border locals who woke up to empty corrals and missing livestock. Nor to their brethren on the big Arizona Apache reservations to the north in eastern Arizona who looked with unease on their wild kin.

Grenville Goodwin was so intrigued by the thought of Nde still living in the old ways in the Sierra Madre that he actually went there looking for them. He did find a few who had been kidnapped by Mexicans and raised in a kind of cultural Hispanic servitude. And he also found camp sites in the mountains, some of them very recent. Though he took numerous photographs of the Nde Mexican mountain camp sites, Goodwin never was actually able to see one of the free roaming Nde. That doesn't mean they didn't see him. They probably did. Seeing without being seen had long been one of their geniuses.

More than a half-century later, Neil Goodwin went to Mexico to trace his father's steps in his search for the Sierra Madre Nde. Neil found a number of aged Mexicans who remembered the Apaches, and also learned a bit about Apaches who had been kidnapped by the Mexicans and raised in that culture. He also stumbled up against contemporary Mexico. Marijuana fields and gun toting heavies who didn't much like strangers coming around asking questions, though it was a whopping improbable stretch to envision Neil as an undercover narc. Still, he discreetly made tracks out of town in an undisguised hurry a time or two. Some stones are better left unturned.

Neil eventually wrote a pair of books about his search for both the Apaches and his father, The Apache Diaries and Like a Brother.

My interest was piqued. When I got a chance I went to the local library and did some reading into the subject. But I never would been aware of any of this if Neil Goodwin hadn't spent a couple minutes telling me about his search in Mexico. And if I hadn't broken the rules and taken the time to listen. Working a car lane didn't need to be mostly weary tedium broken by the occasional jolt of adrenalin pumping enforcement action. But it required a prudent eye towards moderation. There were officers who fatuously chatted up just about everybody who came through their line. You can bet they were at the very top of the smugglers' A-list for weak spots. But, with studied moderation, letting the mind and tongue wander beyond the usual border officer boundaries actually could help to refresh and rejuvenate a weary officer. Such was the case with Neil Goodwin. And he was just one of the many interesting characters I encountered.

All it took was the right question, a ready ear and a willingness to bend the rules a bit.

You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time,

but you cannot fool all of the people all the time. Not even border officers.

Anonymous

### Chapter 3

### The Universe of Drug Interdiction
Within the American universe of drug busting are lots of different worlds. Some, like the Coast Guard, might not come up with loads of dope very often, but when they do they're likely to be real hummers. Multi-ton. Marijuana. Hashish. Cocaine. Even heroin. Though on a somewhat smaller scale, the same can be said for shipping containers coming into the U.S. on ocean going vessels and for trucks coming into the ports of entry along the Mexican (and, rarely, Canadian) border. These can run into the thousands of pounds. Stash houses are also sometimes found with huge amounts of drugs. Such as the 11,000 pounds of marijuana found in a house on East Orange Grove Road in Tucson's mountain-fringed scenic north side in September of 2007. Possibly the largest overall amount of seized drugs is caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. Their loads typically run in the hundreds of pounds. And they catch lots of them. Many, if not most, of the loads that the Border Patrol intercept are not carefully hidden. The smugglers' usual strategy against the BP is avoidance rather than concealment.

On the other end of the scale are the vast majority of drug enforcement actions in the United States. They involve not hundreds or thousands of pounds but grams, ounces, or even fractions of grams and ounces. Sometimes a bit more--a few pounds or kilos. There are exceptions of course, but the generality is that the overwhelming majority of drug enforcement actions in the United States involve small amounts of drugs. These actions are the daily workaday bust em' and fill-up-the-jails realities of the local, county, city and state police agencies throughout the country.

An active drug smuggling port on the Mexican border falls between the extremes of thousands of pounds and fractions of pounds. A more or less typical load on the car lanes at a Mexican border port of entry is about fifty pounds of marijuana. This is only a typical or average load, and the actual range of narcotics busts I saw ranged from very small amounts, a few grams or fractions of an ounce, to close to a ton. And this was just on the car lanes. The commercial entry facilities, the truck docks--especially big ones like Nogales--could and did see multi-ton loads. In June of 2007 sharp-eyed Nogales special team cargo inspectors set a record for a single seizure when they found 6000 pounds of marijuana hidden in trailer load of tomatoes. But that was at the commercial entry facility--a whole different world than the car and pedestrian lanes where I put in most of my time.

What differentiated the work of a Customs officer at a port of entry and a Border Patrol officer working between the ports can be conveyed with a single descriptive word. Concealment. Border Patrol loads were often either not concealed or only minimally so. At a port of entry the very essence of smuggling was concealment. Between the ports of entry the smugglers tried to avoid and/or outrun law enforcement. At a port of entry the smugglers tried to deceive law enforcement officers and literally go right through them. The BP was involved in a cat and mouse catch-em game. The port officers were wrapped up in a semi-intuitive investigative "where is it?" game of detection.

When Customs officers arrived on duty for their daily shifts, they were immediately faced with a sobering head clearing reality. There were plenty of people out there who were not the same well meaning live-a-day folks that most border crossers were. Hidden among the ordinary law abiding regulars were a substantial number who were trying to outfox the officers and slip narcotics and/or illegal entrants right by them. Profiling had some utility, but was by no means definitive. The smugglers could be just about anybody. They were always looking for weak spots. Systemic ones. Or human ones. It kept many of the officers on edge. And for good reason.

Nobody wanted to be one of those weak spots.

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

Anonymous

### Chapter 4

### The Non-Runner

It was Valentine's Day. My Valentine was snug in her bed at home. Her Valentine wasn't either snug or in bed. I was working the graveyard shift at the Port of San Luis close to the California border. K-9 officer 'Cherokee Cowboy' Don Trusty and his trusty K-9 Rock were going out on a early morning pre-primary sweep at the Port of San Luis. Though it was the middle of the night in the winter season, the car lanes were backed up far into Mexico. Wintertime was the produce season in the warm water rich valley of the Colorado River. Mexican farm workers descended in their hard working, calloused hands thousands upon the valley. Most stayed on the more affordable Mexican side and commuted every day to work the fields of winter vegetables that stretched off far beyond the horizon into Arizona and California. Labor contractor buses lined up by the dozen awaited them on the Arizona side of the border. Many had a long way to go. And that meant the workers had to get an early start. Very early. So, when most ports of entry were blissfully somnolent in the early morning winter season hours, the Port of San Luis was throbbing with activity. Like they used to say in the old Jazz Age days--the joint was jumping.

Don Trusty was not one to just hang around waiting for something to happen. Don liked to light the fuse of action and see if anything blew. So he decided he'd run Rock on a pre-primary sweep. At the Port of San Luis the actual border was about sixty or seventy feet from the inspection booths. That meant that at busy times a line of as many as six cars built up inside the U.S. before each of the four or five open primary booths. We called the area in front of the booths on the U.S. side of the border pre-primary. And when a K-9 went out to run the cars there we called it a pre-primary sweep. Trusty beckoned at me just before he headed out. It was local policy that a backup inspector always accompany a K-9 officer on a pre-primary sweep. So off I went behind Don and his straining-at-the-leash K-9, Rock. The dog was so eager and strong that when they went off to run a car Don often had his hands full just trying to control the animal. Rock was a hard dog to manage. Hard, but still a pretty good dog. Not infallible. No dog was. But still a good dog. I always kept a hopeful close eye on him when he was working cars.

Rock fireballed off into pre-primary with a lolling tongue muscular canine eagerness and pulled Don along the lines of cars in front of the inspection booths. About halfway up a line of cars the dog abruptly veered from the lane he was working and pulled Don over to an adjacent lane and an old grayish brown Mazda RX7. Rock circled the car with a keenly advertent Don right behind him. Trusty ran Rock on a practiced K-9 loop around the car. The driver, 28 year old Dagoberto Nuñez, sat stolidly behind the wheel staring straight ahead. Then Don surprised me and also driver Nuñez when he opened up the Mazda's passenger side door. Rock jumped into the car. It must have startled the hell out of the driver, but he remained rigidly locked into his stoic straight ahead stare. The old Mazda had bucket seats and rock went between them, right by the rigidly frozen in place driver, and jumped into the back. The RX7 was a sporty two seater model and had no back seat. Just a kind of sloped bench you could throw some luggage on. Rock buried his nose in the bench and launched into a single minded fervid scratching. Don reached in through the passenger side door and switched off the ignition. Then he shot an intense look at me.

"Take him in", he said. Which meant that the car was loaded and that I should remove the driver, cuff him and secure him in a detention cell in the secondary building behind the inspection booths. OK. Routine procedure. But sometimes easier said that done. Routine procedures don't always work out to be routine when they make the real world jump from words to deed.

One of the reasons we liked pre-primary sweeps was because they eliminated the possibility of a vehicle taking off on us. The cars were lined up bumper to bumper and therefore pretty much trapped. But that didn't mean the drivers couldn't bail out, streak off and pound the pavement for Mexico. They could, and all too bloody often did just that, usually accompanied by lots of vexed hollering and a futile pursuit as the scampering guy made a successful escape into Old Mexico where the prize for crossing the finish line at the border was the sweet air of freedom. That fact zipped to the direct forefront of my attention like a You've Got Mail email header coming out of my own subconscious.

I glanced nervously at Mexico just a few feet away while I opened the driver side door and pulled at the guy to get him out of the car. He came out of the car more or less willingly, unbent his body and straightened up. And up. And up. I blanched. Oh-oh. I just might have a pile of trouble on my hands. This dude was half a foot taller than me, much younger and very powerfully built. There was no way I was going to stop this guy if he decided to blitz off for Mexico. But he didn't. The big, hard-muscled farm worker docilely let me put the cuffs on his thick wrists and escort him back to the secondary office and into a detention cell to await his fate. His stoic eyes straight ahead expression never changed. While I took the guy into the secondary lockup, Trusty drove the Mazda into the secondary lot. After I locked up Nuñez, I went out into the lot to join Trusty at the Mazda.

USMC Viet Nam vet Bill Rodman, who had a couple of sons who went to school with my daughters, came over to join us in secondary. Rodman said he had seen this type of Mazda used as a load car in the past, and the usual place of concealment was a natural--meaning factory made--compartment in the bench area behind the front seats. We took a look at the bench and the screws holding on the metal strips which held the carpet in place. Nothing obvious there. No signs of recent removal. There were no fresh marks on the screws, no indication of the carpet being removed. There wasn't anything immediately noticeable to alert us that the Mazda was loaded.

But Rock had told us otherwise. I ran a Buster density meter over the sloping front of the bench. It read 55-60 where a normal reading would be 20-30. No doubt of it now. Something solid was in the normally hollow natural compartment. We took out the screws and the metal strips, peeled away the carpet and pulled off the metal plates over the compartment. There was the load. 44 packages of marijuana with a weight of 54.2 pounds. The dope was wrapped in brown tape covered with cellophane, and had soap powder between the cellophane and tape and also sprinkled throughout the compartment. Traffickers commonly believed that soap powder would mask the odor of marijuana and throw off the K-9's. It didn't always work. Rock had just proved that.

A Customs special agent by the name of Rory Hale came to the port to handle the case. Hale was a former BP officer who had roots in the old Panama Canal Zone and was fluent in Spanish. He was a competent enough agent, but one of the many who held most Customs inspectors in contempt. Unlike most of the others, though, he often didn't try to hide the contempt. Hale was especially irritated with the Hispanic supervisor on duty, Mario De La Ossa, who he said kept interfering with his interrogation of the load driver. Hale told me he got the guy to confess as soon as De La Ossa had left the cell where Hale was interrogating him. Hale had some unpleasant things to say about Mario. Out of fairness to Hale, I have to admit that a lot of us thought that many if not most Customs agents were a bunch of self important pretentious prima donnas, with Hale right up there at the top of the list. We were the ones finding the loads, not them, was our own myopic self-righteous take on it. Even on what should have been the same team, it came down to Us versus Them. Like that old song said....When will we ever learn?

What Hale said about Mario rubbed me the wrong way, for I liked Mario, despite his frequent negativity. But what stuck in my mind wasn't either Hale or Mario De La Ossa. It was Nuñez. The guy had confessed. He would lose his I-551 Resident Alien Card and was on his way to fifteen months in prison, after which he would be deported. Nuñez was a powerful, good-sized guy. Big enough to brush me aside. And he was only about fifteen or twenty feet from Mexico when we stopped him in the Mazda and I had him climb out of the car. Thinking of him hulking there next to me so close to the border, I still wonder.......

Why didn't he just whack me a good one and light out for Old Mexico?

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by the policeman.

_Robert Fros_ t

### What Goes On At The Ports

We've all seen the images on TV. Illegal entrants swimming the Rio Grande or jumping over the border fences or jackrabbiting through the ports of entry. Groups of brown-skinned people dressed in dusty outdoors clothing, sitting or standing next to the vehicles they were riding in when their rides were pulled over by law enforcement. Where I live these are more than just TV images, newspaper articles and heated radio talk show topics. With the Mexican border just a few miles away in the busiest smuggling corridor in the country, the Tucson sector, we actually see this stuff on a regular basis. Border Patrol cruisers are a daily sight on nearby roads. Some mornings we wake to the chug-a-chug sound of BP helicopters flying low overheard. Nor is it unusual to see a group of subdued roadside illegal entrants apprehended by the Border Patrol awaiting transport to detention centers. We sometimes even see illegal entrants who have not yet been caught. The local Border Patrol number is on our cell phones.

Having been a Customs officer actually working on the border at both Nogales and San Luis, I had plenty of first hand opportunity to see the illegal entrants climb over fences adjacent to the ports, hear them in the tunnels underneath Nogales, see them pop out of those same tunnels or watch as they made a dash into the U.S. through the car lanes at San Luis. And there was also the frequent arrival at the ports of Border Patrol buses pulling up to the border and discharging apprehended illegal entrants back into Mexico. If you think they were all dejected and downcast, think again. Some of them were laughing and joking. Others were even defiant. And why not? They just might make it on the next try.

But you don't hear much about these things. Most of the coverage in the mass media, except for the occasional report of a large bust at a port of entry, is the Border Patrol stuff going on out beyond the boundaries of the ports.

What you don't see in the mass media is the constant flow of illegal entrants through the ports of entry. In 2007 the then new head of Customs and Border Patrol in Arizona, David Higgerson, publicly acknowledged this fact. Higgerson declared that he believes the use of the ports of entry by illegal entrants would intensify. Why? Because the Border Patrol was increasingly shutting down entrant traffic between the ports.

It is almost difficult for me to imagine what that would be like. When I was working on the border they were already coming every day, often all day long, trying to insinuate into the United States. Unlike the busted roadside folks you see on TV, these people used deception to try to get into the United States. They posed as other people using genuine immigration documents. They used phony documents. Or they claimed to be U.S. citizens by birth. I caught hundreds of them and saw many hundred others apprehended by fellow officers. Across the range of the southern border, the annual numbers must run far into the thousands.

Something else which is not widely recognized by the general public is the track record of the border port officers--now called CBP--in apprehending fugitives. More fugitives are caught by CBP officers every year than by any other agency, and possibly more than all other agencies combined. I caught a bunch of them. Maybe not into the hundreds, but certainly several dozen. I also caught a number of deported criminal aliens trying to sneak back into the U.S. And I emphasize the word criminal. These were not ordinary, non-criminal, illegal entrants. Our prisons are full of illegal entrants convicted of non-immigration related felonies. In March of 2008 a CBP spokesperson announced that there were over 300,000 current prison inmates eligible for deportation, and that the number would remain constant or even rise in the next few years. That's a big bunch of people to keep track of. Once out of prison, most will be deported. And a whole lot of them will try to sneak right back into the United States. Disabuse yourself of the notion that all of the entrants are just ordinary folks looking to make a better life for themselves. True for most. But not all. Three hundred thousand deportable felons in our prisons, plenty of whom will want to sneak back into the fabled land of milk and honey once deported, ought to tell you that. There are a lot of bad dudes among them. It happens all the time. Like the following incident, which is typical of what happens on the border just about daily and is very similar to ones I was involved with at both Nogales and San Luis.

The Halloween Season. 2007. A car pulls up to the entry booth at Nogales. The passenger seems 'wrong' to the primary officer. The officer looks at the man's document, asks a few questions and decides the guy needs to be checked our further. He sends him to secondary. The secondary officers figure out soon enough that the guy is a ringer. What they call an imposter. He is not the same person as the one depicted on the crossing document he is using. So just who is the guy? They run a fingerprint check on him. Whoa! The man is 46 year old Juan Cristanos-Ramos. A deportee. His offense? Murder. Cristanos-Ramos was convicted in New Jersey of second-degree murder and robbery, served more than twenty years in prison and was deported earlier that year after being released from prison. A few months later he was trying to slither back into the good ol' U.S. of A. and it wasn't likely that good citizenship was real high on his list of priorities. Guys like Ramos were turning up at the port regularly when I was an active officer. They still are. And, according to the then new CBP Arizona head David Higgerson,......

It was only going to get worse.

Another facet of life at the border ports is the constant flow of narcotics. Some of the big busts make the news. Most of the little ones don't. 'Little ones' is a relative phrase. They would be major busts to most inland police agencies. Marijuana seizures of thirty or forty pounds on up to a few hundred pounds are common daily events at most of the border ports. Sometimes much more, as happened in October of 2007 at Nogales when CBP officers found nearly 1600 pounds of marijuana in a hidden compartment in a Mexican tour bus. And that's just on the car lanes. At the truck entry facilities the busts, though far less frequent, can and do run into several tons. Like the 6000 pounds of marijuana the Nogales cargo special enforcement team caught in a load of tomatoes in June of 2007.In late August of 2008 at the little boondocks Port of Naco near my home CBP cargo inspectors found more than a half ton of marijuana hidden in hundreds of thin one pound packages secreted inside the structural components of a bunch of entertainment centers being shipped into the U.S.

The big dope loads were to be found in incoming cargo. We all knew that. The biggest load I got myself was at the Nogales cargo dock. But I didn't have the patience to bust ass for weeks, months, maybe even years, to come up with that one really Big load. You could fish for lunkers. Or you could fish for keepers. The dope loads on the car lanes might be mostly fifty pounders, but they were keepers. And there were lots of them. Something happened just about every day. That was the way I liked it.

And you could still keep an eye out for the lunkers.

What stands out about the ports of entry is the frequency of the (mostly marijuana) drug busts. It isn't just once in a while. This is the flip side of the illegal entrants trying to deceive their way into the U.S. through the ports of entry. The drug smugglers are also at it almost continuously. There were often several multi-kilo drug seizures in a single day at both Nogales and San Luis. I was personally involved in various ways with hundreds of major multi-kilo drug smuggling actions, and also heard first hand from other officers who were personally involved in many hundreds more. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the thousands of others that we read about in intelligence and seizure reports in our databases and other informational sources.

Though alien apprehension and drug interdiction remain the one/two defensive punches of the border officers, they are far from the only actions going on at the ports. There is the voluminous daily business of the legal importation of huge quantities of materiel and foodstuffs from Mexico. The bigger ports of entry process many hundreds of trucks a day during their busy seasons. San Luis sees scores of trucks every winter day bringing produce that will be trucked all over the United States. Nogales processes hundreds of trucks bringing manufactured goods and components, as well as truckload after truckload of produce from the interior of Mexico. A border officer could well see more tomatoes in a single day than a big grocery chain might sell in a entire year.

All of these trucks are subject to inspection, and a percentage of them are searched every day. The whine and roar of fork lifts unloading trucks preparatory to inspection is a constant at both Nogales and San Luis. So is the sight of long lines of unladen pallets of produce and boxes of merchandise lining the concrete platforms of the truck docks.K-9's are almost always present, continuously running both the unladen trucks and the lines of pallets and not at all coincidentally wearing out both the CEOs and their K-9's. Other officers roam the lines of pallets, comparing the nature and quantity of the goods and foodstuffs with the truck manifests and bills of lading. A sly intentional mislabeling by a shipper could amount to thousands of dollars in lost duty revenue.

While I was there Nogales processed whole trains bringing automobiles and cement from plants in Sonora. One of my least pleasant memories of the border is of clambering on top of those cement cars with a very long metal probe and repeatedly pushing the probe into the cement powder searching for hidden contraband. After a few hours of working the railroad cars, our blue uniforms took on a ghostly white coating. And we were absolutely beat by the exertion of hours of shoving the thin rods into several feet of dry cement powder. Another memory is of climbing up into the three-tiered railroad cars transporting automobiles from the manufacturing plant in Hermosillo and finding that thieves had somehow gotten into the cars and stolen many of the radios. One of the cars reeked of marijuana and we found a good sized roach (marijuana cigarette butt) in the ashtray. The thief was tokin' and smokin' while he ripped off the radios. Maybe he was singing La Cucaracha while he worked.

Whether by design or not--and this was something we actually talked about--the ports of entry didn't get much media coverage. But, media coverage or not, the fact remains. The ports of entry were and still are intense loci of law enforcement activity.

An activity that's not about to slow down anytime soon.

The tendency of an event to occur varies inversely with one's preparation for it.

David Searles

### Chapter 5

### Wrestling Matches

On a typical border workday the standard 'line' rotation was to work a half hour on a car lane, the next half hour on the pedestrian gate, followed by another half hour on a different car lane. Then it was trek back to work in the secondary lot and hump cars until the rotation started again. Towards the end of one of those workdays, on a cool Nogales late autumn weekday evening of light traffic, I was in the middle of one of those rotations. Going from a car lane to the pedestrian gate, I mechanically trudged through the automatic sliding doors leading into the INS building where the pedestrian gates were. I probably was tired and not especially alert. We often were because of the cumulative draining effect of lots of overtime coupled with constantly changing shift hours. Tired or not, as soon as I walked through that door the brain synapses started firing and the adrenalin pump kicked in. I was immediately alert. The place was empty. No one was there. Neither the Customs officer I was supposed to relieve nor the INS officer also awaiting his relief were anywhere to be seen. Where were they? I hadn't seen or heard anything when I was on the nearby car lanes. Yet the pedestrian gates were unmanned and wide open to whoever wanted to waltz through. Odd. Very, very odd.

Then I heard it. Low grunting sounds coming from an open-doored search room a few feet away. I cautiously approached and peered in. Nothing. Just the stark no frills barren walls of a law enforcement search room. More grunts came from an adjacent room. I probably had my hand on my .357 S&W service revolver as I warily went into the empty search room, leaned around a corner leading into the second room and glanced inside. There they were. The two missing officers. On the floor. With a third person. For some as yet unknown reason the two officers were flopping around on the floor in a wrestling match with this guy. They were desperately trying to get handcuffs on him. Without much success. The two groaning and gasping officers were so intensely tangled up with the man that I don't think they even saw me come into the room.

I had no idea what had precipitated this floor flopping impromptu wrestling match, but it was sure obvious they needed help. So I jumped on the pile and tried to cuff the guy. I pulled out my cuffs and went to grab his arms and pull them around to where I could get the cuffs on him. Oh-oh. In a flash I understood what was going on. The man had arms like oak stumps. And those oak stumps weren't about to be moved any time soon. The guy was strong as an ox and I only could get a single cuff onto one of his arms. I couldn't pull his other arm over to where I could cuff his second wrist. We had ourselves a genuine impasse right there on that cold concrete floor. The guy was strong enough to keep the three of us from cuffing him, but not quite strong enough to get away and make a break for Mexico. With a great plenitude of huffing and puffing and grunting and groaning, and no little bluff profanity, we just barely managed to hold on.

We had ourselves a genuine Mexican standoff.

"What the hell!" Another face popped up at the door. It was the INS officer coming off his car lane rotation to relieve his fellow officer on the pedestrian gate. After his initial surprised exclamation, he hotfooted it over and also jumped on the pile. After a lot more moaning and grunting and rolling around on the floor, and a few more heated excursions into floor flopping profanity, we were finally able to cuff the man. Once cuffed, he churlishly responded to defeat with malevolent glares, but nonetheless pretty much quit struggling. We didn't linger and give Mr. Oak Arms a chance at another round. He was unceremoniously hustled off to his new home--a cell in the INS office.

"So what was this all about?" I later asked of the initial two officers involved.

"False claim", an INS officer answered. They said Mr. Oak Arms had been a false claim to U.S. citizenship and had resisted being apprehended when he was caught out. And why so much trouble in subduing him? Seemed the guy had a couple of avocations. He was a weightlifter.

And a wrestling coach.

Another incident happened at almost the same place just a few weeks later. I was back in the secondary lot humping cars when this one erupted. Inspector Fred Alvarez, a lean and easy-going former Viet Nam era Marine, was working the pedestrian gate. It was another quiet evening. A man wearing a light jacket came up to him from Mexico. He seemed OK to Fred, so he motioned him on into the U.S. As he passed through the ped gate, Fred noticed a peculiar lump protruding from the guy's back under the jacket. The dude didn't look to Fred like any kind of modern day local Quasimodo. So he stopped him.

"Hey", Fred said. "Wait a minute." He reached over to pat the suspect lump. "What's this?" He was about to find out. The hard way. The fight was on.

The suspicious-lump dude tried to break loose and run for Mexico. Fred grabbed him. They wrestled around inside peds and then tussled out onto the sidewalk outside. Fred was hollering for backup. It came in a hurry from the officers working the nearby car lanes. Motorists waiting in line to enter the U.S. likely went open mouthed as the officers on primary took off sprinting for the building where the peds gates were. Just as the other officers scrambled up to the scene, Mr. Lump threw Fred against a heavy semi-decorative concrete container filled with sand. The container was mostly just meant for disposal of cigarette butts, but was so sturdily built that a hurricane probably wouldn't have moved it. Fred's head was no match for the hurricane proof concrete pot. He was knocked cold.

Mr. Suspicious Lump didn't make it back to Mexico. The other officers hustling to the scene swarmed over the guy and roughly subdued him. A fellow officer lying unconscious nearby with blood pouring out of his head doesn't exactly strum the strings of law enforcement compassion. Mr. Lump was unceremoniously packed off to the secondary office where he was thoroughly and probably pretty roughly searched. The suspicious lump on his back turned out to be several pounds of marijuana he'd taped under his jacket and tried to sneak into the country. Fred was taken to the hospital and wouldn't come back to full duty for a while. The other officers on the scene were pretty worked up over it. One of them said that they'd bounced the guy off the walls in the detention cell a few times. I took a look inside the cell after the guy had been hauled off to jail. There were indeed some stains on the walls. I wasn't certain of what they were, but I had a pretty good notion of what they might be

Mr. Lump's Blood.

Years later. The port of San Luis. A cool February afternoon. A heroin lookout for a specific vehicle and driver had come in. Lookouts were continually coming in from all kinds of sources. They usually amounted to zilch. Intelligence on the border wasn't any better pre-9/11 than anywhere else in the country. We were usually flat out dubious about intelligence and lookouts. But the originator of this particular lookout was one of the most reliable Customs agents. So it was taken seriously. And duly entered in the Customs computer system--TECS--as a lookout.

A hand printed copy of the lookout was just being manually placed in the booths on the car lanes. We did this as a backup in case the computer system went down. In one of those strange but true coincidences just then the car actually drove up. It was in the lane of an ain't-no-fat-on-me lean and linear older female INS officer named Marilyn. She recognized the vehicle before she entered the plate number into TECS. And had the presence of mind not to enter it. She was afraid that the alarm function in the computer might be turned on and that the alarm could go off, alerting the driver and opening up the unwelcome prospect of a fight or a chase. Probably not much beyond the sunny side of 110 or so pounds, Marilyn likely wasn't too hot on the idea of getting in a wrestling match with the driver of the car, who looked like he might already be far down the well fed road to hefty dudehood.

And he was. Which Marilyn noticed when she had the lone driver get out of his car and perform the routine procedure of opening his trunk. While he was busily stooping to open his trunk lid, Marilyn managed to unobtrusively get the attention of nearby Customs officers and let them know what was going on. She probably silently mouthed the word lookout to them. The officers reacted swiftly, grabbed the guy and physically bundled him off into the secondary office's detention area. As they were taking the suspect in, a visibly agitated Marilyn drove the car into the secondary lot. Inside the secondary building as the shift senior inspector that evening and assigned to ride the duty desk, I saw the suspect being brought into the secondary office and also saw Marilyn driving the car into the secondary lot. The night was about to get interesting.

A K-9 ran the car. 'Inconclusive', the handler said. This caused some subterranean grumbling among the other officers about this particular rather unpopular K-9 officer routinely hedging his bets with 'inconclusives'. He was a kiss ass favorite with the Bosses, which made him pretty much immune from our criticism, which didn't do much to enhance his popularity, either. But no matter. K-9 alert or not, since it was a lookout from a highly reliable source we still had to do a physical search of the car. We did. Nothing. That meant that a pat down and possibly a strip search of the driver had to be conducted. There was a significant possibility that the guy might be body carrying the heroin. A pat down was done. A pat down being just what it says--a physical hand-patting search of a person's clothed body. Negative. To go farther, to a strip search, we had to get supervisory approval. The supervisor on duty, Hugh Winderweedle, a tall drawling Southerner and former cop, comprehended the situation immediately and quickly gave his approval for the strip search.

Enough of the legally mandated articulable factors were present. The man was a lookout as a possible body carrier from a highly reliable source--a proven Customs agent. The man had a criminal history. The K-9 search of the car, albeit inconclusive, at least had not been negative. The body carrying of heroin was historically known to occur at the Port of San Luis and believed to still be occurring. It was enough. The strip search--which was not common Customs practice at either San Luis or Nogales--was on. The searching officer was Tony Underwood, a towering former soldier and a huge mountain of a man approaching if not topping 300 pounds. Put a football uniform on him and he could have passed for a paunchy NFL lineman. The suspect, who we'll call Luis, though short, was also hugely obese. Probably 250 pounds or more. He looked like a Sumo wrestler. Neither of these guys were poster boys for the benefits of the local gym. No sleek muscle bound Schwarzenegger-in-his-prime, these boys. But they were huge in bulk. And when you're holding somebody down, huge does the trick just about as well as muscle. NFL was going to take on Sumo.

The Battle of the Bulks was about to begin.

Luis was escorted into a rear cell away from the entrance. It was a precaution against a possible escape attempt. Such attempts were fairly rare, but they did sometimes happen, and they were an unwanted 'how the hell did that happen?' embarrassment no one liked to try to explain. So we went to a rear cell. Before going into the cell, Tony explained to Luis that he was going to be strip searched. Then we all witnessed a minor miracle. The Transmogrification of Señor Sumo. The formerly innocent acting and talking Luis metamorphosed into a truculent jail house lawyer, defiantly insisting that this was a violation of his rights and that he did not have to submit to such a procedure. It was explained--several times--to him by Underwood that he had no legal recourse in such a situation and had to submit to a strip search. Tony sounded like a by the books studiously correct instructor at the Customs Academy as he carefully went over the relevant laws and regulations about strip searches. The point at which Customs inspectors could go no further, Tony told the glowering Luis, was when an intrusive or invasive procedure of the body cavities was indicated. That required a physician in a medical facility.

Luis was forcibly taken to a rear cell where he had to be muscled inside. Then he began to very reluctantly disrobe. As he did so, the validity of the lookout grew more promising. When Luis removed his long sleeved shirt we saw that he was covered with tattoos. 'San Luis' was tattooed in big letters across his midsection and the signature gang tattoo of a spider web covered one of his shoulders. And he sure as hell was not looking like an innocent person any longer with his malevolent stares and defiant, threatening gestures. Luis disrobed a piece at a time, volubly protesting all the while, until he was bare ass naked. Then it was show and tell time. Underwood told Luis to turn around, bend over and spread his cheeks. That lit Luis' fuse. It was only a matter of time before something blew.

Luis initially turned around and acted as though he was going to bend over. He did. But just slightly. Not enough to afford a view of his bathroom buddy. The pudgy dude then straightened up, turned around and began his jail house lawyer routine again, maintaining that he did not have to submit to such a procedure and would by-God not submit to it.He and Underwood began to argue. Supervisor Hugh Winderweedle, who was hovering next to them, joined in. Then Winderweedle abruptly stopped.

"Hold everything", he said to Underwood. Then the lanky supervisor disappeared out the door. A short time later Hugh was back with another of San Luis' beefy Customs officers, a guy who was carrying at least 250 pounds on his overburdened ectomorphic frame. Re-enforcements had arrived. Winderweedle was obviously expecting trouble.

This second bloated up officer was not an imposing dude like the towering Underwood. No one would have mistaken him for a NFL lineman if he put on a football uniform. The Pillsbury Doughboy maybe, but no NFL lineman. But he nevertheless had the bulk they needed, outweighing me by at least a hundred pounds. After the re-enforcements arrived, Winderweedle turned to me with what seemed to be an uneasy look in his eyes.

"See if you can find out more about this guy", Winderweedle said. I left the cell in a hurry and went down the fifteen or twenty feet of cell lined corridor to the secondary office where I plunked my butt down at a computer terminal and began pulling up the databases in a search for more information on Mr. Sumo. Strip searches were rare on the border and I suspected that Hugh might be getting worried about the way this was one playing out. It wasn't just show and tell time. It was also CYA--cover your ass--time. If the search came up negative and Mr. Sumo did his jailhouse lawyer routine again and decided to lay some allegations on us, we wanted to make darn sure we had as many relevant factors as possible to justify a strip search. I was just getting into the computer search of Luis' criminal history. Then, suddenly, .......

"Hey! Goddamnit!" A outburst of loud yelling and hollering erupted from the search room. I jumped up and ran over to the room and saw Luis and all three Customs officers rolling around on the floor of the cell. The three chunky dudes and the tall and lean Winderweedle looked like three big lumps and a long stick in a state of unexplained jumbled together agitation on the cell room floor. The officers were attempting to subdue Mr. Sumo. But why? It was at first unclear to me exactly what was going on. What good would it do for a naked man to escape from a cell in Customs secondary and run outside where at least another half dozen armed officers were within a hundred feet? Even the most clueless officer would've figured out that a bloated up naked running man was not someone they should just blithely let lumber by. And just where was a naked man going to run to, anyhow?

The reason for the unscheduled sumo bout? Underwood was trying to pry something out of Mr. Sumo's mouth. The officers had been attempting to force Luis to submit to the external visual inspection of his brown bomber when the man suddenly jerked out an object that had been stuffed in his rectum--probably heroin--and deftly shoved it into his mouth. The pudgy squat dude did it so lightning quick that the officers couldn't react in time to stop him. Which is where I came in--the struggling and yelling and rolling around on the cell floor. They were trying to get the recently repositioned foul object out of Sumo's mouth.

But this is mostly after the fact expository rumination. At the actual floor floundering moment I immediately leaped onto the pile and added my modest weight to the struggle. It became apparent soon enough that Luis had managed to swallow the object, whatever it was. We gave up the struggle. And so did Sumo. And why not? In effect he'd actually won the match. Sumo 1. Customs 0.

That was a long way from being the end of it. A whole different reality set in. Like the semi-frantic but well practiced two minute drill in a football game. Sumo had just very likely swallowed heroin. Action had to be taken immediately to transport him to the Yuma Regional Medical Center, for the dual reasons of the possible life threatening situation he had placed himself in (a possible lethal overdose should the heroin package break inside his stomach) and to monitor him for the fecal discharge of the heroin and the resultant critical recovery of evidence. The San Luis emergency response team was at the port in less than five minutes, and the paramedics strapped Sumo--who was still partially nude and had to be covered with a sheet--to a gurney. Underwood accompanied the ambulance to the hospital. What would then follow was one of the understandably little talked about parts of a Customs officer's job. Monitoring a suspect's bowel movements for the presence of contraband.

"So what did you at work today, Daddy?"

"Well, son, I spent the day spooning through a suspect's fecal matter."

"What is fecal matter, Daddy?"

So we didn't talk much about stuff like that. Anyhow, bowel monitoring might be common enough at international airports where they were looking for heroin and cocaine swallowers, but not for us. It was so uncommon as to be just about unheard of. Which was just peachy as far as we were concerned. You can bet your 401K and the title to your SUV that there wouldn't have been many volunteers for a bowel monitoring detail if one had come up. I don't recall for certain what the results of Underwood's unappetizing task were, but I seem to recall they never found the dope. The final result of the Sumo match remained the same. Sumo, 1. Customs, 0.

We never did hear if Underwood told his kids the details about searching fecal matter.

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom

Henry Ward Beecher

### Chapter 6

### Hey, Mom. Let's Go For A Ride

Every day was a lottery. When we showed up for work there was no way of predicting what might happen. At times it was purely mind and body numbing nothing's happening routine. More often there'd be at least an epinephrine teasing modicum of activity to stir the tired blood. Imposters on the ped lanes or in cars. A wanted felon or prior criminal deport. Some luckless person with a chunk of dope on their body. Maybe a stolen car. Or a load. Or several of these together. But sometimes all hell broke loose and we had a wild haired day of corybantic non stop excitement. This was an afternoon like that. Besides the usual daily goulash of pulse pounding enforcement actions, two back to back TECS dope loads came into the port. At 7:30 in the evening the alarm went off signaling yet another TECS hit on primary. We shook our heads in tired amazement.

"Here we go again", somebody uttered. And so we did. Again.

The alarm could only be stopped by someone going to the computer in the TECS room in secondary and hitting the clear button. That would stop the alarm, but the particulars of the TECS 'hit' would remain displayed on the computer terminal. Senior Inspector Hank Hey ran into the office to shut off the alarm and view the monitor. Inspector Jon 'Tony' Underwood went through the office on his way to the primary lanes. I was eager--probably too eager--for loads in those early days at San Luis, so I hurried around the side of the building and was the first to arrive on primary. I hadn't seen the computer terminal in the office and didn't know which lane had the TECS hit. There were four lanes open and no one was making any obvious indication that anything was going on. My eye settled on a female INS officer. She didn't give any clear sign of what was happening, but I saw that she was making out a referral slip and noting the license number of the car. I went over to her lane.

"Is this the TECS hit?" I asked her in a quiet whisper of a voice. She nodded affirmatively. And that was it. No elaboration. She said nothing more.

"And the reason for the hit?" I continued, a bit exasperated at her strange nonchalant attitude.

"Possible load car", she answered with the same odd nonchalance. I walked over to the car. It was a battered old yellow two door Buick LeSabre--not an unusual choice for a load car in those days. But, before I could say a word, a voice came from inside the car and caught me by surprise.

"Hi', a male voice said. "How have you been? "What? How have I been? I looked over at the guy who was talking, a tiny, raggedy man who looked like he'd long ago taken a vow to never visit a dentist for the rest of his sojourn on God's Green Earth. He looked like a heroin hype. I'd encountered several of those beaten -down, bedraggled lost souls in recent days. Was he one of them? Did I know this guy? I took a close look. Did I know him? No. I didn't recognize the guy.

Then it registered in my sometimes twilight dwelling brain that my new good friend wasn't even the driver. The guy was the passenger. The driver was a woman. I deflected my gaze to her. Yikes. It was a granny. A grandmotherly older woman who was even tinier than the man. She could barely see over the steering wheel. If the younger man was being talkative, she was anything but. Granny was stone faced, tight lipped silent. The minuscule older woman had her hands plastered to the wheel and was staring stolidly straight ahead as though her head were locked in place and was never ever going to move again.

"This", I thought with no little wariness, "is going to be a weird one". I glanced at the rear seat. Then I knew it was going to be a weird one. The seat bulged like a Before Ad for Weight Watchers.

I took the referral slip from the INS primary officer. Granny, with her hands welded to the steering wheel, didn't seem like a hot candidate for a port runner, so I didn't remove her and the raggedy little man from the Buick. I told her to drive the car into the secondary lot and followed alongside. There had already been two loaded back seats earlier that day, and I took a longer look at the Buick's back seat. Good Lord! How did they expect to get by with this? The seat was bulging out so much from both the bottom and rear that even sitting on it would have been somewhere between awkward and impossible. It was loaded, all right. And Granny was driving. She was a load driver. Granny the load driver. So who was the guy with her?

Whoever he was, he was now tweaking like one of those bobblehead caricatures you sometimes see on TV ads. His neck was swiveling around and his head bobbing up and down and back and forth. I couldn't see his eyes, but they were probably doing the same thing. And he was talking non-stop.

"What's going on?", he kept saying. "What's up?" What are we doing?" By that time I already knew what we were doing. And so did he. We were rapidly moving towards a set of jail doors slamming shut behind him. It turned out it was a sound he already knew all too well.

The old woman and the old Buick pulled into secondary with Mr. Bobblehead still chattering nervously away. We took them into the secondary office and I called over to nearby K-9 officer 'Scooter' Anderson to run the car. Before he even started, Anderson took a look inside the car and yelled back.

"It's loaded, man. Look at those seats!" I already knew that. But we almost always used a K-9 when one was around. We were told to. The Bosses wanted the K-9 stats, and the agents liked to have a positive K-9 alert as part of their body of evidence during prosecutions. So Anderson ran the Buick that we all knew was loaded and it came as no surprise to anyone when his dog buddy Cabo blasted the back seat. I was back outside just as Cabo finished his wildly enthusiastic canine positive response to the seat. The dog was bouncing around like he'd just encountered a hot K-9 mama. But all the poor critter got was the rolled up towel the handlers customarily used to 'reward' their dogs. The ironic thought did touch my mind that we might not really be all that different from the dogs in some ways. But I didn't let the thought linger and booted it back out of my mind. Some things are best left unthought.

I went over to the old LeSabre and jerked the back seat rest forward, eyeballed the packages behind the seat to visually verify the load, and then went inside to assist with the initial disposition of the driver and passenger. Big Tony Underwood had seen the dog alert and was already in the process of moving the pair through the first stages of what the wags among us called a 'heightened border experience. They were being searched preparatory to going into detention cells. The two of them were so short they looked like a pair of Hobbits gone wrong. I'm a pretty short man myself, but next to them I had the rare experience of peering way down at a pair of standing adults.

The man was Al Anzures, a thirtyish guy barely five feet tall. My initial impression of him as being a heroin hype didn't seem far off. He was very thin, unhealthy looking, and missing teeth. I asked him if he had shot up that day. His eyes blinked and he hesitated, starting to say something that might have been affirmative, but caught himself and said that he didn't do things like that and that he was "....a born again Christian." His idea of a born again Christian and mine seemed to be at some considerable variance on that point, but I let it pass. This was not Top Cops TV, and we didn't much indulge in pointless banal bantering with perps. We patted him down, took his shoes, belt and personal possessions, and plunked him in a holding cell. I walked back out to the car, probed one of the packages behind the back seat for a sample and dropped the tiny sample into a field test vial. A scrunch of the vial released the chemicals inside to mix in with the plant sample. No one was surprised when a moment later the test kit flashed the color of a positive marijuana test. Deep Purple. The same name as an old swing tune that my nimble fingered mother used to play on the piano. But now with a whole new non musical connotation. To the dope smuggler Deep Purple meant Deep Trouble.

Anzures was securely locked away. The woman. Granny. What about her? She was 63 years old and even tinier than Anzures. Not much over four and a half feet tall, she looked minuscule and overwhelmed. She was driving the load car, so she had to be a suspect. I at first didn't realize it because they had different last names, but then it occurred to me that the slender extreme shortness of the pair indicated relationship. I asked Anzures if the woman was his mother. Yes, he said. She was Mom. It was a family affair.

There were no more lockup rooms available in the four cell Customs secondary area. Three of the cells were still occupied from the earlier loads. The fourth cell was now the temporary home of Mr. Al Anzures. I had to take the tiny older woman over to the INS building to put her in one of their holding cells. At first they were taken aback at the sight of the harmless looking frightened little Hobbit-like woman as I escorted her into their office.

"What's this about?" One of their more macho granny protective male officers asked rather abrasively. He looked ready to start an argument.

"She's a load driver", I replied simply. End of argument. Into the cell she went.

One of the case agents, David Fry, was already at the port handling two earlier loads. He called up Tara Perez, the case agent who had entered the Buick load vehicle in TECS as a lookout. Was she interested in coming to the port as the case agent for her lookout? Oh, yeah. Was she ever. Tara was out the door on her way to the port and was there within the hour. They checked out Al Anzures before beginning to question him. No surprise that the little would be smuggler had a very long and varied criminal history. He'd only been out of the slammer ten days since his last misadventure with the law. When Tara and David went to question Anzures, the pint sized dude had his story ready. He said he had gone by his mother's place in Mexico with a borrowed car and suggested they tool over to do some shopping on the U.S. side of the border. Somehow he got her to drive. Apparently his thinking was that a little old lady driving the load car would discourage negative attention at the crossing point.

They picked a lane manned by a Hispanic INS officer who, to put it charitably, was not noted for her alertness or professionalism. She was usually zoned out in some kind of alternative reality of her own. One of her co-workers, a male Hispanic INS officer whose ability and opinion I valued highly, had told me as much not long before. Was the choice of her lane purely coincidental? Most Customs officers believed that the smugglers 'made book', as old border hand Ralph Quick put it, on the officers working the lanes and were very astute in what lanes and individuals they chose to attempt to run their loads. The selection of this INS officer may or may not have constituted one of those choices. Intentional or not, the load very likely might have made it through. Except that the car was a lookout, a TECS hit, and as such was a mandatory secondary. Even a sloppy, disinterested officer couldn't get around that. The car was going to secondary. Period.

Anzures might have been lacking in height, but the glib vertically challenged scammer sure wasn't lacking for words. He breezily told the agents that he owed money to some heavy handed busthead thugs in Mexico and had tried running the load in payment for that debt. Anzures flat out admitted that he had attempted to smuggle marijuana in the car and continued to stubbornly insist that his diminutive gray haired Mom had been oblivious to what was going on. The agents--at least so far as they admitted to me, Customs inspectors never being sure how much information the agents share with them--said they believed his story. I wasn't so sure.

Anyhow, the tiny older woman got a get out of jail free card. She took her personal effects from the car--sweater, purse, etc.--and was about to head back to Mexico. I watched from nearby as she said goodbye to her son. The crestfallen little man embraced her and said "I'm sorry, Mom". The tiny woman looked overwhelmed and very world weary. God knows what she was gone through with her son. Yet, deep down, border cynic that I had become, I had to wonder just what the reality was with her. Did she actually not know the Buick was loaded, or had her son saved her by lying and playing into the natural antipathy of the agents to pop a 63 year old granny? If that was his strategy, it worked. Agent Tara Perez was walking around grumbling about 'poor granny' and being generally pissed off at granny's jerk son, Al.

The old woman embraced her son, saw the cell door close behind him and walked away, tiny and reed thin and downcast, back into the shacks and dirt streets of Old Mexico.

Mom was gone. Al was in his cell. The port procedure at that time was for the case agents to be present when the inspectors removed drugs from a load vehicle. Agents Perez and Fry said they were ready. So we all traipsed out to the old Buick and I began to pull the drugs out of the car. The rear seat, both bottom and back rest, were loaded. We already knew that much. The back rest was packed so full with bricks of marijuana, two and three deep, that the load was bigger than we'd expected. Removing the bricks from that part of the load and stuffing them into the big plastic bags we used to transport them to a scale for weighing was as easy as sacking groceries at the local supermarket. That should have been a warning shot across our bow. On the border when things are going along nice and easy it probably is just about time to duck because you are about to be blindsided.

The good news was that the quarter panels were also loaded. The load would be even bigger than we thought. The bad news was that getting the dope out of them would be much more difficult than the seat load had been. The upholstery first had to be removed. Nothing unusual about that. Underneath was a plate on each side of the car. Still nothing unusual. The smugglers had cut into the natural factory empty spaces in the sides of the old two door Buick, removing oblong sections on each side that allowed them to stuff in the marijuana bricks. Then the openings were covered over with metal plates fastened to the natural factory compartments by several screws. This didn't look like a one shot smuggling attempt. The compartments were manufactured for multiple use. Inside, marijuana was crammed into nearly every inch of available space, much as it was stuffed into the seats, but a hell of lot harder to remove. These guys were greedy. And confident. We had to wonder. Maybe they were too confident. The thought lingered like the memory of an unsettling bad dream just beyond the grasp of recollection. Was this another load that was expected to pass through untouched?

When I went to work that day, wearing a short sleeved shirt seemed like a pretty good idea. Cooler in the summer heat. The idea didn't seem so cool later in the day when I started sticking my bare arms through the narrow jagged edged compartment openings to tug on the dope stuffed tightly inside. I got pretty well scratched up, but I hardly even noticed it at the time. I was zoned out in the hormonal kick of taking down a good sized dope seizure. I finally jerked the last of the recalcitrant jammed bricks from the quarter panels. There was a total of 104 pounds of marijuana. The dope was wrapped in clear cellophane and heavily covered with talcum powder to mask the odor, with another layer of cellophane on the outside of the package. The clear cellophane and white powder underneath gave the impression to several officers who viewed it that perhaps it was cocaine. It wasn't. But over a hundred pounds of weed was still a good load.Tara Perez had been right on with this TECS lookout. Al Anzures went to jail. Not his first time. Nor his last.

I couldn't help but reflect on what happened to Al's Mom once she stepped back onto the dark streets of Mexico that night. A few months later I found out. Apparently nothing serious. She came walking through the pedestrian gate one day when I was on the gate. I recognized her and lingered with her a moment, wondering just what was really up with the woman. On the possibility that the agents had changed their minds about her culpability and put out an arrest warrant, I checked her out in the computer database. Nope. No warrant. I released her into the U.S. and watched her walk away with a touch of irony. My mind wandered back to the day when she drove up to the border in a load car with her hype son, Al. And I wondered.

Did she really not know the old Buick was loaded?

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G.K. Chesterton

### The Starter

It was a typical day at the Port of Nogales. Pleasant. The town had an agreeable winter season climate. This day was no exception. Sunny. Moderate temperature. Lots of cars and pedestrians. Although a senior inspector, I wasn't working the office this day and was in the journeyman rotation. I was just rotating off a car lane to the pedestrian gate where you could plunk yourself down on a stool to rest the weary legs for a spell. The legs. Not the awareness. The peds gate was where we caught loads of illegal entrants trying to deceive their way into the good ol' U.S. of A.

An ordinary looking man of about thirty walked up to me. Middle height. Slender. Wearing faded work clothes and a baseball cap. He was carrying something bulky that was wrapped in a paper bag. The guy took out a faded I-186 Border Crossing Card, handed it to me and said in Spanish that he was on his way to a local auto parts store to get a new starter for his vehicle. He reached into the paper bag and pulled a starter out of it. Into my mind flashed an intuitive vision of this making a dandy stage prop to re-enforce an illegal entrant smuggling attempt. What would be better at validating your story than the very car part you were supposedly going to replace?

At the time I actually thought it was kind of a clever idea. But it also made me check the guy out closely. And a closer inspection of the I-186 Border Crossing Card, along with a few pertinent biodata questions that he stumbled on, quickly led me to the conclusion that this guy was an imposter. The card was probably genuine. But the guy on the card was not the same person as this ostensible mechanic with the stage prop starter in his hand. I turned him over to an INS officer. A few minutes later the INS officer told me that the guy was indeed an imposter. No surprise. I still think it was a clever idea.

It just didn't work.

Mr. Backwards

Before coming to Customs, Bobby C. was an L.A. police officer. Besides being a Customs officer, he also was a reserve intelligence officer in the military and was often gone from the port on military duties. Kind of cool, I thought. He was always jetting off to exotic sounding distant places on military TDY's. I was a shade envious. But that was his military side. Bobby had his problems with Customs. Still, there was no denying he was a powerfully built linebacker kind of guy. He was the kind of husky mesomorph you wanted to have around if things got dangerously physical.

And he was around one quiet evening at the Port of San Luis when Mr. Backwards started his act. To his literal astonishment, Bobby watched this guy as he walked backwards from Mexico into the U.S. Backwards. Did this guy believe that we'd just glance at him and think he was walking into Mexico? Whatever he was thinking, Bobby watched the guy in slack jawed incredulity as he walked slowly backwards into the U.S. After Mr. Backwards got a ways into our side of the border, Bobby did a linebacker rush at him and tackled the guy before he could reverse directions and hotfoot it back into Mexico. Bobby was a rough guy and hit Mr. Backwards pretty hard. He hurt himself and probably also Mr. Backwards. Since we had been repeatedly cautioned by the Big Bosses against chasing illegal entrants, Bobby might have gotten himself into some very hot water over it. Bobby was in luck. Mr. Backwards had something going on besides a bizarre propensity to move illegally between countries walking backwards. The guy had tried to body carry hard drugs into the U.S. The result was not what he had anticipated.

He walked backwards smack into a jail cell.

### The College Kids

I was on the pedestrian gate in Nogales. Sometime around 9/11. A cool late afternoon. Not very busy. A young couple maybe nineteen or twenty years old walked up to me. Anglo kids. Good-looking kids. Both short. Both fair. And looking very out of place.

After a few years on the border, an officer develops a pretty good sense of what's going on. Peds included. And there was something about these kids that struck me as not being quite right. A very likely scenario would be for them to have gone to Mexico to pick up some of the kickass drugs like Valium or OxyContin or Percodan that were so easily obtained at the Mexican pharmacies. It was a very common occurrence at Nogales. That fact was already perched in the front of my mind when they walked up to me.

"Citizenship?" I said.

"U.S.", they both replied. They had the awkward, vaguely uncomfortable look of the unpracticed novice deceiver.

"Did you acquire anything in Mexico?" Negatively wagging heads.

"No. No. Nothing." Some absent-minded shuffling of the feet.

"So what was the purpose of your visit?", I continued, also asking where they were from. They replied that they were a couple of University of Arizona students and had just come down to Nogales to look around.

"Just to look around?" I repeated. Positively wagging heads to re-enforce the answer.

"Yeah. Right. Just to look around."

"And bought nothing?" More head-wagging. Negative ones. "No prescription medications?" The head wagging grew more animated. No. No prescription medications.

By that time I was certain they had something. I had the young man empty out his pockets on the counter between us. And there was what I was looking for. Pills. Not many. Maybe a half dozen. I picked them up and took a look. I looked again to make sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen. Then I shot a very curious glance over at the young Anglo couple. The pills?

There were Viagra.

I looked at them. They looked at me. All this for just a few Viagra? That they could have legally brought into the U.S anyhow? And for a couple of twenty year olds who already had hormones bouncing around their bodies like so many oversexed pinballs? I held out the Viagra to the kid. To say he and the girl looked sheepish would be one hell of a whopping world class understatement. The young guy picked up the Viagra and looked at me with a kind of embarrassed desperation. With one last look at the Viagra and the two of them, I waved them on into the U.S.

"I don't even want to know", I said.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.

Bill Clinton

### Chapter 7

### Pickups

Pickups. Not pickup trucks. Nor a hot new one nighter from the local boozy hangout. Nothing remotely close. This is a whole different species of pickup. This kind of pickup has to do with luggage. And that usual inhabitant of luggage. Clothing.

An officer would look into the luggage compartment of a vehicle coming from Mexico and find a bunch of clothes. Usually the driver would be a single male Hispanic who was born in Mexico but had a legal I-551 Resident Alien card. And the clothes wouldn't just be for an adult male. There were all kinds. Women's clothes. Children's clothes. Shoes. Jackets. Baby clothes. Diapers. Even occasionally something as personal as a woman's purse or cosmetic case. So what were these guys doing with all of these personal items that weren't theirs?

Oh, they had explanations. Always. The border was a fecund seed bed for the creative explanation. It seemed like hardly anybody on the border was ever at a loss for an explanation of one kind of another. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a long way from being the only quick witted Hispanic with a reality stretching vivid imagination. We asked the drivers of the cars where all these mysterious extra clothes come from. And they were ready with explanations that would have made Garcia Marquez smile in gleeful creative appreciation.

The owners of the clothes had clambered out of the cars to do some last minute shopping on the Mexican side and were going to walk into the U.S. through the pedestrian gate. Or they got out to use a bathroom and were going to walk through the border. Or it was too hot waiting in line of cars and they got out to quickly walk through and were waiting in the local fast food restaurant. Or the owners of the clothes were already in Mexico but the driver had to go back onto the U.S. side to pick up something. Or the guy had picked the clothes up in Mexico and was taking them to his family in the U.S. Or the guy was trying to take the clothes to people in Mexico but had been turned back by Mexican officers for their own Customs reasons. Or the clothes owners had gone ahead by other conveyance--bus or airplane--because of some kind of emergency and didn't want to be encumbered with a lot of luggage. The guy was bringing the stuff in by car and would meet up with them at their interior U.S. destination. And so it went with the explanations. There always was an explanation. Always. It was after all the home field of the inspired explanation.

What did we believe was really going on? They were pickups. The guy in the car was bringing in the clothes of illegal entrants who were going to try to sneak into the U.S. either riding in other cars or by coming through the fences. Then the driver of the car would pick them up at some prearranged spot close to the border. There wasn't much we could do about it. Not immediately, anyhow. You couldn't bust somebody for having a couple of extra suitcases in his car that contained female dainties and baby diapers. Imagine how that one would play in front of an Immigration judge....

"And why is this man here, officer?" The judge might say.

"Sir, he tried to drive through the border alone with a woman's purse and a box of baby diapers." That might fly in someplace like Iran or Somalia, but no way in the good ol' US of A.

So we couldn't bust the guy. We couldn't even stop him. But sometimes we'd send a suspect driver over to the Immigration office to be checked out. What happened there depended mostly on the officer who checked the guy. Most would just shrug and let him go. But a few would let him go and then call up the Border Patrol to watch him to see if he did actually pick somebody up. If INS was uncooperative or too busy, sometimes we'd wait for the car to leave and then call up the local Border Patrol ourselves with a vehicle description and license plate number. We never were really sure what the BP did about it. There rarely was any feedback from them. Nor could we be absolutely certain that the pickups were really going on at all. We were pretty sure of it. But there was no proof. Until one sunny day in December at San Luis. Or, more correctly, two sunny days. That's what got Mr. Bullhead City busted.

The Second Day.

The first day he came driving up to me on a primary lane. He might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with Pickup written on it in foot high incandescent letters. He was falling apart nervous, something that was common with pickup drivers. They were mostly ordinary people who weren't practiced in the dark arts of deception. They were doing something they knew to be illegal and jumpy body language showed it. They were betrayed by their own bodies. Nervousness by itself was certainly not definitive. But this falling apart shaker had a trunk full of clothing that didn't belong to him. He gave a lame reason for having the clothing with him and said he was headed back home to Bullhead City, a town two hundred miles to the north on the Colorado River. I sent the guy over to the INS office to be checked out. I didn't hear what they did about him, but assumed they probably didn't do anything. I forgot about it.

Until the next day. The same guy came driving up from Mexico and had the phenomenal bad luck to run into me again. This time he wasn't alone. Three other people were in the car. An older woman in the front seat claimed to be his mother. She showed me what looked to be a genuine I-551 Resident Alien card. The two people in the back seat had I-186 Border Crossing Cards. I asked the driver where he was going this time. He told me. What? Didn't this guy recognize me from yesterday? Did all gringos look alike to him? Or was he that rare bird among border crossers who couldn't come up with an extemporaneous whopper of an explanation?

Because the guy who was on his way home two hundred miles north to Bullhead City the day before was now just going a few miles over the border with his passengers to gamble at the Cocopah Indian Casino. I don't think there was an officer on the entire border dumb enough to have bought that story. I was pretty certain that at least some of the people in the car were imposters. So I walked them all over to the INS office, searched out a diligent officer I trusted and explained what was going on.

The INS officer got to the bottom of it quickly enough. The two in the back seat were imposters. Mr. Bullhead City had been trying to smuggle them into the U.S. INS seized his car. Bad enough by itself. But things got worse. Having knowingly assisted in the smuggling of illegal entrants, his own legal resident status was now in jeopardy. By law, he could be deported. It was not a good day for Mr. Bullhead City. This was one pickup attempt that backfired and bit the butt of the perpetrator. The only thing a little different about this particular pickup situation was that the guy had dropped the clothing somewhere the day before, then drove back into Mexico to pick the people up and then tried to drive them across the border. And he would almost certainly have made it if he hadn't had the rotten bad luck to stumble upon the same officer on both days. Even though he was sent over to INS on the first day, he still made it through.

But the Second Day got him.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

Logan Pearsall Smith

### Chapter 8

### DUI'S

Border officers did not deal with DUI's. That was the official policy. Dealing with DUI's was a police function for which we had neither training nor authority. What's more, it was a state and local matter, not a federal one. So decreed the Suits in the Reagan Building in D. C. What? Who came up with this stuff? The official policy was distant desk bound hot air as far as we were concerned. The reality was that we often encountered drunks behind the wheels of cars coming in from Mexico. No matter what the official policy was, we boots on the ground grunts had no doubts whatsoever about what to do. No way we were going to knowingly put impaired drivers onto Arizona's roads. Occasionally, especially in the earlier, more laid back days, an officer might take away the car keys of the drunk and tell him or her to have somebody come and get them and would only release the keys to a sober driver. Those were the lucky ones. More likely we'd send the suspected drunk to our secondary lot and tell the person to remain there in his or her vehicle. Then one of us would call the local PD to come to the port to give the driver a sobriety test. Most of the time a responding squad pulled into secondary within a few minutes.

I was dead set against letting drunks on the road because of an incident that happened before I became a Customs officer. A group of young soldiers from nearby Fort Huachuca went to the Mexican side of Nogales for a night of drinking. They came back through the border in the wee hours of the morning pretty well lit up. Some border officer let them drive on into the U.S. A few miles down the road they had a fatal wreck. I never forgot it. When I became a border officer I had a simple but hard and fast rule. Better DUI than dead.

Because of the frequency of DUI encounters on the border at San Luis, local Customs managers came up with a simple form. A primary officer would fill it out whenever he or she referred a person to secondary for a DUI test that resulted in an arrest. The form had a dozen phrases that the officer might check off. Things like 'odor of alcohol' or 'red eyes' or 'difficulty walking'. There was also room to put in a very brief narrative, such as 'driver staggered upon exiting the vehicle.' I used this form a number of times for people referred to secondary for sobriety checks. Really didn't give it much thought. Not until the day I was called to court to testify on one of those DUI referrals. A guy who'd been busted for DUI had hired a lawyer--probably a specialist--and was fighting it. So off to court I went. Nothing special. All of us had testified in court numerous times in drug cases.

I took along the standard DUI form I'd made out on the guy and dutifully took the stand when my name was called by the bailiff. This was hardly the first time I'd testified in court, so it all was pretty routine to me. That is, until the defense attorney started asking me questions. And then it hit me. Something had been vaguely gnawing at me as I drove over to the court and while I was waiting in the courtroom hallway to be called to testify. Now it dawned on me. Dawned on me? More like it came thundering in on me like a ton of bricks dumped on my thick memory challenged head.

I couldn't remember the incident! Hardly a damned thing about this guy or the DUI. There had been so many of them, mixed in with all of other enforcement actions we were almost continuously witness to, that I drew a near complete blank on this particular incident. All I could do was stare dumbly at the witness statement form I'd filled out and repeat what I'd checked off. I couldn't actually remember anything beyond the haziest of recollections. Kind of like trying to see during one of our Sonoran Desert dust storms. Nothing but dim, hazy outlines. The DUI form was too generic and vague to trigger the memory. I should have just flat out told the court that I couldn't recall the incident and let it go at that. Maybe it was because the San Luis PD officer investigating the case was a friend and I didn't want to let him down. Ill conceived though it might have been, I decided to try to wing it and must have seemed like a total bloody idiot to everyone in the courtroom when I tried to bluff my way through the cross examination. I might not have been physically squirming, but I sure as heck was mentally. It came as a profound thank God that's over relief when I finally stepped down from that witness stand. Later on, when I was alone, I crumpled up that useless DUI form and threw it in the trash. From then on I invariably wrote up a complete and thoroughly descriptive witness statement on every DUI referral I ever sent back to secondary. If I was called to testify in a DUI case again, I was damn well going to be a lot better prepared.

During the trial the defense attorney was doggedly going after me. On the standard DUI form one of the items I had checked off was 'red eyes'. The attorney asked me if the sand flecked desert wind couldn't have been responsible for the red eyes rather than the alcohol. It was a golden moment all law enforcement officers hope for to zap pushy defense attorneys. If only I'd had the presence of mind to use it.

"Couldn't the desert wind have caused the defendant's red eyes?", the attorney asked.

"Yes", I wish I'd replied. "If the wind smelled like alcohol." But I missed it.

The San Luis PD officer--who would eventually become a Customs officer himself--told me that after a very tough several day trial the defendant was convicted. The vehemence of the defense made sense when the San Luis officer told me that the defendant was facing four charges, not just one. Besides a charge of blood alcohol level--BAC--over .10, he was also charged with aggravated DUI, having a revoked license and having fictitious plates. He was looking at serious prison time. No wonder he was trenchantly fighting the charges.

I was frankly pretty relieved when the San Luis PD officer told me my testimony had no real impact on the case.

Over the years working the border I saw lots of DUI's. I referred lots of them. I often called up the local cops to come and give sobriety tests. And I often watched the cops giving the tests. Most of them were like you'd expect. The person being tested would stagger or be unable to focus their eyes or not be able to count or recite the alphabet. Some of these situations were pretty hilarious, as hopelessly juiced drunks took on the temporarily impossible task of trying to walk a straight line and went through all kinds of double jointed contortions trying to do it. But some were very surprising. Like the guy who passed the physical sobriety test and seemed perfectly sober, but who blew more than twice the legal limit when the cops took him over for a breath test at the nearby police station. If it hadn't been for the overpowering odor of alcohol on him, he'd have made it through. I had to wonder. Legally the guy was drunk. But if he could pass the physical tests, then was he really an impaired drunk? Laws can never cover all eventualities.

One of the many DUI's we saw was a 44 year old guy who drove up to my lane one December evening so obviously drunk that a DUI was as inevitable as road apples at a rodeo. I had him get out of his car and open his trunk to see how stable he was on his feet. The guy staggered and fell against the side of the car. I sent him back to secondary and a phone call was placed to the local PD to send an officer over to administer a DUI test. We all knew he'd fail. He did. But that was only the beginning of his troubles. He already had a DUI conviction. He had a suspended driver's license. He had no insurance. And that wasn't all. He had fictitious plates on the car. This guy was no ordinary DUI. He would be doing some hard jail time over this .I did a criminal history check on him to see if there was more to him than being a drunk. There was. He had a string of convictions. For domestic violence.

This was one DUI we wouldn't mind seeing meet Bubba in the slammer's shower room.

Just a few days later, not long before Christmas, another middle aged man, a 45 year old guy named Navarro, drove up to my primary lane in a van. This guy didn't have a strong smell of booze about him, but he had glassy, bloodshot eyes that made me wonder if he wasn't juiced on heroin or some other flying high drug. I did the usual primary test of a suspected impaired driver. I had him get out of the van and open the back doors. Not only did he fail, he failed with swacked panache. The guy teetered and wobbled and sagged and struggled heroically, but finally fell against the side of the van. Not once, but several times. Then he lurched to the back doors of the van, managed to get them open and had himself another Sisyphean struggle getting the doors closed again. I sent him back to secondary for a sobriety check. I had rotated back to the secondary lot by the time the police arrived to give the DUI test and I watched as Navarro again failed with utter finality. He was incapable of coming anywhere remotely close to walking a straight line. He wasn't even in the same universe with straight lines. And he was also in even more trouble. He was driving on a suspended license. An automatic felony.

It would not be a merry Christmas for Mr. Navarro.

At about 9:00 in the evening towards the end of March an older model Mexican plated Ford van drove up to one of the lanes at the San Luis Port of Entry. It stopped a few feet before an entry booth. I was roving in front of primary and was standing next to where the van stopped. As the van started up toward the inspectional kiosk, it veered off to the side and scraped a pillar between the lanes. Suddenly the van accelerated and crashed into a post right where I had been standing. I dodged out of the way, then stomped hotly over to the van, jerked open the passenger side door and leered inside, ready to blast off with some very unfriendly words. The words died on my tongue. The driver was slumped stupidly behind the wheel. Passed out. The guy was blitzed. Another officer, Tony Underwood, came up to the driver side door, pulled the guy out, handcuffed him and hustled him off into the secondary office.

I turned my attention to the van. It wouldn't have been the first time a drunk drove a load vehicle up to primary. So I started checking out to see if the van was loaded. It wasn't. Not with dope. The interior of the van was stacked high with shoe boxes. Inside the boxes were pairs of sandals. There were hundreds of pairs of newly manufactured Mexican sandals. The Ford couldn't have entered the primary lanes, even with a sober driver. It was commercial cargo and would have had to make a formal entry through the adjacent commercial entry facility--what we called the truck dock. Nor did the driver have any documents allowing him to cross into the U.S. at either the car lanes or the truck dock. His identification was entirely Mexican. The supervisor on duty had himself a border dilemma. The guy had no legal standing to be in the U.S., yet there he was, passed out drunk, with a van full of Mexican sandals. And he'd just had a single vehicle accident on a primary lane inside the U.S. border.

What the heck to do about it?

The supervisor did what he was supposed to do. He dealt with it. I was still out on the primary lane searching the van, so I only heard about what happened second hand. The people working the secondary office had been unable to come up with any police agency willing to respond to the port on the accident or to administer a DUI test to Mr. Many Sandals. Not the local San Luis PD. Not the Yuma County Sheriff's Office. Not the Arizona Highway patrol. Once they heard the particulars they wanted no part of it. It was Customs' problem. So the supervisor decided to return the van and driver to Mexico. He contacted the Mexican Customs officers just across the border. They agreed to take the guy and van--he was after all a citizen of their country, driving a Mexican plated van and carrying a cargo of Mexican merchandise.

Then followed one of the stranger sights I'd witnessed on the border. A U.S. officer climbed in the van and backed it away from the cement post it had crashed into. Several officers set to work on the front fender to pry to far it enough away from the wheel to allow it to be driven. Then an officer backed the van up to the Mexican border while several officers literally carried the passed out handcuffed driver over to the border, uncuffed him and turned him over to the Mexicans.

The man was so drunk that while he was in a holding cell on the U.S. side he stayed passed out in the cell with his hands still cuffed behind his back. We couldn't wake him up. And this guy had been driving a van just minutes before. He hadn't even been aware that he was entering the US. The guy could easily have injured or killed someone and not even known it had happened. We didn't know whether the van and load of sandals were his or whether he was an employee driving the van somewhere. Either way, he would have some serious explaining to do when he finally sobered up. Whether the van was his or not, he was in the hands of the Mexican cops. And the Mexican cops were not known to be overly concerned with the niceties of due process.

Mr. Many Sandals might have sobered up into a very unpleasant reality.

Not all DUI encounters were humorous or relatively benign. On a early afternoon just after Thanksgiving a couple of young guys in an Arizona plated Toyota Tercel drove up to my lane at San Luis. They were zoned out and reeked of alcohol. I did the usual quick primary sobriety check with the driver, a guy named Olivas. He stumbled and fell against the trunk while trying to open it. Besides being the unusual bumbling drunk, he and his passenger were also mean drunks. Belligerent, argumentative and abusive. The passenger even went so far as to threaten me. I sent them to secondary for a DUI check and a San Luis police officer responded. The officer duly administered a DUI test. Driver Olivas failed. The San Luis officer started to arrest him. Olivas' belligerent attitude hadn't abated any and the blitzed young dude wasn't about to let himself be arrested. He started to resist the officer's attempt to handcuff him. About then the loud mouthed passenger jumped in and joined the DUI Resistance. Those of us nearby in secondary--who had all been the targets of verbal abuse--were immediately energized when the words went beyond words into active physical resistance. The rules of the game had just changed. We enthusiastically leaped in to help the San Luis PD officer get control of the trash talking belligerent pair of young drunks.

It was one of those situations where we felt a delicate handling of the matter was unnecessary.

### Non-compliant drivers and vehicles

It was common for DUI offenders to also have other traffic related offenses. No driver's license. Suspended license. No registration. No insurance. Fictitious plates. They were in various degrees of non-compliance. In the case of DUI's, we could take these non-compliant drivers off the roads. But where the driver was non-compliant, but stone cold sober? We sent dozens, scores, even hundreds of them down the road into the U.S. every single bloody day on the border.

And usually there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

When I moved from Yuma County to other side of the state in Cochise County, my insurance agent sent me a notice that my car insurance rates were going down. Down? That was a switch. Thinking that they might have changed the kind of coverage I had, I called her up to find out what was going on. And she patiently explained to me that there were so many uninsured mostly Mexican drivers on the roads in Yuma County that the insurance rates there were considerably higher. I already knew about the uninsured drivers--I had been one of those officers knowingly waving them on into the U.S.--but I had no idea it went so far as to influence insurance rates that much.

Non-compliant drivers and vehicles. Another of the underreported stories of the border.

It doesn't take long for it to dawn on a new border officer that there is devil of a big double standard on the border. American residents are expected to have legal registration on their vehicles, to have up to date insurance and to have a valid driver's license. But for someone crossing into the U.S. from Mexico? No such rules apply. So every day a border officer will almost universally encounter cars with drivers who have no insurance to drive in the U.S. Often they will have no valid registration or title for the vehicle. Sometimes they don't have a driver's license. Many of these vehicles are Arizona plated, though the driver claims to live in Mexico. Some will be U.S. residents illegally driving Mexican plated vehicles, as was the case with one of my neighbors in Yuma. And of those who are U.S. residents coming from Mexico, the same lack of rules applies. They might have no legal driver's license, or a suspended license. They might have no insurance. They might have no registration or title for the car. But it is legally a state and local issue, not a federal one. So the hordes of illegal drivers are waved on into the U.S. every single day of the year.

There were a few paltry attempts to deal with this legal conundrum. Mostly small scale. But there was one occasion when state and local police agencies launched a major operation to get the non-compliant drivers off the roads. Several officers came to the port of entry and began issuing citations to the numerous non-compliant drivers that we referred from the primary lanes. There being a nearly endless supply of non-compliant drivers, they were writing lots of citations. I can't say for certain that the following is what happened, but it is a very likely scenario. Much of it was related to me by other officers from various agencies.

The phones starting ringing off the hooks. The people were calling the politicians and the politicians were calling the police agencies. What was this about harassing the poor Mexicans? And the local businesses were complaining. All of this ticketing of non-compliant drivers coming through the border was bad for business. A lot of pressure was brought to bear. The phone calls went up the pecking order to those remote ethereal beings on high--the Very Big Bosses. Whatever the reason, the fact is that the operation was suspended. The hordes of non-compliant drivers returned to the roads. It was back to business as usual.

And all of those illegal drivers were back on Arizona's roads.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

Jim Horning

### Chapter 9

### Compartments

When I first went to work for Customs on the Mexican Border, I found it hard to believe all the smuggling tales the border wise veteran officers used to spin. Like a bunch of grizzled Minnesota duck hunters sitting around a potbellied stove after a day of slogging the sloughs, I thought there was a lot of colorful embellishment going on in the interests of enhancing the telling of a good tale. Especially concerning the almost endless variety of smuggling techniques being used. Most particularly the range and quality of the smuggling compartments. It didn't take long for reality to batter it's way through my skeptical thick head and for me to grasp that these people really weren't exaggerating. I'd stepped into the Twilight Zone of the Border. And this Twilight Zone was real.

Over my years on the Arizona border I saw with no little amazement just about every conceivable part of a vehicle used to smuggle narcotics. I felt like I'd led a sheltered existence in life before Customs. Who thought up this stuff, anyway? Small amounts of drugs could be found in almost endless permutations of concealment in places such as shift boots, vents, ashtrays, headers, under floor mats and in a myriad of other spots such as in the head and tail lights. But that was the small stuff. The big stuff, meaning multi-kilo, could be--and was--anywhere.

Tires. Mounted on the car and/or in the spares. Bumpers--front and rear. Doors. Seats. Backrests. Floors. Roofs. Gas tanks. Hoods. Engine compartments. Some actually inside the engine, as in the Dodge Ram pickups where ten pound cocaine loads were found going north and money going south, or the heroin found at Nogales that was actually inside vehicle engines. Side panels. Quarter panels. Frame rails. Trunks. Tailgates. Trunk lids. Compartments built into fender wells. Compartments built into trunks. Compartments built behind rear seats. False beds in pickup trucks. Air bags. Air conditioning units. Dashes. Vent systems. Factory spaces, such as under windshields and in many other places in different cars. I even saw a load of dope that my Cochise County neighbor Alan Contreras found in a washing machine sitting in the bed of a pickup truck in Nogales.

Some of these were so well done as to be virtually undetectable. They were found by the use of K-9's, or by the use of the new generation of tools that were just becoming available to the line officers. The K910 Buster density meter. The fiber optic scope. The X-ray units, large and small. At times we quite frankly had to admire the ingenuity and craftsmanship of the best of the smugglers. What nifty things could they have done with those talents if they put them to legitimate use? Some of these guys were really good.

Not all the compartments and smuggling attempts were slick professional jobs. The smuggling organizations ranged the human spectrum, from the ominous big cartels to good ol' boy regional family based groups to local independent wannabes to wildcatting individuals. And the smugglers themselves ranged from the thoroughly professional to the competent middle level trafficker to the naïve beginner to the almost comically inept to the wild haired wonder boy who'd dreamed up a surefire rags to riches smuggling scheme that was a lot more likely to get him jail time than money. Had I been born five or ten years later--after the 60's drug tsunami engulfed America--I might well have fallen into that group myself. But I wasn't. Fate plunked me down just on the edge of the last lingering twilight before the Dawn of the Drug Age. So I ended on the cop side of the drug war. The Good Guy side. At least we liked to look at it that way. Maybe, to keep our challenged brains from being hopelessly scrambled, we had to look at it that way.

In mid October at the Port of San Luis, just before midnight, I was about to end a double shift. I was tired. 16 hours, mostly on your aching feet, makes for a long day. Just then an old blue four door Oldsmobile drove into the secondary inspection lot. Thoughts about going home to flop exhausted into bed fled before that approaching venerable Olds. It was a classic load car. And the driver was such a teeth rattling shaker that I immediately took the guy into the office as a precaution against flight. I'd lost a few runners in recent weeks and wasn't about to lose any more. The referral slip attached to the windshield confirmed our initial observations. Obvious load car, the slip said, driver nervous. Nervous? The guy was shaking so bad I half expected the fillings in his teeth to pop out.

The driver, a young Hispanic dude--which means absolutely nothing, since just about everybody at San Luis was Hispanic--said he had bought the car two weeks earlier. But he had no title. There were no papers of any kind in the car. The young man did not even know the exact year of the car. First it was an '85, then an '84, then an '80.This set our heads to wagging. How many young studs buy a car and don't have a title, bill of sale or even know what year the car is?

But the real clincher came when veteran canine officer, toupee topped Eric 'Scooter' Anderson, ran his K-9 on the Olds. The dog came up with a blank faced nothing there boss look, but Anderson kept saying "this roof feels thick. There is no dome light in here". Still, the dog hadn't alerted to the car, and the K-9 was a reliable dog, so the likelihood of a load did an abrupt nose dive. I pulled out a density meter, a Buster, and slid it slowly across the roof. Nothing. Normal readings. But a closer look at the roof revealed something that was about as normal as a three headed chicken. A fresh from the chop shop custom manufactured compartment. A plate had been built to extend across the entire interior roof of the vehicle and then covered over with fabric. The plate added a couple of extra inches to the roof space for a total of four to five. Easily enough for a good sized compartment capable of carrying a substantial load of drugs. Maybe a hundred pounds or so. We pushed upwards on the plate. Little resistance. It moved easily. Too easily. We were disappointed. The compartment was empty.

It wasn't a bad job. But the smugglers' mechanics had neglected to add a dome light, which Anderson spotted right away. As we looked more carefully at the false roof we could see the places above the door jambs where metal had been cut away to allow fixing the plate to the jamb. Not real obvious, though. It probably wouldn't have been noticed if an officer didn't make the decision to check the vehicle out more thoroughly. A different driver and it might have made it through. But they chose the wrong guy to drive the car. With the spooked shaker behind the wheel it didn't have much chance of making it through. That is, unless it had already been arranged for the car to make it through. That was a subject that always made us uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.

There wasn't even a sliver of a shadow of doubt that this was a compartment specifically manufactured to transport contraband. Empty, but a compartment. As soon as we'd figured it out, we began an effort to minimize the driver's suspicion about what was going on. Bobby Washington--a dapper, rail thin, ceiling-scraping 6'7" black officer and Viet Nam Army vet--went to get the supervisor's approval to cut the car loose. Official Customs policy was that we should seize the aging Olds for having a non-factory secret compartment. We didn't want to seize it. We figured that seizing an old car worth a few hundred bucks was a poor choice when we might be able to catch it trying to come through loaded with dope. I went in to try to calm the jumpy driver while Washington sought out the supervisor on duty, Ralph Quick--himself a near-giant, 6'4" and a tough old farm and ranch boy from the days when Arizona grew hard men on its hardscrabble soil.

Quick came over, sage old border hand that he was, eyeballed the compartment and immediately recognized the situation and agreed to let it go in the attempt to catch it with a load of drugs. I went to where the jumpy driver was fidgeting in a chair in the secondary office and tried to convince the guy that we had thought it was a stolen vehicle and that was the reason for our interest. It was an almost impossible long shot, but we still were hoping it just might work. He was so nervously inept that it was likely that he was only some clueless soul that the traffickers had recruited to drive the car across the Border.

After talking to the driver in the closed off area inside the Customs building where he couldn't see what was going on in the secondary lot, I motioned him back outside. As we came out the door three officers were clustered near the car studying the compartment. All three jumped in choreographic unison and scattered from the car like a covey of startled desert quail. It couldn't have been much more obvious. Washington, in particular, was almost hilarious. He was so treetop tall that he looked like a perambulating cell phone tower as he attempted to walk coolly away from the car, looking at some papers in his hand and mumbling something about them as he passed. The whole scene was the next door neighbor of being the antithesis of subtle. At that moment I think we all knew that unless this driver came from the sub-basement of the human genome, he must have realized that the compartment had been found.

Despite that, the process was completed when the guy drove out of the secondary lot in the aging Oldsmobile. The car was entered in the computer system--TECS--as a lookout, and the driver's name was also put in as a lookout. We didn't have much confidence in anything coming of it.

And, as far as we knew, nothing ever did....

But empty compartments were the exception. More than an exception. They were about as common a steak sandwich in a trendy vegan restaurant. When we found compartments, they almost always were not empty. Mostly marijuana. But also cocaine and methamphetamine, and, less often and in smaller amounts, heroin. Once in a while there'd be smuggled prescription drugs. And, on rare occasions, animals.

One of those unempty compartments was in a gas tank behind the seat in a battered old pickup truck. 38 pounds of marijuana. Former Marine--don't ever call a Marine an ex-Marine--Frank Alshouse, a good natured tough guy who was also sometimes disarmingly funny and even naive, was the seizing officer. The old truck came through right next to me in the lane of a new Immigration officer named 'Paco'. Ray Nagy, a veteran officer, happened to be walking by and the new officer beckoned him over to get Ray's take on the pickup. The truck showed a crossing history at the gargantuan perpetually frenetic San Ysidro Port of Entry south of San Diego, but the hapless driver lied about it, saying he was local. That alone would have set off the warning bells in any veteran officer's mind. But Paco was a new guy and still learning his way around.

Nagy figured it out quick enough and told Paco to walk the truck back to secondary. Hard working retired Marine Don Trusty ran his K-9 'Rock' on the truck. Rock alerted to the gas tank. I helped out as Trusty and Alshouse pulled out the dope. The compartment took up almost the entire tank. We drained the tank of the gallon or so of gas in it and set to checking out the tank itself. First impression? Cheesy job. The Bondo work over the compartment seams on the back of the tank was very obvious. The seams had been attached with rivets. A small access plate of roughly 6 by 12 inches was at the bottom of the compartment and was attached with screws. The marijuana inside was not uniformly packaged. Some of it was the usual professionally done brown-tape-wrapped packaging of compressed bricks. But some of the bricks were just wrapped up in plastic shopping bags. Odd. And sloppy. An altogether thoroughly amateur job. Oh, that they were all so obvious! Not much future in the dope smuggling world for these guys. But you had to wonder. All those crossings at San Ysidro? Could the pickup have been loaded then? And done as sloppily as this one? Did the arresting agent check that out?

If he did, we never heard about it.

The same year. Cinco de Mayo. May 5th. Cinco de Mayo is one of Mexico's holidays, often celebrated as a kind of independence day. It actually commemorates the day in 1862 when a Mexican army beat an invading French army at the battle of Puebla. It was at about the same time when my great-great grandfather was dodging whizzing minie balls in Virginia from a Yankee army doing their damnedest to kill his Rebel butt. The Yankees didn't get 2Xgrandpa, nor did the French succeed in beating the Mexicans at Puebla. The Mexicans clobbered the French at the battle. On Cinco De Mayo. 1862.

What the Mexicans often neglect to mention is that they might have won this battle, but the French eventually came back to Puebla with reinforcements, beat the bejabbers out of the Mexican Army, overran the city and went on to take Mexico City. The Mexicans had to endure a few more years of French rule under the Emperor Maximilian before the unwelcome foreign francophone interlopers were finally booted out. Maximilian was duly permanently done in by the Mexicans. The French learned their lesson. They left Mexico to the Mexicans.

For some weird minded reason, I was fantasizing about the thought, of the French coming back out of the past and taking on the Mexicans again. Here. San Luis. The Battle of San Luis. The victor would get all the sand they could ever want. But the French Army didn't materialize out of the past to liven things up for this year's Cinco de Mayo. It was pretty quiet. Quieter than we expected. Still, slow or busy, all it took was one car to liven things up. A car. Or, as in this case....

A pickup truck.

I was working the line when a black Mazda pickup rolled up in my lane. The truck had two male Hispanics in it, the driver, Jose Romero, and the passenger, who we will call Mr. Garcia. Their trip was one of the Top Ten border crossing reasons. They were just going over to San Luis, Arizona, to do some shopping. The truck, they said, was not theirs and they had borrowed it for the shopping trip. I shot a glance at the screen of the aging computer terminal in the clunky little outhouse shaped booth on my lane. The vehicle had no travel history. I double checked the license plate number. No mistake. A local vehicle that had never crossed the border before? That called for at least an initial brief inspection on the line. So I launched into my two minute line drill.

I began to check the vehicle. The pickup bed--which had a liner insert over the metal bed--seemed somehow wrong. I used a K910 Buster density meter on the truck bed and came up with readings in the 70's. Very high. But not definitive. The high readings could have been caused by the gas tank underneath, so I casually sidled over to the other side of the bed and tried the Buster in several places where there was no gas tank beneath the bed. Same readings. 70's. I bent down to look at the bed through the wheel well. The bed's bottom had a fresh black coating on it. Home run! The home team had just scored. There was something on the order of a 99.9% chance that this baby was loaded. This was one of those backslapping hoorah moments that was the payoff for enduring the tedious wearing grind of a Customs officer's usual workday. I was excited. Very excited. And trying darned hard not to show it.

Though my heart was thumping so hard it almost seemed to be bouncing off the sides of my rib cage, I tried to look and act casually unconcerned as I went slowly back around the vehicle to driver Romero's window. I already had his I-551 Resident Alien Immigration Card. It was routine to hold the driver's identification while checking a vehicle. I asked passenger Garcia for his document. He looked at me blankly. Both guys were now starting to look nervous. Garcia held his Immigration card up for me to see, but he didn't look like he was any mood to hand it over any time soon. The guy had a Vulcan death grip on the card. I told him several times to give it to me. Finally I had to reach over and grab the card out of his hand.

There were two men in the truck, and the Mexican Border was only a short sprint away, so I made a quick decision not to try to take them down right there on the lane. But I still thought these guys might try to run, so I hastily scribbled out a referral slip and tried to deflect their suspicion by telling the pair that their Immigration documents might need to be renewed and US Immigration was going to have to check their records. I instructed them--all this was in Spanish--to drive to the rear of the Customs building and park there. As the truck drove towards secondary, I followed anxiously behind it with the documents and referral slip clutched in my fist, hoping they didn't try to make a run for it.

Several inspectors were in the back, including new inspector Joe Rodriguez, a retired US Marine sergeant who was a good worker but was still a trainee, and a sloppy obese officer who was very spotty and unenthusiastic about Customs enforcement. I always tried to avoid giving referrals to this guy. But also there was Tom Schmunk, who my down home Indiana grandpa would have called a crackerjack, one of the best if not the best of the Customs inspectors. I called him over, handed him the Immigration documents and referral slip and told him that the truck bed bustered very high. The driver and passenger--especially the passenger--jumped out of the truck almost before it stopped and were up on the balls of their feet, weaving like boxers and looking as though they were about to jackrabbit for Mexico. They didn't get the chance.

Schmunk found the load almost immediately by dropping the tailgate and seeing the unnatural thickness of the bed. Tom didn't hesitate an eye blink of a moment. He hadn't missed the run-rabbit-run body language of Romero and Garcia. He and the other inspectors grabbed the dudes' arms and physically removed them into the secondary office, where they were patted down and placed in holding cells. K-9 officer Don Trusty was also in the area and ran his K-9 'Rock' on the truck. The dog went nuts over the truck bed. Schmunk and company later removed 122.3 pounds of marijuana from the false bed of the Mazda.

The passenger and driver both attempted to pretend that they did not know the truck was loaded. They almost pulled it off, but a persistent Customs agent managed to prevail on a reluctant (he wanted a slam dunk with a confession) prosecuting attorney to authorize arrest and prosecution. The pair was arrested. I thought we'd have to go to court on that one, but don't recall (I went to court on lots of cases and can't recall them all) if we actually did end up in court on this one. I do remember the passenger walking through a pedestrian lane some weeks later as an ordinary border crosser, recognizing him and checking his records to see if he was a deportable alien. He wasn't. They hadn't prosecuted him. Complicity in attempting to smuggler 122.3 pounds of marijuana wasn't enough to prosecute? And the guy still legally had his immigration document? Yep. Happened all the time. For a variety of reasons.

Lots of ingredients go into the prosecutorial stew that flavor the decision on whether or not to prosecute a particular individual for a particular offense. Some are pretty straightforward. Degree of culpability. The offender cut a deal and agreed to cooperate. Lack of evidence. And the big one--lack of resources--overworked, understaffed and under funded prosecutor's offices. But there are also reasons that set a Customs inspector's teeth to grinding. Lazy and/or sloppy Customs agents and prosecutors. Political decisions--like going for the more high profile, media friendly cases. Many times we were told that the federal prosecutors wouldn't take cases unless a confession had already been obtained. If it wasn't damn near a sure thing, they didn't want to hear about it. And of course there were always those who were looking for dramatic cases that would be career builders for themselves.

I don't have a clue what the reasoning or justification was behind not prosecuting Mr. Garcia, who was in the passenger seat of the black Mazda pickup. But I do have a clue about his guilt. His behavior left me with absolutely no doubt that the guy was complicit in the attempting smuggling of 122.3 pounds of marijuana. How many star crossed souls are doing prison time for far less amounts of dope? But that was--and is--the border. What bothered me the most about this situation was that this guy still had his Immigration document. And there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. Oh, well....That was the often maddening Byzantine world of border reality.

A different day. I was working primary lane three at just after 10:00 on a warm June San Luis morning. An Oregon plated GMC Caballero pulled up. Heraclio Sandoval, a 42 year old Hispanic legal resident alien, was behind the wheel. Sandoval's story was that he'd been visiting his father in San Luis Rio Colorado for a couple of days and was on his way back to his job in Santa Ana, California. Sandoval claimed he'd just purchased the Caballero two weeks earlier. In the bed of the truck was a travel bag and other items indicative of someone doing just what Sandoval said he had been doing. Just a workaday guy on his way back to the grind after a couple of days off.

But there was the Caballero. GMC hadn't made Caballeros for at least a decade, yet this older vehicle immediately grabbed the attention with its clean, spotless appearance. It looked like someone's lovingly maintained classic car. The interior looked almost showroom new. Only on later close inspection did we notice that the interior had been very carefully cleaned and refurbished rather than replaced. The exterior, too, was clean and well-kept looking. Again, later inspection showed that to be true only on the driver's side facing the inspection booth. The far side of the vehicle did show some light damage. Still, the overall impression was of an almost immaculately clean vehicle, one that had recently been detailed. As in restoration. As in readying it for resale.

Or as in readying it to try to run some dope.

The Caballero was one of those hybrid car/pickups that Detroit made a generation ago. As smuggling vehicles, they had names that might now seem ironic. Chevrolet's El Camino, Ford's Ranchero and GMC's Caballero. The Caballero, like the Ranchero or El Camino, was a hybrid car/pickup that looked like a car with the back half chopped down to make a pickup bed. A couple of things about this Caballero caught my attention. The bed had a liner in it. When used to smuggle contraband, this kind of vehicle often had an access plate in the pickup bed that opened into a storage compartment behind the seat and under the bed. The liner covered over where an access plate might possibly be and hid from view any possible signs of recent tampering.

The second thing that set off the beginning warning bells was something intangible about the synergic impression of Sandoval and the Caballero together. A stoic reticence in his behavior, the feeling of the vehicle almost being a prop--like a stage setting. These inklings hadn't quite consciously surfaced yet and were more of an opaque sensing of something wrong. Wrong enough, in my suspicious Customs border officer mind, to take a Buster density meter to the bed. I got a variety of readings, from normal 20's to suspicious 60's. The 60's reading iced it. Nothing with a reading that high was getting by without first making the trip back to secondary for a more thorough inspection. I began writing out a referral slip. As I was writing it I told Sandoval he'd have to drive the vehicle back to secondary. As he pulled away I noticed his hands. They had begun to tremble. Port Runner! The thought suddenly came galloping into my head that the guy might make a run for it. I turned and watched anxiously as the Caballero drove towards secondary. If he had been toying with the idea of making a run for it, he decided against it. The Caballerro pulled obediently into the secondary lot. I breathed a sign of relief.

And maybe Sandoval did, too, when he saw an unthreatening looking mature woman walking up to the Caballero. If he did, his relief would be very short lived. Loretta Gamble plucked the referral slip from the windshield, carefully read it and then proceeded to ruin Sandoval's day and a whole bunch of days still down the you're busted road to the slammer. With one Greek parent and one American black parent, Loretta Gamble was another of the port's 'Obamas'--multi-ethnic and/or multi-racial. A blue eyed, dusky skinned single Mom from New York, Loretta was one of the dependable inspectors who could be trusted to do a thorough job on secondary inspections. Loretta figured the Caballero to be a good bet for a load car and asked the very improbable looking K-9 officer, pony tailed, potato shaped CEO David Baron, to run his K-9 'Max' on the vehicle. Max alerted behind the back seat. Loretta, Baron and a senior inspector named Ron Mann took a look and discovered that the normal wheel sized storage compartment behind the seat of the Caballero was only half the size it should be. A false wall had been built into the factory compartment and sealed off. It was a very professional job and was freshly refurbished like much of the rest of the vehicle. The access plate was from the top of the bed, under the bed liner, which covered the plate. Loretta, Baron and Mann pulled off the bed liner to expose a truck bed also freshly refurbished. The access plate had been Bondoed over and painted and was not immediately obvious to the unaided or untrained eye. A couple of well aimed whacks with a hammer changed that. The Bondo broke lose and the outline of the access plate popped into view.

Loretta and crew pulled 70.3 pounds of marijuana out of the compartment. It was the first time Customs officers had pulled dope out of this Caballero but it wasn't the first time dope had been in it. The presence of different layers and colors of Bondo on the access plate meant that the compartment had been used before. Sandoval confessed and apparently did not implicate anyone else. I was told that he said he was to meet someone in Yuma and pass the car off to them, and that was all he knew. Most mules didn't know much, and had little to tell the investigating agents even if they had wanted to. Which probably was why many of the agents were less than enthusiastic about port seized contraband. They were after all investigators and many of the port cases turned out to be investigative dead ends.

But that didn't mean load drivers like Sandoval didn't go to jail. They often did. Was Sandoval one of them? Maybe not. He did plead guilty to the transportation of marijuana for sale before Judge Steward Bradshaw of the Yuma County Superior Court.

But I could find no record of him being in the Arizona state prison system.

On a different San Luis day a sharp looking Nissan Maxima drove up to one of the primary booths. The officer working the booth routinely punched the plate number into the computer. The response was anything but routine. The vehicle came up as a lookout. What we called a TECS hit. Four young Hispanics, two of them juveniles, were in the Nissan. Twenty one year old Eliazar Robles was the oldest. All were from the galloping megapolis of Los Angeles. The vehicle was escorted to secondary. As the four occupants were being removed into the Customs secondary office, CEO A.J. Chavez was running his K-9 "Cabo" on the Nissan. Cabo was 'hitting' the rear bumper even as the four young people were being escorted inside. That electrified the place in a hurry. The several officers present saw the dog alerting and immediately launched into the usual drill for load drivers. Male officers patted down the male suspects, female officers patted down the female suspects and the four were placed in separate detention cells, filling the place up to its four cell capacity .One of the officers shoved a probe into the rear bumper of the car. The probe came out with marijuana odor and debris. The Nissan was loaded. We drove the car to the rear search compound and up onto the hydraulic rack. Then we settled in to wait for the Customs duty agent to show up. I started on the usual lengthy seizure paperwork on the load while we waited.

About an hour later Special Agent David Fry, a salty, down to earth long time Customs officer, responded to the port. I'd noticed the young driver's apprehensiveness and told Fry that I thought the kid would break easily. A computer check of his criminal history revealed that he had a long series of minor brushes with the law but nothing really hard core. Fry went into the detention cell to talk to the young man and almost immediately received a confession. Robles was so anxious to talk, Fry later said, that he had hardly finished reading him his rights before the kid was roaring off to the verbal races of confession.

Robles had a story. And maybe even a peculiar notion of honor. He told Fry that the other kids in the car had no clue that he was smuggling dope. The kid said that he and the other young man, a juvenile, had dropped off the two girls (a citizen of El Salvador who was Robles' girlfriend and the mother of his child, and another juvenile). After dropping off the two girls, giving them money and telling them to go shopping, Robles said he told his juvenile buddy what was going on as they drove to the place where the marijuana was to be loaded into the vehicle. After the dope was loaded into the car, they returned to pick up the girls and headed back across the border.

With the four young people in a car filled with souvenirs bought by the girls, they might have made it through had it not been for the vehicle being a TECS hit. But only might have. Most officers would probably have sent the car to secondary because of the peculiar circumstances attached to it. A four or five hour drive from L.A. to buy souvenirs in a backwater Sonora border town when huge, bustling, probably cheaper and certainly a lot more interesting Tijuana was closer?

After Robles confessed, we went to the vehicle and raised it up on the rack. I had a trainee assigned to me, Laura Ball, a good looking woman that the self styled port studs salivated over. From a safe distance. She was a body builder and a very active and athletic young woman who could flash angry quick as lightning on a hot summer night. Nobody was challenging her to an arm wrestling contest. If there was a fight, you wanted Laura on your side. But it was getting close to midnight and she left because her shift was over and she was not yet authorized to work overtime. Too bad. It turned out that we could have used her energy and muscle.

David Fry and I went to the Nissan and began to scope it out. Right away we saw fresh tool marks on the rear bumper bolts. We removed the bolts. The only thing visible through the factory holes in the bottom and inside of the bumper was Styrofoam insulation. We knew marijuana was there because the rear of the bumper had been probed earlier with an ice pick like tool and come out with odor and marijuana bits. So we pulled the bumper away from the frame. The marijuana packages were clearly visible inside. The Styrofoam insulation had been scooped out to make room for the shaped marijuana packages, while still having the exterior of the Styrofoam facing out to the holes so as to give the appearance of normalcy. These guys knew that we used inspection mirrors to check bumpers and looked into the factory holes in them for signs of contraband. The odd thing was that there were only two packages. One on each side of the bumper. Big packages, true, each weighing over seven pounds. But still only two. This seemed peculiar. Robles and crew had come all the way from California for just two marijuana packages? A cursory search of the vehicle's underside did not reveal any more packages. Nor did a initial search of the seats, trunk and tires.

Robles had told Fry that the people who loaded the car said they'd put eighteen kilos of marijuana in the vehicle. Both Fry and I thought it very improbable that he was lying. A kid busted for attempted smuggling and facing jail time wasn't about to exaggerate the amount of dope in the car. The name of that game is minimize, not maximize. Fry went back in the building where the kid was in a detention cell and asked the young man exactly where the marijuana was. Robles replied that he had seen 'them' around the right rear door and the air conditioning ducts. We went back to the car and immediately found a single package in the right rear door. All the other doors were empty, though the factory paper seal on the inside of all the doors had been cut. They'd probably been previously used for smuggling. This didn't look to be the Nissan's first shot at smuggling dope.

Robles was right about the door, so we took the kid at his word and turned our collective inspectional attention to the air conditioning ducts under the passenger side dash. I corkscrewed my aging body underneath and took a look. The duct work appeared normal. There were no telltale signs, such as tool marks on the screws, of tampering. I couldn't see anything unusual looking up under the dash from my upside down corkscrewed viewpoint. But we still were taking Robles at his word, so I removed the screws holding the glove compartment box in place and pulled the glove box out. That opened a little window into the interior of the dash. And there were the first of the packages. We set to work with screwdrivers and pliers and wrenches to widen the hole. As we pulled more of the dash off we saw more packages. Finally a large compartment was opened up that had been made by stripping out the guts of the air conditioning duct and blower system inside the passenger compartment under the dash. Another thirty pounds of marijuana was removed from this compartment. It looked as though it could have held considerably more. The total removed from the vehicle was 45.6 pounds. Pretty close to the 18 kilos--almost 40 pounds--that Robles had said was there.

After we took out the dope, Fry arrested Robles. He released the other three. The Nissan was seized, so the trio of young people called someone to come pick them up and then set to taking all of their personal belongings items out of the car. The two girls were periodically crying as they were emptying the car of their effects. The Nissan didn't belong to Robles. The owner was his sister, who had the same address as he did in L.A. Robles claimed that this was his maiden voyage as a smuggler. The kid's story was that he was a first timer who had gone by a shop in Mexico and had them alter the car for smuggling and then load up the marijuana. It only took an hour. So the kid said. We would have believed Bill Clinton was a drag queen before we would have believed that.

The compartments in the bumper and the dash were way beyond Robles' version of reality. They were far too sophisticated--at least the dash--for this to be a first time operation. The vehicle had 12 or 15 crossings in San Luis within the past few months. That many local crossings? With the owner living in L.A.? We thought that at least some of those crossings must have been loads. I was relieved to see that the one time the vehicle came through me, just a week earlier, I had referred it to secondary. The thought came slithering into my mind. Had it been loaded then? Had someone in secondary missed a load? I'll never know it for an absolute certainty, but I believe it likely that the vehicle was also loaded then. Some sloppy or lazy officer had missed it. Good God! If I had checked it on the line, maybe I was the officer who missed it. I got rid of that thought in a hurry. Too much second guessing was the kiss of inspectional death for a line officer.

I worked on the seizure until 4:30 in the morning. Somebody picked up the three kids who'd been with Robles in the Nissan. I don't know if anyone noticed who picked them up. I went home.

Eliazar Robles went to the Yuma County Jail.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

Mark Twain

### A Quartet of Crotches

So you're a wanabee smuggler who's going to try body carrying hard drugs over the border. But where on the body? Drugs under shirts or jackets or blouses, or wrapped around the legs, could easily be detected by the briefest of border pat downs. So where to put the drugs? The choice quickly narrows to one. Where else but the crotch? They don't call the crotch the private area for nothing. It would take more than a simple frisk to find a chunk of cocaine or methamphetamine or heroin or some other illicit substance stuffed into someone's crotch. And what officer is going to go probing people's private parts in public at a border crossing station? So that's it. The smart money settles on the crotch. The Privates. The Naughty Bits. The Forbidden Zone. The smugglers' all purpose, all weather repository of choice.

The Crotch.

It was a lovely evening in San Luis. Late October, still warm but no longer the blast furnace heat of the deep desert summer. We had closed up the port building and moved the pedestrian entry outside to an unused car lane. It was a week night. There wasn't much car traffic. Even less pedestrian traffic. It was pleasantly mild and quiet and we were all enjoying the respite from the noise and bustle and heat. I was lolling at the improvised outdoors pedestrian entry when a guy came walking up from Mexico. I immediately zeroed in him. This dude was something you almost never saw this time of the evening coming on foot from Mexico into San Luis, Arizona.

He was a white guy. A Rubio. A blond white guy. Very mainstream, middle class looking dude. And he was not only a young white guy, but a very fit and muscular looking young white guy. Which conjured up a single word in my skeptical border officer mind. Steroids. The Red Flag of Suspicion was already up before I even talked to the guy. But the alarm bells weren't going off quite yet. It was mid summer and the guy was dressed very lightly. T-shirt and shorts and shoes. So where was a guy going to hide steroids when he wasn't dressed much beyond beach basic? It didn't even seem that the Forbidden Zone--the crotch--could have concealed much beneath his light summer clothing. But he did have a small gym bag with him. That at least required a look see. So I called him over.

The guy identified himself as a U.S. citizen by the name of Breitenbach. I asked him what he was doing in San Luis. He said he was passing through the area and thought he'd go into Mexico to take a look around. Look around San Luis? Did this guy have an abnormally low entertainment threshold? There wasn't much of anything to see across the border on the Mexican side of San Luis unless you were into shabby buildings and denuded landscapes. For that matter, there wasn't much to see on the Arizona side of San Luis. I took a look in his bag. Nothing illegal. I asked him if he had any steroids. He said no. I wasn't so sure. There remained the possibility of the Forbidden Zone and I told the buff young dude I was going to do a quick pat down. I moved to begin the search. Up that point he had been pretty calm. No more. The guy's hands commenced a subtle but clearly visible shaking.

"Do you have anything hidden on your body?" I asked.

"No", he replied, not at all looking like he meant it. I started to pat him down.

"Wait", Breitenbach said abruptly. I stopped. "OK", he said. "OK, I'll do it." Then he began to pull packets and vials out of the Forbidden Zone one after the other. By this time some other officers had noticed what was going on and walked over to watch bemusedly while the guy kept pulling packages of steroids out of where no one would have thought there was enough room to hide much of anything. He ended up pulling a total of three vials and 150 tablets of steroids out of his underwear in numerous small packets. He had enough steroids to juice up the New York Yankees starting lineup

Breitenbach's tourist visit to San Luis was about to be unexpectantly prolonged.

It was another summer evening in San Luis. The pedestrian entry had not yet been moved outdoors and I was sitting at the counter next to the pedestrian gate--that prosaic yet semi-mythical chunk of shiny metal turnstile that gave access to the Great Cornucopia of the United States of America. I was the keeper of the gate. I was the man. The man with the power of the gate. The man with control over people's entrance into the U.S. The spotlight was on. I was the guardian of the border. I was ready.

Except there was no one around. Empty. So I just sat there, probably looking dumb, waiting for my half hour on the pedestrian gate to pass. I was diddling with the computer terminal. From the corner of my eye I saw someone come through the double doors from Mexico. I turned to look. And up went the Red Flag again. Maybe not quite of suspicion. Not yet. But certainly of curiosity. Sauntering in from Mexico was what some of my younger testosterone blasted co-workers would have called a real babe.

A good looking, shapely and minimally clad young woman came walking up to me with a toothy smile. She had on very brief shorts and a summery tank top and tennis shoes, like she was dressed for beach volleyball. She was alone. What? This good looking girl? Dressed like this? Alone? In San Luis? At night? And she was that rarest of pedestrians at any hour in San Luis, and even more so at night. In a place that was 110% Hispanic, this young woman wasn't anybody's idea of Hispanic. Pura gringa, this one.

There had to be something more to this story.

Her name was Bell. Mainstream, middle of the road middle American who looked like she should be hanging out with her buddies in a sports bar in Yuma. So what the heck was she doing in not so safe after dark San Luis by herself at night? Which is exactly what I asked her.

"I was with friends", she said, still flashing me her toothy smile. "But they wanted to keep on partying and I wanted to go home." She shot me one of those cute and innocent looks that probably would have immediately bought her a ticket north with most of my gonad juiced younger co-workers. "So I decided to come back across the border and go home." While she was talking I ran her name in the computer. Nothing. But I did notice that on a closer look her youthful beauty was a little faded around the edges.

"Do you have a car on this side?" I asked.

"Yes, sir", she replied, nodding towards the U.S. side of the border. "Right over there." In an intuitive flash I asked the simple question that changed everything.

"Do you have your car keys with you?" It was the right question to ask. From my viewpoint, anyway. Not hers. The smile left Bell's face. Her friendly, calm demeanor fled before obvious alarm. She began to rummage through her purse, growing more and more nervous and agitated as she did. By then I had a pretty good inkling of what was going on. She was still rummaging through her purse, approaching panic, when I picked up the intercom phone and called back to the secondary office for a female officer to come over to the pedestrian gate.

In a few moments feisty little Teresa Guzman came determinedly marching through the door from secondary. Teresa was an intense firecracker of an officer. If there was anything to be found, Teresa would find it. I took her aside and explained to her what had happened, and that I suspected the young woman to be a body carrier. Teresa took Bell into a side room, leaving the door ajar with me standing just out of view beside it in case she needed immediate assistance or a corroborating witness. It wasn't much more than a minute or two before diminutive Teresa poked her head around the corner and gave me a thumb's up.

"It's positive", she said.

Positive. But positive what? Pat downs by definition are done over a person's clothing. Teresa had patted Bell down and when she got to the young woman's Forbidden Zone had felt something hard protruding from the girl's private parts. Teresa knew there was sure as heck something there besides the usual feminine equipment. But exactly what? Removing objects from body cavities was a touchy subject in more ways than one with Customs, and Teresa didn't want to proceed any further without discussing it with the supervisor on duty. So we removed Bell to the Customs secondary office where the young woman solved the dilemma herself by agreeing to voluntarily remove the object from her private parts. She did so in a discreet area with Teresa as a witness. The tightly wrapped object turned out to be a hefty chunk of methamphetamine worth a whole bunch of money.

Ms Bell wouldn't be needing her car keys that evening after all.

1999. It was a March evening in San Luis. Still cool. The oppressive summer heat was a couple of months away. A little past 9:00. I had just rotated off a car lane and plunked my butt down at the pedestrian gate inside the government building just north of the border. And then it happened. Again. Another sticks-out-like-a sore thumb white guy coming in from Hispanic San Luis. At night. Alone. And he hit the ground talking.

Or maybe I should say chattering. He kept up a constant banter from the moment he walked up to me. He was a young man in his early twenties. Dressed for the weather in a shirt and long pants. Not a big guy. On the light side of middle height. Slender. He pulled out an Arizona ID card with the family name of Burnette. If he'd had time, he probably would have told me the story of his life. As it was, before I could even ask him any questions he volunteered that he had been in Mexico drinking with his buddies and for some reason they'd left him. He was afraid to be in San Luis by himself at night, so he came back across the border. He said he was going to call up his mother in Yuma to drive the twenty or so miles down to San Luis to pick him up. He said all this is a chatty, conversational way and did not appear apprehensive or nervous. But appearance is only one factor in assessing nervousness. Another factor can be excessive chattiness. Like Burnette was at that very moment.

I ran his name in the computer, thinking there might be a warrant out for him. Nothing. No warrant. Not a felony warrant, anyhow. But something bothered me about Mr. Burnette. He said he'd been down in Mexico hitting the bars with his buddies. Yet he didn't seem at all impaired by alcohol. But what really got my attention was that there wasn't any noticeable odor of alcohol on him. And, though he was friendly and talkative, he also seemed to be in a hurry to leave. Another of those occasional mysterious enforcement intuitions hit me. I slid off my chair and moved behind him so that he was hemmed in between me and the locked turnstile.

"Do you have anything on you?" I said, even as I was already starting a quick pat down. He didn't even get a chance to answer. Mr. Burnette's future prospects took an abrupt nose dive when I got to the Forbidden Zone. Burnette had a chunk of something very hard in his crotch and it sure wasn't Mr. Woody. His body slumped. He knew he was busted. He gave up right then and there and didn't even try to run or resist.

"What is it?", I said.

"Crystal meth", Burnette replied glumly, then fell silent. No more Mr. Chatty.

Just four or five feet away on the adjacent pedestrian gate was Chris Eidbo, an INS officer new to the border. He had his face glued to his computer terminal and didn't at first notice what was going on. He saw the movement when I started Burnette's pat down and turned to look at us questioningly.

"He's got dope", I said. Eidbo's new to the border mouth dropped open. He stared at me in astonishment a touch longer, but quickly reclaimed his composure and jumped over to help me handcuff the guy. It didn't matter. Burnette wasn't making any attempt to resist. I escorted him over to the nearby Customs secondary office where we did a more thorough search and then placed him in a detention cell. Then I turned to the dope that had been in the guy's Forbidden Zone.

In my witness statement I described the hard wrapped methamphetamine package as being six inches long, two inches wide, irregular in contour and with a bulbous shape at one end. I didn't remark on it then, but now the image leaps out at me that the damn thing was shaped like a dildo. Did the smugglers do that intentionally? I don't know, and I don't even want to begin ruminating on the permutations of that idea. But the package did fit the specs for the Forbidden Zone's compartmental dimensions. Anyhow, I cut open the package and took a small sample. It tested positive for methamphetamine. 207 grams. Not a whole lot less than a half pound. The value of methamphetamine can vary by quite a bit, depending on how and to whom and when and where it is going to be sold. But, even taking a DEA low end figure, the 207 grams of dildo shaped methamphetamine stuffed into Dennis Burnette's Forbidden Zone was worth a considerable chunk of cash. Thousands of bucks.

There would be some very pissed off meth dealers in Yuma that night.

The Three B's--Breitenbach, Bell and Burnette--were all flagrantly obvious non-Hispanics. Their physical appearance and clothing and ethnicity made them Day-Glo targets for border officers in the almost totally Hispanic world on both sides of the border at San Luis. The thought might occur to you that a smart smuggler would be looking for drug mules that weren't so obvious. You can bet your 401K and the entire equity in your home and grandma's too that they had. It also occurred to me. The notion that the smugglers were using ordinary looking people as mules to body carry thousands of dollars worth of methamphetamine--and probably also therefore cocaine and heroin--was unsettling. And it was more than just a notion. The Three B's and their Forbidden Zones proved that most eloquently. It was happening. So how in the world did an officer figure out whom among the crowd of ordinary border crossers might actually be hard drug body carriers?

The short answer is that you didn't. A normal-looking person whose actions and behavior and documents raised no questions was almost always fast tracked through the border. I don't even want to think about how many times a local Hispanic who came through me who was supposedly on the way to the grocery store or an auto parts store in San Luis or Nogales but was actually body carrying a chunk of methamphetamine or cocaine or even heroin. I am certain it happened, and I am certain it happened to every single officer who ever worked on the border. It will continue to happen until somebody comes up with an effective and fast non-intrusive sensing system that reliably detects the presence of hard drugs without a muddying bunch of false positives. Something like the discreet T5000 passive imaging technology camera system that was in the trial stage in England. Or, approaching detection from a different, behavioral, perspective, the Sci-Fi sounding but real technology called the Laser Doppler Vibrometer that was being tested at the University of Arizona might just turn out to be workable. But until--if ever--one of those whizbang new technologies change the rules of the game, the good old crotch will continue to take first place in the Body Carrying Olympics at the border ports.

The Forbidden Zone still rules.

There were two of them. Same place. The indoor pedestrian gate at San Luis. But not evening this time. Mid afternoon. And not gringos. They were a pair of young Hispanic males, one 17, the other 20. The younger one was well dressed and clean cut, wearing a short sleeved shirt, shorts and a baseball cap. He didn't look at all like a gang banger type. The other young man, though similarly dressed, had a kind of veiled tough arrogance to him that caught my attention. I had no idea of it then, but I was about to enter the outer edges of what could be a very dangerous world. This guy looked tough and arrogant because he was tough and arrogant. No hapless down on his luck everyday drug mule, this dude. He was the real deal. A bona fide, one hundred percent genuine bad ass bad guy.

The younger man, Luis Rivera, said he had no ID with him. He told me he was a U.S. citizen and gave me his date of birth. I ran the name and date of birth in the computer and came up with nothing. The other young man, Pedro Jimenez, did have an ID with a date of birth on it. His name did come up in the computer. Did it ever. Big time. He was a DEA suspect, believed to be part of a smuggling ring and involved in a recent smuggling run to Hawaii. Hawaii? From little old San Luis? And more. The Customs special agent who had entered the record wanted him ID'ed and searched, and, because of Jimenez's suspected serious involvement in a sizeable smuggling ring, requested that the agent be contacted immediately if the guy showed up.

I didn't know exactly what, but I knew this was going to amount to something. It got my blood up in a hurry, yet I managed to keep my cool. I'd lost enough runners on peds to learn the hard way to keep things as low key and subtle as possible. I kept up a casual banter with the two young men while picking up the intercom telephone and calling back to the Customs secondary office for a backup officer. I was still chatting with the two guys when Woodrow 'Chuck' Westerfield, a good sized, Kentucky accented former Marine, came walking in from secondary. I motioned Chuck over to take a look at the computer screen that had alerted me. He did. The two young Hispanic men couldn't see the screen from where they were standing, but must have had figured out by then that something was going on. They missed their chance to run for it. Chuck and I deftly slid behind them, took control of the two by their arms and escorted them back to the Customs secondary office. Chuck took Rivera. I took Jimenez.

We got the pair into the secondary office and started to pat them down. Chuck, who was a man long on ambition but short on enthusiasm for finding dope, surprised me when he jumped back from Rivera almost immediately. He's just hit Rivera's Forbidden Zone.

"He's got something!" The unusually agitated drawling Kentuckian said. Westerfield wanted to get the duty supervisor's permission to do a strip search before he went any further. That approval came lightning quick. Before the strip search had hardly even kicked into gear a brown tape wrapped, sausage shaped package about two inches in diameter by ten inches in length came sliding down the boy's leg. Either he had a salamander tail for a pecker, or the boy was smuggling something. And he sure didn't look like a salamander.

There were two of those ten inch brown tape wrapped long, thin packages. The first one had voluntarily surrendered. The second was a recalcitrant holdout. It was so securely taped to Rivera's leg and underwear that we had to cut away at it before we finally were able to tug the dope loose from the kid's leg and underwear. The two dope packages were hard to the touch. Marijuana packages usually were soft or spongy. Excitement flooded into the search room. Hard drugs. Finding the hard stuff always got the juices going with us, even the more jaded among us. We expectantly tested samples from the packages for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. The methamphetamine test was positive. It was meth. 1.1 pounds of it. Worth lots of money. A darned good seizure for a body carrier.

But it wasn't over. Rivera had given me a phony date of birth. We ran his correct name and date of birth in the computer. The ordinary looking kid had been busted at the nearby Calexico port of entry in California just weeks before driving a load car with 70 pounds of marijuana in it. The courts might have cut him some slack over the first marijuana bust because he was a juvenile. But now Arizona law would mandate he be tried as an adult.

And there was the other guy. Pedro Jimenez. A search of him was negative. So what was his role in this? Customs agents came down to the port of entry and seemed pretty excited by the seizure of the methamphetamine and catching the kid and Jimenez. They said that Jimenez was the controller who was watching over Rivera, who was the mule. The agents busted both of them and hauled them off to jail. Several weeks later I recognized Jimenez walking through on the pedestrian lane from Mexico. He had that same tough, smug arrogance as before. It was obvious he recognized me, too.He didn't look at all like he was nervous or might run. I ran his name in the computer, thinking that there likely was a warrant out for his arrest. The DEA lookout was still there. But no warrant. What? Nothing? This guy who the agents had insisted was a drug trafficking organization controller for a methamphetamine courier was still on the streets? Bizarre, maybe, but not at all unusual. I did a thorough pat down of the guy and came up with nothing. I don't remember if I had INS check his immigration status--the guy was born in Mexico--but I probably did. But what stuck in my mind was something the guy said.

"I know you", Jimenez said to me, smiling in that smugly veiled menacing way he had. I looked at him, not quite sure what he was getting at. Then he shocked me. "Your daughter plays volleyball for the high school", he said with that same arrogant smugness. And that was a fact. My daughter did play volleyball for a local high school. It might sound innocuous enough on the surface. But this was coming from a known member of a sizeable narcotics trafficking organization who was an active DEA suspect. A guy who'd I'd busted once already, and whose organization lost a bunch of money on the seized methamphetamine. And besides that I'd busted a sizeable cocaine load on the primary lanes that was probably also tied to the same organization and that involved some really big money.

I took his comment as the veiled threat that it was and immediately reported it. Soon after Lori Janosko, a Customs special agent, came to talk to me about it. Later she gave me a sheet of paper with photos of the other major players in the trafficking organization that Jimenez was part of it. She told me to show it to my family and for all of us to watch out for any of their faces in the photos. If one them showed up, I was to call her or another agent immediately. I never saw any of them again, Jimenez included. But Jimenez remains of keen interest to the DEA to this day. Pedro Mario Jimenez had moved on to bigger things. He was no longer just a DEA suspect.

He was now on the DEA's wanted fugitive list.

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else.

Will Rogers

### The Birds and The Bees

I love this place. I'm sitting with my laptop on my front porch with an eye catching view of the serenely beautiful mountain country of southeastern Arizona. Close to Mexico. So close that the nearby San Jose mountains to the south are well within Old Mexico. While I write I'm also watching my hummingbird feeders swinging gently in the wind. The hummers swoop in and dive bomb each other as they battle over who gets to dominate the feeder. The local Africanized honeybees unconcernedly swarm around the feeders while the hummingbirds duel and joust with each other a few feet away. Hummingbirds are a passion with lots of people in these parts, especially with the nearby presence of the Ramsey Canyon Nature Preserve and the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. People come from all over the country and even from other lands to see the unusually large variety of hummingbirds that pass through here, as well as other uncommonly seen birds in the U.S. such as the Elegant Trogon and Green Kingfisher. As America moves on in the 21st Century, bird watching has become a favorite national pastime and has been rapidly supplanting the traditional nature based activities of hunting and fishing. Lots of folks like birds. They like to watch them. And they like to own them. Legally.

Or illegally.

Busting dope smugglers. Catching illegals. Apprehending wanted fugitives. Facilitating the movement of people and cargo. Those were our main foci on the border .But we were also cross trained in the enforcement of all kinds of federal laws, rules and regulations The thinking apparently was that, since we were already there, we could keep an eye peeled for all this other stuff on the border, too. A lot of it had to do with animals. Especially birds. Importing a bird into the U.S. was a big pain. They had to be quarantined for a period of time, and that could be done at only a very few inconveniently located places. I think the closest was hundreds of miles off in San Diego. The reason for the stringent regulations on birds was the presence of avian diseases such as psittacosis (parrot fever) which could spread to humans. Nowadays, with the threat of avian flu and other scary diseases looming everywhere, the strict regulations on bird importation seem pretty obvious. Still, there undoubtedly are people today, as there were a few years ago, who think there is an easier way to get their hot hands on a parrot or parakeet or some other cute little bird than going through the tedious and expensive importation process or paying big bucks at a pet store. Why mess with that when they had another alternative?

Smuggle the darned birds into the U.S.

So, mixed in with the days of beat you down heat and sucking fumes from the smothering carbon monoxide of internal combustion engines, of the endless streams of cars and people and cargo, of drugs and illegal aliens and fugitives, there was another, improbable, reality. The occasional bird smuggler. Not that we went to work thinking, "hey, today I'm going to catch a bird smuggler." We didn't. But there were bird smugglers. And we did occasionally catch them. On rare occasions we encountered the pros--professional animal smugglers. But the vast majority of the people we caught smuggling birds were just ordinary people who wanted a bird for their home. The save a dollar math was enticing. Birds that might cost several hundred dollars at a U.S. pet store could be bought in Mexico for a few bucks. No one gave much thought to the possibility of the birds being diseased. Probably still don't. Maybe the next pandemic will be started by a feisty diseased corvid or lovebird snuck across the Mexican border under grandma's voluminous skirt or in junior's lunch box.

At Nogales there were bird sellers on the Mexican side working the crowds and cars moving north into the U.S. I saw them myself the few times I ventured over to the Sonora part of Nogales. There probably was a lot of impulse buying. Little Anna sees a cute parakeet and begs her daddy to buy it for her. Daddy shells out a few bucks and Anna shoves the parakeet inside her jacket. A little while later daddy drives their car up to the inspection booth at the border. The inspector manning the booth asks them what they are bringing into the United States and ticks off the names of items that either are prohibited or have to be checked. Raw meat? Guns? Fruit? Birds? Daddy and little Anna all waggle their heads innocently. Birds? Oh, no. No birds. Then they drive on into the U.S. with little Anna's new pet still snug inside her jacket. The bird may or may not be diseased and may or may not make it to Anna's place alive. But the bird has made it into the U.S.

Not all illegal entrants are of the human variety.

That probably is what usually happened. How does an officer working an entry booth discern whether someone has a bird stuffed inside their jacket or under their skirt? But we did catch some of them. One obvious giveaway was the presence of a bird cage in a vehicle. So you're going to drive through the border with a bird cage in your back seat and claim you don't have a bird? All bird cages had to be checked, anyhow, because used ones could also carry diseases and had to be cleaned before entry into the U.S. Sometimes people just bought cages in Mexico because they were cheaper. Other times they bought a bird to go along with the cage. It was pretty unusual for folks to admit they had a bird. Not until they were caught. They could have saved themselves a lot of time and money if they'd just 'fessed up when we asked if they had any birds.

It seemed kind of odd, but bird smuggling was one of the areas where enforcement was backed up with a quick and often substantial fine. Maybe it was because of the disease risk. Anyhow, we made sure to ask several times--in Spanish or English or both, as the situation indicated--whether or not they had any birds, and to explain that bringing them into the U.S. was illegal because of the potential for disease. Almost always we were met with blank stares and protestations of innocence. There wasn't much middle ground on this one. If we found undeclared birds, then a fine almost always followed. It was based on the type of bird and the severity and blatancy of the deception. The fines generally went from a hundred bucks on up. Blatant deception could bring a whopping fine. If they didn't have the money, we had pens and promissory note forms ready.

When the bird smugglers heard the word 'fine' we caught their attention. The words 'fine' and 'money' focus the attention wonderfully. Sometimes it seemed that this whole bit was somehow scripted, because almost always the smugglers would then say they didn't have that much money with them. There were some among us--should I call them bird specialists?--who seemed to revel in situations like this. Though the smugglers were mostly Hispanic, I couldn't say it was racially or ethnically motivated, since the bird specialists were usually also Hispanic. They knew the culture better than us gringos and seemed to pick up quicker on when people were being deceptive. I wouldn't say they took pleasure in what went on, but they certainly were amused by it. They'd ask to see the wallets and purses of the bird smugglers who said they didn't have any money. As often as not, the money they said they didn't have magically appeared. When money was still not visible, the hardest cases among the bird specialists had another tactic. They'd tell the smugglers they were going to hold their vehicles until they came up with the money. Their logic was compelling. They'd ask if the smugglers had any credit cards. No? Then just how were they planning on paying for the gas to get back home?

I don't think I would have believed what happened next if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Once the smugglers were convinced that the 'bird specialist' was dead serious in what he or she said, the scrambling started. A guy would pull off his boot and pluck a hundred dollar bill out of it. A woman would reach inside her blouse or under her skirt and do the same. Or the driver would dig into some nook or cranny in his vehicle and pull out the money from its hiding place.

Some of the Hispanic officers explained to us that in Mexico people didn't look upon law enforcement as being there to protect them. They considered law enforcement to be exploiters rather than protectors. The cops were looking for La Mordida--the little bite, the bribe. They expected a shakedown. That attitude carried over into the U.S. and was underneath the reticence of Mexicans and lots of Mexican Americans to cooperate with law enforcement. Having seen plenty of examples of corrupt Mexican--and not just Mexican--law enforcement, such an attitude wasn't all that hard to understand.

But, back to the birds. Bird smuggling often brought us a kind of comic relief.That might have been at least partially behind the behavior of the 'bird specialists'. Our days were long, often 12 and even 16 hours. We were working out in the weather and sucking car exhaust day after day. The work was usually repetitive and wearing. And when the work suddenly morphed into the dead opposite, as it often did, when we starting catching dope and illegals right and left and the crescendo of enforcement excitement built up into a cacophonous border symphony, our tired bloodshot eyes watched wearily as the caliginous border symphony segued into the finale of a grim stream of crestfallen faces going off to jail or INS detention centers. Watching bunches of people being hauled off to the slammer ain't exactly Comedy Central.

With bird smuggling, well, maybe it cost them a couple of hundred bucks, but they still went on their way back to their ordinary workaday lives. Not to jail. Not to an INS detention center. Back home. Birdless. But back home.

Dean 'Dino' Morgan, a cowboy-inclined retired Marine and purple hearted Vietnam vet told me a story about a parrot they caught at San Luis. Bird smugglers used various tactics to get their birds across the border. This particular guy had fed booze to the parrot and got it drunk. It seemed he thought the alcohol would sedate it and keep it quiet. Whatever his thinking was, it didn't work. I don't think I ever heard just how he got caught, but he did get caught. The drunken parrot was apprehended and the smuggler was whacked with a substantial fine and sent on his way.

But not the bird. The officers still had the bird. It was night. They had no cage for the bird. The Aggie--U.S.D.A, United States Department of Agriculture--office where confiscated birds were usually kept was also cageless, and was unsecured. The bird was put in there but somehow the door came open. The bird got loose. And there was this drunken parrot staggering around in the secondary building in the middle of the night. A bird, sloshed as it was, violently resistant to the ideas of being confined again. They had a fine old time trying to catch the drunken parrot. Dino couldn't tell the story without falling apart in hilarity.

"What did you do at work today, Daddy?" , a border officer's big eyed son might ask eagerly, visions of drug smugglers and foot chases dancing in his little boy's mind. What could the kid make of an answer like this?

"I caught a drunken parrot today, son."

I had plenty of my own experiences with parrots and other birds. One dark night at Nogales a Ford Ranchero pulled into the secondary lot. The driver gave the usual negative declaration. The guy said he wasn't bringing anything from Mexico. The primary officer thought otherwise and sent him back to secondary for further inspection. So I started to inspect the vehicle. Rancheros were one of those hybrid car/pickup vehicles that had a compartment behind the seat that extended under the pickup bed. The compartment was designed to store tools and the spare tire and luggage. But it also made a dandy place to stash contraband. I pushed the driver's seat forward and stooped to take a look at the compartment behind the seat. Hmmm. Wait a minute. There was something hanging over the compartment. Dark cloth. That was interesting. I pulled the cloth up and looked inside. Good God. Something struck out in the dark at my hand. I jumped back in shock. If I'd had a bad heart then I probably would have had the Big One right there.

AAWWWK! Went a piqued parrot from inside the compartment.

Another bird incident that sticks in my mind happened at San Luis. It was summer. A typically miserable San Luis hot season day. A junky looking pickup came through my lane that had a bunch of stuff piled in the bed of the truck. Sitting amongst the other stuff was a bird cage. A dirty bird cage. That alone was a mandatory secondary. After a few questions I was also certain, because of the obvious guarded behavior of the occupants of the pickup and a van that was traveling with it, they had birds to go along with the cage.

So I sent both vehicles to secondary with a referral slip on the windshield with a single word. Birds. A little later I was relieved on the primary lane and went back to secondary. Ron Mann Jr. was in the middle of searching the vehicles and I joined in. There were birds hidden all over in that messy van. Most of them were dead. Probably because of the heat and the vehicles having to wait in the line of cars before being admitted into the U.S. The entire family--grandparents down to little kids--lied to us about the birds. Lying. What a great thing to teach your kids. These people ended up paying a substantial fine.

For dead birds.

At a different time at San Luis I was searching another van. Bird smuggling was already suspected and I made sure to get multiple negative declarations from the driver and passenger. The first bird was snuggled inside a stocking that was in the glove box. I handed the bird to another officer and turned to the occupants of the vehicle who were standing nearby. A man and a woman. Did they have any more birds? Oh, no. No more birds. The second bird was in the van's console, also snuggled inside a sock. The reasoning for the socks was the same as that for dropping a cover over a bird cage at night. It quiets the bird. If that was the intent, it worked. I never heard the birds. But I did see them. After I found the second one, I turned to the couple again.

"Are there any other birds that you don't have?" I asked.

"Oh, no", they said. "Not any more. That was it." I handed the second bird to a nearby officer. The little critter somehow got loose and in a flash of fleeing feathers was gone. North. An absconder. Another illegal entrant that got away. Fortunately, we didn't have to confront the dilemma of trying to fine a bird smuggler when the bird took off for parts unknown. We still had one bird. Enough to fine this delusive couple. I searched the rest of the van and found no more birds. We took the pair of would be bird smugglers inside the secondary office and were about to begin the process of fining them. I suddenly had a thought. The woman's purse. She was clutching it pretty tightly to her chest. Too tightly. I hadn't checked the purse.

"Do you have any more birds", I asked the woman. She shook her head. I pointed at the purse. "Is there a bird in there?"

"No", she said firmly. "No bird."

Her body language said otherwise. She didn't want to give up the purse, and tried to cling onto it while I took it forcibly from her. I opened the purse and peered inside. I couldn't see much. Then I reached inside. A mistake. There was something there. A bird. A parrot. A mean little bugger of a parrot. And that cursed little parrot grabbed hold of my finger and wasn't about to let go until at least the Second Coming. I grabbed the parrot with my other hand. I had him. He had me. I had myself another genuine Mexican standoff. This time with a parrot.

A Mexican parrot.

There I was. If I took my other hand away from the parrot to use it to pry it loose from my finger, the darned bird would get loose. And then we'd have to try to catch a loose bird inside the secondary office. We'd had this happen before. It was like a Saturday Night Live routine. A bunch of guys running around the secondary office trying to catch a dratted bird. I didn't want to repeat that experience. Especially with video cameras in the secondary office. I could just imagine the Big Bosses in their big offices howling in back thumping condescending hilarity as they watched a tape of us stumbling over each other trying to catch a bloody fugitive bird in the Customs secondary office at San Luis.

So I held onto the bird. And the bird held onto me. We were now a couple. Till death do us part. At least in my mind. Finally, another officer--I think it was Pancho Soto, who was probably doing his damnedest not to laugh--got a cage. Together we pulled the darned bird loose and stuck it in the cage. Aha! The bird was now our prisoner.

And then I turned a baleful eye to the truth impaired woman with the birdless purse.

There was one exception to the generally amusing bird smuggling experiences we usually had. One afternoon a Border Patrolman showed up at the Grand Avenue secondary office in Nogales. The Border Patrol surveillance cameras spotted a guy catching something that was thrown over the border fence from Mexico. The Border Patrolman responded before the guy could get away in his car. After the BP officer saw what was in the bag that had been thrown over the border, he escorted the guy in his car to the Customs Grand Avenue secondary building. So what was in the bag? A parrot.

This was the first time I had ever encountered a guy like this. He was instantly likeable. The guy had a kind of innocent, naïve charisma about him that made you feel as though he were your childhood best friend that you hadn't seen in years. And it wasn't just me that had that impression of the guy. The other officers in secondary did, too. His story was simply that he had wanted a bird but couldn't afford the high prices in the Tucson pet stores, so bought a much cheaper bird in Mexico and had a kid throw it over the fence to him. Sounded good, and he might have gotten off with a light fine and handshake. Some of the more malleable officers might have even let him off with just a warning. After all, he was so non-threatening. So friendly. So...so...so likeable.

But this was the computer age. I checked him out. The guy had a criminal record from back east. He was a longtime con man. And his vehicle's license plate showed Nogales crossings from Mexico into the U.S. just about daily. On top of that, the guy had seven or eight thousand bucks in his pocket. In good ol' U.S.A. cash money. That's a whole lot of pocket change to be carrying around. And this guy said he didn't have the bucks to buy a pricey bird at a Tucson pet store?

This likeable and innocuous appearing guy was in fact a professional bird smuggler as well as being a con man. He'd likely been making a handsome living by driving into Mexico, buying parrots and other birds for a fraction of their American value, having someone toss them over the fence to him, then reselling the birds at a whopping profit in the U.S. We couldn't prove any of that beyond the single bird we had him with, and he wasn't about to admit it, so we had to be satisfied with fining him the maximum allowable by law. I don't know if anyone contacted other law enforcement agencies about this guy and the potential for busting an animal smuggling ring, but someone certainly should have. This guy might have been smuggling the birds into the country. But someone else was sure as heck buying them. It's a darned good bet that a 'legitimate' outlet was retailing them to the public.

And making a handsome profit for themselves in the process.

I used to be Snow White. But I drifted.

Mae West

### Chapter 10

### Mexican Border Corruption

Westerns have pretty much gone to America's cultural junkyard. Despite the occasional exception of movies like The Unforgiven and 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, horse operas are largely dead along with the Old Wild West that inspired them. Right? Yes. And no. Westerns, yes. But anyone who thinks the Wild West is dead better clean their glasses and take another look at the border. In northern Sonora there is a municipality and a town of the same name about 35 or 40 crow-flight miles from my home. Cananea. The place isn't exactly a throbbing urban center. The municipality has 30,000 people and almost as many cattle. 30,000 cows or not, the town's name is supposedly taken from the Apache word for horse meat. But it wasn't horse meat that made Cananea famous. It was a copper mining strike a century ago that resulted in a bloody confrontation that left a bunch of people dead. The Cananea miners' strike is still considered by the Mexicans as the opening gun of the brewing Mexican revolution in much the same way the Americans consider Lexington and Concord as the open salvoes of the American revolution.

Tales of bloody confrontations aren't just fading old men's park bench memories in Cananea. In May of 2007 a caravan of cars drove into what was and still is the copper-mining town of Cananea. The half a hundred thugs in the cars kidnapped five Cananea police officers and two civilians. These guys meant business. No negotiations. No kidnappings for ransom. The thugs promptly did in the captives. Summarily executed them .Mexican federal police and army units were alerted and headed in hot pursuit after the killers. They caught up with the heavily armed Mexican thugs near the rugged mountains close to the town of Arizpe. A bloody running gun battle more dramatic than the most fanciful Mexican Narcotrafficante TV or movie soap opera followed. At least twenty more people were to make the silent one way trip to the mortuary. Many others were wounded. There has been a lot of speculation about the exact reasons for the executions and subsequent gun battle. Whatever the actual specifics might be, no one doubts that they were drug related. Maybe it was infighting among the drug lords. Maybe the drug lords were letting the government of Mexico know what they think about the recent federally orchestrated campaign against them. Or maybe it was some kind of payback against the widely acknowledged deeply rooted police and government corruption in the town.

The shootout in Cananea was too blatant not to make the national and international news. What doesn't usually show up in the national media is the almost daily organized crime drug related violence in Mexico. Earlier that same year the police chief of the town of Agua Prieta, which is just across the border from the Arizona town of Douglas, about thirty five or so crow flight miles from both my Arizona home and Cananea, was gunned down in the street. In the same town an investigative journalist, Saul Martinez-Ortega, was kidnapped outside the police station. His corpse turned up in the adjacent state of Chihuahua. Another journalist in the Sonoran capitol of Hermosillo who was reporting on drug related corruption in Cananea,, was lured into an ambush and nearly beaten to death. He was so shaken by the experience, coupled with the death of his colleague Martinez-Ortega, that he fled to the U.S. and asked for political asylum. Think about that for a moment. A Mexican reporter. Seeking political asylum in the United States. In 2007. Largely because of the difficulty in getting political asylum, later in the summer Tiznado dropped his asylum petition with the intention of returning to his profession in Mexico. If he did indeed return to independent investigative journalism in Mexico, it is doubtful anyone was crazy enough to sell him a life insurance policy.

The iconic Old West town of Tombstone isn't far from my home, either. In Tombstone they have regular reenactments of the Old Wild West days complete with feigned shootouts using blank cartridges. The locals have a hooting good time dressing up as cowboys and firing off blanks in their six shooters. The tourists love it. An hour's drive south from Tombstone, in Old Mexico, they also have shootouts. You won't find any tourists there. Overweight baseball capped tourists and their summery clad sunburned wives aren't crowding in to ogle the gunfighters. On the contrary. Any poor souls unlucky enough to be in the neighborhood frantically scramble to get the hell away and stuff themselves behind some kind of cover. The Mexican shootouts aren't tourist attractions. The bullets aren't blanks and the shooters aren't actors.

The Mexican shootouts are still real.

Another Mexican reporter, Maria Idalia Gomez, attended the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference in Phoenix in June of 2007. She said that it was only a matter of time before the widespread drug violence in Mexico spilled over into the U.S. Gomez noted there were 1200 drug murders in Mexico directly related to the warring cartels in the first few months of 2007, and the cartels had become very dangerous because large numbers of ex-Mexican military had joined them. A sinister group called the Zetas, made up at least partially of Mexican Army elite Special Forces deserters, is terrorizing Mexico with its brutally violent attempts at taking over the Mexican drug trafficking networks from the cartels. The same cartels that unknowingly created a Frankenstein monster when they hired the Zetas in the first place. It was probably the Zetas who attacked Cananea. The Wild West is dead? Not hardly. Not on the border. Not on either side of the Border. And it's gotten worse. Much worse. As 2007 faded into 2008, 2008 into 2009 and 2009 to 2010, 2011 and now 2012 the incidence of drug violence in Mexico continues unabated. In mid 2012 the drug-related Mexican death tool is approaching 50,000 with no end in sight. Ordinary Mexicans have become downright terrified by it.

And not so ironically. Arizpe, where the shootout with the Zeta thugs took place in May of 2007? Violence is nothing new there, either. A big battle was once fought at Arizpe between the Mexicans and the Apaches--the Nde. One of the Apaches was a vengeance-consumed man whose family was murdered by treacherous Mexican officials during what were supposed to be peace negotiations. Geronimo. His name still resounds through time as the very embodiment of the Old Wild West.

And, given the recent widespread border violence....maybe also the New Wild West.....

When I began working at Nogales it wasn't long before the border veterans started in with tales about the centuries old Mexican 'institution' of La Mordida--the bite. Meaning the bribe. The co-workers, mostly Hispanic long time border residents, flatly said that much of the Mexican economy was based on the informal and nearly universal practice of La Mordida. The bribe--the little bite--was ubiquitous in Mexico. There was no way around it. There were jobs in Mexico but most were poorly paid. The Mexicans had to resort to cash creating alternatives. Like La Mordida. It had roots so deeply seated and pervasive, my border co-workers adamantly insisted, that nothing and nobody would never dig out the deep roots of La Mordida from the economic soul of Old Mexico.

What to make of all these hairy tales about La Mordida? I'd grown up only a couple of hour's drive from the Canadian border in a world where you could go a thousand miles in any direction and still be in a world where people spoke the same language and came from the same general cultural background as yourself. This Mexican border world was still pretty alien and I just didn't know quite what to make of all this talk about La Mordida and Mexican corruption. Until Christmas came that year. It was the first Christmas season following a full year of the Amnesty program. Thousands upon thousands of formerly illegal Mexicans who had been afraid to go back to Mexico now piled up all along the border. They had cars and vans and pickups and trucks, most of them piled high with the material abundance of the United States. Clothing, TV sets, toys, sound systems, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, just about everything imaginable. These people had escaped the soul grinding poverty of Mexico's corrupt plutocratic economy and were coming back during the festive Holiday season to share the fruits of their labors with their homebound hardscrabble families in Mexico. Nogales seemed to crackle with an electric excitement. The town took on almost a carnival like gypsy atmosphere and there was a huge backlog of cars and pickups going into Mexico. The backlog of vehicles went all the way through the town of Nogales onto the regional highways. It was a chore for some of us to even get to work because of the congestion.

The Customs border veterans, many of them Mexican Americans, enthralled us newcomers with their cynical stories of what happened at the Mexican border crossing stations. They called it Customs on the Mexican side, too. Aduana was their word for Customs. But what they did was light years away from what we thought of as Customs. What the Mexican Customs officers did was a hell of a lot closer to what we'd call an old fashioned shakedown. The hordes of Mexicans returning to Mexico were a golden opportunity for the Mexican Aduaneros to supplement their humble salaries. This was the goose that was going to lay their golden egg. And they meant to squeeze every single bit of gold out of that vulnerable golden goose of returning countrymen that they could.

I didn't yet speak much Spanish, but English speaking Mexicans and Spanish speaking co-workers translating for me told a hair raising tale that sent a lightning bolt of border shock through whatever was left of my naïve Minnesota-nice attitudes. It also made me want to get down on my knees, kiss the ground and thank the Good Lord I was born an American. The Aduaneros were extorting the returning Mexicans with all kinds of semi-imaginary fees and duties that mostly took a permanent detour from the official revenue stream into the willing pockets of the Mexican Customs and Immigration officers. Some pissed off southbound Mexicans were so outraged with the Aduaneros that they did a U-turn and went back into the U.S. rather than be shaken down. Some even said that they would never go back to 'that country' again. I listened in open mouthed astonishment when I heard a couple of them say that.

But it really hit home in full border twilight zone force when a female Mexican border officer drove into the U.S. in a car lane from Mexican Nogales. One of the U.S. Customs officers, a feisty, pint sized Hispanic female named Elvia who knew the woman, spotted her and pulled her in for a currency check. The Mexican officer made the standard currency declaration of having less than $10,000 and therefore didn't need to officially report her currency. Our female officer had a strong inkling of what the Mexican officer was up to and started a count of the currency the Mexican officer had with her. I stood next to her as a witness while our skeptical little inspector carefully counted out the Mexican officer's money. At the very end I caught on. This Mexican woman knew exactly what she was doing. $10,000 was the threshold where trouble started if you had more and didn't declare it. She didn't have $10,000. But she had just under that amount. So what she was doing was legitimate in the eyes of U.S. law. But how did this woman, who made a very modest salary by U.S. standards as a Mexican border senior inspector, come to have so much money? Our hot eyed female officer knew exactly where the Mexican woman got the money. La Mordida. The Bite. The U.S. officer grudgingly had to let the woman go with the money, even though she knew the woman had extorted it from the long lines of hard working Mexicans who'd been scrimping and saving for months and years so they could return to their former homes for Christmas. Mexico had a Christmas present waiting for its returning expatriates at the border that none of them wanted. La Mordida. The Mexican officer was a legal U.S. resident and the wife of a U.S. INS officer. Much later I had to wonder.

Did their 'extra' income make its way onto their tax returns that year?

In the year 2012 the government of Mexico is deeply into a renewed and very intense anti-narcotrafficante campaign. It is a battle between darkness and light for the very soul of the country. Army troops have been sent to numerous places to bolster and often replace the civil authorities in combating the increasingly pervasive influence of the drug lords. Army patrols are regularly on the streets of nearby places like Agua Prieta and Cananea. Federal prosecutors have been assigned to pursue cases against the drug lords. Finally, it seems, the Mexican government is taking steps to deal with the drug-related corruption that it eating away at the foundations of their country.

Here is a quote taken from a newspaper article about Mexican government corruption.

'The President of Mexico "....has called drug trafficking the 'greatest threat to national security, the biggest hazard to social health and the bloodiest source of violence in Mexico.'"

Interesting quote. The President quoted in the article was Ernesto Zedillo _. In 1997._ Presidente Zedillo launched a new anti-drug trafficking initiative following the disbanding of Mexico's top anti-narcotics agency and the arrest of its head, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. The General was on the payroll of a notorious drug lord. The article went on to say how as part of the Zedillo's anti-drug campaign the Mexican Federal Judicial Police in the state of Sonora were ordered to take drug tests for marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine before they were allowed to renew their weapons permits.

Of the 840 Federal Police in Sonora initially tested, more than 11% tested positive for drugs. Among the nearly 100 who flunked were four police commanders. Another 50 plus officers didn't show up for the testing. The drug-positive cops were fired. You can probably guess where they went to look for new jobs. You can probably also guess the effectiveness of the 'new' anti-drug campaign of President Zedillo's time. Things have only gotten worse. And, recently, with the arrival of groups like the Zetas, lots worse. Other nations are looking at the country with increasing alarm. Old Mexico is actually teetering on the verge of collapse, both as a government and as a civilization.

The people of Mexico should be worried about this. Very worried.

As border officers, we were always hearing tales of border corruption, the overwhelming bulk of it on the Mexican side. The honesty of the Mexican police and officials was always an open question. Even those who wanted to be honest were up against a violent steamroller of very powerful corrupting influences. Go along with the system and supplement your income handsomely. Oppose it and put your life and even the lives of your family in danger. Be corrupt and be well paid. Be honest and be beheaded. Some choice. Most of us understood what the Mexicans had to deal with. But that didn't mean we admired them for it. And we sure as heck didn't trust them.

One of the fluent Spanish speaking officers at San Luis was regularly tasked to read Mexican newspapers and periodicals. A synopsis of information from the Mexican papers relevant to our job was regularly disseminated to the line officers. In those bits of condensed information we read of repeated drug seizures on the Mexican side, particularly on Mexican Route 1, the main east-west highway running towards Tijuana. A treacherous road that years earlier scared the hell out of me when I was a wandering young Hippie-flavored dude riding in a wildly driven Mexican bus coming out of Tijuana. In recent months the Mexican military had established roadblocks on the highway. They were regularly catching multi-ton loads of marijuana in big tractor trailer rigs on their way to either San Luis or to Baja California and the ports of entry in California, especially Calexico and Otay Mesa. Travelers told us of having to go through multiple highway checkpoints in Sonora, and the police and soldiers manning those roadblock checkpoints looked to be deadly serious about what they were doing.

We joked among ourselves that they weren't actually catching the drugs. They were recycling them. They'd show up again in smuggling attempts across the border. In this line of cynical--but probably not so very incorrect--reasoning, the roadblocks were more like another form of the Mexican shakedown culture than a real anti-drug effort. That is of course simplistic, and there were undoubtedly Mexican officers and soldiers who were trying to do the right thing. But they were voices in the wilderness next to the overwhelming malevolent pervasiveness of drug tainted corruption. It all kind of reminded me of Viet Nam, where among the Vietnamese friend and foe all looked alike and you never were sure which was which. So it was with the Mexican officials. We never knew which was which among them, either. Friend? Or foe? In Viet Nam it was usually one or the other. But in Mexico it could be both at the same time.

We used to say that you couldn't tell who the players were even with a program.

The newspaper article about President Zedillo also contained a sliver of information about an incident in San Luis Rio Colorado that we had heard about. It was like something out of a pulp fiction crime novel. An airplane landed on a remote stretch of highway near the border. A Mexican military unit was alerted of the landing and intercepted the cargo before it could be whisked away. The cargo? Over 1000 pounds of cocaine. Whatever the actual facts surrounding that part of the incident were, we had been reliably informed that 1000 pounds of cocaine was seized and placed in a Federal Judicial Police substation locker in San Luis Rio Colorado. An officer was stationed there to guard it. Eight days later, when someone 'officially' checked on the case, both the officer and the cocaine had disappeared. Disappeared?

"Recycled", was the way we put it.

At about the same time this was going on with the Mex Feds--the Mexican Federal Police--in Sonora, the city of San Luis Rio Colorado tested its police force for drugs.

One third of them failed.

He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.

Anthony Burgess

### Bathroom Ethics

Most people wouldn't connect the issue of bathroom use with the job of a CBP officer. But it is an issue. A pretty big one, actually. In at least two ways. And not Number One and Number Two.

The first one you've probably encountered yourself while waiting in a seemingly interminable line. You need to use the bathroom. But if you leave the line you'll lose your place and have to wait that much longer. Even after several decades, I still remember with active distaste the long registration lines at the University of Minnesota. We all hated that very customer unfriendly process at the University. And then there are situations where you can't leave the line. Like one of those long vaccination lines in the U.S. Army.

Or when you're in a car waiting to enter the U.S. from Mexico.

It happened all the time at both San Luis and Nogales. Border crossers were often stuck in the car lanes for quite a while. Their bladders didn't follow the same schedule as the sometimes maddeningly slow pace of a U.S. border crossing. Many was the time I saw a urgent face on the edge of panic in the window of a car that pulled up to my lane. Those faces generally had one word on their lips.

"Baños?" Bathrooms?

We had to tell them no, that we didn't have public bathrooms. Public bathrooms adjacent to our search and seizure rooms, break rooms and computer rooms and offices would have created a constant security nightmare. Not to mention the congestion. There were bathrooms in the buildings open to the public, but generally only for those there on border business or the occasional exigent circumstance. Most folks we had to tell to go to the nearest public bathrooms, which usually meant nearby service stations or fast food restaurants. We'd point the direction and wave them on after Immigration and Customs checks indicated they were OK to enter the U.S. The hackneyed phrase hang in there had real very unhackneyed meaning for the bladder challenged travelers as they drove away from the border on their urgent bathroom quest.

Occasionally things got more complicated. When one of these full-to-the-brim travelers got sent to secondary for a search we had a potential dilemma. If we did let them use our bathrooms, there was always the possibility that they were carrying contraband on them that they would flush in the toilet or dump in the waste basket. That left us with a couple of options. Accompany them into the bathroom. Or tell them to wait while we hustled through a quick inspection of the vehicle. I got more than one very strange look from men I accompanied into the bathroom. Strange looks or not, experience taught us that it was usually a good idea to not let a person use a bathroom before or in the middle of a vehicle or personal search.

A large percentage of the cars that were sent to the secondary lot for further inspection were pretty low risk. Often it was a new inspector who sent a poorly chosen vehicle to secondary. They hadn't learned how to practice selectivity yet and were intimidated by the scary wide eyed reality that drugs were smuggled daily through the car lanes. Their reaction was to send far too many cars to secondary out of fear of letting a genuine load car get through. This was a constant source of irritation to the secondary officers. For a couple of basic reasons. The motivated officers who were actually actively trying to find dope were deflected from more discriminating searches by the constant arrival of poorly chosen vehicles in secondary. Those cars had to be checked, poor choice or no. The second reason for irritation on the part of the secondary officers was one found throughout the Service. The lazy, unmotivated officers just didn't want to be bothered. A good many of them were promoted and now are in comfortable supervisory positions where they spend part of their time ruminating about the lack of motivation among the line officers. Such is life. And not just on the border.

When a car pulled into secondary for a search, most of us usually looked it over and made a quick preliminary assessment of the likelihood of it being a load vehicle. Part of the assessment was soundly grounded on observable external factors. But, right or wrong, part of it would also be based on who had sent the car to secondary. New, inept or sloppy officers' referrals were much more likely to get short circuited attention. What we called 'DTR'--down the road. Kind of an extrapolation on the idea of 'you are what you eat'--'you are what you send to secondary'. Garbage in. Garbage out. That's what got me in trouble. One of those poorly selected cars came back, I made my assessment as such, and determined to do a very quick routine inspection and send the occupants on their way. When a cowboy hatted Mexican man who'd been in the car insisted that he had to use the bathroom, I told him I'd be done in just a minute and he'd be free to leave. He again insisted on using the bathroom. I thought about it, made my decision, said 'no' and continued with a very rapid inspection that wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. As I continued the inspection, I happened to glance over at the man standing nearby. There was a puddle of urine pooling around his boots and a dark stain running down his pants leg. Uh-oh. I apologized profusely to the man. And I meant it.

From then on I took the bathroom look a heck of a lot more seriously.

Let this sink in for a moment. I've had my hands in more men's crotches than a lot of happily promiscuous San Francisco live-it-up gay males. For those of you living in a reasonably normal world, the idea of regularly palpating people's privates must sound strange as hell at the very least. Who is this guy? Some kind of twisted character? No. Probing people's private areas is a regular part of the normal daily routine of a CBP officer. When we went through the Customs academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Brunswick in steamy coastal Georgia, the first inkling we got that we were into something very different in our new careers was when we started with personal search training. And that meant, besides the rest of a thorough pat down search, particular close attention to the private areas of the searchee.

Two things struck you right off at the academy. One was the odor. The presence of a nearby pulp mill made the whole area reek unpleasantly similar to a well frequented urinal. And, as if being in a place that smelled like a Satellite toilet wasn't bizarre enough, the thought of a future with your hands in guys' crotches really struck you as bizarre. Almost to the point of do I really want to do this?

It seemed the crotch area was a particularly favored spot for would be smugglers to hide contraband. The crotch, and also the brassiere zone in women. This is what the instructors said at the Customs Academy. Later experience on CBP's front line in the real world would hammer it home beyond even the most skeptical shadow of a doubt. For God knows what reason, the would be smugglers seemed to think the private areas are somehow off limits to law enforcement and are therefore a dandy safe place to hide contraband.

The crotch area and Bathroom Ethics super glued themselves permanently together in my mind one early morning on a charming superficially anachronistic British colonial island. A picture postcard of a place still graced with a stunning abundance of colorful pastel shaded 18th and 19th Century Caribbean style buildings. Bermuda. A handful of us were assigned as line inspectors at the U.S. Customs Preclearance facility at the airport there. Kindley Field. I was one of the sleepy eyed officers covering the early morning flight. At that time, the early 90's, there were still several non-Bermudian military bases on Bermuda. American, British, Canadian. Bermuda was a major base for tracking Russian subs during the Cold War and the Navy had a bunch of P3 submarine tracking aircraft stationed there. The U.S. Navy's Kindley Naval Air Station was adjacent to the civilian airport and the strip was used by both military and civilian aircraft.

Several thousand U.S. military, military dependents and civil service employees lived in Bermuda in those days. One early morning one of them came sauntering up to my Customs and Immigration booth. Whatever the guy's real name was, I immediately nicknamed him Mr. Clueless. I doubt this guy could have even begun to grasp the concept of being unobtrusive. He could hardly have been more conspicuous .He was a young black, with a baseball cap on sideways, tasteless clothes, ratty shorts and combat boots. Bermuda was a black majority country, but the Bermudians of all flavors were pretty much a dignified and prosperous people, at least in mainstream public places. The sight of a crass, blatant exhibitionist like this guy in the airport was just about unheard of. So naturally I was more than a little curious about him.

He turned out to be an American sailor who was booked on the early morning American Airlines flight to New York. Nothing unusual there. But he was very vague about where he was going and the nature of his trip. Enough for me to think he warranted a personal search. Since we were on foreign territory, personal searches generally had to be conducted by local officers. I was about to have the local officer search him when the young American sailor said he had an urgent need to go to the bathroom.

'OK', I thought. 'Let's see if he really does have to go to the bathroom.' He probably was shocked when I said I was going to accompany him. I did and it turned out this young dude who said he had to take a leak in the worst way had a sudden hold-the-presses emergency urine stoppage. His urine stream was as dry as an Arizona streambed in the dry season. Wasn't a drop of moisture anywhere in sight. That definitely called for a personal search. We returned to the main terminal and I accompanied the Bermudian officer--who was also black--into the search room, with the whispered advisory of "I think he's got something".

He did. Several thousand dollars in Bermudian currency. In his underwear. That tipped us off that there was something serious going on, something more than just a few thousand bucks tucked in the guy's shorts. Almost certainly it was drug related. In Bermuda the local currency was pegged 1:1 to U.S. currency and the export of Bermudian currency was tightly controlled. Only a small amount of Bermudian currency could be legally taken out of the country. Any more than that had to be officially exchanged with the Bermudian Monetary Authority--BMA--for U.S. dollars at the 1:1 rate to a maximum of $3000.

Bermuda kept track of those Monetary Authority purchases and got raised eyebrow interested when folks with modest means made substantial BMA transactions. People smuggling out Bermudian money were people who were trying to avoid public scrutiny. After they'd snuck the Bermudian currency out of the country the money smugglers took the cash to money exchanges in the U.S. There they settled for a exchange purchase of anywhere from 60 to 90% of the Bermudian dollar's value. That nailed it. Nobody on honest business was going to cavalierly throw away from 10 to 40% of their money's value. One of my Customs duties in Bermuda was to research those U.S. money exchange purchases, so I had a pretty good inkling of what was going on.

A quick phone call and the American sailor immediately became of intense interest to an investigator with the Navy's Criminal Investigation Service, a guy whose daughter was in school with my kids. The Navy investigator quickly cracked the sailor. The young dude admitted that he and several other black American sailors had been running a narcotics smuggling operation through the U.S. Navy postal facility on Kindley Field Naval Air Station. And right under the nose of the smug control freak Navy captain who supposedly had an iron fisted control over the base. The post office sailors imported drugs and exported money to buy more drugs. A series of trials followed and several sailors were convicted and imprisoned and/or dishonorably discharged.

And it all started because a guy wasn't able to take a leak.

A few years later. The secondary inspection lot at the Port of San Luis in the far corner of southwestern Arizona. A young couple had been sent to secondary because of an odd story. They were from Blythe, California, and had gone to San Luis, Mexico, to pick up prom pictures. Bythe being about a two hour drive from San Luis, this seemed strange. Subsequent questioning of them showed that there was some logic to their story because of the considerable differences in cost. The young man's nervousness, however, was enough to indicate a K-9 search of the vehicle. While that was going on, the pair was taken into the secondary office, which by then was routine port procedure. The K-9 search was negative, but the guy's flagrant nervousness had made us suspicious and I went out to physically search the vehicle. While I was doing this, square-built Mexican/Native American Gulf War vet Francisco 'Pancho' Soto came bustling towards me.

"The dude inside wants to use the bathroom", Pancho said. "I thought I'd better tell you first." Soto was thinking the same thing I was. People who suddenly had to go to the bathroom sometimes had something on their mind besides attending to their toilet functions. Like dumping hidden contraband anywhere they could. Pancho and I went inside, took the guy into the pat down room and proceeded to start a search. By then we both thought the young man had something on him. I asked him if he had any drugs on his body, and, if he did, to place them on the counter in front of him. He said he didn't have anything. The search began. Immediately I found a wad of paper in the 21 year old's pants pocket.

"What's this?" I asked.

"I don't know", was the young man's reply. I opened up the folded paper. A white powdery substance was inside.

"Meth or coke? I said. The kid sighed and shrugged. His shoulders sank.

"Meth", he said resignedly.

It was only a gram or two, so the local San Luis police were called to take custody of the pair. Both--the girl was only 16--were handcuffed and taken away. The young man didn't really seem like a criminal type or an addict. He worked at an auto parts store in Blythe as an assistant manager. The girl was still in high school. Her folks were likely none too happy with her when the phone call came from the San Luis PD that evening.

"Hello? You said what? You're the San Luis, Arizona, Police? And my daughter is....WHAT?" Mom and dad probably had to drive down to San Luis to pick her up and must have had some superheated words for her on the way back to Blythe about her taste in boyfriends.

So. Another one bit the dust. Variations on this bathroom related seizure theme were pretty common with us, even though we really didn't much like getting involved with seizures for piddling amounts of drugs.

There was a whole different side to bathroom use that we didn't talk about much. And that was because, just as inland law enforcement had its own reality, border law enforcement had its reality, too, and it could sometimes vary widely from off border procedures. The one area where that was especially true was the disposition of personal use quantities of drugs. Inland police departments took the subject of personal use drugs very seriously and--as you've probably seen on the Cops TV show--treated the possessors as serious offenders. Even a small amount of illegal substance on your person could get you into serious trouble in the interior of the United States.

Not with us. We didn't talk about it outside of ourselves, and written policies and official stances were scarce. But the fact was, especially when I first arrived on the border in the late 80's, that no one wanted to mess with small amounts of drugs. We were looking for large amounts. Kilos, not grams .That doesn't mean that the small amounts of drugs weren't there. Nor does it mean we didn't find them. They were and we did. The difference lay in what we did with them. You guessed it. We flushed the dope down the toilet. Especially marijuana. Getting a couple of grams of marijuana and making an official seizure out of it would tie an officer up for nearly as long as a big load. It would also earn you the enmity of your fellow officers and your supervisors, for they would be working one person short while you were doing the seizure. Some officers intentionally did this in order to get off the rotational schedule and kick back while doing the seizure paperwork. They were roundly disliked by their co-workers for it.

This gradually changed as the drug smuggling world became more entrenched and the border more regimented. At first we had to make formal seizures out of any hard drugs--cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin. We still flushed small amounts of marijuana. Eventually even that stopped and flushing was confined to prescription painkillers people would try to smuggle into the country illegally. Even that began to dry up after a while and only happened occasionally, and then we usually had the person trying to sneak in the drugs do the actual flushing themselves. A flick of the handle and hundreds of bucks worth of whoopie pills were on their way to God knew where. Would the stuff eventually find its way into the water table and maybe the drinking water of some nearby homeowner's private well? Nobody really knew then. With Customs nothing was ever simple.

Even a bathroom visit.

Strong Reasons Make Strong Actions

William Shakespeare

### Chapter 11

### When Things Get Really Serious

Sharon Romosz was a yeoman Customs senior inspector at the Port of Nogales. Sharon was a short, square person who carried herself with a somber no nonsense professionalism. She'd been with the Border Patrol before coming over to Customs. The pronunciation of her name sounded very much like the Hispanic 'Ramos', but it wasn't a Hispanic patronym. It wasn't even really her name, being the one she took along with a husband. She got rid of the husband but kept the name. Sharon hailed from Minnesota, like myself, and had first hooked up with the Border Patrol on the frigid northern border in our home state. Sharon took over the leadership of our employees' union, NTEU, after the former leaders, Emma and Art Voss, had retired from the grind of union business. I worked closely with her as a steward in training. She was in the process of teaching me the ropes when something altogether unexpected happened. One day Sharon was there. The next day she was gone. When I heard the reason, my dumbfounded reaction shot smack into the outer edges of the Twilight Zone of border reality.

Sharon had just shot some guy stone cold dead.

I wasn't there when it happened, but the details were repeated to me many times over by various credible officers. Sharon and one other officer were the only ones in the Grand Avenue secondary lot one evening in early 1989. The other officer, Big Jim, escorted a suspect into the secondary lot search room. I think the guy had some kind of a lookout attached to his name. The officer did a brief frisk of the suspect for weapons before entering the search room building.

Not enough of a frisk, as it very quickly turned out. This dude was not the ordinary garden variety low level suspect that we usually encountered. We later learned he was part of a drug trafficking family and currently out on bail awaiting a court date for serious criminal charges. As the hefty Customs officer maneuvered the much smaller suspect into the little Grand Avenue secondary office, the guy suddenly pulled out a gun. Though not a big person, he was wiry. The male Customs officer, Big Jim, was a big man and a Viet Nam vet and tried to wrestle the gun out of the man's hand. The wiry little suspect was juiced on something, if nothing else his own fight-or-flight adrenalin, and Big Jim couldn't get the gun out of the guy's hand. While they were struggling the guy kept uttering expletive laced threats that he was going to shoot him. Sharon heard the commotion and made tracks in hurry to the search room. It was a slow, understaffed night and she was the only other person nearby besides the grimly grappling pair of men. Sharon jerked her service weapon out of its holster and repeatedly ordered the man to release his gun. He wouldn't. He kept on shouting that he was going to blow them both away while fiercely trying to bring the weapon to bear on one or the other of them. It was a lethally desperate situation. Finally, Sharon no longer had a choice. She had to shoot. She did.

The suspect slumped to the floor of the search room. Dead.

We later learned that the guy had recently been involved in a very similar scenario when he pulled a gun on someone and threatened them with it. I believe he had also been charged with attempted kidnapping. He was a known member of a drug trafficking family. Yet a judge had let this guy go free on bail. It was a fatal decision.

Things got very serious for Sharon in a hurry. She received death threats, presumably from the drug trafficking family the dead guy had belonged to. Federal agents swooped in Stealth-like and literally overnight whisked Sharon away to an undisclosed location. She never did come back to Nogales. I heard some of the details of what happened from her second husband, who was a Border Patrol officer at Nogales and didn't leave right away when she did. Later we learned that she had been transferred to a Customs airport facility in the interior of the country. Though for reasons of safety the location was supposed to be confidential, one of our computer savvy officers easily found out where she was by scouring the databases. The shooting was found to be justified and Sharon cleared of any implications of the inappropriate use of deadly force.

But she still probably wished it had never happened.

Robert Labrada was an interesting guy. And outspoken. When we transferred from very different directions into the Port of San Luis in 1995 we learned that both of us had had nasty run-ins with a particularly arrogant and obnoxious Customs management official. Robert and I hit it off well from then on. Kind of like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Robert transferred from the northern border in western Washington State because the perennially gloomy wet climate was getting to him. Robert also got my rapt attention from the beginning of our acquaintance for a very different reason. He had two small children and his young wife had terminal cancer. Some months later I would go to his wife's funeral across the border in California, where Robert eventually transferred to the Port of Calexico to be closer to family during his wife's final days. Robert took a double whammy in California. His wife died.

And some dirt bag smuggler shot him.

The year was 1997. The guy's name was Senovio Gonzalez Birrueta. He was 74 years old. Birrueta was a Mexican national with a U.S. record of arrests and deportations going back at least thirty years. A whole bunch of offenses. And mostly he coasted through it all with little more than a hand slap. He had been arrested for smuggling marijuana or illegal aliens at least four times and had been deported or removed to Mexico on numerous occasions. And Birrueta's criminal history wasn't just fading old septuagenarian memories. In the previous two years the guy had been twice busted for attempted marijuana smuggling at the San Ysidro Port of Entry south of San Diego. For that he got a total of a mere sixty-two days in the slammer and "...another formal exclusion from the country,"

Birrueta was driving a van that was in the slow moving line of vehicles coming from Mexico towards the car lane entry gates at Calexico. A Customs K-9 handler picked out the vehicle for further inspection. That probably meant that the dog had showed some interest in the van. Established procedure was that the driver of a vehicle that was to be searched should be taken into the secondary office while the search was going on.Robert Labrada escorted Birrueta into the office. Robert suspected nothing. A superannuated 74 year old wearing a flowery Hawaiian shirt doesn't raise a lot of alarm bells with border officers. But this was no ordinary 74 year old with a flowery shirt. He was a long time criminal with nothing to lose. And he had a small caliber semi-automatic handgun hidden on his body. As Robert escorted Birrueta into the secondary office, this harmless looking old man pulled out a gun and started blasting away. He shot both Robert and officer Nicholas Lira, who was sitting nearby at the secondary desk. The officers' training kicked in and they responded to the threat of deadly force with their own deadly force. Birrueta crumpled up and slumped to the secondary floor. Dead. Both Robert and Nicholas Lira would survive their wounds.

The whole thing was captured on the secondary office's video camera. Anybody who had any doubts about what happened need only have looked at the video of the event. I saw it several times myself. Yet, even so, and despite the violent old man's long rap sheet, there were "Mexicans who sought assurance that Birrueta hadn't been the victim of police brutality", according to a San Diego newspaper.

125 pounds of marijuana was found in the van he was driving.

I believe that sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.

Garrison Keillor

### Chapter 12

### These Shoes Are Made For....Smuggling?

For body carrying dope smugglers, the hands down all time champion remains the Forbidden Zone. The crotch. But there are a few runner ups in the dope body hiding contests. We often found small amounts of narcotics in pockets and purses and in wallets. We saw dope and money sewn into the lining of trousers and shirts and coats. We saw dope and large amounts of cash taped around midriffs and covered by body stockings and jackets. But that wasn't quite all. Say you have a guy who's falling down nervous and you suspect drugs. You do a pat down of the guy. Nothing. You go through his pockets and wallet and personal effects. Still nothing. Yet the guy is still shaking. You don't think the guy is either a stuffer or a swallower. That leaves one more possibility. Your eyes fall to the floor. Yes, that might be it. No, not the floor.

The shoes.

Not that shoes were any kind of priority with us. The Arizona border was in the heart of dope busting country and we were bringing down sizeable loads almost every day. Who was going to focus on a few grams of dope in some guy's shoe when they could find kilos of the stuff hidden in a car or truck? It would be like hunting chipmunks with an elephant gun. But we still sometimes were involved in personal searches where the process of elimination eventually led to the person's shoes. Was there a choice? Not really. A search is a search is a search. So we checked the shoes.

I was the lead senior working the office. The port intercom phone rang. Teresa Guzman was on the other end calling from the pedestrian gate.

"I need a male officer for a pat down", Teresa said.

"O.K", I said. "Be right there." I hung up the phone with a grin. Teresa was at it again. Lord knows what she'd come up with this time. I headed across the narrow street that went between the secondary building and the main government office building and on up to the interior pedestrian gate. Teresa was standing there waiting, looking resolutely serious. With her were a couple of young guys, Ramon Aguilar and Ruben Esperanza. I glanced at the pair.

"Both of them?" I asked about the pat down. Teresa nodded.

"Both". We escorted the two young men into a small adjacent room where we often did pedestrian gate pat downs. Teresa couldn't do the pat downs because of gender. It was a hard and fast your-job's-at-stake rule that only males could pat down males and only females could pat down females. The only exceptions were a frisk for weapons and life threatening emergency situations. So Teresa watched while I began the pat downs.

Esperanza came up clean. His name--which is Spanish for 'hope'--delivered on its patronymic promise. Then I started with Aguilar. The pat down was negative. Nothing on the guy. So far, anyhow. I had him sit down and turned my attention to his shoes. If I hadn't known Teresa and her ability to sniff out dope, I might have wondered what the heck was the point in searching these two. But Teresa's mysterious sensory dope antennae were often smack on the money. So I kept at it. As I started to check out Aguilar's shoes his behavior changed. He had been chatty and relaxed. Now he became quiet and somber. Oh-ho! The hound had the scent. I removed his left shoe and checked it out. Nothing. Then I took off the other shoe and took a look inside. The reason for Aguilar's sudden change of behavior appeared in the form of a roundish black object about an inch and a half by two inches inside the shoe. I looked up at him.

"Weed?" I asked.

"Cocaine", was the glum answer. Teresa and I went through the usual drill with him, cuffing him and removing him to the secondary office where he was placed in a detention cell. We weighed the round black object and field tested it. Cocaine. 15 grams. Aguilar was arrested and hauled off to jail.

I still don't know how in the devil Teresa figured that one out.

On a different day I was on the pedestrian gate. A kid named Madrigal came up to the gate from Mexico. He said he was a U.S. citizen. I at first had my doubts. The kid was shaking badly. But he really was an American citizen. There had to be another reason for the guy's nervousness. It was a short list and dope was at the top of it. I did a quick pat down of the kid. Nothing. He was still shaking. I had him sit down and remove his shoes. Under the soles of one of his shoes was a baggy of marijuana. Like a bunch of other weed toters both before and after him, Madrigal made the well traveled walk from the pedestrian gate back to the secondary office and a detention cell.

The pedestrian gate again. A pair of young dudes named Bustamante and Cordoba came walking up from Mexico. They were locals who lived in San Luis on the Arizona side and had been over on the Mexican side for some reason now lost to memory. But I do remember that their behavior made me suspicious. I noticed that Bustamante was holding one of his hands in a clenched fist.

"What's in your hand?" I asked, motioning at the closed hand. The kid just shrugged.

"Nothing", he replied. I wasn't so sure.

"Open up your hand, please", I said. The kid didn't reply. The hand stayed clenched.

"Open up your hand!" This time it was an order, not a request. Still nothing from the kid. So I reached over and tried to force his hand open. He still resisted. I set in with both hands and was finally able to force his hand open. And there was the reason for his resistance. The kid had a small baggie of marijuana in his hand. So we made the walk over to the secondary office where a thorough pat down of the two was done. A few grams of marijuana in Bustamante's hand didn't amount to much in our eyes. And Cordova was totally in the clear. Until secondary officer Luis Torres checked his shoes. There he found a couple of small packets wrapped in a yellow Seran Wrap-like plastic covering. Torres field tested a sample from inside the little packets. Methamphetamine. In a twinkling Cordoba went from being in the clear to being in hot water. And mostly because his buddy Bustamente had pulled the lamebrain stunt of holding a baggie of marijuana in his hand when he came through the border.

Cordoba likely had some incendiary words for his buddy Bustamante over that one.

Aguilar. Madrigal. Cordoba. Just a few of the many we busted who tried to hide narcotics in their shoes. Some were strange or ironic or bizarre, such as Bustamente and Cordoba. But none of them were any stranger than the father and son team we caught one day at San Luis. Before it was over, it wouldn't be just the shoes of the smugglers that came off.

A juvenile court judge would be pulling his shoe off, too.

We jumped. The alarm went off in secondary. There was a TECS hit on one of the primary lanes. A gray Toyota Corolla station wagon had pulled up to INS officer Ann Glass' primary lane. When Ann entered the wagon's license plate number in the primary lane's computer the word TECS popped out on the computer screen. At the same moment the TECS alarm sounded in the secondary office. Several of us scrambled to respond to the primary lanes. The TECS lookout, which had just been phoned in by a Border Patrolman, was a heads up serious one. Heroin. There were a pair of Hispanic males in the Corolla, 46 year old Arsemio Ibarra and his 16 year old son. We got to the car and pulled the pair from the vehicle. I did a quick weapons frisk of the older man. The kid's carotid artery was going full blast and the older man was so wide eyed apprehensive that I was pretty sure that this was going to end in a drug bust. While the other officers took the pair back to the Customs building's detention area, I drove the Corolla wagon back into the secondary lot where I asked a K-9 officer to run the wagon.

We were thinking this could well end up being a pretty good drug bust when the K-9 officer, who was very new and inexperienced, finished his run and said the results were negative. Negative? With a urgent lookout like this and the way these guys were acting? We were both surprised and disappointed. At that time I don't think I'd yet had a heroin bust. But it wasn't quite over. We still would have to do a physical search of the car and there was always an outside chance something would turn up in a hand search. I turned and walked back into the secondary office where Ibarra and son were being held. Both suspects had already been patted down, but there was a suspicion that the two might be body carriers. A body carrier had been caught on the pedestrian gate the day before, and there had been a wild brawl with a heroin stuffer in secondary the day before that. We all agreed a strip search would be a good idea with this pair. The supervisor on duty authorized the strip search. I took the older man. Other officers, including supervisor Benny Franklin, took the kid. Ibarra, who had seemed so apprehensive when pulled out of the Toyota on primary, now seemed relaxed. He cooperated fully during the strip search. So much so that I concluded it would be negative even before it was finished. And it was.

Not so with his son. I had finished searching the elder Ibarra and just walked into the room where the kid was being searched when Benny Franklin found the reason for the lookout. 1.2 grams of black tar heroin. In the kid's shoe. And then a different K-9 officer, Don Trusty, ran his dog on the Toyota and this time came up with a positive hit. We searched the car and found a half gram of marijuana in a partially smoked cigarette that belonged to the older man. A trifling amount of dope in our eyes. But considering that the kid had the heroin in his shoe, and it seemed very likely Ibarra knew about it, the marijuana was enough to arrest him along with the kid. Off they went to the slammer. Because Benny Franklin was a supervisor and couldn't do a seizure himself, he turned it over to me. I became the seizing officer. And as a result I would be getting a subpoena a couple of weeks later to testify at the kid's trial before the juvenile court judge.

It was juvenile court. No jury. Just a bunch of government employees of one species or another, all paid for by the taxpayers--including the defense attorney--and the kid and his family. The elder Ibarra had also been called as a witness. He was there with the kid's mother. The woman appeared to be distraught and shaken, but Arsemio Ibarra looked wooden and expressionless. I was sworn in at the start of the trial and then told to wait outside in the hallway and not to discuss the trial with anyone. So, like all the other trials I was subpoenaed to, I sat dumbly outside the courtroom and had no clue of what the hell was going on until it was all over.

The clerk of the court leaned out the courtroom door and called my name. In full duty uniform, including a firearm, I went into the courtroom and took the stand. The prosecuting attorney went through the usual preliminaries, establishing that I was a trained veteran Customs officer and then going into the details of the actual drug seizure. Including my statement that another officer had actually done the searching of the accused young man and that I just had come into the room and saw the heroin being found in his shoe. The defense attorney took issue with that, arguing that I hadn't been the searching officer and consequently couldn't testify about finding the heroin, but the judge wasn't buying it. Then the defense attorney took issue with something else I had said, about noticing the kid's carotid artery pumping furiously and remarked on the subjective, non-scientific character of my observation. The judge wasn't buying that, either. He must have known that a visibly throbbing carotid artery is a well established major indicator of stress.

I finished my testimony and was directed by the judge to again wait outside in the corridor. I grabbed a seat in the corridor and sat there wondering what was going on inside the courtroom a few feet away behind closed doors. I later heard that the defense's main argument was that the kid did not know the heroin was in his shoe. But I didn't know that yet. The clerk of the court came out of the courtroom's door, looked around, saw me and headed purposely over to where I was sitting. He told me that the judge had adjourned the proceedings to go into his chambers to deliberate his decision. Since the basic issue was whether the kid knew the heroin was in his shoe, the judge sent the clerk out to ask me exactly how it was hidden. I tried to explain it but the clerk's expression looked blank. I wasn't getting through. It seemed a visual demonstration might get my point across. So I took off my shoe, lifted up the sole and pointed to the middle of the shoe under it, saying that the heroin had been hidden under the sole of the shoe just like this. The clerk's blank expression vanished. He nodded understanding and promptly made a brisk return to the judge's chambers.

The little packet of heroin in the kid's shoe had earlier been described as being about the size of a quarter and three times as thick. With that description in mind, and with the visual aid I gave to the clerk, the judge then took two quarters and a nickel--he couldn't find another quarter--stacked them on top of another and took off his own shoe. He put the heroin-simulated stack of coins under the sole, put the shoe back on and then stood up to see if he could feel the object in his shoe. He took a step or two. No doubt of it. The object in his shoe was clearly tangible. The judge made his decision. The kid, who'd had other brushes with the law and already was on probation, was convicted and sent to the juvenile detention center.

And all because a quick thinking judge was willing to take off his shoe.

There is no such thing as justice--in or out of court."

Clarence Darrow

### Chapter 13

### Bad Guys or Good Guys? Bobby Butler and Greg Floto

Bobby Butler was one of the first officers I met at San Luis. He was a first line GS-12 Supervisory Customs Inspector--SCI--who'd been with Customs since 1979. Before that he was the first full time chief of police in the town of San Luis. Bobby was an All American Amalgam. An Anglo name coupled with a mixed race parentage of gringo, Mexican and Native American. And he had a colorful personality to match. Bobby was a jaunty guy who looked like a frontier mixture of cowboy and Customs officer. He wore a .45 hanging ready off his hip and his shirt was as likely as not to be unfastened a button or two. Spit and polish were not Bobby Butler concepts. He was easy going and laid back and a very pleasant person to work with. He was good at what he did. Everyone seemed to have a high opinion of him.

At least among the front line troops. It would be no surprise if the desk and rule bound types in the air conditioned offices in Tucson and Houston and maybe even Washington D.C. found him to be an anachronism and perhaps even an embarrassment. His laid back individualistic persona didn't fit in with the tidy spit and polish orderly Customs officer image the agency held as an ideal. Bobby was nobody's idea of what a recruiting poster should look like. Was that a factor in his fall? Considering what happened to him, maybe there is some substance to the old border paranoia that still kicks in to ruminate over what might be the real facts behind his very questionable departure.

The first doubts about was going on began innocently enough one day when I put on my union steward hat. INS internal affairs officers wanted to interview Customs Inspector Fernando Castillo about allegations against an INS inspector. Castillo was thought to have relevant information. Fernando agreed to be interviewed, but only with a Customs NTEU (National Treasury Employees' Union) steward present. On that day that meant me. So I put on my union hat and we went into a private room where INS internal affairs officers began to question Castillo. We already knew the basic facts of the allegations against the INS officer. He was suspected to have taken an undocumented entrant into an empty side room, had sex with her, then let the woman go on illegally into the U.S. This officer was a guy that we all considered to be of questionable character, so the chances of the allegations having substance behind them seemed very possible. And that is what we expected when we went into the private conference room.

But that wasn't what was on the minds of the INS internal affairs agents. They seemed far more interested in asking questions about Bobby Butler and his knowledge of certain events and his actions in relation to them.

"Did you report this to Supervisor Butler?" The INS agent asked.

"Butler? He's a Customs supervisor, not an INS supervisor", I interrupted.

"Yes. Yes. We know. What did Supervisor Butler do about this?"

This line of questioning made us wary. We paused the interview while I took CI Castillo outside for a private discussion. Fernando agreed that there was something else going on here than what we expected. We reconvened and told them we would stay on the subject of what CI Castillo knew in relation to the suspected INS officer. And that wasn't much. Castillo had seen the other officer come out of a private conference room very red faced and out of breath. I no longer recall whether he had seen the woman come out of the room or not. I do remember that the officer in question eventually left INS under a cloud of suspicion. We never heard if he was eventually prosecuted.

We looked upon internal affairs officers pretty much like you might see in a TV cop program. We did not trust them. We did not trust their motives. And we definitely did not think they had the well being of the line inspectors at heart. Nor did we doubt that they would use deceptive, dishonest, unethical and possibly even illegal methods in their investigations. This is not to say that all these things really were true of internal affairs. But it does mean we believed them to be true. I was disturbed enough by the duplicitous behavior of the INS internal affairs officers to personally warn Bobby Butler about it. Although as a supervisor he no longer fell under the rules of the union contract, he still was a Customs officer of long standing and upright reputation. He was taken aback by what I told him, and was uncertain of what it was about. But there was obvious consternation in his eyes.

It didn't take long to find out. Someone was gunning for Bobby Butler. Big time. One day some species of federal agents showed up at the port and humiliated the man by hauling him away in handcuffs. What the hell was going on? The details, the facts, the reality, remain murky to this day. On the surface, the facts were these. According to a newspaper article, Bobby pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully disclosing information about the details concerning the destruction of confiscated drugs. As part of his plea agreement, he was forbidden to ever hold a position with the federal government again. He resigned his Customs position and was sentenced to one year's probation. His career was shot, his long years of Customs service down the tube. But his reputation? Among his fellow officers there was and remains a deep set suspicion about what really happened to Bobby Butler.

Several other officers, who had known Bobby Butler for years, and including the NTEU chief steward at San Luis, Ron Mann, believed that Bobby had been railroaded. The confidential information that he had disclosed was probably no more than him chatting up someone at a party or some kind of social occasion and remarking that he was going on drug burns at certain times. Drug burns are a regular part of a Customs officer's job. They entail periodically moving confiscated drugs from the secure prison like barbed wire enclosed San Luis drug storage unit to an incinerator in Phoenix, where the drugs were destroyed. Bobby Butler was the supervisor in charge of the drug burn detail. Apparently he told a nebulous 'someone' that he was going on one or more of these burns.

That was uncool, and he shouldn't have done it. But to cost him his job? What Bobby didn't know was that the person he was talking to was an informant. The informant was supposedly wearing a wire. According to the newspaper article, the name of the informant was not publicly disclosed. In at least some sense, Bobby Butler was set up. Why? By whom? Someone with their own personal axe to grind? A federal agent looking to fatten her or his resumé? An overzealous federal prosecutor? An enemy within the government? We probably will never know, but most of us who worked with Bobby Butler believe that he was unfairly singled out and railroaded out of the job that he had done so well for so long. Management could easily have handled this internally, and we were aware of far more serious supervisory misconduct that was glossed over by upper level management with few consequences for the involved managers. So why bring the Big Hammer down on Bobby's head when these others bosses skated? In the opinion of many of his co-workers Bobby Butler was undoubtedly the target of someone's ruthlessness and/or vindictiveness. He might as well have had a big red bull's eye slapped on his forehead. He was somebody's target. And that somebody scored a direct hit.

We always wondered why he didn't fight the allegations in court. We were later told that he was offered a deal. If he pled guilty to the two misdemeanor counts and resigned from the service, they would let him keep his pension. If he went to court, they'd go after a felony conviction and the loss of his pension. No one knows better than a law enforcement officer that justice doesn't always prevail in the courtroom. Bobby didn't want to take the chance on losing his pension. So he pled out. And thus a fine officer left the Service in official disgrace.

But not in the minds of his friends.

### The Mystifying Case of Greg Floto

Two colorful characters stick out in my mind from my first day on the job in Nogales. I was a new hire and told to show up for the first day of work on a Monday morning at the Nogales truck dock. A handful of other new hires showed up at the same time. Whatever we might have expected of that first morning, we were promptly told to go hang out in the lunch room until they figured out what to do with us. We had not yet been to the Customs Academy and accordingly were about as useful to a working Customs facility as a condom to an Ottoman eunuch. So off we went to the lunch room. Sitting there at a table in the middle of an intense discussion of rules and regulations over opened Customs manuals were Lance Klump and Greg Floto. To my virginal Customs ears they almost sounded like old hands. I was mildly surprised to hear that they were new hires like us from just a couple of weeks earlier. Both of these men would go on to a kind of Customs fame

But of very different kinds.

I saw a lot of Greg Floto in the early days with Customs. Greg had been an MP in Viet Nam and later worked in security until he got his college degree and joined Customs. He had a particular interest in unions. So did I. We both joined the union. It wasn't long after we returned to Nogales from the Federal Law Enforcement Academy in torrid coastal Georgia before we investigated the idea of becoming union stewards ourselves. The union was NTEU, the National Treasury Employees Union, and included IRS and Social Security workers as well as Customs employees. Though we worked side by side with officers of the INS--Immigration and Naturalization Service--they had a different union. NTEU seemed to us to be a reasonably effective and uncorrupt union and both of us decided to become stewards.

The leadership in the local union chapter, NTEU 116, changed not long after that. The couple who had run it, Senior Inspector Emma Voss and her retired husband, Art, needed a break. Leadership devolved to Senior Inspector Sharon Romosz, a former Border Patrol agent and a fellow native of the frozen state of Minnesota. Sharon didn't last long. She was involved in a fatal shooting at the Nogales Port of Entry and had to be relocated for her own safety. Sharon's unexpected departure left a sudden void in the local NTEU chapter. Greg Floto and I became the president and vice president of the Union. Greg blew my mind. He was like a blooded thoroughbred charging explosively out of the starting gates in his new role as chapter president. It was as though the guy was born for it. I was left far behind in the dust as he galloped away and exponentially expanded his knowledge and concurrently extended the influence and reputation of the local NTEU chapter. Arizona Customs management, which was often prone to blow off the union as ineffectual and mostly just a waste of time, now was forced to pay attention. When they didn't, they found out quickly enough that this wasn't the same old union. Greg Floto meant business. It wasn't long before his name was being mentioned in regional and even national NTEU circles.

Greg's reputation among the workforce bordered on the legendary. The union chapter included all of the Arizona ports of entry. Douglas, Naco, Nogales, Sasabe, Lukeville and San Luis on the border and two permanently staffed airports, Tucson and Phoenix, plus some support staff. The vistas in Arizona are grand. And the distances are grand, too. Hundreds of miles separated some of the Customs ports and Greg soon found himself traveling very frequently. It wasn't long before he was burdened with the reality of union chapter leaders that had burned so many of them out. Though management contractually was obligated to devote union time to NTEU officers on union business, that union time was not always granted and inevitably fell far short of the actual hours spent on union business. When a union officer is already working 60 plus hour weeks on regular Customs business, with endless hours of union business added to that, a person wears down quickly. Greg kept it for a long time, though the edges of his life were growing frazzled. He managed to get transferred to the Tucson airport and from there began to work nearly full time on NTEU business. he Arizona Customs Management Center was also located in Tucson and he was frequently there. Eventually, management and NTEU agreed that he would devote himself full time to his union work.

I followed a very different track than Greg. While he went on to intense NTEU involvement, I went off on a four year overseas tour not too long after our mutual NTEU beginnings at Nogales. By the time I returned to Arizona, this time to the San Luis Port of Entry, Greg Floto had become a union legend. His intensity and effectiveness were stunning. Together with his Chief Steward Ron Mann Sr.--also in San Luis--they had transformed the Arizona NTEU chapter into a force to be reckoned with. Beware the manager who tried to blow off Greg Floto and Ron Mann! They might be a couple of guys with rough edges you wouldn't have at the top of the guest list for your cocktail party. But they were pit bulls when it came to fighting management for employee rights.

Of course they had their detractors. Plenty of them. But those very same detractors, when they were in trouble, did not hesitate one blinking minute to run to Greg and Ron and ask for and even demand help. Still, Greg had his serious enemies. Some of them probably remained anonymous and worked against him behind the scenes. Some of them were out front about their opposition. Foremost and probably most effective among those were the former union leaders from Greg's first days in Nogales, Art and Emma Voss. They began circulating allegations of corruption against Greg. They also apparently managed to get the ear of Department of Labor special agents who specialized in investigating such allegations. From there the tale gets murky and frankly even now what really happened remains about as clear as the Seattle sky in a January drizzle.

Greg told me that the investigator had turned up at his place and attempted a bullying kind of intimidating confrontation. Greg Floto was the wrong person to try that kind of tactic on, that's for sure, whether it actually happened that way or not. Greg said that from that point on the investigator launched a vendetta against him. As a former journalist as well as a Customs officer and NTEU steward, I'd learned to weigh all statements very carefully. But in my own personal experience I'd been the target of a vendetta consumed unprofessional Cochise County Sheriff's Department sergeant. So I knew from personal experience that vendettas do exist, even among law enforcement personnel. And I did not discount what Greg said about the vendetta. Nor did I completely buy it. The jury was still out on that one. And it still is.

About the time all of this was beginning, the Arizona NTEU chapter held a stewards' meeting in a downstairs meeting room in the peculiar obelisk shaped control tower building at the sun spackled Tucson airport. Along with the other San Luis stewards, I went to the meeting. There we saw Art and Emma Voss show up and accuse Greg of corruption. No one believed them then, and Art was booed and very nearly physically ejected by the outraged stewards. Looking back, one had to wonder. How much substance was there to their claims? Time was to prove that there was a least some fire beneath the smoke. Greg Floto was soon to have his moments under a very bright spotlight. But they were not to be moments of fame. He was about to become another shooting star flaming out before our startled eyes.

His moments in the spotlight were to be moments of infamy.

Here is an excerpt from the U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Division Office of Labor Management Standards website for Criminal Actions 2002.

On September 10, 2002, in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Gregory B. Floto, former president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Chapter 116, was sentenced to six months of home detention, three years of probation, fined $2,000, ordered to pay a $100 special assessment, and ordered to pay $7,714.68 in remaining restitution to the union (or bonding company). On March 15, 2002, Floto pled guilty to making a false statement to a federal agent to conceal his embezzlement of $15,714.21 in union funds after being charged in a seven-count indictment. This case was prosecuted by attorneys from the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, following a joint investigation by the OLMS Los Angeles District Office and U.S. Customs Internal Affairs Tucson office.

Newspapers also reported Floto's case. Floto's attorney, Bruce Heurlin, was convinced that Floto was being unfairly singled out for prosecution in a very questionable fashion. Whatever the underlying factors, the result was the same with Greg as it had been with Bobby Butler. His career was shot.

It is clear that Greg Floto crossed the line. But how far, and was the punishment commensurate with the offense? I am not one to lightly embrace any kind of conspiracy theory. But, with Greg, you certainly had to wonder. Was there a vendetta against him? Did he have secret enemies working to bring him down? We'll never know.

Greg Floto stepped over the line and undoubtedly had to suffer some form of punishment, but he still was hands down the best union representative I ever had the opportunity of working with. The union members might have gained a few thousand bucks in remuneration from Greg, but they lost far more than that in effective union representation. Floto and his strong right arm, Ron Mann, won many, many quality of life enhancing concessions from Customs management during their tenure with the union. Many of us remembered that and were genuinely saddened by Greg's fall from grace. Maybe a few folks took pleasure in his fall. His enemies. The investigators. The prosecutors. Internal Affairs and probably Customs management. But not most of us. So is there a lesson to learn in all of this?

Well, one of them is pretty obvious. It you decide you're gonna wrassle the bear, don't be surprised if you get bitten. I was myself targeted for revenge by a couple of Customs supervisors and a U.S. Navy Captain, mostly because I stood up to them and spoke my mind about employees' rights. I got bitten by the bear a time or two, but nothing anywhere near to what happened to Greg. His aggressive and effective union representation was light years beyond mine. And so was his punishment. Greg did step over the line and had to pay the price. But what about the price? Loss of job and union position, six months home detention, three years probation, plus a fine and payment of restitution. Sound reasonable? Maybe so. Maybe not. Was it fair and balanced?

Probably not.

At almost the same time another scandal was unfolding inside U.S. Customs in Arizona on a scale comparable to Greg's case. This one involved a highly placed Customs manager on the Arizona Mexican border. Undercover agents observed this senior manager take a government vehicle while on duty, pick up a male illegal alien--possibly underage--and have sex with the boy, then return him to Mexico. And this was not the first time. They reportedly had the incident on videotape. This outrageous behavior by a senior management official, who presented himself as a upright religious paragon and family man, did not end up blatantly headlined in the newspapers or in a courtroom. The official was allowed to quietly resign. No charges, no penalties, no publicity. No long public investigation. Just a quiet resignation and a departure into the sunset. And with no loss of pension. There's a lesson in this mess, too. It is possible to wrassle the bear and not get bitten....

If you're another bear.

### INS AGAIN

When transferring into San Luis I still had a bottom scraping low opinion of the Immigration and Naturalization Service-INS-was a bad joke among the inspectors at Nogales, largely from the direction and example set by those Above, including a notoriously non-enforcement oriented port director. Individual officers might have been dedicated and professional, but the thrust of the system steamrollered them. I recall relating to my wife that after catching an INS 'pop' on the Nogales pedestrian lane and taking the person upstairs to the INS office, the 'caught' person would just about beat me back downstairs on their way hotfooting north into the U.S. after being released by INS. When we did southbound operations we'd repeatedly find people who had been living illegally in the U.S. They would have no U.S. residency documents, but would have Social Security cards, driver's licenses, pay stubs from U.S. firms and other U.S. based documents. Nor was it uncommon to find welfare cards or food stamps. When we would take these people to the INS office they wouldn't even look at them.

"They're going south", INS would say. "Leaving the country. So what's the problem?"

Well, let's see. Maybe having a phony or illegally obtained social security number? Or receiving benefits only a legal resident could receive? Not paying taxes on income? Obvious intent to return illegally? Having already broken the law by entering illegally? Or how about checking to see if they have a criminal record or have a warrant? Or how about the companies named in the pay stubs who were hiring illegal aliens?

The best we got from INS was blank stares. Even if they wanted to do something, the pressure from Above was to look the other way. One dark evening at Nogales a casual glance to just beyond the Grand Avenue secondary area spotted a line of rough dressed men filing from the sidewalk into a pair of taxis. A few quick steps to the taxis. A simple question. Did they have any U.S. identification? Except for the taxi drivers, they had none. There were eight or ten illegal aliens in the two cabs. Talk about brazen! The smugglers blatantly loaded the illegals into the cabs literally right next to the Customs secondary inspection lot. It was too much to stomach. So I directed both cabs into the secondary area and found an INS officer to hand them over to. He looked at me with opened mouthed shock as though I were stone cold crazy. Word got around quickly enough and a while later I was taken aside and quietly dressed down for interfering in what was supposed to be the Border Patrol's job.

Another time I was working the Morley Avenue pedestrian entry gate in the old fading center of Nogales, just east of the main entry point on Grand Avenue. Working the Morley gate was a welcome change of pace. No suckin' fumes like on the car lanes. And it was also pleasant because the old colorful pageantry of the border was still palpable in the perambulating flow of dressed up Mexicans parading through the gate. But Morley was also notorious among us for the outrageous way in which illegal entrants climbed through the border fence on the hill that climbed steeply to the east of the gate. It went on all day long. That is, until the understaffed and overworked Border Patrol--they were spread very thin in those days--showed up near the crossing point. Then the illegals would start climbing over the border fence next to us, some as close as twenty feet away. That was too much for me. When I saw them jump down from the border fence, I'd walk a few steps into the road right behind us and intercept them. All that was necessary was to point at the Morley south gate into Mexico. With only an occasional swift footed exception, they all just shrugged and more or less good naturedly complied and walked back into Mexico. I was working with a young female INS officer one day, and she became upset with me for disturbing the easy going routine of Morley by intercepting the fence jumpers and sending them back to Mexico. Wasn't that our job? Not to her. She just wanted to sit on her stool and wave people through. I was disturbing the tranquility of her day and of the 'vacation' of working the Morley Gate. After a few more incidents like those I hardly ever bothered to send someone to INS. What was the point? And, on top of all that, there was a lot of Customs gossip on all levels in Nogales about many of the INS officers being corrupt. Later events would prove that there was some truth to the gossip, though not nearly to the extent that some had maintained. The overwhelming majority were honest and reputable federal officers.

Three years into my Nogales tour there was a message in my Customs email one evening after I reported for work on the swing shift. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was the Customs jackpot. The impossible had twisted inside out and become the real. It was a transfer to the Island of Bermuda, where U.S. Customs and Immigration had a Preclearance Station. I'd put in for the transfer just for the hell of it, never in my wildest dreams thinking I'd get it. We all knew you had to have some serious juice with the government to land a plum assignment like Bermuda. And my juicer was bone dry. But I somehow got the impossible transfer. It was Providence. With a Capital P.

Bermuda had a very different INS than Nogales. It was hardly an intense INS environment. The INS port director there was more interested in playing golf and dabbling in the lifestyle of a Bermuda patrician than INS enforcement. But still he was a competent man, and the INS officers there were more involved in a variety of INS work than the mostly Mexican related stuff in Arizona. Since we were cross trained with the INS officers and did the same work--with the exception of Customs inspections--we learned a fair amount about INS procedures and laws, passports, fraud, and the various types of visas, particularly as used in the temporary INS paper document called an I-94.

But that was Bermuda. Four years passed. Another transfer came, this one back to the United States to the Port of San Luis on the Arizona side of the Arizona/California border with Mexico. It seemed that it'd be the same old lackluster Mexican Border INS like at Nogales. Wrong. This was nothing like the Nogales INS had been. INS was actually enforcement oriented at the Port of San Luis. What a refreshing change that was. What a pleasure it was to see how effective border INS officers could be when given proper leadership and encouragement! The INS training in Bermuda was soon put to good use and a much closer relationship developed with INS, both individually and collectively, in San Luis than had ever been the case in Nogales.

The functions of INS and Customs officers have now been combined into one under the name of Customs and Border Protection--CBP--in the Department of Homeland Security. Even the line between port officer and Border Patrol is blurred, with blue uniformed port officers sometimes working the Border Patrol checkpoint a few miles north of my home in Cochise County. But they were all still separate when I was at San Luis, though we were theoretically cross trained in each other's border functions and were supposed to be able to perform either one. That was the theory. But theory is just that. Theory. In reality, most Customs officers had little knowledge or interest in INS work and most INS officers were pretty much clueless about Customs work. I was something of an exception, mostly because of the INS training and experience I'd had in Bermuda. That, and the fact that I took the INS function seriously once I learned that the local INS administration was enforcement oriented. By no means was that a typical attitude among Customs officers in those days at San Luis. Most of the Customs officers were either narrowly focused on looking for dope, or else they were burned out or overworked or just showing up to get a paycheck. Because of that, and also because of the lack of INS expertise typical of many Customs officers, it was commonly believed that illegal entrants would target pedestrian and car lanes manned by Customs officers. Pull that attitude inside out and you had the corollary belief that drug smugglers would target Immigration officers manning car lanes.

Immigration work for a Customs officer at San Luis took place at a pair of locations. The pedestrian lanes. And the car lanes. On both, Immigration and Customs officers worked side by side. As a general rule, if only two car lanes were open, one would be manned by INS, the other by Customs. If four lanes were open, it would be two and two. And the usual two open pedestrian lanes were generally manned by one each--one INS officer and one Customs officer. While working on the pedestrian lanes, I several times observed individuals who later would prove to be illegal entrants intentionally angling over to my pedestrian lane when they saw my blue shirt (Immigration officers wore white shirts).

On the pedestrian lane I was looking for several things. Illegal entrants. Wanted fugitives. Narcotics carriers. Possible excludable aliens. And, to a lesser degree, intelligence. We also frequently had lookouts for individuals for a variety of reasons. Most people were just ordinary folks going about their daily business. But mixed in with them were the illegal entrants, the fugitives, the narcotics carriers and the various other non-ordinary crossers. Our effectiveness was closely related to port activity. Because the Colorado River Valley and neighboring areas in Arizona and California were largely frost free and had plenty of available Colorado River water, winter agriculture was the omnipresent green growing lifeblood of the economy. The busiest time of the year at the Port of San Luis was during the winter. And the busiest time of the work day was not during the day at all but in the wee hours of the morning. Thousands of farm workers living on the Mexican side of San Luis tumbled out of their beds and crossed sleepy eyed early every morning in the wintertime on their way to work the fields that spread their verdant tentacles many miles into the desert beyond San Luis and Yuma. At 1:00 in the morning the Port of San Luis was somnolent. A couple of hours later, the port was jumping with activity. It seemed as though the place went from cemetery empty to rush hour busy in little more than the blink of an eye. Suddenly, the car lanes were backed up as far into Mexico as that blinking eye could see. You had to wonder. Where in the world did they all come from so quickly?

And not just the car lanes. Hordes of farm workers arrived en masse on foot at the pedestrian gates. There were so many that any hopeful notions about enforcement were quickly trampled under by the crush. Farm workers were passing through the pedestrian gates at the rate of one every few seconds, most of them with the stony faced, bleary eyed, 'what the hell am I doing up at this hour?' look. With their border crossing documents woodenly thrust out before them and pointed in our general direction, they marched through the turnstiles one after the other in an interminable line that seemed to us to stretch all the way to Mexico City. It was 3:00 in the morning. The U.S. officers were groggy to begin with. Many were working a double shift, or at least a twelve hour shift, and were worn down. There was something oddly hypnotic about a steady line of people pushing past at that hour in the morning, all of them shoving their crossing cards out in the faces of the eye strained U.S. officers. Strange as it may sound it was often very difficult for an officer to stay awake. Imagine trying to make out the faces from two or three feet away on those small credit card sized cards as they crowded by you in an urgent, never ending steady stream? Enforcement? It was like shooting from the hip with a slingshot at a charging bull.

We all knew this early morning crush was a window of opportunity for both attempted illegal entrants and narcotics body carriers. And the window was wide open. If there was any one thing smugglers were good at, it was finding and exploiting windows of opportunity. If the Olympics had a Windows of Opportunity category, these guys would be the hands down champions. God knows how many illegal entrants--not to mention body carriers, a subject dealt with in a different chapter--walked right by us in those hectic early morning stampedes into the U.S.

This is what probably often happened after they crossed through us at the pedestrian gates, exited the U.S. government building squatting just inside the border and sauntered freely into the good ol' U.S. of A.

"Señor", an illegal entrant might have said as he handed a border crossing card back to the waiting professional smuggler. "I walked right by that sleepy old gringo with this mica you rented me."

"Happens all the time", the smuggler might have replied with a wry smile, taking the card and stuffing it into a pocket already full of cash.

And it probably did.

But it basically wasn't a Customs issue. The illegal entrant problem was INS business, not Customs. It was up to INS to figure out how to deal with this particular window of opportunity. If one of us tried to take a more aggressive enforcement posture and check the entrants closely, the throngs entering the US quickly backed up far across the Mexican side of the border. That got the attention of the Bosses and they let you know in no uncertain terms that the operative philosophy here was facilitation, not enforcement. In other words, blow the bloody buggers through so they could get to the fields. So we just shrugged our collective mental shoulders. And did the best we could with what we had during those wee hour winter mornings when the entire town of San Luis Rio Colorado seemed to roll out of bed to descend all at once on the formerly somnolent Port of San Luis.

But that Window of Opportunity wasn't always open. Most of the time during the course of the workday there was reasonable opportunity for an officer to check people arriving at the pedestrian entry gates. We watched them come into the U.S. building through the doors from Mexico. Did they obviously head for the Customs lane by angling from one side of the hallway to the other? Did their dress fit the weather or the situation? Did they seem hesitant? Nervous? What was their body language saying? We watched as they approached the entry desk. Was their behavior ordinary? What were they carrying, and how did that fit in with the circumstances? Did they avoid eye contact? Was their demeanor relaxed? Non-emotive or wooden? Was the body relaxed? Rigid? Did they have their entry document ready? Were they holding very tightly onto the document? Were they holding the document at a reasonable distance for the officer to see? Were they partially shielding or hiding it? And then there was the document itself. Did it look genuine? Did the photo on the document look like the person? Did the person have no document, but claim U.S. citizenship? Did the person have a birth certificate, but no photo ID?

There was a range of documents illegal entrants might use to try and slip by on us. Most commonly it'd be either a border crossing card of some type or an I-551 Resident Alien Card. The card would be genuine. It just wasn't theirs. The card belonged to someone else. These folks we called imposters. Sometimes the imposters closely resembled the photos on the documents. Sometimes not. Frequently the documents were old ones and the individual whose photo was on the document would have aged. That made comparison difficult. Many of these imposters exhibited the classic rigid behavior that reminded me of a statue in a courthouse park. But by no means all of them. Of those who didn't show obvious behavior giveaways, some didn't look very much like the photos. But others did. At times it was no more than a shadowy hint of intuition that led to an illegal entrant's exposure. The inkling that something 'just wasn't right'.

Every person that showed up in front of an officer on the pedestrian lane was a potential conundrum. Legitimate or not? How the devil could you discern the difference? We had several ways of determining whether a person was a poser. Almost all of the Immigration cards had names, dates of birth, ports of issue, fingerprints and signatures on them. If we had doubts about a person's true identity, the crossing card was a bonanza of information to use in questioning the person. Many of the imposters were tripped up by something as simple as forgetting the date of birth on the card. Some couldn't remember the name on the card. Others got the issuing port of entry wrong. If the crosser had the information on the cards down pat, but still seemed 'wrong', we would have the person write their signature and then compare it to the one on the card. That caught more than a few. There also were fingerprints on the cards, but I never was very good at comparing prints. I'd always ask a nearby INS officer to compare the prints. Many of them were pretty good at it and we nailed many an imposter with their fingerprint savvy help.

I usually tried to be certain a person was an imposter before taking them into the adjacent Immigration office. I also tried to 'break' them into admitting their real identity before turning them over to INS. It was a habit that harkened back to the bad old days at Nogales when INS was so lackluster that referrals went down the road much more often than not and I had developed a deep seated distrust of INS because of it. San Luis' INS was not at all like that, yet overworked, understaffed and frenetically busy officers could easily miss an INS referral sent in to them. But not if the primary officer already broke the poser.

There were times when a suspected illegal entrant made it through the battery of queries and tests but something still seemed wrong about them. That left the mainstream INS course of action many officers preferred. Referring the suspect to INS for further examination. Besides being far more knowledgeable than us, the INS officers could access their databases which often had considerably more information on the owners of the cards than was actually encoded on the cards themselves. This often tripped up the illegal entrants who had otherwise almost made it through.

Of course, we all knew that there were those that beat us and got through into the U.S. It wasn't a subject you wanted to think too much about. Like with the dope smugglers, too much second guessing about being beat could hamstring an officer and paralyze judgment. There was such an officer at Nogales. I can still see the pained look on his face when he repeated what had become his own personal mantra.

"They're beating us."

And so they often were. You might think that it really is no big deal that they beat us, considering the millions of illegal entrants already in the U.S. After all, weren't they just ordinary folks looking to come to the U.S. to make a better life for themselves? That is one of the border myths perpetrated by the naïve and those with parochial agendas. Though it is certainly true of the majority, there is a sizeable enough minority of not so ordinary miscreants among the others that the 'just ordinary folks' idea won't fly. A statistical analysis put out by the Border Patrol in the summer of 2007 said that of the recent illegal entrant apprehensions in the Tucson sector, close to ten percent were found to have criminal records.

And those are U.S. criminal records. There are undoubtedly large numbers who have Mexican criminal records, but there is no system at present for U.S. officers to routinely check the illegal entrants' Mexican criminal histories. It would be invaluable to us were the Mexican authorities to make those records routinely available. Though there is plenty of difference of opinion about the subject of illegal immigration in general, the dissension largely evaporates over the issue of letting large numbers of criminals into the U.S. Who would be in favor of that? Yet that is actually what we are doing with the current unrestricted northward flow of illegal entrants. Mexico is a crime ridden country.

What in the world makes us think that only honest people are coming north?

On a mid October late afternoon a big Hispanic guy walked up to a pedestrian lane at San Luis. He had a bag full of patent medicines and claimed to be an American citizen by the name of Francisco Cordero. He pulled out a California ID, said he had been born in California and was living in the town of Calexico (an easy hour or so drive from Yuma). Cordero said he was in San Luis Rio Colorado in Mexico to visit friends. He also handed over a Social Security card with the name of Francisco Cordero. He was very talkative and friendly and not at all nervous. As a matter or routine, his name was run in the computer. Nothing. But he seemed too talkative and too friendly and up popped that border veteran sense of something not right with him. At first it seemed he might be carrying narcotics and a quick frisk was done of his person. That set his hands to shaking. I motioned at Immigration Inspector Barry Nicholson--a rare black face in the local mostly Hispanic INS--to come over from the adjacent pedestrian lane to back me up and I asked him to check the man out as a possible prior deport. Nicholson escorted the man into an INS holding room and then went to check out his identity. A while later Nicholson came back with a big grin on his face and whipped off a high five.

Friendly, talkative 'U.S. citizen' Francisco Cordero was in fact a previously deported criminal alien. Note the word criminal. He wasn't just some guy caught trying to sneak across the border. He'd been deported for criminal activity in the U.S., for which he had been convicted in a United States courtroom, served his jail time and then been deported. Despite what the parochial hysterics in the Great Immigration Debate might try to impute, by far the greatest number of criminal deportations to Mexico are for good cause. At that time, attempted illegal entrants caught and kicked back to Mexico weren't deported criminal aliens. Criminal deportation was an entirely different process. Deported criminal aliens were just that. They were criminals.

Another uncomfortably warm San Luis summer evening. A few months before the end of the Clinton decade. I strolled into the secondary lot at the San Luis Port of Entry and noticed a Ford pickup sitting there. A primary officer referred the Ford to secondary but no one had checked it out. Not yet. A pair of young guys were sitting in the pickup. The passenger, Jose Perez, was noticeably jumpy. A local cop, Norberto Meza of the Somerton PD, was in secondary working a detail. I asked Meza to run Perez through the computer database for a warrant. He did. And he came back with a NCIC felony warrant for the guy's arrest. Since Perez had an I-551 Resident Alien Card, U.S. Immigration was notified of his presence and of the felony warrant for his arrest. They did some checking and found out that Perez already had a felony conviction for dangerous drugs, for which he apparently already should have been deported. Whatever the reason he wasn't deported before, this time INS wasn't messing around. They immediately initiated deportation proceedings.

But first there was the outstanding arrest warrant. Officer Meza transported Perez to the Yuma County jail. Perez would probably have to do jail time. There would be an INS hold on him, which meant he couldn't be released from custody. When the matter of the arrest warrant was settled, including the possible incarceration, Perez would revert to INS custody and the possibility of more jail time. And then he would be deported. He fell through the cracks once before. Not this time.

Some months earlier I was hunkering at the desk in the secondary office. My assignment that evening was to be the lead senior officer on the 4-12 swing shift. It was a mostly administrative desk job and came as a nice change of pace from the physical grind of being in the inspectional rotation. The secondary office could be a quiet place in the evening after the Customs 9-5 bosses and other office dwellers had gone home for the day. But tranquility with U.S. Customs was always ephemeral. This was after all a busy Customs port of entry and all hell could--and often did--break loose at any time. True to Customs form, whatever fleeting quietude there might have been that evening suddenly went flying out the border window of might have beens. Dark haired, intense, Celtic blooded K-9 officer Frank Lewis came bustling in from outside with a firm grip on some guy who looked like there were at least a million other places he'd rather be at this minute than in a U.S. Customs secondary office. Having seen similar situations many times before, I thought that this was like the others and the guy was a load driver who'd just been busted.

Not quite. Frank told me in a hurried voice--he was anxious to get back outside and run the guy's car with his K-9--that the guy was in a lookout vehicle. The officers out on primary asked Lewis to take the man into the secondary office and detain him. So we secured the man, Isaac Garcia, and Lewis hurried back into the secondary lot to run his K-9 on the suspect vehicle. While Frank was working his dog, I checked out Garcia in the computer database. His name came back as a prior violator for very serious narcotic involvement. He was no simple dope smoker or kid down the block candidate for a treatment center. This guy was an aggravated criminal violator. It was severe enough that one had to wonder why he still had his I-551 Resident Alien Card. Not much later K-9 officer Lewis came back into the office looking disappointed. To just about everyone's surprise, the K-9 had not alerted to the vehicle .A physical search by secondary officers confirmed it. The car wasn't loaded. Like most lookouts, this one had turned out to be a dud.

But that didn't mean Garcia had just received his ticket to ride. Not with the heavy criminal history this dude had. We took Garcia over to INS and told them about what I had found, that not only was he a lookout for current narcotics activity, but he also had a very serious criminal history. They did a quick check and were as surprised as we were that the guy still had his I-551 Resident Alien Card. They initiated deportation proceedings against him that same evening. Garcia was another one who fell through the cracks once. But the crack didn't open up this time around.

On a cool December evening under a bright waning gibbous moon, a trio of Mexican relatives showed up in secondary in a vehicle sent back for a narcotics search. We ran their names in the computer and found that two of them were hits. Filiberto Beltran was an INS hit for being removable from the U.S. upon attempted entry. Narcizo Cuevas was a hit for having been the driver of a load vehicle caught at the California Port of Calexico the previous year. Cuevas also had a phony I-551 Resident Alien Card hidden in his sock with Beltran's name on it. We took the two men to the INS office to see if that agency was interested in them. You bet INS was interested! A phony card. A guy who was supposed to be removed upon entry into the U.S. Another guy who had been the driver of a load of drugs caught at the Port of Calexico, but still in possession of his INS document. They wouldn't be falling through the enforcement cracks again this time.

Those INS folks at San Luis were sure a refreshing change from the bad old days at Nogales.

Sometimes changing names is done to protect the guilty.

Author

### Cocaine

The Ides of March was just one sunset into the past. The year was 1996. At a little after 10:00 in the morning a California plated blue Mercury Topaz pulled into secondary. It'd been referred from primary by a veteran inspector who had aroused the ire of the secondary inspectors all week by his excessive and seemingly irrational referrals. I had personally searched and had K-9ed a number of them. Bad referrals. The guy was losing credibility rapidly, not only to me, but also to other inspectors. Loretta Gamble, who was herself a hard working, aggressive and enforcement oriented inspector, was not mincing any words about her hot tempered irritation with the guy. But with this referral the inexplicably stumbling seasoned inspector caught himself in mid stumble and blasted a bases loaded game winning drug busting homer right over the fences in secondary.

One look at the guy in the Merc was all it took. We'll call the driver Tomas Beneto. Not his real name. He was coming apart at the seams. The guy was falling apart. Beneto was shaking badly. His presence of mind had literally left him. It was like the connection between his brain and his speech had snapped. Words tumbled out of his mouth seemingly without conscious direction or connection. Yet the guy displayed the very bizarre characteristic of being effervescent. Like the cork had popped on his personality and he was bubbling over out of control. It was probably the strangest set of characteristics I'd ever seen in load driver.

I stared at him in semi-astonishment, and then glanced over to CEO officer DonTrusty, who was on the opposite side of the Mercury. "Good one", I mouthed at him. Trusty nodded obvious agreement. I took Beneto into the secondary office, frisked him for weapons, had him sit in a corner under the watchful eye of the shift senior, and hotfooted it back outside. Trusty had already lifted the trunk and was looking inside. He motioned me to hurry over.

"Smell this", he said. I hustled over to the opened trunk and took a whiff. Whew! There was a powerfully strong vinegary caustic odor which I and Trusty instantly recognized as almost certainly being the odor of fresh Bondo--a slam bang indicator of a hidden compartment, and therefore very probably also of a cache of concealed drugs. At that moment I was pretty certain that this was going to be a narcotics seizure. But I'd been wrong about 'pretty certain' loads more than once before, so I hedged my bets by suggesting to Don that he get his dog and run him on the car--something which Trusty was probably about to do, anyhow. A couple of Border Patrol bicycle officers were taking a break and standing nearby. In my excitement, I incautiously told them they were about to witness a narcotics seizure. There have been times when such imprudent statements came back to bite me in my overzealous butt. Not this time.

Trusty brought his K-9 'Rock' over and circled the car. Don said that the dog was showing interest in the trunk. Maybe he was, but I sure couldn't see it. Then Trusty unleashed Rock into the interior of the Topaz and the dog jumped from seat to seat, nose down, searching hard. It seemed to take a good deal of time before the dog could get past the strong Bondo odor to the narcotics underneath. Yet Don was confident. He patiently waited for Rock to alert. I also thought that Rock would alert and was a little surprised--and maybe also a touch alarmed and disappointed--that it was taking so long. But then good ol' Rock picked up the odor and did his canine thing, zeroing in on the Merc's back seat like a red tailed hawk whistling down to blast a luckless rabbit. That was all I needed. I rushed back inside the office, removed Beneto to the pat down room, patted him down and then secured him in a detention cell. He realized he was busted, in fact he likely had grasped it from the time he was removed from the car in secondary and escorted into the office. He nodded wearily with a combination of resignation and comprehension while I patted him down. He had nothing to say, except to ask Mario De La Ossa, the supervisor who was also assisting in the pat down, if he spoke Spanish. Mario said that he had the impression that Beneto would talk.

I did a beeline back to the car and, together with Trusty, looked into the trunk again. It was very clean, with carpet overlying a fresh, albeit dusty, inner trunk surface. It seemed high, but we were uncertain what a normal trunk in this kind of car would look like. Trying to estimate depth by placing one hand on the top of the trunk space and another underneath the car proved to be inconclusive. Use of a Buster density meter, however, was anything but inconclusive and put big ol' grins onto our faces. The Buster read from 70-90 in a space that should have registered not even half that. Even the most cautious and the most skeptical among us were now convinced. There remained only one explanation. This baby was loaded. It was another of those ecstatic hoorah moments that ignited the flame in our law enforcement souls and made all of the never ending, bone wearying BS and tedium endurable.

We drove the Merc back to the rear enclosure where the hydraulic lift was, hit the button to raise the car up, locked it in place and then started looking it over. There was a drain plug in the spare tire well at the bottom of the trunk space. I pried the plug loose and peered inside. Packages. I shoved a sharp, thin probe into one of the packages to get a sample of what was inside it. Trusty had already gone to get a marijuana testing kit when some of the hidden drug trickled out. Ooooh! Not marijuana. It was white. White powder. The white stuff. Cocaine. The effect was electrifying. _Cocaine!_ Inspectors were always hoping that hidden narcotics would turn out to be cocaine or another hard drug. There was usually mild disenchantment when--as usually happened--it turned out to be marijuana.

Not this time. I, Trusty, Mario and the two Border Patrol officers--Gil and Byrer--all shouted in excitement. Even Mario, who almost never seemed to be fazed by narcotics seizures, was visibly excited. Trusty had to reverse his steps, return the marijuana test kit and come back with a cocaine testing kit. The white powder tested beautifully positive. The test kit turned a brilliant blue color. Customs agents were called to the port. One of them was a guy on TDY from Buffalo who was skeptical when we'd told him the day before that he'd be back the next day for a load. Besides the chastened Buffalo TDY agent, Lori Janosko--recently transferred into the Yuma office--and two veteran agents, Art Herman and Steve Mercado, questioned Tomas Beneto. He confessed, although the full story of what went on was never passed on to me. I did hear that there was more to it than this single load, that other loads were involved as well as other people.

Then things got even more bizarre with the already bizarre load driver, Tomas Beneto. This guy had previously been scheduled to be turned over to Special Agent Janosko as her own CI--confidential informant--before the cocaine seizure took place. Beneto's status took a quick and precipitous nose dive as the result of his being busted in an unauthorized load run. The skeptical side of the mind had to wonder if the load run really was unauthorized. Had we caught someone who wasn't supposed to be caught? Was he playing the Feds? Or had the guy been playing both sides of the law? Whatever the truth of it was, Lori Janosko, who was supposed to be his handler when he was a confidential informant, ended up being the case agent handling his prosecution for cocaine smuggling. No wonder the dude was such an emotional basket case when he drove into secondary that evening. He knew what kind of mess he had gotten himself into. He was a cocaine smuggler and a Judas to boot who'd just moved to the front of the you're screwed line. A future of hard metal bunks and steel bars was staring him in the face.

But Beneto's future was still just that. The future. We were in the present. And our immediate focus was on figuring out how to get the cocaine out of the load car. But before tearing into it with our blister producing well used kit of cutting, ripping and shearing manual and power tools, we paused to take a closer look at the Mercury's trunk. The smugglers had begun with the original trunk and placed a layer of cocaine packages on the floor of the spare tire well and on the sunken lip of the floor surrounding the well. Then an entire separate floor from another car was placed on top of the cocaine, covered with Bondo and sprayed over to give the trunk the appearance of being a normal factory installation. It was a good job. Several inspectors looked at the trunk before we began the demolition derby, scratched their heads and muttered that the trunk probably would have gotten by them. I confess to being one of them. But that was disregarding the odor. The smell would have tipped off anyone who got close enough to catch a whiff of the vinegary fresh Bondo. It was so strong that even the worst case of stuffed-nose allergies wouldn't have missed it. Which brought up a question. Why in the world didn't the smugglers try to mask the odor or just wait until it dissipated?

We looked at the trunk and thought we understood what we were dealing with. It was time to break out the tools and start dismantling the smuggling compartment. Easier said than done. The false trunk wasn't cooperating. We had to use a sledge hammer, air chisel, a pry bar and plenty of muscle power to get it off. After a spell of this, we paused to give it a moment's more thought. Was this the way the smugglers were going to do it, too? Or was there a simpler way to remove the dope that we had missed in our excitement to get at the cocaine? There probably was. But we didn't linger over the thought. The discovery of what promised to be a sizeable load of cocaine had us all wired and short circuited the deductive processes. The glandular juices said to hell with rational analysis and the demolition derby began. We eventually brute forced the recalcitrant false trunk and got to the packages of cocaine beneath. There were 27 packages in all, many with three inch high markings of 'NIT' in a black lettering that had been done with a stencil or stamp. Total weight, 63.8 pounds. A nice cocaine load. Good for a few rounds of high fives and a smattering of atta boys. Everyone involved was buoyantly pleased with the load.

Everyone but Tomas Beneto, whose face and appearance floated in my memory for a good while afterward. He was an ordinary looking man, not at all rough or tough, or seedy or degenerate, in appearance. Slightly pudgy. Very much deflated. Odd kind of half smile on his face. He seemed more like a victim than a criminal. But, with him already agreeing to be a snitch, and pulling off a load despite that, you had to wonder. What kind of dude was this guy? Just what had he been up to? Was he in reality a trafficker who was scamming us by pretending to be a CI? Whatever the truth was, the rules of the game had changed. He was now facing federal prosecution and some serious prison time. Tomas Beneto had tried to manipulate events but instead ended up manipulating himself into one very big hot seat.

Weeks later I was subpoenaed and drove up to federal court in Phoenix a couple of times for Beneto's trial. Andy Metz, the primary officer who had referred Beneto's cocaine load, had since transferred to the Customs preclearance facility in Vancouver, Canada. It cost Customs some bucks to fly the big fella down from British Columbia to testify. I don't remember hearing specifically what happened with Beneto's trial. Feedback on trials and narcotics busts was not one of Customs' strong points. In fact it didn't even really qualify for a weak point. More like a no point. We rarely heard anything. But I assumed that the evidence was overwhelming and that Beneto was convicted and probably drew some hard time.

But maybe not. A search was done of the federal and state prisoner databases to see what the details of his incarceration were. What? There didn't seem to be any record of him being in prison at all. A double check of his name on the subpoena from the federal district court in Phoenix commanding us to appear as witnesses at his trial verified the name. No false name mistake there. And it is doubtful he was found innocent. The guy was smuggling almost 64 pounds of coke. Yet he didn't go to either federal or state prison. So just what did happen to this elusive play-both-sides smuggler?

There's probably some very hard eyed dudes from the Stygian world of the border Narcotrafficantes who'd like very much to know the answer to that question.

_Update_ : The answer to 'that question'. After reading the paperback edition of this book when it was first published in 2009, Andy Metz contacted me and said Beneto did get hammered with a long sentence. His memory was a little cloudy on it, but he thought it was something like ten years.

There are men who love women who love men

There are women who love women every now and then

There are men who love men because they can't pretend

They are men who love women who love men

Lyrics to a Song by Steve Goodman

### Chapter 14

### Genders Bent And Unbent

I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of exceptional female officers at the Port of San Luis. Michelle Shaughnessy, a wiry, fit woman who idolized her U.S. Army Ranger grandfather who'd been at Normandy on D-Day in WWII. Besides being a solid officer, Michelle was probably the nicest person I ever met in Customs. Cecelia Prince, a tall, rangy blond, was another gentle mannered woman, and also an intense hard worker and a very effective inspector. Tragedy bound Lisa Stubbs was hands down the best INS officer I ever knew. There were plenty of other hard working, solidly efficient female officers, Loretta Gamble, Luz Galarza, Anita Trujillo, Eutemia Shireman, Margaret Mendez, Sherry Jenkins and Margie Gutierrez are the names my memory can still put to the faces. There were others--faces whose names have faded with time. But the one who stands out in my mind more than all the others was a pert and tiny young woman named Teresa Guzman.

Customs officers had a knack for coming up with nicknames for other officers. One big and rather clumsy INS guy was called Lurch. Another big guy named Troy Palmer who had a very distinctive way of walking had the nickname of Big Bird. Bobby Washington, a rail thin, ceiling scraping black guy who moved with a kind of fluid grace was called Stealth. And then there was a diminutive, perky Hispanic girl they called Minnie Mouse. It was Teresa. Teresa Guzman.

I first met Teresa when she'd just been hired and before she went off to the Customs Academy in humid, rain drenched coastal Georgia. Teresa was a good looking young single mother with a small child. She immediately struck me as being bright and vivacious, but I had my doubts she'd ever make a good Customs officer. She had no law enforcement experience and was clueless about the job. But, then, that had been true of many of us. Including me.

The weeks flew by. Before I knew it, Theresa was back from the Academy and I was assigned as her FTO--field training officer. One evening we were sent over to a Customs Explorer meeting in San Luis to talk to the high school kids in the Explorers about Customs careers. That was when I first caught on that Teresa Guzman was more than a pretty, sparky young woman who was pleasant company. I was taken aback when Theresa launched into a description of a Customs career that made her sound like a long time border veteran and a seasoned public relations spokesperson. Wow! Where did that come from? Theresa Guzman was still just a trainee, yet she had already pretty well zoned into the border world. She was very accurate about what she said. This girl was one heck of a quick study.

So I had my first real inkling that Theresa Guzman was going to be more than just another Customs face among the constant flux of faces on the border. This girl was going somewhere. And she did. Again, before I knew it, she was pulling down lots of loads and popping bunches of illegal entrants. She quickly became one of the handful of solid officers I trusted to always do a thorough job. A few years passed and a still very young Theresa became a supervisor at the Port of San Luis. At least that is what I was told by another retired officer. And she's probably not done yet. Teresa Guzman's star could well still be in the ascendancy. I'll bet they don't call her Minnie Mouse any more. Not anybody with any sense, anyhow.

### Gender Benders

Women in law enforcement. Once a controversial subject. Not any more. Though a woman might be of limited use in a flat out brawl, she also might calmly defuse another situation that a macho male officer was about to ignite into another brawl. Things balance out. Men have their place in law enforcement. So do women.

But what about someone who was both?

Karl was a retired sergeant from the U.S. military. He was a big guy. Had a wife and kids. A very funny guy with a quick and non vicious sense of humor. He was fun to be around. Just about everyone liked him. Karl came into Customs about the same time I did and we both worked at Nogales. Then I transferred overseas, came back to a different port and didn't return to Nogales until nearly ten years later. Karl was still there. Except he was no longer Karl. And he wasn't a he any more. He was now a she.

Karl was now Kay.

Karl had gone down the transgender road and become Kay. At first it seemed strange as hell to meet a person you'd known ten years ago as a man and find that person was now a woman. But, once the shock of it wore off, about all it amounted to was that the person who used to wear trousers now sometimes wore a skirt. Same humanity. Same cool sense of humor. Same intelligent competency. The whole gender thing seemed somehow kind of irrelevant. Probably not to Kay who used to be Karl. But it did to me. And more to the point. Karl had been a big man as a male. As a female, Kay hadn't shrunk any and was therefore comparatively an even bigger woman. If it came down to a fight, this was one woman you wanted on your side.

Which brings up an aspect of the subject of personal searches in a way rarely if ever talked about formally in law enforcement circles. And that aspect is of transgender, bi-sexual and homosexual searches where either the subject or the searching officer isn't a straight heterosexual. It's a mind twister of a subject. If a gay male officer is doing pat down searches of a man, is that any different from a straight male patting down a female? Or vice versa? A lesbian female patting down a straight female? I know of instances where both happened. We all knew of gay and bisexual officers who were performing pat down searches on people. Where exactly did one draw the lines of gender distinction in situations like those? A thorough pat down search involves touching the searched person's genitals. A male officer patting down a female suspect's genitals would constitute a sexual assault and could well get the guy fired and even thrown in the slammer. The same with a female patting down a male. But what about a gay officer patting down someone of the same sex? How about Karl-who-became-Kay while he was in the process of becoming a she. Exactly who could Karl-becoming-Kay perform personal searches on when somewhere in the middle of the journey from he to she?

Kay's case is obviously not a common occurrence in law enforcement. Transgenders are rare and transgenders in mid journey even rarer. But gay males and lesbian females and bisexuals are anything but rare. Where do you draw the lines for personal searches when you're dealing with unclear sexualities of either the searching officer or the person being searched? Maybe don't ask, don't tell, makes a little bit of sense after all. At least until someone figures out how to defuse the touchy subject of the genital time bomb of personal searches.

A final thought. Should you happen to come across a law enforcement officer ostensibly doing a same sex personal search of someone, stop a moment and take a look at the officer's eyes.

They just might be twinkling.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. But what about poison oak?

Anonymous

### Chapter 15

### Hey, Honey. Go Get the Kids. We're Gonna Smuggle Some Dope

I saw hundreds upon hundreds of people busted over the years. Illegal entrants. Drug smugglers. Deported felons. Fugitives. The deported felons and fugitives and some of the drug smugglers didn't deserve a second thought on their way to the slammer. The illegal entrants were mostly ordinary folks who weren't really criminals. Strange as it may sound, that was also true of many of the drug smugglers. They were mules hired by the real smugglers to try to smuggle dope across the border, people who were desperate or vulnerable or gullible or just dumb kids with more guts than sense. I didn't demonize them. With a couple of exceptions. One was the people who tried to smuggle in the hard drugs that caused so much human damage--cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. The other was a group of people that deserved their own special circle in hell.

The ones that used their own kids to smuggle dope.

Nogales. A woman had come in from Mexico with an infant in a child carrier. I wasn't one of the officers directly involved, and had just come into the Grand Avenue secondary building and noticed her and the child in the grim bare walls and steel benched secondary detention room. The room had a menacing look that conjured up images of the old Russian KGB. There was an ugly mood to the place and some of the other officers were pretty riled up over something. I asked what had everybody so fired up. It was the woman in the detention room. Underneath her infant in a baby carrier a suspicious officer had found several pounds of cocaine. I shot the woman a disgusted look. Using her baby to smuggle coke? Now there was an 'A' list candidate for that special circle in hell.

San Luis. An old Chevy Nova pulled up to a primary lane. A man and a woman were in the front seat and a couple of kids were in the back. One of the kids was strapped into a car seat behind the woman in the front passenger side. The other kid was behind the driver. A loaded Chevy Nova had just been caught at the port. Maybe that was made the primary officer suspicious. Something about this Nova alerted the primary inspector. The officer sent the car to secondary for an intensive search. It turned out to be a bull's eye of a referral. This Nova was also loaded. Officers searching it in the secondary lot found marijuana in all four doors and in the seats. These smugglers were slick. Besides using the kids as a cover, they had hedged their bets by the way they loaded the back seat. The part under where the kid was fastened into a car seat was loaded. But the other side, behind the driver, wasn't. Anyone who watches inspectors working the primary lanes will see that they often will open a car door and reach in to push on the back seat, looking for the tell tale unusual hardness that signals a loaded seat. And the seat they usually check is the one right behind the driver. The same spot the smugglers didn't stuff their marijuana in the otherwise dope filled Nova.

It might have worked before. Not this time. The parents and kids were escorted into the secondary office. The woman sat there patiently waiting with the kids for hours. She was surprisingly nonchalant. The woman claimed that she didn't know the car was loaded. Her husband probably protected her during his interrogation and said the same thing about her. None of us believed that for one bloody minute, but when it came time for her husband to be hauled off to jail he would be walking that road by himself. Papa went to the slammer. Mama walked. They sprung the woman with her two kids. She seemed to know all along that's what would happen. And she was right. Women with children in load cars walked more often than not.

We watched in studied disgust as she walked away free.

6:00 on a cool San Luis morning. The port's own human perpetual motion machine, busy footed Don Trusty, was out running a pre-primary sweep with his dog, Rock. The dog went past an old van, then pulled up and turned back to the van. The vehicle was crammed full of people. A man, two women, a bunch of kids. One of the women was driving. Rock made a beeline for the van. The man, who was sitting on a middle seat by the van's side door, saw the dog coming. Trusty saw the guy try to reach over and lock the door. Trusty beat him to it. He sent the van back to secondary and followed it with Rock. The secondary officers emptied the van of its occupants and Trusty did a complete K-9 run of the vehicle. Rock blasted the middle seat where the man and several kids were sitting. A couple of officers pushed on the seat. It didn't give an inch. Either this seat was a butt busting engineering disaster or there was something inside it. There was. Close to 50 pounds of marijuana was packed inside the seat. The man was arrested. And the woman driver? This time the woman didn't skate. They busted her, too. Maybe because that there was a second woman in the car to take the kids. The second woman?

She walked away free with the kids in tow.

Nogales. The Mariposa Port of Entry out on the sparsely peopled western edge of town. It was a cool day at the open, breezy port and we were wearing light jackets. A modest little hatchback pulled up to a primary lane coming from Mexican Nogales. A family was inside the hatchback. Dad was driving, mom was in the passenger seat and junior and sister were in the back. There was nothing about them to initially arouse suspicion. So far it was just a routine inspection.

"Would you open the trunk, please? I asked. The driver nodded, climbed out of the car and walked back to pop open the hatchback lid. The guy looked to be about thirty, was a touch on the chunky side and was plainly, almost shabbily, dressed. Out of routine, almost mechanically, I pulled my Buster from its holder on my utility belt and ran it over the spare tire. Oh-oh. High readings. Abnormally high readings. This wasn't routine any more. Without letting on to the driver what had happened, I directed him to close the hatchback and get back into the car. While he was climbing back behind the wheel, I walked around to the passenger side of the little car and put the Buster on the side panel. High readings again. No doubt now. The car was loaded.

I concentrated on appearing calm and non-threatening as I walked up to the driver and told the guy to drive the car over into the secondary lot that lay just a short distance away. I followed behind, holding the family's immigration documents in my hand, which we typically did when walking a likely load car back from primary to secondary. As I followed the car back towards the metal canopied secondary lot, I had a clear view of the no frills functional but austere concrete lot. It stood in oddly jarring contrast to what lay beyond--the dramatic winter bronzed grassy hills rolling off into the clear blue sky of the Arizona/Sonora border horizon. It seemed almost too beautiful a place to be busting people. Almost.

The handful of officers in secondary, including diminutive cherubic faced Myrna Cota, looked on curiously as I walked the car back under the secondary canopy. The hatchback stopped and I lost no time in getting the ignition keys from the driver. I wanted direct sensory confirmation that the car was loaded, so I turned to the hatchback, pulled it open and took out the spare. I fished in my shirt pocket for a pen and stuck it into the tire's valve stem, sticking my nose next to it to sniff the escaping air. There was the confirmation. The unmistakable odor of marijuana. Myrna was standing close to me.

"It's loaded", I said to her. I motioned at the woman. "Take her in". I dropped the tire and hustled over to the driver and unceremoniously bustled him into the secondary office. Myrna did the same with the woman. The spectacular rolling brown hills loomed in the distance as we took the parents to their fate.

And the two little kids just stood there watching us in open mouthed horror.

Nogales. The November following the grim disaster of 9/11. The DeConcini Port of Entry on Grand Avenue in the center of town. Not quite 3:00 on a pleasant autumn afternoon. Pedestrians were still busily going about their perambulations along and across the border. A Mexican plated van--a Plymouth Caravan--pulled up to my primary lane. A guy named Francisco Lucero was driving it. His wife Maria was in the passenger seat. In the back were their two little girls. The family was all dressed up as though going to church or maybe some kind of semi-fancy occasion like a birthday party. Having a pair of daughters myself, and remembering them at that age, I thought the two little girls looked awfully cute in their dressed up goin' somewhere clothes. Their daddy appeared calm and composed, though he did look rather gravely serious. But nothing about him triggered the enforcement senses. It was the woman. She had a wide white toothed smile that hovered as immobile on her face as a likeness plastered on a highway billboard. The kind of smile that made a veteran officer instantly wary. All too often it was a smile that was meant to convey the impression of innocence but was in reality the flat opposite. The Red Flag of Suspicion was up. This van needed to be checked out. Not knowing how thorough a search the van might get if referred back to the inspectional crap shoot in secondary, I decided to do a quick intensive check of the vehicle right there on primary. I pulled out my Buster and ran it along the van's side panels right next to where one of the gussied up little girls was primly sitting in the vehicle's middle seat.

Whoa! The Buster read from the 70's into the 80's.Way above normal. Now the warning bells were really reverberating loud and clear off the walls of my suspicious cranium. So loud to me that it almost seemed as though the people in the van could hear them. And in fact the adults probably did pick up on the unconscious clues my body language was broadcasting. I slid the Buster over several square feet of the van's side panel. Same high readings. Almost certainly a load. But I'd learned the hard way not to jump to conclusions. So I went at it cautiously. Some vans had equipment in the side panels, such as heating and air conditioning units, that could also give high readings. I had the driver give me the ignition keys, then moved around to the other side of the Caravan and pulled open the sliding door. The woman turned to look at me with that same strange permanent press smile still stuck on her face. I think by then she knew that I knew, even if she was sure hoping that I didn't. The entire family clambered out of the van while I climbed in and put the Buster onto the interior of the van where I had received the high Buster readings. There were high readings everywhere. The doubt meter in my head went flat. I knew then that the van had to be loaded. The family stood quietly by the side of the van while I was inside, the woman still with that same smile on her face and the man maintaining his same calm, gravely serious manner, the two little girls standing there all dressed up and looking cute and innocent--and also vulnerable and maybe a touch bewildered.

I told them in Spanish--most border conversations were in Spanish--to climb back into the van and directed Mr. Lucero to drive back in the secondary lot. I followed behind it with the family's immigration documents in hand. In the secondary lot was Sam Mills, a towering, easy going Special Forces two tour Viet Nam vet. I turned the van over to him, pausing to take out the Buster and show him where the high readings were before I returned to my primary lane. Sam was a good guy who didn't have the best luck with seizures and I wanted him to get credit for this one. After I left, for some reason I've now forgotten, Sam turned the van over to another inspector who became the seizing officer. I came back to secondary a while later and inquired about it and the guy acted as though the whole thing had been his doing. Had I any idea that was going to happen, I would have just carried the whole damned seizure through from beginning to end. We had a word for a guy like that. Load jumper. And it sure as hell was not any species of compliment. He did back off from that a bit later, knowing better than to try to put his load jumping version of events into the official seizure narrative. And maybe his overly eager, grab the spotlight attitude was at least a little understandable. This didn't turn out to be just another marijuana bust.

The van contained 37.8 pounds of methamphetamine and 18.9 pounds of cocaine.

There was a bunch of high fiving and fist pumping and excited congratulating going on among the officers. Everyone was all fired up by getting a hard drug seizure of both methamphetamine and cocaine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the officers of the U.S. Customs Service at the Grand Avenue DeConcini Port of Entry were busy high fiving and hand jiving and backslapping, something else was going on literally right next to them. A pair of cute little girls all dolled up in their frilly party dress best had their innocent children's world fall apart right before their eyes. I sure as heck didn't want to see those hard drugs end up on the street, knowing the havoc and degradation they would bring. But I still couldn't get the image of those two little girls out of my mind. No more high fives for me that night.

I went home that night with very mixed feelings.

I was on the midnight shift and had pulled down a load of dope towards the end of the shift. That meant several extra bleary eyed hours to finish up the by the numbers mandated procedures we had to follow when processing a load. I was still thumping away on a computer terminal inside the secondary office when a car came slowly into the secondary lot. A woman was behind the wheel. With her were a couple of kids. A girl about seven and a boy about fourteen. The boy had a cast on one of his legs and was laying down on the back seat with a pair of crutches propped up next to him. Must have been one heck of a bumpily uncomfortable ride. The seat the kid was on was crammed full of marijuana in both the bottom and back and probably was hard as a rock. The kid said he had no idea what was going on. And so did the woman who was driving the van. Sure she didn't know. And pigs can fly and none of those bulked up mesomorphs in major league baseball ever did steroids.

The woman was playing dumb and stubbornly insisted she knew zilch about the dope in the car. Which meant that she either was a Guinness Book of World Records finalist for Most Clueless or she was lying. Chances were she'd been coached that playing dumb and hiding behind her kids would keep her from being busted. And it very well might. We'd all seen it happen. Too many times. We tossed the idea around among ourselves and came to the conclusion that it had a good chance of working this time, too. It probably depended on which agent came down to work the case. And when the agent did show up, we knew the dumbed up I'm innocent act just might fly. It was one of the burned out older agents who had a track record for letting women with kids walk. And he was about to do the same with this woman. What he didn't know was that there wasn't just one woman involved with this. There were three. The woman who'd been driving the load car. And a pair of hot eyed and determined U.S. officers who were about to cross verbal swords with him.

It was not going to be a good day for this agent. He wasn't an incompetent guy, and there was plenty of logic on his side. Busting a woman with kids could enormously complicate things, especially if Child Protective Services got involved and gummed things up. The lawyer-designed voluminous procedural bureaucracy involved with a border narcotics seizure and arrest became even more time consuming and Byzantine. Agents were often working with little sleep and under legal mandate to very quickly--almost always within 24 hours--bring the case before a judge for arraignment. Most of the women were just mules anyway, so why make a big deal out of prosecuting them? They were only ciphers in the smuggling world.

This same agent had come to the port to assist with the load I'd had that early morning. We talked at some length then. He told me it was getting more and more difficult to get the state--via the county attorney's office--to assume prosecution of the loads caught at the port of entry. In the past few months they started to refuse taking on many prosecutions. The agent said he thought the reason was mostly because of the escalating costs involved, and also something to do with a power struggle. He said the only cases they were likely to take were the ones where prosecution was pretty much cut and dried. That meant that the person caught with the load had to confess, or it had to be a case that had substantial possibilities in some other way--either in the amount or type of narcotics or some other aggravating circumstance.

There was an aggravating circumstance with the woman who was driving the load car. The I'm just a poor innocent woman act didn't fly so well when we found out she had a prior heroin conviction. But the woman lawyered up and the agent declined to pursue prosecution. And that was when he crossed swords with a couple of female U.S. officers and the orderly progression of his envisaged workday began to tatter and go to hell. He was about to make the mistake of raising the ire of both Loretta Gamble and Lisa Stubbs. Which was something like a one armed man taking on a couple of pissed off wildcats.

Coffee skinned, with striking bright blue eyes, Loretta was the officer who'd referred the load to secondary in the first place. Loretta was a quick study and a sharp observer. She was convinced without a shadow of a border doubt that the woman driving the load knew what she was doing. A mature woman with her own kids at home, Loretta flipped out over the idea of a woman using her own children as props in a smuggling run. She wanted the woman to be prosecuted and told the agent so in no uncertain terms. The agent then made the dumbass mistake of cavalierly blowing her off, telling her the woman had lawyered up and the county would not prosecute and he was going to let her go. Period. The clueless guy then repeated the same mistake when INS officer Lisa Stubbs came over to Customs secondary to check something about the immigration status of the load driver and family. I was nearby and heard the agent curtly tell Lisa he was busy and she could talk to the woman when the agent was good and ready and not before. I could almost hear Lisa's temper simmering towards the boiling point when she stormed off hot eyed to the Immigration office.

What the agent didn't know, or didn't want to hear, was that when the female load driver had been in the Immigration office she had confessed before several witnesses. Mama Smuggler had admitted that she knew the car was loaded. That iced it. Neither Lisa nor Loretta was going to let this one go. The next day they went to the Big Bosses and commenced to burn their ears over what had happened. The Bosses listened like they were supposed to do, then surprised everyone by actually following up on it. They picked up the phones and went to work. The Office of Investigations, OI, which is what the agents were called in those days, backpedaled. Agents were sent out from the OI office to arrest the woman. Mama Smuggler didn't walk after all. And because a pair of determined female U.S. officers--women who were mothers themselves--couldn't abide the thought of another mother who would use her kids as props in a dope smuggling sally. The rest of us were unanimously behind them in what they did. There was nothing more demoralizing to us than seeing a load driver we knew to be guilty walk free because the government refused prosecution.

If the guilty kept walking free, then what the hell was the point of anything?

What Loretta and Lisa did was gutsy and refreshing and still lingers in my memory. But my most vivid recollection about this incident is of the little seven year old girl who'd unknowingly been used by her own mother to smuggle marijuana into the U.S. During the early stages of the seizure, the little girl was sitting quietly on a bench in the secondary office. I happened to walk by her. She gave me a shy little smile. And timidly raised her little hand to wave hello.

Sometimes border reality sucked.

These boots are made for walking

And that's just what they'll do

One of these days these boots

Are gonna walk all over you

_Sung by Nancy Sinatra  
_

### Chapter 16

### On the Pedestrian Gate

Every single day of the year hundreds of people are apprehended at Mexican border ports of entry trying to bamboozle their way into the United States. A lot of them are caught. A lot of them aren't.

### An Unlucky Day

At the Port of San Luis the pedestrian entry gates were in the unremarkable ho hum administrative building that squatted between the carbon monoxide drenched car lanes on the west and the noisy sprawling cargo facility on the east. Double doors opened from the south to a well lit corridor through the building and another set of double doors opened to the north. In the center of the ten foot wide corridor was a kiosk with turnstiles on either side and a pair of inspection stations. An officer from each service--U.S. Immigration and U.S. Customs--sat at the stations. The officers had computer terminals and card readers--when the temperamental contraptions were working--at their disposal. People entering from Mexico came through the double doors, walked up to one of the two inspection stations, presented their documents and then moved on through the turnstiles and to the double doors beyond leading to the Great Cornucopia-the good ol' U.S. of A. Most of these pedestrians were what they said they were. Just folks out on ordinary live-a-day business. Most....

But not all.

San Luis. A new assignment. A new duty station. But more than that. Much more. It was more like stepping through a warp in the fabric of space/time and coming out into an alternative reality. From a cushy inside clean hands job in an air conditioned subtropical island airport to an out in the weather dirty job of humping cars in the deadly midsummer deep desert heat. Because of the intense heat, it was always a big Thank-You-Lord! welcome respite when the half hour turn on the pedestrian gate rolled around as part of the regular inspectional rotation. This was the rotation: A half hour on a car lane. A half hour on the pedestrian gate. Another half hour on a car lane. Then to secondary to hump cars. After an hour or two in secondary the rotation started again. Those all too brief half hour stints on the pedestrian gate in the lovely plunk-your-tired butt-down air conditioning became high points of our days. Days when the temperature outside often ranged up to 110 degrees and above.

Most officers viewed the half hour on the pedestrian gate as kick back time when they could recharge their overheated batteries for another sally out into the withering heat. Maybe that was why hardly anyone seemed to be using the automated card reader on the pedestrian gate. It was simple enough to log onto the reader, but few did it. INS officers did it even less frequently that Customs officers. The readers were temperamental, often off line, and tricky to get working. But they still were a powerfully potent tool. In the early days of my Customs career it dawned on me that by using the technology available to us I could at least somewhat make up for my sometimes embarrassing lack of law enforcement experience. And things pretty much turned out just that way. Why dig a hole with a stick when you've got a shovel? But the disparity in tools was far more profound than that. More like the difference between a stick and a behemoth earth mover. And the card reader was the portal into that world of difference.

Whatever the other officers' reasons for not using the reader, I felt like a grizzled old law enforcement prospector who'd stumbled on a rich vein of perpetrator ore. Hardly a half hour tour on the pedestrian lane went by without at least one hit. In just a few months I came up with more than a half dozen prior criminal deportees, two NCIC fugitives and numerous other individuals either set up for deportation or with a criminal history opening them up for deportation. There were also many more whose records suggested suspicion of on going criminal activities. From the first moment I plunked my gringo butt onto that pedestrian gate seat I used the card reader with the proprietary fastidiousness of a spinster librarian. The card reader was my friend. And so was the clunky aging computer terminal that was there. The three of us stood guard at the pedestrian gate. The Three Amigos of San Luis. The Clunky Computer. The Cranky Card Reader. And the Greying Gringo.

Which is why it was about to be a bad day for the guy just approaching from Mexico. He was about to be a triple bad luck loser. Bad luck number one was when he came up to me on the pedestrian lane and plunked down an I-551 Resident Alien Card. How was he to know that his card was going to be checked right on the lane in the card reader by a officer who was looking for all the technological help he could get? Dressed in faded rough duty work clothes, he looked like the field laborer he said he was. Over his shoulder was slung a cloth travel bag. The guy said he was en route to Oregon. He seemed just like most of the others passing through the gate and presented nothing special to draw attention. Nothing special about this guy.

So much for first impressions. My relaxed attitude was gone a millisecond later when the card reader came up with a hit on the guy. The computer readout said that he'd previously been deported and remained a deported/deportable alien. The name on the card checked out with all three names. First name, father's surname, mother's surname, as well as the date of birth. Apparently the same guy. Looked like him, too. By this time the man realized that something was going on. He started to get a touch nervous, but made no move to run. Maybe because there were people piled up in line behind him and blocking the way. Or maybe because he didn't understand the technology and still thought he could bluff his way through.

Whatever the reason, he hesitated. I didn't. I latched onto the man and moved him into the adjacent Immigration office and, along with one of the INS officers, Joe Martin--a cocky, youthful-looking and thankfully enforcement minded officer out of Michigan--took him into an interrogation room where Martin searched the guy and put ankle cuffs on him. Then I returned to the lane to go through the man's bag. In the bag were two birth certificates from Mexico, a letter and a few other scraps of writing. My enthusiasm at making an INS 'pop' took a definite downturn when I found a couple of pairs of tiny children's shoes in his bag. Maybe the dude had a child somewhere in the U.S. I took all this stuff into INS and handed it over to them. By this time Martin had discovered that the man was an imposter. The card wasn't his. Looked like him. But it wasn't him. That was item of bad luck number two. First, he had picked an officer to come through who was one of the few who used the card reader. And now, secondly, he had tried to use a card belonging to someone who had been deported--which had alerted us and gotten him busted.

But that wasn't all. Item of bad luck number three was even worse. Under his real identity he was also a prior deportee. That meant that, unlike ordinary imposters who were often just processed and let go, he was subject to immediate arrest, transportation to a detention facility, a hearing before an immigration judge, sentencing to some time in prison and then he would be deported. In this instance, deportation did not mean the same thing as an illegal alien who is picked up trying to sneak through the border, caught and sent back to Mexico. This guy was someone who had committed serious offenses in the U.S., been convicted of them, probably did some jail time and then subjected to the legal process of criminal deportation. Minor offenses did not qualify for criminal deportation. Generally it required a series of convictions, or something extremely serious--such as attempting to import narcotics. One of the terms the INS used was CMIT--meaning Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude. In this case, the man had been deported for chronic alcoholism and drug abuse. The final blow had come from the birth certificate found in his bag. The birth certificate--which he had placed in a Spanish language New Testament tucked into a side pocket of the bag--had revealed his real identity, under which he had been deported. It was not a lucky day for this hapless dude.

He'd banged himself straight into a triple play.

### Just Going To The Store--But It's A Ways Off

On the pedestrian gate the next day a man of about thirty walked up holding a BCC-- Border Crossing Card. The BCC was a document that allowed him to cross temporarily into the U.S. but did not give him residency status. The card was at least ten years old and the man had aged enough to make the resemblance close but not exact. Did he have another ID? No, he said. He didn't have another one. Did he have a wallet? No. He had no wallet. What? No wallet? No other ID? Not having a wallet or any other ID is a great big ol' Red Flag to a border officer working a gate. This guy required a closer look.

"Where are you going?" I asked in Spanish.

"To the store", the man replied, also in Spanish.

"Do you have any money?" Was my next question.

"Yes", the man replied.

"May I see it, please?"

The man began to fumble with something out of sight below the level of the pedestrian counter I was sitting behind, taking great pains to keep me from seeing what he was doing. After a bit more fumbling, he pulled out a bill. It was a hundred dollar bill. Large denomination bills are another Red Flag to a border officer. I stood up and looked over the counter to where the man had been fumbling with something out of my view. What was that he'd said about having no wallet? It had miraculously appeared. By now we were flashing each other looks acknowledging at some level a mutual understanding of what was really going on. I reached out and asked the man to hand me his wallet. He was very reticent to hand it over. The man began to tremble slightly and look nervous. He reluctantly handed the wallet over to me. That was it. Busted. In the wallet was the reason for his reticence. A Hawaiian driver's license with the man's name and date of birth on it, along with a much more recent picture than the one on the Border Crossing Card. Also inside the wallet was a pay check stub from a Hawaiian company .I took the guy into the Immigration office, wondering as I went how the guy had made it all the way from Mexico to Hawaii as an illegal entrant.

I didn't feel especially good about busting some guy who had entered the U.S. illegally, probably just so he could make a decent living for his family. It was part of my job, and I did it with professional thoroughness. But not with zeal. Anyhow, I thought they should be going through the legal process of immigration like everyone else who didn't have the access to the illegal shortcut from the country just south of the U.S. My wife's Maltese parents had been among those, waiting their turn to enter the U.S. legally at Ellis Island. A few years after I left San Luis, when my youngest daughter married a Cambodian refugee, it was the same. He and his family--actual survivors of Pol Pot's death camps--waited their turn to enter the U.S. while languishing in a refugee camp in Thailand. Why should all these people coming in from Mexico not have to play by the same rules? So I busted them when I found them. But I never gloated over it. Mostly they were only people like you and me.

But there were times when my sometimes criticized diligent Immigration enforcement posture came into lucid focus. There were actually very good reasons to catch the illegal entrants. The Hawaii bound dude I caught on the pedestrian gate was identified as a former Amnesty applicant whose petition for permanent residency in the US had been denied. He was notified of it, but had not acknowledged the notification and claimed when questioned that he had not known he had been refused. That was almost certainly untrue, since otherwise he would have used his amnesty program document--they had temporary resident cards called 'Red Tops'--to come into the US, not an old Border Crossing Card. U.S. Immigration formally served him with his petition denial, then deported him and kicked him back to Mexico. He probably will return, but if caught might be facing prison time.

Having heard from the whispering lips of numerous INS officers that the Amnesty program was absolutely overflowing with fraudulent applications which the Immigration Service--on the instructions of Those Above--still had approved, I thought this guy must have done something very serious to have his petition denied. And he was a very long way from being the only illegal entrant that I caught who either was a deported felon or had a felony warrant out for their arrest or was a lookout for any number of other criminal offenses. As the government grows increasingly serious about deporting convicted felons, and their booted out the door numbers continue to climb steeply, thousands upon thousands of them will try to get back into the U.S.

Ought to keep the border officers on their toes for years to come.

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

Yogi Berra

### Chapter 17

### The Flip-Flopping Load Driver

In the following narrative I changed the name of the suspect. Even after this many years revealing his identity might get him killed. His pseudonym here is Herrera.

The end of October. The time of year when the oppressive San Luis desert heat eases up and the wonderfully mild winter season begins. It's harvest season in most places. Including San Luis' summer crops. But it is also the beginning of the winter vegetable season along the Colorado River and the place throbs with activity in the winter months. A busy 12 hour shift was just about to end when a guy came through pedestrian who looked a little dicey. Running his name in the computer came up with a pair of TECS hits. The first was a kind of generic advisory message which said that he was a DEA suspect and may be a drug trafficker. There were so many of these, and they so infrequently amounted to anything, that we tended to view these DEA suspect hits with a jaundiced eye much as we did with the TECS hits that also all too frequently amounted to zilch. Right up there with them were the 'lookouts' we regularly received that an airplane had just landed at some unusual location south of the border. The implication, of course, was that an aircraft had just ferried in a load of drugs that were in turn going to be carried over the border. But what we supposed to do beyond what we already were doing? Look for a driver wearing aviator goggles?

But the second TECs entry on this pedestrian was altogether different. It grabbed our attention and held it fast. This one was a Customs entry which said that the guy was arrested the year previous for driving a vehicle containing 154 pounds of cocaine. What? A load driver for 154 pounds of coke? Why was this guy not in the slammer? Yet here he was, free as a bird and walking the streets. And he even still had his Resident Alien Card! He seemed like one hell of a good candidate for being an excludable alien. This had happened several times at San Luis recently. Convicted felons who should have been deported, but weren't. Catching some guy just trying to sneak across to find work was one thing. But a guy who'd driven a load car with millions of dollars worth of cocaine? This guy wasn't about to be blown through.

But first a quick frisk of the guy for hidden weapons. He reacted hostilely, pulled away and glowered. Oh-oh. This guy had a strong reticence to being touched or controlled. He had a very serious criminal history and was flashing the I'm about to boogie look. Mexico was only a quick dash to the south. The guy just might get away. Just then providence intervened. Superman showed up. Superman, in the form of another Customs officer, Steve Clark, who arrived to rotate onto the pedestrian gate as my relief. It turned out he was a relief in more ways than one. Clark has also been at Nogales before coming to San Luis. He'd been a dog handler then, but had come over to being an inspector at San Luis. Steve was a Mississippi native in his early thirties who was a look alike for Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman in a series of movies. Steve was also a serious weight lifter. He had arms like thick steel cables. Mr. I'm about to boogie wasn't going anywhere now. Not with Superman on the scene.

As Steve arrived he was tersely warned that the suspect--whose name we'll say was Herrera--was about to attempt to boogie. Clark put a quick steel gripped end to that and we physically removed Herrera to the adjacent Immigration office. From there we took him into a back room and left him with a pair of INS officers.

"This dude's computer record was sent to your office printer", the two surprised officers were told. "You'll find it to be very interesting reading."

"Has he been patted down?" One of the INS officers asked.

"No", was the answer. "Not yet. But he needs to be. He's pretty squirrelly."

A short while later the shift was almost over. It was just about time to head for home at the tired end of another 12 hour day. But then someone commented about some kind of commotion going on over in the Immigration office. Could it be the squirrelly cocaine load driver we had taken into their office a little while earlier? Given Herrera's criminal record, it seemed INS might need a witness statement from the primary officer who'd brought him in. That was standard procedure then at San Luis for INS. So the tired old feet trudged back across the narrow street between Customs secondary and the main office building and to the INS office inside. Yep. They'd be needing a statement, all right. And more. The INS searching officers had found some pills hidden in Herrera's clothes. And not just any pills. They were Roches. Nicknamed after a drug company's name, Roche, the pills were a highly potent tranquillizer known as Rohypnol. The Date Rape Drug. This was the latest Drug de Jour and was the subject of a recent enforcement alert--whatever the hell that meant (weren't we always supposed to be alert?). Rohypnol was the latest high profile illegal drug to get a lot of official attention. This was the first instance, so far as we knew, of any appreciable quantity of this drug being found locally by Customs. So they were making a big deal out of it.

Which meant that someone had to do a seizure report on the pills. U.S. Immigration couldn't legally seize the drug and had to turn it over to Customs for the formal rigidly mandated seizure process. I was the culprit that had started all the trouble to begin with by taking the guy in. So the seizure fell into my hands. A Customs agent came down to deal with the case--rather surprising, given that there were only 109 tablets of Roche Rohypnol, (along with another 58 Darvon--a different kind of moderate level potent opiate class pain reliever). There obviously was serious Upstairs interest in this drug. The agent was a very competent, picturesquely gruff and grumpy Hispanic dude named Steve Mercado who looked and acted like a character out of an old western. He arranged for the Southwest Border Alliance, SWBA, a law enforcement group made up of several agencies, to take over prosecution. Two members of SWBA, one of them being petite and amiable Puerto Rican descended Customs agent Tara Perez, came down to talk to Herrera.

Hours later the laborious time consuming seizure process was done. All that was left was to head over to a back room--where they were still questioning the Roche toting coke driver Herrera--to get the agents to sign a chain of custody form. With the form signed, the pills could be officially turned over to them and what was now almost a 16 hour workday could be brought to a final grateful end. When I walked into the room where the agents were sitting with Herrera, the man's appearance stopped me in my tracks. Herrera was wild eyed with agitation, his carotid artery pumping so furiously that it was the most vivid example of that stress indicator I had ever seen. If the guy had not been a relatively healthy young man, his galloping blood pressure might have blown his arteries then and there. His respiration was also extremely rapid and shallow. The guy was so blatantly falling apart that he was a textbook example of a perp's guilty behavior and body language. They could have videotaped him and had a dandy training film.And who knows? Maybe they did.

And that wasn't all. This guy was babbling on about who was to blame for all his problems. Me. This guy had the balls to claim he only had the drugs for his own personal use and that my detaining him and having him searched was not fair or reasonable. What? Not fair or reasonable? For a guy who had tried to smuggle a fortune's worth of cocaine? This guy had morphed the dark art of self delusion to a new level. I was just about speechless. My mouth might even have dropped open in astonishment. Then the agents in the room confirmed that Herrera had in fact been busted for being the driver of a 154 pound cocaine load the previous year. Prosecution had been dropped in exchange for his cooperation as an informant. Herrera had saved his butt by becoming a snitch. But were SWBA to interpret the bust with the pills as a breach of faith on the deal over the coke load, and reinstitute the charges on that load, Herrera would have been facing a minimum of ten years in prison. No bloody wonder his carotid was pumping at warp speed.

But that was the agents' business. Not mine. Not any more, anyhow. Long days tend to eventually distill down to the basics. Like getting home and plunking your tired body into bed. I silently thanked the Gods when the agents signed the chain of custody form and took control of the Roche and Darvon pills. I left the interrogation room, the agents, Herrera and the INS office behind me and was about to leave the port for home and bed when all hell broke lose again in secondary. Dark skinned, blue eyed inspector Loretta Gamble came puffing in agitated and white as a ghost.

But that's another story.

That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything and they don't drink all your beer.

Paul Leary

### Technology

The border. Illegal immigration. You can't escape hearing about it. You even see it scrawled on the walls of public restrooms. It's everywhere. TV. Radio. Newspapers. The internet. The movies. Probably even on your mobiles. You can bet that the members of congress from border districts are regularly getting their ears burned about a host of different border issues. One of those issues is the use of technology to secure the border. There's a lot of high tech stuff coming to the border, including the Department of Homeland Security's border surveillance system, SBInet. The glitch plagued system, dubbed the Virtual Fence, was built--and then partially rebuilt because of its many flaws--by Boeing along parts of the Mexican border south of Tucson. The goal of the Virtual Fence was to complement existing enforcement with a variety of hot new whizbang high tech sensors and to practice a more efficient, judicious and effective use of manpower than the old fence and boots on the ground philosophy of border policing. The boots of the Virtual Fence were to found behind sophisticated control consoles, in helicopters and in high tech computer-equipped quick response mobile teams.

The glitch-plagued SBINet program was eventually canceled in early 2011 because of technical problems, delays and cost overruns. That doesn't mean the technology itself failed. Much of it is still in use and integrated into a revised border initiative which is intended to be much more flexible.

Here is what the DHS had to say about the SBInet and the new initiative. The following is from Department of Homeland Security News Release on March 15, 2011. March 15. The Ides of March. Coincidence? Maybe so. Maybe not.

To assess the cost-effectiveness of SBInet, DHS conducted an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA). In the AoA, DHS quantified relative effectiveness and relative costs of various technology solutions, and compared these measures for each option. The results of the AoA showed that the selection of technology for a given area of the border is highly dependent on the nature of that area (e.g., terrain, population density). Therefore, the SBInet concept of a "one size fits all" solution is not appropriate across the entire border. In fact, the AoA suggested that the optimal technology deployment strategy would involve a mix of technologies tailored to each area of the border and based on the operational judgment of the experienced Border Patrol agents deployed in that area.

One size doesn't fit all. Flexibility. Ideas that are sure no great surprise to any veteran border officer. This is how DHS thinks it will work.

New Technology Deployment Plan

The new border security technology plan will utilize existing, proven technology tailored to the distinct terrain and population density of each border region, including commercially available MSSs, Unmanned Aircraft Systems, thermal imaging devices, and tower-based RVSSs. Where appropriate, this technology plan will also include elements of the former SBInet program that have proven successful, such as stationary radar and infrared and optical sensor towers.

Based on the Border Patrol's assessment of priority needs and the Department's 2011 and 2012 budget requests, the Department intends to initiate procurements for the Remote Video Surveillance Systems and cameras, thermal imaging systems, Agent-Portable Surveillance Systems, imaging sensors, Unattended Ground Sensors, and Mobile Video Surveillance Systems in fiscal year 2011, with deliveries scheduled between 2011 and 2012. The integrated fixed towers will follow starting with procurements in early fiscal year 2012.

There was a common misperception after SBInet was canceled that the technology 'fix' on the border had failed and was called off. Nope. DHS is loading on the high tech stuff more than ever before. But, like SBInet, will it work?

Many voices have been raised doubting the ability of technology to control the border. Yet at the same time many doubt the ability of technology to control the frontier, just a few miles away from Nogales, at the world famous Kitt Peak National Observatory, a wide array of space age technology is busily working on unlocking the secrets of the universe. The voices of doom and gloom aren't nitpicking the Kitt Peak folks. So...

Controlling the border is more difficult than cracking the cosmic codes of the universe?

Articles on the Virtual Fence appeared regularly in Tucson's Arizona Daily Star newspaper. No surprise that in our blog-saturated, everybody's-got-an-opinion world, people by the gadzillion responded to the newspaper's internet comment link. Most of them vented out of their parochial political belief systems rather than any attempt at objective analysis. On both sides of the issue. Some coldly foolish person would say we should mine the border and guard it with machine guns with orders to shoot to kill. Or somebody on the other side, some impossibly naïve person, might say that the illegal entrants are all just poor, harmless people looking to better their lives. Both views are blindly wrong headed.

But what really is astounding is that so many people think that the use of technology could never work to control the border. In a country that has put people on the moon?A country with the incredibly complicated technical sophistication of its cities, airports, power grids and perpetually flowing commerce? A country whose advanced agricultural complex feeds much of the world? A country that has mapped the human genome--including the extinct Neanderthals--and is on the edge of miraculous quantum jumps in medical science and deeply involved in the greatest Age of Discovery in all of human history? A country that in a single century went from a horse-and-buggy, kerosene-lamp-lit world to the nuclear age and to launching space probes into our solar system and beyond? A country that is searching the universe from the nearby Kitt Peak National Observatory? This country can't build a border fence that'll work?

That's a pretty hard one to swallow.

At least for me. A boots on the ground veteran border officer who routinely used technology in border enforcement. Technology was at the very core of whatever success I had as a Customs officer. Both low tech and high tech. The low tech was as simple as a five foot length of aluminum tubing with a side view mirror from a pickup truck bolted to one end that made it much simpler and faster to look at the undercarriage of cars and pickups. That one simple piece of low tech contributed to thousands of narcotics seizures along the border. There was also an array of other low tech tools that we used. Probes, tire thumpers, tiny pocket mirrors for looking into small openings inside vehicles. Handy little multi-tools. High intensity flashlights. Sharp eyed officers using no more than their own experience and initiative along with high intensity flashlights and inspection mirrors put many a would be smuggler in the slammer.

And that was just low tech. Then there were the high tech tools. Number one. A no brainer. The computer. I nabbed dozens of fugitives and deported felons, as well as scads of phony documents, using a computer and a card reader umbilicaled to a computer. There was a very deep and broad vein in this gold mine of information at your fingertips through the computer and its links to a host of law enforcement, government and other databases. Information that fleshed out the bare bones of situations and incidents for us just about every day--such as a criminal history check that revealed a female load driver who was loudly proclaiming her good citizen innocence to be a previous violator. We are light years beyond the abilities of law enforcement of only a few years ago. Before the computer and its access to a legion of databases, most of the criminals we catch now using the computer would have just sauntered right by. Crime didn't start with the birth of the computer age. In the 'Good Old Days' lots of criminals waltzed right through the border without so much as breaking a sweat. Some of them still slip through. But the computer has made it a whole lot harder. A simple entry of a border crosser's name and date of birth has ruined many a malefactor's day--and likely many days to come.

And we're not talking about some hardscrabble working guy from Guadalajara or Vera Cruz, or some cash poor peasant woman from Hermosillo or Chihuahua City, who are just trying to sneak into the U.S. in order to make a better living for themselves and their families. Those folks aren't criminals. Not real criminals. The people we're talking about here are criminals. Child molesters. Rapists. Armed robbers. Burglars. Smugglers. Con men. Scam artists. Car thieves. Murderers. Thugs. Drug dealers. Not the kind of people any of us want running around loose on our streets. Many thousands of them are in jails and prisons because of the nearly universal law enforcement use of a basic high tech tool that society now pretty much takes for granted. The ubiquitous and exquisitely effective computer. Though it might sound improbable or even downright outrageous on the surface, the fact is that nimble fingers on a keyboard catch more bad guys than lit up squads hurtling in hot metallic pursuit down city streets or Robocop clad SWAT teams busting down fortified doors. You don't hear much about it. Quick and quiet computer based busts don't make for dramatic TV.

But the people who get caught because of the computer sure know about it.

You could call the computer a kind of passive tool. At least in the sense that it is stationary and you can't lug it around with you. There weren't many laptops around when I was an active officer, but even today going Law Enforcement Sensitive over a wireless laptop connection might not be the greatest idea. And it remained and continues to remain an informational tool rather than a directly hands on tool. But we had another high tech tool that was hands on and that we could carry. And one hell of a wonderfully effective tool it was, with a name that perfectly fit its drug busting function.

The Buster.

Officially it was the K910 Buster Density Meter. We just called it just the Buster. A clunky pound-of-butter-sized rectangular metal object that was carried in a pouch on your utility belt. It was essentially a kind of portable X-ray device that measured the density of objects beneath it on a numerical scale. At Nogales in the late '80's the first Busters were just being issued on a trial basis. There were only a handful of them available and an ordinary grunt was lucky to even get a close look at one. The Busters were signed out only to the proven high power A list inspectors. Just the Big Dogs got them, folks like the legendary Mike Little, who was known on the Mexican side of the border as El Mecanico because of his intimate knowledge of the mechanics of vehicles He died a few years back and I heard the Department of Homeland Security folks give him a heck of a funeral in Nogales. Mike was no Gold's Gym stud. Mike was a slight, boozy character with a shabby uniform that as often as not was crusted with dirt and grease from crawling under cars. You didn't need to be a 200 pound mesomorph who could bench press 400 pounds to be a first class dope buster. In fact, more often than not the reverse was true. A lot of the really good dope finders were either unremarkably ordinary looking or borderline zany characters like Mike. I watched Mike using the Buster and immediately fell in love. Not with Mike. With the Buster. A tool like that could go a long ways towards helping a blundering new kid on the block pursue the golden Grail of the border. Finding Dope.

One of the first memories of working the border at Nogales was watching Buster-toting Mike hurrying to pull over an old pickup truck that had just been released by a U.S. INS officer. Mike put that Buster to work and before the evening was over Mike had pulled hundreds of pounds of dope out of a false bed in that pickup. I had no idea how he'd spotted the false bed from twenty or thirty feet away, but he had. And Mike wasn't the only officer I saw do that in the early days. Another officer who'd come out of the Customs Academy close to the same time as myself was a cigarette puffing, drawling, perpetually disheveled New Mexican named Rick Davis. Rick was a border natural. He took to it immediately and was soon walking around with more tools hanging off his belt than a power company lineman. And he knew how to use them. He became a drug snooping shambling mobile rover and while he was roving one evening along the primary lanes he went over to a pickup truck a couple of lanes over from mine, thumped on the bed from underneath and promptly got himself a huge dope load. How the hell did those guys do that? I knew I would never be a border legend like Mike Little was and Rick Davis was becoming, but I might develop into a pretty good officer--with the aid of tools like the Buster.

"That is one dandy tool", I thought to myself about the Buster, "that I have got to get my hands on."

But there was no getting my hands on it. Nor for a new and untried inspector. Not then.It would have to wait several more years after returning from a four year overseas tour of duty with Customs. By then Busters were widely available. Available, but not as frequently used as you would have thought. A lot of inspectors shied away from them because of the radioactive core in the device. The common gossip based belief was that a guy could become sterile or even impotent from carrying around a Buster dangling from the utility belt in the general neighborhood of his privates. The old body was approaching the age where the idea of sex was becoming more amusing than amusement and the communal ballocks fixated aversion to the Buster didn't register very high on my personal aversion scale. The others shied away from it. Not me. It wasn't difficult to get a Buster on almost every shift. The basics of being a reasonably sound Customs officer had percolated down by then, but it'd been at an airport and that wasn't knowledge specific to border drug busting. It was time to rectify that lacking. And the K910 Buster was the key.

The official policy on Busters was that you were supposed to plunk your rear end down in a formal classroom setting for a lecture on the nature and use of the supposedly gonad threatening instrument before you were allowed to actually put your sweaty little hands on one and put the critter into action. OK. Probably made sense, considering the radioactive core of the Buster. So somebody in an air conditioned office in the distant Reagan Building in D. C. came up with the policy. But where were the classes to go with the policy? Nowhere in sight on the classroom horizon. The general experience with Customs was that if you waited for the agency to get around to train you to do something you might well be celebrating a birthday or two before any classes showed up at your port or Customs parted with the bucks to send you to a class somewhere else.

What to do? Learn by doing. Pick the brains of a few officers who knew how to use the Buster. And then Buster everything in sight. Floors, walls, posts, anything. I didn't actually use it on people. But once in a while I pretended to, which was always good for an animated histrionic reaction with the announcement that the Buster had picked up a low sperm count from them. Anyhow, all of that was for comparison and distraction and a bit of puckishness. Mostly what Mr. Buster was put to work on were the various surfaces of cars and pickups. Tires, roofs, floors, hoods, quarter panels, doors, bumpers, seats, trunks, dashes, gas tanks and frame rails and ever other bloody part and location you could think of. First get to know the normal readings of the parts on various vehicles. Then begin to look for the abnormal readings. I might never be a hotshot like Mike Little or Rick Davis, but by God I was determined to find something.

Whenever there was a load car in secondary, I'd beat tracks over to it as soon as possible and use the Buster while the load was still in the vehicle. It was a quick first hand education in what a real load vehicle bustered. No dry classroom pontificating here. Soon I was methodically putting the Buster to use on my secondary inspections. It was a shock that things happened so quickly. It had seemed likely there would be a long exploratory period before the loads started showing up. Not so. Almost right away the first secondary load popped up. It started with a routine pass with the Buster on a car's quarter panel. The readings suddenly jumped way up into the 60's and 70's. Whoa! A load! The first secondary load using a Buster. More followed--also sooner than you might have expected. It was a real boost to the enforcement ego to get these loads in secondary, even if another officer had initially referred them. The Buster was a hell of a tool. Confidence was building. The loads were good. But not good enough. It was time to make the quantum leap from finding loads in vehicles that other folks had sent to secondary to actually finding the loads myself on the primary lanes. It finally happened a couple of weeks before Christmas one late afternoon as the sun was sinking into the western horizon in nearby California. This was another of those times when there was a weird numinous intuition that something was going to happen.

December 14. About 5:15 . A Mexican-plated Ford F-150 pickup truck pulled up to my lane at the San Luis POE. Fortyish Juan Cervantes was driving the vehicle. Cervantes handed over his Mexican passport for identification and in a flash there was an inexplicable tingling numinous intuition that this just might be the one. It was another of those seemingly impossible yet real intuitive moments when I knew there was dope present. The dull quiet of the evening morphed into a palpable feeling of anticipation. The very air seemed to vibrate with excitement. This Ford had to be checked. I started to give the vehicle a rapid primary check, first looking to see whether the gas tank showed signs of recent removal. It didn't. I moved over to the far side of the vehicle and used a Buster on the right rear tire. I froze for a moment. 60's! Twice what would normally be expected. I shined my high-intensity flashlight beam on the truck wheel. The lug nuts had fresh scratches on them. A sign of recent removal. Tapping of the tire also did not give the customary ring of a normal tire. The tire sounded solid or dead. These were all signs of loaded tires. The adrenalin kicked in. This not only might be it, it was looking very much as though it actually was it. There were too many positive indicators. This had to be a load.

I took a couple of steps forward and checked out the front passenger side wheel. Same thing. No doubt now. The Ford F-150 had loaded tires. In later years I would always walk a load vehicle back to secondary, but I was still a new kid on the border block so I hastily scribbled out a referral slip saying the tires had high buster readings and told driver Cervantes to take the Ford back into the secondary lot. As the truck drove off, I reinforced the referral slip--which was on the truck's windshield, along with the man's passport--with a phone call on the port intercom to the secondary lot. Inspector Andy Metz picked up the intercom and I told him the tires on the truck driving into secondary were loaded. I wanted no misunderstandings or miscues on this one. This was my first primary load and I was taking no chances on losing it. I also noted the license plate number and color and model of the truck in case the F-150 made a run for it and then intently watched as Cervantes slowly drove the Ford into secondary. He parked along the fence where INS referrals and some non-inspectional visitors parked, not in the actual secondary inspection lot. I was still on the intercom with Andy and told him where the truck was parking. A couple of minutes later the intercom buzzed on my lane and Andy Metz gleefully passed on the news.

"It's positive", the gentle giant--the guy looked like an NFL nose tackle--said. "The tires are loaded."

Inspector Robert Labrada--who would some months later be shot by a narcotics trafficker at the Port of Calexico in California--was actually the officer who took the referral slip off the truck. Labrada was the seizing officer. It was midnight before he finished the seizure. San Luis was still lacking some basic tools and Bob had to take the truck to the vehicle impound lot, remove the wheels, and then cut them open. I had a nearly identical experience with a tire load and knew how miserably hot, physically exhausting and time consuming that sweat soaked job was. The truth is that I was secretly glad it was him and not me out in that miserably hot impound lot laboriously sawing on the Ford's tires. Bob found that the two front tires and the right rear tire were loaded. The left rear and the spare lying in the truck bed were not.

This was a sly trick sometimes used by the traffickers. They would not load the tires most likely to be checked by a primary inspector--which, no surprise, were the driver's side rear tire and the spare. I had already picked up on that and generally bypassed the left rear tire in routine inspections and went for the right rear. And usually also the right front, since statistically that tire was more likely to be loaded than any other--something that actually had happened the previous week at San Luis. In fact, on the Ford pickup load Andy Metz at first used a Buster on the left rear tire in secondary and was puzzled when he got normal readings. He initially thought it wasn't loaded and was having his doubts about my inspectional abilities. But then he scooted over to the other side of the Ford, slid the Buster along the sidewall on the right rear tire and got the same high readings I had gotten on primary. Then he made the intercom call to me.

The Ford had 134 pounds of marijuana in the three loaded tires. One of them had foam wrapping around each brick, a second had foam wrapping between the bricks and the third had none. Either they got tired of wrapping the bricks or they ran out of foam. Or maybe they just ran out of enthusiasm. The driver, Juan Cervantes, who looked broken and crestfallen as he sat for long hours in the holding cell, immediately asked for a lawyer when the case agent arrived and began interviewing him. That kind of surprised me. Seeing the man's dejected behavior in the holding cell, I figured he'd confess without much convincing. This happened more often than not with previous seizures I had seen. The agent was a new man and inexperienced as a case agent. Maybe Cervantes would have lawyered up for any agent. Maybe not. But he did and that was that.

In this case, unlike many others, the lack of a confession didn't stop prosecution in its tracks. Cervantes was eventually convicted and would spend nearly twenty months in prison. He was turned over to INS after his release and immediately deported. Or at least he was supposed to be. And, if he was, whether or not he stayed in Mexico is an altogether different question. But wherever he was, I wonder if he ever told anyone the story of a clunky little rectangular pound-of-butter-sized black box. The Buster.

And how it put him in the slammer.

The Buster was the only hand carried high tech tool that we had. Another tool that was partially mobile, though much less so than the Buster, was the fiber optics scope. The fiber optics scope consisted of a wrapped cable bundle of a large number of very thin fiber optic wires. It had a viewing camera at one end, a control console/power source at the other end of the long covered cable and a plastic eyepiece hooked up to the control console to view what the camera saw. Like an angiogram for a vehicle. The scopes were fairly fragile and often out of service. Only part of that was because of their fragility. The other part was because the officers using them were frequently not trained in their use and handled them too roughly. Some of the scopes were more powerful than others. The really good ones we called Super Scopes. And when they were working you felt like a doctor in the operating room deftly maneuvering a catheter into somebody's heart. The heart of a car. Which usually meant a gas tank.

If we had a car or a pickup or a van that we suspected had a loaded gas tank, but hadn't been able to pin down definitely by using visual inspection, running K-9's, tapping for the sounds of unnatural solidity or by bustering, then we could turn to the scope as the next step. Before the coming of the scopes, the next step would have been to drop the gas tank on a suspect vehicle for direct visual inspection. That was time consuming, tied up manpower, and could result in technical side effects such as screwing up a unloaded vehicle's fuel system. Which would very likely get the owners pretty riled up and send them stomping into the Bosses' office with hot eyed complaints and demands for compensation. Because of that a lot of tanks that had only a moderate level of suspicion were just let go. And in the process undoubtedly some loads went down the road. The fiber optics scope changed that. Now we could break out the scope, carry it out to the place where the car or truck was and hook it up. In just a couple of minutes we could scope out a tank and make a reasonable determination whether it was loaded or not. As smuggling techniques grew more sophisticated into the 2000's, the use of the scopes became more and more important. Maybe even critically important.

The process was simple enough. We'd thread the fiber optics cable with the camera at its end down the gas filler tube and run it into the gas tank itself, then look into the eyepiece. Most of the time you'd see nothing. On very rare occasions you might see a package. If you did see something unusual, it likely would be some kind of compartment inside the gas tank. Either there would be a box inside the tank, or the tank would be modified by sealing off part of it to hide the compartment where the dope was hidden. The process might be simple enough, but seeing into a gas tank was easier said that done, and some officers were better at it than others. I wasn't one of the better ones. Fortunately, there was always some sharp young officer around with eager 20-20 vision to tap for a second opinion. I didn't hesitate to borrow their fresh young eyes. A very long time ago one of those amazing contemplative ancient Greeks observed that two, walking together, see farther than one. That ancient Greek was my contemporary dope finding partner--at least tactically. I borrowed those eager pairs of young eyes and more than once they spotted something I wasn't at all clear about, turned to me with refreshing youthful eagerness and said something that was the National Border Anthem to our ears....

"It's loaded!"

Customs raised the bar on the smugglers with technology. The computer. The Buster. The fiber optics scope. And also the X-ray machines. Besides having fiber optics scopes, San Luis had a couple of X-ray units while I was there. A small pallet X-ray at the truck duck and a mobile unit in a van. I didn't work much with either one. My co-worker Frank Gonzalez got a marijuana load of several hundred pounds at the truck dock. The dope was inside large patio blocks imported from Mexico that were spotted by the pallet X-ray. And Jesus 'Chuy' Mata used a buster and a fiber optics scope to locate a cocaine load of several hundred pounds in the gas tank of a semi-tractor at the same truck dock.

My own experience with X-ray units at San Luis was not promising. A prototype truck mounted mobile X-ray unit was brought into San Luis on a trial run. I drove a battered old van over to where the unit was set up at the truck dock and asked the X-ray team to run the van through their unit. They did and it showed nothing.

"Nothing there", they said.

"Oh?", I replied with a newly acquired deep skepticism about this particular high tech tool.

The van was in fact loaded. There were numerous marijuana packages in the gas tank. I'd already found the dope before driving it over to the X-ray out of curiosity to see how the unit would do. The X-ray team at first wouldn't believe me. Then they turned the van around and X-rayed it from the other side. The packages showed up then. The X-ray team said that this was a prototype model and could only X-ray one side of a vehicle at a time. What they called a double pass. The final production model of the unit would be a single pass and be able to X-ray an entire vehicle at one time. The final model wouldn't have missed the dope on the first pass. So they said. I remained skeptical.

The fact was that the unit had missed the dope on the first pass.

It was only when I transferred back to Nogales in 2000 that I became deeply involved with the use of both the fiber optic scopes and the X-ray machines. Officers there were having considerable success with both. That caught my attention. Nogales had several X-ray units. It had a huge stationary unit that could X-ray entire tractor trailers. And it had a truck mounted mobile unit that could do cars and pickups. It even was in the process of getting one on the railway entrance from Mexico. Nogales also had several fiber optics scopes. Enough so that more often than not at least one of them was working. Having embraced technology at the very beginning of my career as a way to counterbalance my lack of native drug finding abilities, I was quick to begin using both the scopes and the X-ray units at Nogales my second tour there.

And the result was a series of seizures that made me wonder how much dope we'd been missing before we got these dazzling new startlingly effective whizbang high tech tools.

A word about the use of dogs. K-9's were certainly at the top of the list of the most important enforcement options we had. Time and again, a K-9 alerted us to the presence of narcotics that we otherwise wouldn't have had a clue were there. On the other hand, time and again a K-9 threw an alert when an exhaustive search came up with nothing and left us silently slamming the K-9's and their handlers. Dogs are living creatures, not machines, and there are a lot of variables with the animals. Weather is one. Very hot weather, such as we had much of the time at San Luis, severely limited the usefulness of dogs. With their noses and feet down on the scorching pavement, the dogs got overheated in a hurry. Rainy weather also could have a negative effect on a dog's usefulness, making it harder for the canines to pick up narcotic odor.

And, like their human co-workers, dogs varied in ability. Some were better than others. A mediocre dog could surprise us by having an outstanding enforcement day. But a superior dog could just as easily disappoint us by having a bad day. Dogs wore out just like people. They lost their edge when they were worked too much. And, like the dogs, some handlers were better than others. A good handler with a good dog, both of them fresh and raring to go, were a dynamite drug busting combination. But the reality very, very often fell a long ways short of the ideal. The use of dogs was not the slam bang surefire enforcement tool it might seem to the outsider. It could and did vary a whole lot.

So when the high tech options came along, we more and more frequently used them to verify K-9 alerts. A couple minutes with a scope was a lot quicker and easier than a half hour or more spent dropping a tank. A trip to the X-ray unit took just one officer off the line, not the two or three that dropping the tank required. The high tech equipment was faster and more efficient. And it was finding dope.

I was talking one day with a Customs agent named Ruttencutter, a former Customs inspector, about what he had looked for when selecting cars to check for drugs back when he was an inspector.

"Clean cars", he said. "That was one thing I looked for. Very clean cars. For some reason, the dopers seem to think a real clean car won't arouse as much suspicion." The guy had a superior reputation as a dope man, so I took in what he said and filed it away in my mental inspectional toolbox for later use. That opportunity for use turned up sooner rather than later.

A pleasantly warm early November morning. The DeConcini Port of Entry on Grand Avenue in downtown Nogales, with the colorful pageantry of the border unfolding mostly unseen by us grunts just a few dozen feet away. I was post-primary roving. That means I was watching the cars that had been cleared on primary and were heading north into the U.S. Post-primary roving was not something that made you a candidate for the most popular guy at the port. No officer wanted to check a vehicle on primary, consider it OK and release it only to have some other officer wandering around behind in post-primary pull the vehicle in and find it to be loaded. At the very least it made the primary officer look bad. But it could also open up the unpalatable question of possible corruption. Did the primary officer know it was loaded? It happened. How often? No one knew. I'm not sure we really wanted to know.

There was more than one reason to post-primary rove. Anti-corruption was one. Anti-sloth was another. But my reason was selectivity. I preferred to personally select the cars to search rather than be limited to what someone else sent back to secondary. Which is what I was doing. And which is when I noticed a car just being released from primary. The conversation with the Customs agent ballooned back into memory. This car being released? Even from a distance there was something distinctly noticeable about it. It was more than merely clean looking. It sparkled immaculately. The car was a Mexican plated Ford Grand Marquis. I stepped out in front of the vehicle and held up my hand. The driver hit the brakes, startled. I stepped to the driver's window and motioned for him to lower it. Just a few quick questions, I told him, and he could be on his way. Most of the time that would have actually been the case.

Most of the time.

The guy's name was Jesus Perez. 41 years old. From Hermosillo, the state capital of Sonora a few hours' freeway drive south. I asked him if the Ford was his. He replied that it was and he'd bought the vehicle two months earlier. I always looked for a cluster of indicators before going into an intensive search of a vehicle. No one indicator meant much. But a group of them could mean something. The first indicator was the unusually clean vehicle. Now there was a second indicator. The guy had no paperwork on the Ford. I was getting interested. I asked Perez what his reason was for coming into the U.S. He answered that he owned a refrigeration business in Hermosillo and was on his way to Tucson to buy some parts. He seemed reasonably calm up to that point--bearing in mind that it was common for Mexican citizens to become apprehensive when crossing into the U.S. Badges and guns made many of them uneasy. But this detail-shop-clean car somehow didn't fit in my mind with a guy who owned a refrigeration business going to buy parts. I had another question for him.

"Do you have a business card?" I asked Mr. Perez. The color left his face. He began to get flustered, patting and reaching into his pockets nervously and starting to get that deer in the headlights look I'd so often seen. "No", he replied with a voice that matched his face. "I don't have any with me." The abrupt change in behavior had just bought him a trip into secondary.

"Pull over there, please", I said, pointing towards an open space in secondary. He did.

K-9 officer Carol K. was nearby with her dog, Wisca. I asked her if she'd run the Grand Marquis. Carol was agreeable and started to prep Wisca for the run. I had Perez get out and stand well back from the car while Carol and Wisca went into their practiced K-9 run. I plunked myself right at Perez' elbow so that I could stop him should Wicsa alert and Perez decide to boogie for Mexico. Wisca did alert, but Perez didn't move a muscle. Carol gave me the thumbs up sign and I immediately whisked Perez into the secondary office where we patted him down and stashed him in a detention cell. I went back outside to where Carol was waiting.

"Wisca alerted and responded?" I said. She nodded. "Where?" I asked.

"The dash", Carol replied. Together Carol and I went at the dash. At first with an excited confidence. At first. The enthusiasm quickly waned. We found nothing. No tool marks, no signs of removal, no visible signs of anything. Even a partial removal of some of the dash's components came up empty. Carol and I looked at each other quizzically. Where was the dope? Then I went inside and scared up some of the veteran officers who I knew were good dope men and asked them to come out and take a look at the dash. Ever single one of them, including the contagiously enthusiastic dope busting supervisor, Colin Christenson, came up empty. Was this another K-9 false alert?

"Could Wisca be wrong on this one, Carol", I asked, trying my best to sound diplomatic.

"No", Carol said flatly. "I trust my dog. There's something there." And that was that.

I took her at her word. So I jumped into the Grand Marquis and drove it the few miles over to the Mariposa Port of Entry on the western fringe of Nogales. The mobile truck X-ray unit was set up behind the primary car lanes at the Mariposa secondary lot. Running the X-ray were a couple of rock solid officers I'd known since my early days at Nogales, Bob Marez and Manny Gonzalez, as well as a hotshot young new officer, Rick Perez. I told the X-ray team about the dog alert, how a bunch of officers searched the Ford without finding zilch and that K-9 officer K. was dead certain something was there. Whether or not they bought the story in its entirety or not--K-9's did sometimes throw false alerts and inspectors did sometimes miss finding loads--they said they'd be happy to run the Grand Marquis through the X-ray. I climbed into the control room of the mobile unit and watched while the X-ray image came up on the display terminal. The experienced officers of the X-ray team leaned over the image and studied it for a few moments.

"There's something there, under the windshield", Bob Marez said. "Look." He pointed at some long, thin whitish objects under the windshield. "Packages", he said. I bent to look at the image. I saw them, too. Packages. Carol and Wisca had been right.

I climbed out of the mobile X-ray and hurried over to the Grand Marquis. Rick Perez and I dug into the factory space under the car's windshield with a thin, sharp probe. We probably were holding our breath when we pulled the probe back out. A compartment hidden as well as this one might contain something other than marijuana. The probe came out. White powder! Either cocaine or methamphetamine. That was good for a round of hearty high fives. I drove the car back to Grand Avenue with the news that it was loaded, and also with the strange thought that I was driving a loaded car on a highway and was therefore in at least one sense a load driver. Carol K. was ecstatic, and righteously so since some of the officers had doubted the validity of her K-9's alert to the car. We later removed seven of those long, thin packages from the factory built channel under the Grand Marquis' windshield. The white powder was cocaine. Total weight, 14.7 pounds. So much for the skepticism I'd once had about the effectiveness of X-ray units.

After that I never doubted the ability of X-ray units to snoop out hard to find dope.

I was post-primary roving again. Same place. Grand Avenue at the DeConcini Port of Entry in downtown Nogales. It was a few months after 9/11 in early 2002. I was looking for clean vehicles again and spotted another, a '89 Chevy Astro Van that looked unusually clean, especially for a vehicle that old. I motioned it into the secondary lot for a brief inspection. Driving the van was a guy named Edi Velazquez. His wife Bertha was in the passenger side front seat. A couple of kids were in the back seat. Velazquez said he owned a small business in the Mexican side of Nogales and that he and his family were just going over to the Arizona side to do a bit of shopping. Nothing special so far.

As I was talking to the driver, I casually slid my inspection mirror under the van to take a quick peak at the Astro Van's gas tank. Damn. I hated it when kids were involved. Was I going to end up busting yet another family for smuggling dope? The gas tank of the Astro Van had a uniform sandy textured substance over it that I had seen several times at San Luis. Smugglers developed a technique of using a paint sprayer to spray mud or sand over loaded gas tanks to cover signs of tampering. Some of the spray jobs were pretty good. This one wasn't. I reached under and rubbed a finger lightly over the tank. The sandy covering came off easily to the touch. I was pretty sure this was going to be a load. Sure, but not positive. I'd once had one of those sprayed tanks on a Chevy pickup in San Luis that had turned out not to be loaded, even though a companion pickup with a loaded gas tank came in at the same time driven by a member of the same family as the one I had and was sprayed in the same way. I never did quite figure that one out.

Anyhow, I was pretty sure this was a load. But I wanted confirmation. First the family was taken into the secondary office and put under the watchful eye of the senior officer on duty. Then I got one of the fiber optics scopes and took it out to the Chevy van. I couldn't make out anything definite in the tank. So I called over a couple of nearby K-9 officers and asked them to run the van. Both ran it and both said that their dogs alerted. But I still couldn't see anything in the tank. So I drove the van over to the big stationary X-ray unit at the Mariposa truck dock and had the officers run it through the big unit.It was inconclusive, too. I was about to take the van over to a lift and drop the tank when a couple of the guys at the X-ray station, senior inspectors Fuentes and Osorio, suggested we try what they called 'the Super Scope'. The scope was a very powerful fiber optics scope that the officers working in the X-ray facility jealously protected. The red-headed Fuentes and dark-haired Osorio pulled out the Super Scope and lugged it outside to the Astro Van and put it to work. It didn't take long. The music of the Border National Anthem came to my ears again.

"It's loaded", one of them said.

"There's a box inside the tank", the other announced with a wonderful practiced finality.

I took the van back to Grand Avenue and turned it over to Myrna Cota. Together with her and several National Guardsmen--despite what you might have heard in the media, the National Guard had been working with us for many years on the border--we dropped the gas tank of the Astro Van. We were hoping it would be hard drugs. It was marijuana. Not quite 32 pounds. Mildly disappointing. Except for one thing. I'd made a very important new friend.

The Super Scope.

I was on primary Lane 6. 10:00 A.M. Grand Avenue in Nogales in January of 2002. An Arizona-plated Nissan Pathfinder drove up from Mexico. A guy in his early 40's was behind the wheel. He said his name was Francisco Cabrera and that he had been born on the Arizona side of Nogales and was a U.S. citizen, but was living in Mexico. He spoke very little English. And he didn't show me any identification. The guy said he was living in Nogales, Sonora, and was on his way to Tucson to make some purchases. He also said he was unemployed, had just recently bought the Pathfinder and had not yet changed the title to his name. And if that wasn't enough to win him a free trip to secondary, his behavior sent him straight through the goal posts to the secondary lot. The guy wouldn't look me in the eye, stared rigidly straight ahead and seemed for all the world to me to be either pissed off or arrogant. And on top of that, the Pathfinder was very clean and showed only a very few border crossings on the primary station's computer terminal. I did a quick primary inspection, found nothing definite, then sent the Pathfinder to the secondary lot for further inspection.

Soon after that I rotated off the primary lane and went back to secondary. The Pathfinder was sitting in the lot, still unattended. No one had come up to check it out. So I took my own referral slip off the windshield and began an inspection. I had Cabrera get out of the vehicle and stand nearby where I could keep an eye on him. Then I began to take a closer look at the guy's SUV. About that time a couple of rookie officers, Jason Trebes and Brett Gamble, ambled over to see what was going on. They joined in the inspection, and also helped keep an eye on Cabrera. We opened up the rear of the Pathfinder and looked around. The screws holding down the carpet in the cargo compartment had fresh scratches on them. At that moment K-9 officer Jackie Yocupicio came up to us with her dog, Roxy. We backed off and she ran the Pathfinder. Cabrera was escorted into the secondary office and left there under the supervision of the shift senior.

Roxy hit the same place we'd been looking at in the Pathfinder. The trunk area. We took out a fiber optics scope and ran the cable into the gas tank to scan the inside of the tank. It wasn't definite, but it sure looked like there was a box inside the tank. I turned the seizure over to Jason Trebes and he drove the Pathfinder to the X-ray unit at the Mariposa truck dock. A few minutes later he called with the news that the X-ray had confirmed the presence of a box inside the SUV's gas tank. While Trebes was driving the vehicle back to Grand Avenue, I went into the secondary office and began the usual bit with load driver Cabrera. Before putting him in a detention cell, I patted him down and searched his personal effects. This supposedly unemployed guy had nearly a thousand bucks on him in a combination of Mexican and U.S. currency. A few minutes later Trebes returned with the Pathfinder and we opened up the gas tank and took out the packages. There were 13 of them. Total weight, 33.24 pounds. I probed one of them. Another jubilant round of high fives followed. The probe came out covered with that coveted fine white powder.

Cocaine.

I was certainly one of the oldest active line officers in the Customs service. The day before I had celebrated my 62nd birthday and my two daughters had surprised me by coming down to Nogales from the University of Arizona in Tucson to wish me a happy birthday and take me out for supper. Still with a smile in my heart from that, I was working a primary lane at Nogales at a little after noon. A Ford Explorer came driving up to my primary lane past the string of modest storefront businesses that lined the Mexican side of downtown Grand Avenue. The driver was a guy in his late twenties, Carlos Peña. He seemed all right to me at first. The computer terminal in the primary booth showed the vehicle was a regular crosser. And Peña had the paperwork to show he was the registered owner of the Explorer. He said he was an electrician with his own shop and he was going into the U.S. to buy some parts for his electrical business. OK Sounded good so far. I looked around at the interior of the Ford. Strange. There were no tools, no boxes, no parts, nothing at all that would indicate the guy was a working electrician. I did a quick primary inspection of the Explorer. When I slid my inspection mirror under the gas tank, I immediately got very interested in Mr. Peña. The gas tank was covered with mud. Except for one bolt, which was very shiny and looked like it had recently been removed. This looked like another spray job. A piece of the sprayed on mud had fallen off and left that single shiny bolt exposed. One small chunk of mud had refused to stay in place. It was not Mr. Peña's lucky day. A chunk of mud was about to do him in.

I walked the Explorer back to the secondary lot and asked K-9 officer Joe Lopez to run his dog 'Smokey' on the Ford. He did and the dog hit the gas tank. Then we drove the Explorer over to the Mariposa truck dock X-ray. We ran the SUV through the truck X-ray. Red-headed senior inspector Fuentes was on the scene again and took a look at the image on the X-ray console. He flashed the thumbs up. There was a box inside the gas tank. This one turned out to be marijuana. Just shy of 37 pounds. The Ford had come through the port a number of times, most likely with Peña driving. We had to wonder. It was an odds on sure bet that on at least some of those trips the Ford had been loaded. And we'd missed them. The point was made to us loud and clear.

All the high tech in the world didn't do any good if it wasn't used.

I was walking near the primary lanes on Nogales' Grand Avenue when I heard Inspector Tom Duran calling out to someone from a primary lane. I looked around and saw a Mexican plated Chevy pickup truck stopped in the road midway between primary and secondary. A woman was behind the wheel. Duran came off his primary lane and we met in the middle of the road a few feet from the Chevy. Tom told me that the woman claimed she was a local resident, but on questioning didn't seem to know anything about the area. Tom thought she was worth a more intensive inspection. I went over to the Chevy and directed the woman to drive into the nearby secondary lot and followed behind her into the lot.

Driving the truck was 32 year old Andrea Peral. And she was every bit as confused and contradictory as Tom said. At first she claimed she lived in the south of Mexico, then changed her story to say she lived in the nearby town of Santa Ana. She maintained she'd bought the pickup three months ago, but that it was not registered in her name. The woman also gave the reason for her going into the Arizona side of Nogales as a trip to the local Auto Zone to buy a carburetor for a Ford Crown Victoria. What? She was going to buy a carburetor? For a Crown Vic? This ditzy person who didn't even seem to know where she was? That was a hard one to swallow. Likely she'd been coached on what, and not very well coached by one of the dimmer bulbs in the smuggling world. I had her get out of the Chevy and I started a secondary inspection. As usual, I stuck my inspection mirror under the gas tank to take a look. Tom was immediately looking right about this one. The tank and undercarriage were covered with a lot of mud. Too much mud. I slid under the truck and put the Buster on the tank. The readings varied from low to high. Not definitive. But enough to take it a step further. It was time for Ms. Peral to go into the secondary office and have a seat while we checked things out.

The suspicious mud smothered tank called for the fiber optics scope.I brought one out from the secondary office, threaded the cable into the gas tank and squinted into the eyepiece. It sure looked like there was a box in the tank. I looked up and saw Joe Lopez nearby with his dog, Smokey. Joe ran his dog on the Chevy. Smokey nailed the tank. Curious to see whether the box would show up on an X-ray, I drove the Chevy over to the Mariposa secondary lot where the mobile X-ray unit was set up. We ran the unit on the pickup. Senior inspector Bob Marez looked at the image and said that there was an unusually high density in part of the gas tank. There was something there besides gasoline. So what would be in a gas tank besides gasoline? The list of possibles was short and they were all narcotics. It had to be loaded. I went to the Chevy, took out a Buster and climbed under the tank again. The Buster read high on much of the tank. Then I drove the Chevy back to Grand Avenue where several of us dropped the tank. We first drained off the gas. That turned out to be the easy part. This proved to be a tough one. It took an assortment of cutting and crushing tools and a grunting expletive lubricated use of straining muscles. We had to rip the tank apart to get at the metal box that had been welded inside it. The metal box inside the tank was also welded shut and we had to cut it open, too. When we finally got inside the box we found just three packages of marijuana. But not packages like we usually found. These were big ones, more like the kinds of packages the Border Patrol caught in off-port loads. Each of the three packages weighed nearly fifty pounds. The total weight of the three was 141.7 pounds.

Andrea Peral had blundered into a nearly perfect textbook seizure. She was blitzed with just about every tool we had. Her behavior and answers alerted the primary officer. A mud covered tank alerted the secondary officer. The tank bustered high. A K-9 alerted. The fiber optics scope spotted the box. The mobile X-ray picked up the density in the gas tank. Andrea Peral couldn't have known that a new generation of sophisticated technology had already come to the border when she drove up to Tom Duran's primary lane that January day in Nogales. She never had a chance.

The world of High Tech was waiting for her.

You can observe a lot by watching.

Yogi Berra

.

### Chapter 18

### DRUG TUNNELS

From 1990 to 2006. 1990 was the year the startlingly sophisticated drug tunnel running underneath the border at Douglas, Arizona, was discovered. 2006 was the year the architect of the tunnel was finally convicted in an Arizona federal courtroom. It took 16 years of dedicated, dogged law enforcement and prosecutorial work in two countries to finally nail the guy. And that was just on the one tunnel. Since 9/11/01 many dozens of drug tunnels have been discovered along the Arizona and California borders with Mexico. When I was working at Nogales in 2001, a drug tunnel was found there and 840 pounds of cocaine seized. In July of 2007, three more drug tunnels were discovered in Nogales in less than a month, one of them yielding over 3000 pounds of marijuana. Like we used to somewhat ironically observe during my days on the Border. The smugglers came right through us. They snuck around us. They flew over us.

And they tunneled under us.

I was walking from the employee parking lot adjacent to the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales one day on my way to work when I heard nearby voices. I looked around. No one in sight. The voices were still audible. But from where? I looked down at a storm drain. The voices. They were underneath me. Somebody was in the drain tunnels. Again. A few days later I was eating my lunch in the break room looking north over the DeConcini Port of Entry with a couple of Border Patrolmen when we saw a manhole cover pop open in the Arizona side of Grand Avenue. One after another a dozen illegal entrants popped out of the manhole and took off running in all directions. Their lunches unceremoniously cast aside, the two Border Patrolmen were immediately on their radios reporting the location of the entrants as they both scrambled out of the break room towards the exit onto Grand Avenue. I watched as Border Patrol officers in vehicles, on foot and on bicycles converged from all directions and began to round up the illegal entrants.

Just another day on the border? Yes. And no. The existence of a partially unmapped honeycomb of old drainage tunnels beneath downtown Nogales on both sides of the border made things much more complicated. The trafficking groups had long ago discovered the tunnels and were continually using them to smuggle both drugs and people. In Nogales, as well as some other ports, border enforcement was carried on not only on the surface of the land against foot, motorized and even animal borne smugglers, and in the air above against airborne smuggling, but also under the surface of the land. Yet another dimension to confound border enforcement.

Those days one of the common sights on the border was what looked for all the world like a small LRRP patrol heading off into the boonies in Viet Nam. They were actually heavily armed Border Patrolmen entering the tunnel network beneath Nogales near the Mariposa Gate. Their goal, to search for illegal entrants and drug smugglers and any new tunnels they might find. Gutsy guys. Drug smugglers were always more prone to violence than the alien smugglers, but the latter had been getting increasingly violent, too. The BP tunnel teams never knew what they'd run into. The cat and mouse game that we played with the traffickers above ground was also played out underground, with the BP running LRRP-like patrols, putting up barriers and sensors and other anti-smuggling technology, and the traffickers countering the BP efforts by ripping the technology out whenever they found it. Mother Nature even got involved when big storms brought in a deluge of storm water runoff that swept away the some of the BP counter measures. The permutations of border enforcement measures and counter measures seemed never-ending. It was a chess game with wild cards thrown in.

The nation was shocked when the Douglas drug tunnel was found in 1990. What the hell? Was this real? It was like something out of a fanciful Hollywood action flick. But this was no fantasy. The sophisticated tunnel was professionally engineered, with electric lighting, concrete reinforced walls and rails running along the bottom of the 200 foot long tunnel. The tunnel supposedly even was air conditioned. The local boss of the tunnel smuggling group, Francisco Rafael Camerena-Macias, owned both the house on the Mexican side of the border in Agua Prieta where the tunnel began and the warehouse on the U.S. side in Douglas where the tunnel ended. A spigot outside of Camerena's Agua Prieta home was actually a hidden switch that activated hydraulic jacks underneath a pool table in the home that raised the table several feet into the air. Below was a shaft leading 35 feet down to the tunnel. Another shaft on the Arizona side led up to a room beneath a false drain in the warehouse.

And just a few blocks away were the blissfully unaware men and women of the Douglas Customs Enforcement office and the Douglas Port of Entry.

Take a moment and give this some thought. Douglas, Arizona, was and still is an overwhelmingly Hispanic small town. Many if not most of the people in Douglas had close relatives and numerous contacts on the Mexican side of the Border in Agua Prieta. And that included public officials and businessmen. Consider the organization and logistics of building the drug tunnel and the connecting buildings on either side of the border. There had to be lots of people involved in the tunnel project: laborers, skilled workmen, suppliers, truckers, concrete companies, concrete finishers, electricians, building construction workmen and foremen, even engineers and architects. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of people had to have had some inkling of what was going on. Yet it remained a secret and was only detected after a truckload of cocaine discovered in upstate Arizona was traced back to Douglas. How in the world had such a sophisticated, large scale project involving so many people been kept secret? A single word comes to mind immediately.

Corruption. There you have the conundrum of the border all wrapped in a single all inclusive term. And another word, just as relevant. Money. And yet another, even more powerful. Fear. Who is going to speak out about a drug tunnel and run the risk of very quickly ending up a beheaded corpse in an Agua Prieta landfill?

Camerena disappeared after the drug tunnel was discovered. So did the architect who had designed it, Felipe de Jesus Corona-Verbera. They were both fugitives for several years before Mexican law enforcement finally apprehended them. Both were extradited to the United States. Camerena plea bargained a ten year Federal sentence in 2003. Corona was convicted three years later, in 2006, and sentenced to 18 years. A Mexican drug informant who was part of the same narcotics organization, but who agreed to testify against Corona, was held in a Mexican jail pending extradition. Three separate attempts were made on his life while he was in the Mexican jail. The first two times he was stabbed multiple times. The last time someone went after him with a couple of hand grenades inside the Mexican prison. The man miraculously survived to be extradited and testify in Federal court against Corona. Not likely he was in any big hurry to go back to Mexico.

The leader of the drug organization that Camerena and Corona belonged to, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was also apprehended. Guzman was sentenced to a twenty year prison term in Mexico. The drug lord was sent to the maximum security Puente Grande prison in the state of Jalisco. According to the website of America's Most Wanted, Guzman received preferential treatment at Puente Grande and exerted influence over just everybody in the prison, including the warden. Possibly fearing extradition to the U.S., in 2001 Guzman got a prison employee, with the collusion of some of the guards, to wheel him out of the prison hidden in a laundry cart. He remains a fugitive and is believed to be still running his trafficking organization. Does the U.S. still want him? You better believe it. There is a five million dollar bounty on Guzman's head.

I live in southeast Arizona a dozen miles south and east of the town of Sierra Vista and about twenty five miles west of the old mining mountain town of Bisbee. The Port of Nogales, where I once worked, is about 75 miles by car from my home. But that is a route that has to go around and between mountain ranges. The direct crow-flight distance to Nogales is probably forty or so miles. The Port of Douglas, where Guzman, Camerena and Corona's sophisticated drug tunnel was, is about the same distance from my home. Even closer is the Port of Naco, which is only a twenty five minute drive from my home. The descent to its basin and range valley location is scenically spectacular, with expansive broad you-can-see forever vistas and towering surrounding jaggedy peaked 'sky island' mountain ranges. But, despite the world class eye popping spectacular scenery, Naco is a small, obscure, dusty and mostly impoverished place with a low traffic volume compared to most of the other Arizona ports.

It wasn't always a dust choking, end of the road backwater. The town made the archaeology textbooks when a 11,000 year old Paleoindian Clovis mammoth kill site was discovered in Naco's Whitewater Draw by Southwestern archaeologist Emil Haury. A few years later a second site, named Leikem after a local family, was also discovered in Naco, reinforcing the place's importance in the archaeology textbooks. Nor was Naco always just dust and ancient history. At the turn of the 20th Century heyday of copper mining on both sides of the border, Naco was a loose and lively little town of bordellos, saloons and restaurants. It even boasted an international railroad connection between Sonora and Arizona. But being a wild and loose border town paled to a mere faint shadow in comparison to what was just beyond the rim of tomorrow. In the second decade of the 20th Century tensions built up between Mexico and the U.S. as the Mexican revolution mutated violently along the border. Numerous raids were mounted from Mexico into the U.S., killing and wounding dozens of Americans. Everybody's blood was up. On both sides of the border. The U.S. Army stationed troops at all the population centers along the frontier, including a contingent at Camp Naco (also known as Camp Newell).

Fighting broke out between pro-government and rebel armies on the Mexican side of Naco in October of 1914, signaling the beginning of a ten week long siege of the Mexican town. The American troops stationed at Naco were instructed to keep the fighting from spilling over the border. They were successful in that, but woefully unsuccessful at stopping the barrage of Mexican missiles that regularly battered the U.S. side. During the ten week siege one U.S. soldier was killed and another 18 wounded, along with many horses and mules killed by Mexican cross border fire. The U.S. troops were strictly disciplined and managed to refrain from reacting despite the casualties they took when the bullets and shells came whistling onto the U.S. side of the border. Some on the U.S. side believed that not all of it was accidental. More than a few of the Mexican missiles, the U.S. soldiers suspected, were intentionally launched at the U.S. The continual bombardment from Mexico forced the abandonment of the U.S. encampments close to the border in favor of safer locations farther north. A thin line of troops stayed on the border protected by WWI style bombproof dugouts. And to make things even more complicated, when the actual battle started in the Sonora side of Naco, crowds of Americans came down from the nearby mining town of Bisbee to watch the fighting from the U.S. side--thereby managing to get in way of the U.S. troops guarding the frontier and considerably aggravating things for the stressed soldiers.

The Battle of Naco eventually ended. The crowds went home, the mining industry would soon go into decline and history slowly passed Naco by. The town fell into a long, somnolent decline in its picturesque mountain valley home in the Chihuahuan Desert. Yet it was in this little, sleepy out of the way port that one of the most successful drug tunnels in Arizona's drug tunnel-rich history was found.

Christmas of 1999 took on a new wrinkle in the humble little twin border communities of Naco. The town was the setting for a break out the champagne, Hoorah! Christmas present for U.S. drug busting law enforcement. Running parallel to the border just inside Arizona is Hogan Avenue. Hogan Avenue is in a rambling dusty neighborhood of modest dwellings, fading mobile homes and a jolting jumble of paved, partly paved and unpaved streets. In recent years a towering, ugly border fence was erected just south of Hogan Avenue. One look at that fence and there is no doubt this is a literal as well as a symbolic line between Them and Us.

But in 1999 the towering fence wasn't there and border relations--at least superficially--weren't as polarized. In quiet little Naco the old naïve laid back border insouciance still held sway. At least on the surface. Under the surface was a different story. Literally. In the last twilight of the millennium at the end of 1999, U.S. authorities reported the discovery of a 210 foot long drug tunnel that began in a yard in Naco, Sonora, and ended under a mobile home on Hogan Avenue in Naco, Arizona. The house on the Mexican side where the tunnel began is sealed up. The mobile home on the Arizona side where it ended has since been replaced by another mobile home. The tunnel is now filled with cement. But, before being discovered, the tunnel, which had been used during at least two periods during the late 1990's, by DEA estimate, was used to smuggle as much as 25 tons--possibly more--of cocaine. 25 tons. In dusty little backwater Naco.

So how does an operation of that size go unreported and undetected for so long? Hogan Avenue is not a rural street. It is in a small town neighborhood of modestly sized lots and numerous unpretentious houses and mobile homes. People know their neighbors. Unusual activity doesn't go unnoticed in places like Hogan Avenue. There must have been a number of people who at least suspected something was going on. There certainly were a bunch of convictions coming out of it. When the smuggling group finally was busted and the prosecutions began, there eventually would be close to fifty indictments and over forty convictions related to the tunnel. Tucsonan William Dillon, one of the reputed masterminds of the group, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2003. Other ringleaders also were convicted and sentenced. Francisco Alvarez and Jose Loya got 15 years. Jesus Alvarez and Richard Valenzuela were each sentenced to ten years. Franciso Valle-Hurtado and Ruben Ultreras-Astrada, both in their late thirties and both from Naco, Sonora, were extradited into the United States in May of 2006. Both men stood accused of involvement in the Naco drug tunnel and were apprehended in Mexico after they were indicted in the U.S. Even into 2009, the law enforcement book was not yet closed on the Naco drug tunnel activity going back into the 90's.

But there is more. In May of 2004 three members of the Paredes family and a fatally luckless waiter were gunned down in an Agua Prieta restaurant. Agua Prieta is about one hundred miles southeast of Tucson. The town is just across the border from Douglas, Arizona, and is only fifteen or twenty miles from Naco. Among the dead in the Agua Prieta restaurant was 43 year old Manuel Leobado Paredes. Paredes was indicted and arrested in the U.S. back in 1989 on drug trafficking charges. His lawyer posted a $350,000 bond and Paredes promptly did a disappearing act. When his court date arrived Paredes was nowhere to be found. Señor Paredes was long gone. He remained a fugitive for years. But that didn't mean he wasn't still somewhere not far away and still in the drug smuggling business. He had his fugitive fingers in the Naco tunnel. Besides being a fugitive on the earlier charges, Paredes was again indicted along with the several dozen others involved in the Naco drug tunnel. Among those killed in the Agua Prieta restaurant with long time fugitive Paredes was his sister, Maria del Refugio Paredes. So no one knew where the fugitive Paredes had disappeared to? His sister, Maria, who died with him in that Agua Prieta restaurant....

She was a resident of Tucson.

What the hell are we gonna do with all this dirt?

Anonymous tunnel digger

### Drug Tunnels. Old News? A thing of the past?

The following is taken from a DEA news release from July of 2012.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: July 12, 2012

Contact: Special Agent Ramona Sanchez

Number: 602 723-4764

DEA Probe Leads to Discovery of Cross-Border Drug Tunnel in San Luis, AZ

Passageway Stretches the Length of 2 Football Fields

July 12 - SAN LUIS, Ariz. – Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) along with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), Yuma County Sheriff's Office (YCSO) and Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) executed a search warrant Saturday morning at a business used to conceal the U.S. entrance to a tunnel that stretched 240 yards underground to an ice plant across the border in Mexico.

Inside a one-story nondescript building at 508 Archibald Street in San Luis, agents discovered the tunnel's entrance in a storage room hidden beneath a large water tank. From the floor, the tunnel plunged more than 55 feet into the ground. Its walls stand more than 6 feet high. The shaft of the passageway measures 48 inches wide at the San Luis entrance. The tunnel is equipped with lighting and a ventilation system. The tunnel is reinforced with 4 x 6 beams every few feet along with plywood for the walls, ceiling and floor.

When agents entered the San Luis business, it was empty and largely unfurnished. Found on the floor next to the tunnel entrance were numerous 55 gallon drums filled with dirt and soil excavated from the vertical shaft as well as large plywood boxes believed to be used to cover the pallets of drums for later removal from the location. As DEA agents searched the business, the Mexican Military made entry into the ice plant business across the border in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, where they located the tunnel's other entrance. Mexican authorities found numerous bags of dirt stacked to the ceiling in the room where the tunnel's entryway was located.

Since January 2012, DEA agents began conducting surveillance on the business after observing possible suspicious activity that indicated the site was being used as a potential stash location. On July 6, 2012, agents learned that DPS had stopped a black Ford F-150 pickup on Highway 95 on a traffic violation. Inside the bed of the truck, DPS officers discovered 39 pounds of methamphetamine. Information gleaned from the stop led the vehicle back to the business location in San Luis, AZ.

Based upon the results of the vehicle stop coupled with DEA's active investigation, agents obtained a search warrant to enter the business location.

So far, three suspects have been taken into custody in connection with the tunnel.

DEA agents are coordinating the ongoing investigation into the tunnel. Law enforcement officials from Mexico are also aiding in the investigation.

The San Luis passageway is the only known completed and fully operational smuggling tunnel ever uncovered in the Yuma, Arizona area. In the past 10 years, 89 cross-border tunnels have been discovered in Arizona and 50 in California.

So. There it is. Drug tunnels a thing of the past? Not hardly. From 2002 to 2012 about 140 new drug tunnels were found in Arizona and California.

You have to wonder how many weren't found.

I know what those pinche gringos are gonna do even before they do

Anonymous drug smugger

### Chapter 19

### You're not paranoid--They really are watching you

The TECS bell went off in the San Luis secondary office and jangled everybody alert. It was 6:30 in the morning and we were coming towards the drowsy end of the graveyard shift. A couple of officers stumbled out to primary to respond to the TECS alarm. I stayed in the secondary lot. Around the corner of the building K-9 officer Adam Chavez came walking back with the TECS lookout, a Dodge Daytona. Chavez didn't have his K-9 with him. The enterprising young CEO was out on primary snooping around and had taken the lookout when it came in. He held the referral slip out to Inspector Frank Alshouse. Frank shook it off, saying he had a court appearance that morning. If the Dodge was in fact loaded it'd probably take at least five hours to do the whole seizure and Frank didn't have the time. Judges took a very dim view of missed court appearances and we didn't mess around with witness subpoenas. Chavez looked around for another candidate. Coming off a midnight shift and then facing another five or more hours doing a seizure didn't soar very high on the list of things they'd like to do with most of my fellow officers. They made themselves scarce in a hurry. In a twinkling no one else remained in the immediate vicinity but me. I'd already been tapped to work overtime past 8:00, so I figured I might as well take the car. Chavez handed me the referral slip and the ID of the Dodge Daytona's driver. The guy's name was Amador Lara. I escorted Lara into the Customs secondary office. While I was taking the guy in, Sergeant Tim Payne, a U.S. Army K-9 officer at the port on a TDY, got his dog ready to run the Dodge.

I left Lara inside with the senior inspector running the office and trundled back out into the secondary lot. Sergeant Payne's dog was inside the Dodge working the interior and I walked over to the front of the car. I should have waited for Payne to finish his run, but for some reason I absent mindedly stuck an inspection mirror under the front bumper for a quick peek. Maybe because experience had taught us that Dodge Daytonas had a lot of empty space in their large front bumpers. As I looked in the mirror I saw that there were a series of quarter sized drain holes in the bottom of the bumper. All but one were obscured by something dark inside the bumper. The drain hole closest to the driver's side was the only one that was open. I moved the inspection mirror over to where I could see up into it and peered inside. Whoa! Was I seeing a package? This TECS lookout might be one of the too-infrequent good ones. I bent down and looked directly up into the hole. It was a package. And it appeared to be the typical brown tape-wrapped marijuana packages we so often encountered. I shoved a thin probe into it and came out with residue and the distinctive odor of marijuana. Nothing special about this so far. This was hardly inspectional hotdog stuff on my part. The Daytona was after all a TECS lookout as a load vehicle. The credit belonged to the owner of the TECS lookout, not any of us at the port. Just another load.

But things were about to get complicated.

Not at first. It began routinely enough. I went back to the secondary office and flashed the thumbs up it's-loaded sign to the office senior and supervisor. They paged the Customs duty agent in Yuma to come down to the port to take over the case. I proceeded to pat down Mr. Lara and put him in a detention cell. The guy didn't look to be the least bit nervous or apprehensive. Though his ID said he was in his early twenties, he looked ten years older. And he also had the studied nonchalance of the career criminal. Just a kind of stony veiled expression. He'd likely play dumb when the case agent came down to question him.

Then the routine stopped being routine. The duty agent that morning was the same guy who'd entered the TECS hit in the first place. Rory Hale. And Hale got all fired up when he heard his lookout had come into the port loaded. He called up the port and told the supervisor that he wanted to do a follow-out on the Dodge. He asked that we put up some kind of smoke screen to mislead Lara about what was happening. Hale would round up some other agents and come down to the port as fast as he could.

So what exactly did that mean? First off, think of a Customs agent as being to a Customs inspector the same way that a police detective is to a street cop. Like the street cops, we often did the initial busting but the agents (detectives) took over the investigations and carried them through the legal process. An over simplified description. But close enough. Doing a follow-out meant that the load vehicle would be released and covertly followed by the plainclothes special agents in unmarked cars. Kind of like in a TV cop show. Hale already had an investigation going on the smuggling ring behind the Dodge Daytona driven by Lara and was hoping that a follow-out would lead to more arrests. Our part in Hale's extemporaneously hatched game plan was to figure out some way to fool driver Amador Lara into thinking we hadn't found the dope in the Dodge's bumper.

So we turned to U.S. Immigration and the always energetic, cooperative and incisively efficient Immigration inspector, Lisa Stubbs. Stubbs, whose red hot meteoric career would one day tragically end with a prison term, was then still a creative young hotshot Immigration officer. She was more than ready to grab the ball of follow-out deception and run with it. Lisa would make a big show of checking Lara's immigration documents in great detail before finally appearing to grudgingly let him go. Her document checking act would probably have made a professional actresses smile in thespian sisterhood approval.

But that meant we had to take Lara out of the holding cell and take him over to the adjacent U.S. Immigration office. And that meant he had to walk by where the Dodge was parked and see it still parked in the secondary lot. The problem was that it wasn't there any more. Typical of load cars, as soon as it was verified as actually being loaded, officers had driven the Daytona back to an enclosed privacy screened search area at the rear of secondary. There was a hydraulic lift in the search area and the Dodge had been driven onto it. No problem. We'd just bring the car back and park it where it had been when Lara was taken into the secondary office.

Except the sharks had already circled, smelled blood and blasted off into a feeding frenzy. At times when a load car was discovered the excitement of getting a seizure short circuited the sensibilities of some of the officers and they started wildly ripping a car apart looking for the hidden dope. In a way, you couldn't really blame them. Finding dope was the big payoff for the long, tedious hours out in all kinds of weather sucking car fumes and desert dust. Though they weren't supposed to have touched the Dodge, they nevertheless had. Several of them had been at it and left the car a mess. The supervisor hotly ordered them to put the Dodge back together the way it had been. And quickly. They did. Then Adam Chavez climbed in behind the wheel and started to back the Dodge off the hydraulic lift. It wouldn't move. The reverse gear didn't work. So several officers pushed it off the lift. And when they pushed it off, the bumper slammed down on the end of the ramp and partially broke. One of the marijuana packages actually was knocked loose. Then commenced a few semi-frantic moments before someone found some strapping tape and managed to put a temporary fix on the bumper. Though I had to admire the creative way the officers had rescued a situation teetering on the precipice of disaster, I nevertheless came to a rock hard conclusion right then and there. From that day on whenever I had a load car I'd lock the damn thing up, stuff the keys in my pocket and tell the other officers to hold off on messing with it.

The temporary patch job done, an officer drove the Dodge back to where it had been initially parked. I went in to the holding cell where Lara was and explained to him that there was a U.S. Immigration lookout out for him and that I had to take him over to the U.S. Immigration office. Then I led him out a door from where he could catch a distant glimpse of the Dodge parked in the same place he'd left it and looking undisturbed. From there it was over to the U.S. Immigration office where Lisa Stubbs went into what seemed to us like an Academy Award winning performance. Hale arrived with the other agents and got ready for the follow-out. It was a while before they were ready. Then Stubbs was told it was OK to release Lara from the feigned U.S. Immigration hold. The guy came walking back to secondary with a mile wide grin on his face. He must have been thinking that this was his Hallelujah! lucky day and that we were one bunch of world class total idiots. I met him as he came back, apologized for U.S. Immigration's 'stupid' actions and deflected him to the trunk where the car keys were inserted in the trunk lock. I didn't want him to see the emergency patch job on the front bumper. He didn't. Lara took the keys, climbed into the Daytona and drove away. As he drove off the wide grin still on his face was growing wider.

I suppose we all let out a big sigh of relief when Lara drove away and this part of the extemporaneous game plan was over. Relief, but also a healthy dose of skepticism. We considered this to be a big circle jerk. We all knew that the smugglers had spotters who watched load cars moving through the port. Lara and the Dodge had been at the port for two hours. All the activity around the Dodge, including it being driven into the screened off search area, almost certainly was noticed. So the smugglers were alerted that the load had been busted and a trap was being set up for them. Lara dropped the car off by the Fiesta Mart a couple of blocks from the port, stood around a bit, then headed back for Mexico. No one came to pick up the car. No surprise. But Lara wasn't home free. The hapless would be smuggler was grabbed by the agents before he could slip quietly back into Mexico.

When they brought him and the Dodge back to the port, the big smile was long gone from Amador Lara's face. Nor did he have the stony look of studied nonchalance he'd had at first. Now he just looked defeated. He confessed and said there were 16 packages of marijuana in the bumper. And there were. 40.6 pounds in 16 packages. The arresting officer was an Arizona Highway Patrol officer named Tom Hash. I told Hash that Lara had an ID that said he was 23 years old, but that he looked ten years older. I'd just had a couple of other load drivers who had been using false identities, and I figured that was also true of Amador Lara. Lara was fingerprinted after the arrest, so they should have discovered whether he was using a false identity. I was later unable to find any court or prison records under Amador Lara's name and date of birth, so it's a pretty good bet the prosecution agents did come up with a different identity.

And maybe even more than one.

### I am my brother's keeper--of his birth certificate, anyway.

San Luis. Pushing 7:00 AM. The summer sun was up but the day still had that mellow early morning gentleness to it. An '85 Chevette drove into the secondary lot. I met the car as it came in and plucked the referral slip off the windshield. The slip had been written hurriedly and I couldn't make out most of it. The one part I could read was that the driver had no photo ID.I turned my attention to that. The guy said his name was Julian Rios and showed me a birth certificate issued in Los Angeles. I took the birth certificate and asked him several questions. He was thoroughly familiar with the information on the certificate. He also spoke the easy fluent English of a native speaker. But he had that stony mien so often seen in load drivers and he needed to be checked out thoroughly. I returned my attention to the referral slip.

The primary officer's handwriting was pretty bad. So bad that it almost approached the rare level of illegibility I had long ago achieved with my own scrawl. But I was used to reading a scrawl--my own--and managed to work my way through it. Julian Rios, the note said, besides having no photo ID, was not the registered owner of the Chevette and the car showed only three local crossings at San Luis. Certainly not reasons to start banging the you're busted drum, but enough to pique the interest. Rios did have a title for the car, and somebody had signed the seller part of the title, but Rio's name was not on it as the buyer. It was what was called an open title. Open titles were very common in load cars. But they were also common in other, non-loaded, cars. And people coming through the border without photo ID's were not exceptionally unusual, nor was it at all unusual for drivers to not have valid driver's licenses. The border was a kind of no man's land for Arizona traffic laws. A regular traffic cop would have had apoplexy over what we saw all day long every day in the anything goes world of the cars and drivers crossing the border.

Mr. Julian Rios was under some suspicion. Still, it still was just suspicion. Nothing really tangible. But he had aroused my interest with his behavior and that stony expression seen so many times before in load drivers. I escorted him into the secondary office as a precaution before beginning to search the car. As we were going into the office we passed K-9 officer Don Trusty.

"Don, would you run that car?" I said, motioning over my shoulder to the Chevette.

Trusty replied with a positive nod of his head. I settled Rios safely inside the secondary office and went back outside while Trusty was in the process of running the Chevette with his K-9, Rock. Rock was usually a pretty reliable dog. But he wasn't having one of his good days. He'd alerted to a couple of cars earlier and we had come up empty in the following exhaustive physical searches. We'd learned the hard way not to damage a car during searches because so many of them turned out not to be loaded, but we nevertheless did very thorough searches of high interest cars. Especially where a dog alerted to the vehicle. Rock was doing pretty much the same thing with the Chevette as with the two earlier cars that turned out to be false alerts. He circled the car a couple of times, looking noncommittal, and I was shaking my head thinking here we go again on another false alert. Don put the dog into the car and at first Rock just stood there and didn't do much. Then his ears went up. A moment later Rock hurtled over into the back seat and went after a quarter panel in a flurry of biting and scratching.

I watched with a well schooled reserve. This might have been a glandular Hoorah moment had the dog not given false positives twice earlier that morning. I wasn't about to jump to any conclusions. I walked over to the quarter panel and put a Buster on it. Oops. This looked to be a Hoorah moment after all. The Buster read high up in the 60's, way above normal, and confirmed Rock's alert and response. At Nogales I once thought I had a quarter panel load because of high Buster readings but found the quarter panel only contained a bunch of trash. Another lesson learned. So, just to be sure, I unfastened the ventilation cover on the quarter panel and took a peek inside. There they were. Packages. Good ol' Rock hit it right this time. He'd redeemed himself--and his handler. He was now one for three for the day. Good enough to make the major leagues.

A good day for Rock and Don. Not a good day for Julian Rios. Doubly so. A computer check showed Rios already had a felony warrant out for his arrest from Yuma. That is, if this guy really was Julian Rios. The fact that he had no photo ID and that he was driving a load car made me think he was hiding his real identity. I told Senior Immigration Inspector Jim Bradley--another of INS' hotshot officers--what I thought. Bradley went into the cell to talk to the guy and came back a few minutes later with the news that this guy was actually Manuel Rios, Julian's brother, and he had been using his brother's birth certificate. That didn't make things any better for the guy. Under his real name he was a deported felon who had been excluded from entering the United States for twenty years. The guy also would later say that his brother Julian had been in a truck just in front of him in the line of traffic from Mexico and not been sent to secondary. That got our attention. If this Rios had a load, then the other Rios probably did, too. We did a lane check, found the license plate number of the truck and pulled up the license owner's information. The registered owner was a woman. Her last name? Rios. We were a little disgusted. They probably got away with a load in the pickup.

But not the Chevette. We pulled 67 pounds of marijuana in 24 packages out of the little car. Eight packages were under the back seat and several others were in the quarter panels. It was typical marijuana wrapping. On top of the marijuana was a layer of plastic wrap, then a layer of soap, then more wrap, then grease, then more wrap and finally brown plastic tape. Some of the packages had been shaped to fit in the natural spaces in the rocker panels, and on each side was a nearly three foot long package made up of three single packages wrapped together in a linear sausage link-like chain. There were also several other long, narrow packages made to fit in the small spaces in the little Chevette. Seeing the irregular shapes, we probed all of the packages to make certain that they contained just marijuana. A similar load had contained a couple of irregularly shaped packages that had turned out to contain methamphetamine. Not this time. These were all marijuana.

Manuel Rios served nearly three years in prison and was released just before Christmas in 2000. As a previously deported criminal alien, by law he should have been released directly into the custody of U.S. Immigration authorities and deported immediately. He probably was. He might be in Mexico now. Or he might be living just down the street from you somewhere in the U.S. under a different name. He's used a false identity before. That of his own brother, Julian. Julian Rios was released from prison in December of 2006 after serving eighteen months of a thirty month sentence. He's back in Yuma and still popping up before the local judges. Probably no one has asked him.

But it's a pretty good bet Julian knows exactly where brother Manuel is right now.

_Oh, shit! Those are_ _real_ _bullets!_

CPB Officer Frank Alshouse

### Chapter 20

### Serious Incidents

December. The seemingly endless flood of wannabe drug smugglers at San Luis had surprised us by dwindling to a mere trickle. A few of us were ruminating on the recent dope smuggling drought. We got to comparing today's trickle to yesterday's flood in a kind of wistful dope busting 'good old days' reminiscing.

"I'm sure we caught more dope last year", one of the officers said. "And not just a little bit. A lot more."

"No doubt of that", said another. "Let's get out the seizure book from last year and compare the difference." Somebody went to get the book. A look in the seizure book confirmed the glaring disparity with hard numbers. The previous December had 36 major multi-kilo narcotics seizures. This December had only six. Everybody had a theory about why. Nobody really knew. And it wasn't just at San Luis. It was happening all along the border. But that didn't mean nothing was going on. Drug seizures might have been the preferred main course in our border diet, but they were a long way from being the only entrée. And the others could be hummers.

Like these......

It was in the whisper quiet hours of a traffic less December night. The quiet was suddenly shattered when a pair of cars came barreling around the corner from Mexico in a tire screeching wild car chase. The first car made it into the U.S. and jerked to a stop just south of our entry booths. Two pretty young girls piled out of the car and scrambled in a panic stricken stumbling run toward us. One of them blurted out in a frightened voice that the men in the pursing car were trying to kidnap them. Whatever was actually going on, one look at the girls' faces was enough for us to know it was something damned serious. The girls were flaring-eyed freaked out. Or, as one of my more blunt co-workers put it, these two girls were 'scared shitless'.

The second car hammered on the brakes just inside our side of the border. But that wasn't the end of the chase. We could hardly believe it when the two men in the pursuit car bailed out of it out and came hotfooting it after the girls. We stood there open mouthed when these guys ran into the U.S. in their determined fervor to grab the pair of terrified girls. Our stunned surprise was only momentary--not much more than an eye blink or two in real time. We reacted swiftly to move between the brazen border crashing men and the girls. We yelled out at them to show their identification. One of guys seemed to suddenly realize the mess he had gotten himself into. He did an abrupt about face and started to scamper back to Mexico. As he ran he put his hand behind his back as though he was reaching to stabilize something hidden under his jacket. Was it a gun? Someone yelled gun and several of our officers pulled out their service weapons. We all hollered at the guy to stop. It didn't go beyond a loud holler. Even the most trigger happy among us knew that they couldn't plug some guy in the back over something as nebulous as an unexplained car chase. We could only watch in frustration as the guy managed to scramble back to the safety of Old Mexico. But not the second guy. We nabbed him before he could join his buddy on the untouchable Mexican side of the border.

The gun bit turned out to not have been an overreaction. This second dude did have a gun. A 9mm pistol. And that wasn't all. The guy also had a small amount of meth on him. Then things got complicated. We checked the guy's identification. He had a set of credentials on him. Including a badge. The guy was a Mex Fed. A Mexican Federal Police Officer.

Whatever somnolence might have lingered over the sleepy night time port before the two cars came roaring up to the border was long gone. This had everybody wide awake. This was an eyes wide open downright serious incident. An armed Mexican Federal policeman with a baggy of meth on him chasing someone across the border into the U.S.? It sent alarm bells ringing in all kind of places, some of them a long way from the border. It wasn't long before a Mexican official came across the border to talk to us. This guy had the sense to leave his firearm in Mexico. He told us that both of the men who ran into the U.S. were Mexican Federal officers. The Mexican official also said the car they were driving--which had been driven into the US and was being detained by US Customs--was a recovered stolen vehicle. What? A recovered stolen vehicle? Stolen in the U.S.? And they were driving it? It looked like the situation might develop into a full blown international incident. Armed Mexican officers chasing people into the United States in a stolen car was not something to be taken lightly. Especially when it happened in full view of U.S. officers in a clearly marked regular border crossing.

The situation remained tense. Our little chunk of the border was probably the most important part of the entire border world for those few taut hours. We continued to hold the Mexican officer. We didn't know what was going on behind the scenes, but knew that there must have been a lot of raw nerves late night phone calling going on, possibly all the way to D.C. and Mexico City. After several hours of a tension filled stand off we were ordered to return the Mexican officer to Mexico. And not just him. Also the stolen car. His gun. His credentials. Even the methamphetamine. The 'official' story the Mexicans fed us was that the little bag of methamphetamine on the guy was from a narcotics seizure and arrest he'd made earlier in the evening. They got the cop and car and drugs back. But not the girls. No way. Whatever the hell the Mex Feds were really up to, we weren't about to let them get their hands on those two terrified young girls. The girls were legal U.S. residents and we were under no statutory obligation to send them to Mexico. The two young women were sent safely back to their homes in the U.S.

We never did hear what the whole wild assed chase scene was really about.

The second incident happened a couple of days after Christmas. This was another time when we felt like we'd slipped through a warp in the fabric of space and time smack into the middle of a Hollywood movie. A car chase came roaring out of Mexico towards us. A car with two young men in it came racing for the U.S. Three cars were on their tail in hot pursuit. Yikes! The pursuing cars were shooting at the two youths. And this wasn't Hollywood make believe. These bullets were the real deal. We didn't linger over scrambling for some kind of cover. The car with the kids in it came barreling into the U.S. We jumped up, stopped the car and took control of the two youngsters until we could find out just what the heck was going on. The pursuing cars were again Mexican police. This time, though firing their weapons close to the border and sending everyone scurrying for some kind of solid protection, they did not enter the US--at least not by much--and turned their cars around to race back into Mexico.

A short while later the port's phone rang. The San Luis, Arizona, police were on the line and said that the Mexican cops had contacted them about the two young men in the car. The Mexicans said that the two had weapons and drugs with them. We did a thorough search of the two and the car and found neither weapons nor drugs. And the story the kids told was light years away from the Mexican version. They said they had been drinking at a club. An argument broke out. One of them was thrown out of the club and then jumped on by the club's security. The security officers were moonlighting Mexican police. While they were pounding on one of the young guys, the other came to help him out. They somehow managed to get free and get to their car. And then the chase commenced. Or so they said. So what really happened? The truth most likely lay somewhere between the two versions, but the border veterans among us, skeptics all, leaned in the direction of the young men's story. The Mexican police were not people you wanted to mess with. Things could get ugly real fast with those guys. Nor did they routinely trouble themselves much with the impedimenta of minor things like illegally coerced confessions or civil rights. If the cops caught then, the very best the kids could have hoped for was a flat out ass whomping. The kids were U.S. residents, so they were home free once back on U.S. soil.

No damn wonder they burned rubber boogying the heck out of Mexico.

Another January serious event. An older model van pulling up from Mexican side of San Luis tweaked the enforcement antennae of the officer on primary. The suspicious officer sent the aging van to the secondary lot for further inspection. It never made it. The driver hammered the gas pedal. Several of us saw the vehicle suddenly swerve from the secondary entrance and roar off down the fenced off northbound exit dividing the secondary exit lane from the southbound lanes into Mexico. The van did a sliding screeching turn around the end of the fence and slammed the accelerator to the floor as it raced south towards Mexico. There was no question of using our weapons. We weren't even allowed to draw weapons except when someone was in imminent mortal danger. But there were other options. Several officers moved into the southbound lane with Stop Sticks and slid them along the pavement at the van as it roared past. At least one of the officers had a good pitching eye. A Stop Stick slid perfectly under the van and blew some of the vehicle's tires. The vehicle skidded and fishtailed. It looked like it was going over, but the driver did a nifty Nascar like move and managed to correct the skid. He got the fugitive van into Mexico on screeching, spark spewing tire rims and continued his screeching, spark-flying flight on into San Luis Rio Colorado. Like in a movie chase scene--except this was flat out real. And so were the guns the Mexican officers on the other side of the border were about to jerk out of their holsters.

Our yelling alerted the Mexican officers and they exploded into action. These guys had far fewer restrictions and even fewer compunctions about the use of firearms than we did, and we heard shooting as the Mexican border officers gave chase. A while later they towed the van back to their side of the border. Some of our Spanish speaking officers were asked to come over to assist in searching the van, after first prudently leaving their firearms on the U.S. side. Surprisingly, they said the Mexican officers claimed that only two packages of marijuana were found in the van. Our officers reported seeing blood in the vehicle. The Mexicans said the driver escaped, but they'd caught the passenger. He was a juvenile who attended Kofa High School in Yuma. The same school where my daughters were students. Much to our amazement, the Mexican officers claimed no shots had been fired. We had all very clearly heard a number of shots. There is the Fog of War. And then there is the Fog of the Mexican Border.

We were all of course very skeptical about their only being two packages of marijuana in the van and grumbled that most of the dope was being recycled in typical Mexican style. But what really stuck out in my mind was the vivid image of that van racing towards Mexico. It was during the busy daylight hours and just a few feet from that wildly fleeing van driven by a panicky desperate kid was a sidewalk filled with pedestrians. When that van fishtailed after the Stop Stick blew its tires out it could very easily have careened out of control into that throng of pedestrians.

From then on I was very cautious in the use of Stop Sticks.

### The Potato Chip Load

It was 2315 on August 28th. 11:15 at night, civilian time. The heat had backed off some. But it was still warm. It was always warm at that time of the year in San Luis. If you liked warm, then San Luis was the place to be. And so who came up with the idea of naming a spot in the bloody middle of the heat drenched sea level Sonoran Desert after a European saint who had absolutely nothing to do with the place? It would have been more aptly named Oven Town or Thermal or Infernal City. Or, considering the extreme heat of the place, Devil's Home. Hot. Always hot. I was coming to the end of a sweaty always-hot 12 hour shift. We worked lots of those. I was fried. I was tired. There was no way for me to know it for sure, but the smugglers probably knew I was tired, too. Tired, and ready to go home. And also an older man in a young person's job. The smugglers target what they think are the personal weak links--the new, the lazy, the sloppy, the old, the tired. With the midnight shift change less than an hour off, and the inspectors' eyes mostly riveted on the clock rather than inspections, it was a window of opportunity.

Smugglers were always looking for windows of opportunity. Some Customs inspectors did the same. I tried to make up for my embarrassingly numerous inspectional failings by figuring out where the windows of opportunity might be. A good man who still lingers gently in my memory, Ron Van Why, a K-9 handler who was part Dutch and part Native American Tohono O'odam and whose career would one day come to an abrupt alcohol fueled end, once said that I stumbled on a lot of loads. Maybe so, though he was probably just regurgitating the venom of the resident port assassin, who was almost universally intensely disliked and slandered damn near everybody. Stumble? If so, it was because I intentionally was in the right place to stumble. You might say that I knew where and when to stumble. So, that evening, despite working a hot 12 hour day and being worn down and tired, I was actively looking for a load. It was no secret that the shift change hour was a window of opportunity for the smugglers.

But also for inspectors like me who needed all the windows help they could get.

A lot of us had learned the hard way about the fate of what we thought were good secondary referrals. DTR. Down The Road. The outcome of a referral from primary of what we figured was a pretty good bet as a load car was a blind crap shoot. It depended more on who was doing the secondary inspection than on how good the car really was. On primary we'd assess a car as being a possible load car based on a series of facts and observations that taken together added up to the conclusion that the car was a good bet for a load car. But the reality in secondary was all too often a bored or lazy 'DTR'. After seeing too many of those promising cars released down the road because of lazy, inept, perfunctory or--very commonly--just plain worn out secondary inspectors, we adopted a different tack. When a promising car came up to us on the primary lanes, we'd give them a serious primary inspection before even sending them to secondary. This proved to be a dandy way to get the attention of the secondary officers. Walking a car back to secondary that you'd already found to be loaded made the point eloquently. Even the biggest duds in the service weren't about to turn loose a car you'd already found to be loaded. It was kind of like an inside the park home run. Except the team you were scoring against was your own.

When one of those promising cars came up to my lane at 11:15 that evening, I gave it a pretty thorough inspection. Part of the tactic I'd been using that late evening was to blow through the cars. That meant I moved the cars through very rapidly, hoping to draw in a load car that assumed a fast moving lane was not a thoroughly searched lane and that the officer working the lane was sloppy and ineffective. When a promising car showed up at the inspection booth, then the fast lane suddenly screeched to a halt and I launched into a thorough primary inspection. That's what happened that evening. I'd blown through the cars until a promising car showed up. I hit the brakes on my lane and started to give the car a thorough primary inspection. This included all or part of the following: checking the bumpers with a mirror; looking to see if the gas tank has been off; checking the back seat and side panels for untoward hardness; looking under the dash with a mirror; checking the ceiling and the floor; and checking the tires. About halfway through the inspection, I started to notice the pickup truck in line behind the car I was searching. I didn't know it yet, but that blue '78 Chevy Silverado pickup next in line...

It was going to be my first--and only--Potato Chip Load.

What I noticed was that the truck didn't move. I spent two or three minutes searching the car in front of it, but the Chevy just sat in my lane. The other open lane, manned by a U.S. Immigration officer, was empty. Now, there was an unwritten rule in Mexico that you pick the fastest lane into the U.S. even if you have to cause a near accident to get into it. The corollary to that was don't let some SOB in a hurry pull in front of you. There were plenty of fender benders that happened because of that. Often the drivers would get into arguments in Customs secondary. Some wanted us to call the police. Police? How could we call the police for an accident that happened in a foreign country or the nebulous no man's land between them? I guess they figured that since they'd been waiting to get into the U.S., it was a U.S. problem. Anyhow, the fact is it wasn't often that a Mexican driver missed the chance to jackrabbit into a faster lane. Yet this blue Chevy Silverado pickup just sat in my lane for a couple of minutes while I finished searching the car in front of it. And the lane next to me was empty. The whole time. Empty.

So I was already eying the Chevy by the time it pulled up. Almost pulled up. The Silverado came forward, but stopped too far back. I couldn't make out the plates in the license plate reader camera. I told him to come forward. He did. Too far. I still couldn't see the plates in the reader. By this time I was getting very interested in this guy. I stepped up to the vehicle's window to take a look at the driver, 26 year old Raul Apodaca. He said he was a field worker on his way to work. Next to him in the truck was a hot lunch and work clothes. Tools were in the truck bed. But it was kind of early for a field worker to be heading to work. They mostly came through after 2 or 3 in the morning. He also was dressed in flip flops and sweat clothes. Not exactly the typical field worker clothing. I took his I-551 and studied it. He gave me a small, wan smile. Then he took out a bag of potato chips, opened the bag and started to munch on the chips.

Epiphany!

Who the heck would pull up to a primary booth and then pull out a bag of potato chips and start munching away in mid-interview? It had to be an unconscious nervous response to stress. It would happen to me again months later with a guy sucking on a popsicle. That one turned out to be a load and triggered off the memory of this one.And what about this one? The Silverado next to me with Raul Apodaca behind the wheel? I knew it in the intuitive marrow of me ol' border bones. "It's loaded!", I thought to myself. "Gotta be loaded." The realization came thundering into my consciousness. Adrenalin raced through my body. I tried hard to stay calm. I'd learned a hard lesson from past mistakes. Don't let on you know. Just let the guy continue to chomp on his potato chips while getting ready to take him down.

I stayed cool. I walked around the vehicle in the typical primary inspectional pattern, in no particular hurry, checking the driver's side saddle tank, the truck bed, the spare (there wasn't any) and the rear bumper as I moved around to the far side of the truck. I pulled out my Buster and placed it over the right rear tire. The Buster read the tire's density on the numerical scale as being in the 80's. I felt like leaping in the air and hollering like an Arizona Cardinals fan when the team had just scored one of its last minute game winning touchdowns. Normal tires mostly bustered around 30 or 40. This one bustered in the 80's. Weren't no way this critter wasn't loaded. I sauntered back around the rear of the Chevy, casually stepped into the inspectional kiosk and called the secondary senior inspector on duty, a retired Marine and part-time cowboy, Dean 'Dino' Morgan.

"Dino", I said quietly into the intercom. "I've got a load out here on primary. Can you come out and give me some backup?" He was immediately on his way.

Meanwhile I had Raul Apodaca turn off the truck and hand me the ignition key. I placed my body against the driver's door so he couldn't get out. This was all done very calmly and quietly, so much so that the Immigration officer on the adjacent lane, the genial redheaded Debbie Nieto, and her backup who was also on the lane with her, Senior Immigration Inspector Cordero--a cool dude who was a Puerto Rican Hispanic and a retired Marine warrant officer--did not have any idea of what was happening.

Soon Dean--who was a two tour Marine combat veteran of Viet Nam--came very warily around the corner from secondary looking like he was expecting a Viet Cong booby trap or a firefight to break out any minute. Dean was on the dramatic side, and this was no exception. Of course he didn't really know what to expect out on primary, so he was acting appropriately. Still, if the driver hadn't caught on yet, he had by now, watching Dean's wary approach. He looked like a miniature Clint Eastwood about to draw down on the bad guys in a local adaptation of a spaghetti western. No matter. There was nowhere for Apodaca to go. I had the truck key and the door was blocked. Dean circled around the Chevy and came up from the rear and together we removed Apodaca, handcuffed him and Dean escorted him to the secondary office. Meanwhile Apodaca had run a rapid fire zero to sixty emotional gamut from nervous to concerned to downright run-rabbit-run scared in little more than a couple of eye blinks. By this time Nieto and Cordero had noticed something was going on. So how could you not notice someone being handcuffed fifteen feet away? They came over to back us up, should the need arise. It didn't.

"No traigo nada", Apodaca kept repeating. He didn't have anything.

But he did.

While Dino took Apodaca into the secondary office, I checked the Silverado some more. All of the tires bustered high. And when tapped they gave a dull thud rather that the usual clear ringing tone of a normal tire. By then I had absolutely no doubt the tires were loaded and went inside and told Dino and the supervisor on duty, stocky Mario De La Ossa–a man who some months later would be paralyzed in a tragic car accident–that the car was loaded and to pat down Apodaca and put him in a detention cell. Then I went back outside to drive the Chevy into secondary. Except it wouldn't start. The starter wouldn't engage the flywheel. Any way you looked at it, this was not Raul Apodaca's lucky day. What would have happened if he'd been cleared to go and tried to start up the truck again on primary? Did he have enough potato chips to cover that eventuality?

The others came over to help and together we pushed the truck back to secondary. A K-9 ran the truck and did not alert, which gave both Dino and Mario De La Ossa pause. No K-9 alert? A couple of you-dumb-ass looks were shot at me. I was after all an unknown quantity having only recently transferred into the Port of San Luis. Then long time border veteran De La Ossa, a short, heftily burly man--who was generally none too fond of gringos and inclined to be skeptical anyhow--checked the tires and finally agreed they indeed were loaded. We cut a tire open and took a sample from the ubiquitous 'green leafy substance' inside. It field tested positive for marijuana. Then we towed the pickup over to the seizure lot.

Pretty soon the midnight shift started to arrive and inspectors Tom Schmunk, Steve Ponce and trainee Ron Mann Jr. helped take off the tires and open them up. We didn't have a tire breakdown tool, so the tires had to be cut open. It was hot, hard work. Even in the middle of the night, it was still the deep Sonora Desert in the heat blasted summertime and the sweat was pouring off us as we worked. There were a total of 79 packages literally crammed into every spare inch inside the tires. The packages were similarly sized and weighed close to three pounds each. I think the smugglers might have used an adobe brick hand press to make the cloned looking uniformly sized packages. Total weight was 241.2 pounds. The packages were all freshly wrapped in brown masking tape. Some of them had circles written on them in black ink or heavy marking pencil. Others had happy faces written on them in the same heavy black ink or marking pencil. Happy faces? For whom? The buyer? The seller? Not any more.

The only happy faces left were ours.

Interestingly, the Chevy Silverado pickup was actually a pretty well done load vehicle. There were no fresh tool marks on the lug nuts, there was a coating of dust over the lug nuts and tires, no indication of recent removal and no visible fingerprints either on the outer facing or inner facing of the mounted tires' exteriors. The truck was a frequent crosser, so as not to arouse suspicion. The driver had a hot lunch in the car with him, which was common among the field workers, and had work tools in the bed of the pickup. The problem wasn't the vehicle. It was the driver. He caved in almost immediately and confessed, saying he was to leave the vehicle in the parking lot of the local Fiesta Mart, turn the vehicle over to 'someone' and walk back to Mexico. He'd been paid $500 to drive the truck across the border. He said he didn't know the name of the person who hired him. Which probably meant he had chosen to keep his mouth shut and stay alive. He was a poor choice as a driver, especially considering the skill with which the contraband had been concealed. Still, he might have made it through.

But for that bag of potato chips.

Experimenting with drugs is like target practice where your head is the bull's-eye.

Michael Josephson

### Lisa Stubbs

The Port of San Luis. Twenty-some miles south of Yuma. Deep desert. Hot. Close to sea level. You'd think the place would be as barren as the moon. Not so. The Colorado River separates Arizona from California and the real gold of the desert, water, makes the Colorado River Valley a pleasantly lush and verdant place. Fields of cotton and alfalfa and Sudan grass grow in the superheated summers, with miniature rainbows sparkling over the sprinklers bathing the fields. Endless expanses of melons, with so many left on the ground after the harvesters pass through that passing motorists jerk their cars over to the highway shoulder and jump out to help themselves to the leavings in the fields. No fallow season here. Winter vegetables of every description feed much of the nation's appetite for vegetables in the cold country to the north. Agricultural fields crowd both sides of the river and canals arrow out to supply nearby valleys with the precious water. I was surprised to learn that the water table below my new home was just a few feet beneath the surface. Because of a nearby canal, I even had to have flood insurance. Flood insurance? In Yuma? Yes. Flood insurance in rain starved Yuma smack in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

Yuma was then a pleasant town of around 100,000 average population, fluctuating in numbers between the unpleasantly hot summer months and the huge influx of winter visitors and farm workers in the mild wintertime. The town was named after the Yuma Indians, a tribe of decidedly non-docile Native Americans who hotly contested the arrival of all the foreigners--Spanish, Mexican and Anglo. A pair of Indian reservations flanked the Colorado River near Yuma. The Cocopah, on the Arizona side.And the Quechan, on the California side. The ubiquitous Indian casino sat on a nearby hilltop.

Twenty miles south, the town of San Luis in Arizona was then only a fairly recently established and small place. The Mexican side, however, was much bigger. And the U.S. side, though still small, like nearby Yuma was on the verge of explosive growth. Both sides of the Border in San Luis were overwhelmingly Hispanic and the language of the Border officer's customer workday in San Luis was Spanish, not English.

In 1995 I transferred into San Luis from a cushy overseas assignment. Reality smacked me in the face in a big hurry. In was mid-summer and in my first weeks on the job the temperature hit an all time high of 124. 124? 124! I would have thought such a temperature was just about unsurvivable. Not so on the Sonoran Desert border in Arizona. I stood outside that evening, mesmerized, as I watched a huge blood red sun setting in the California desert haze. I felt as though I'd walked into a science fiction movie. And I also had to wonder just what the hell I was doing here. But not for long. I came to San Luis because I wanted to be on the front line of Customs' drug war. I wanted to go fishing. Not for the lunker catfish and largemouth bass of the nearby meanders and dammed lakes of the Colorado. I was fishing for dope. And San Luis was one of the places where the dope fishing was known to be pretty darned good.

I first remember Lisa Stubbs from one quiet warm evening when there wasn't much going on at the San Luis Port of Entry. Probably was in the quiet middle of the midnight shift. I remember talking to Lisa that night and immediately taking a liking to her. Lisa had transferred into San Luis about the same time that I got there. She came over from another border port, Lukeville, and I had come from that plush overseas assignment. I hit it off with her right away and we remained on good terms for the entire time I was at San Luis. Even today, despite what later happened, I have a fond place in my heart for her. Any officer who's been on the border for any amount of time is aware that sometimes bad things happen to good people. And, in my opinion, at least, that's what happened to Lisa.

Lisa took an entry level job with INS somewhere back east, went through the INS academy in Glynn County on the gorgeous but steamy Georgia sea coast and transferred out to Lukeville and then San Luis. She was a slender and attractive light-brown-haired young woman with an engaging manner. She was also a quick study and a diligent and very effective officer. Lisa had grown up in Puerto Rico and was consequentially fluent in colloquial Spanish. As a young working mother with her new professional career very much in her mind, it seemed to me as though she would rise quickly in INS .And she did. Lisa soon showed the rest of us that she was downright serious about being an effective INS inspector. It didn't take very long at all before I was taking my INS referrals directly to Lisa whenever I could. Unlike some of her co-workers, Lisa could be depended upon to do a thorough investigation of whatever situation I brought to her. The feeling of trust was mutual, for the majority of cases I brought to her I had already broken and she therefore came to believe in my ability as much as I believed in hers. And when I brought those cases to her that I had been unable to break myself, but which I strongly suspected might be righteous INS pops, I was confident she'd get to the core of the matter quickly.

Lisa was a bright light radiating within San Luis' INS and it didn't take long for others to see the light and notice her competency, diligence and pleasant positive attitude. The promotions came to her quickly. From entry level inspector to journeyman to senior inspector to supervisory inspector. Then it was deputy port director, acting port director and, finally, port director. All in the span of a few very short years. A hell of a ride for anyone, and especially for a young working mother. I guess I should have been worried for her. INS was not known among its people to be a very employee friendly organization. A previous INS port director had rather mysteriously disappeared from the job because--according to the local bush telegraph--she had cracked from the constant stresses of the job. I did notice that Lisa often seemed distracted and distant. The old feeling of camaraderie was no longer there. At the time I chalked it up to the different focuses of different positions. I was still an officer doing daily battle on the Customs/INS front line. She was now the top local INS manager with lots of heavy responsibilities. Even so, she still found the time to twice publicly present to me certificates of achievement for INS enforcement actions. I transferred from San Luis to Nogales in 2000 and retired from U.S. Customs a few years later. That was when a former co-worker from San Luis told me the news that almost literally laid me low.

Lisa Stubbs had been arrested.

The newspaper account covered the surface of the story. Someone had tipped off the FBI that Lisa was trading immigration documents with a Mexican national named Juan Ortiz-Herrera for vials of the morphine-based drug Temgesic (buprenorphine). They set up surveillance and eventually arrested her. She pled guilty to 25 counts of exchanging immigration documents for drugs. She could have faced up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. At the age of only 36, Lisa Stubb's rising star had turned out to be really only a shooting star. She flashed brightly through the sky. And then she was gone.

The someone who tipped off the FBI was most likely someone with a personal axe to grind rather than a public spirited citizen. Maybe a co-worker who resented Lisa's quick rise. Maybe someone with a personal grudge. Or, from a not altogether paranoid viewpoint, maybe someone who wanted to see her deposed as the port director for someone less enforcement minded. But, whatever the reason, Lisa was gone. As she had to be. She had undoubtedly fundamentally violated the trust placed with her in the office of port director. There was no way around that sad but hard fact. She became another statistic for the cynics and blame seekers to ruminate over. Gone was her reputation as an outstanding officer with a superb enforcement record. She was now just another dirty cop. The bottom feeders could point to her as proof of border corruption and blow hot air for hours on end about the drug sucking corrupt drudges employed by the government.

I have a different take on Lisa. Coming from a family with a strong current of alcoholism going back to my Indiana great-grandpa whose horse and wagon team was trained to take him back home to his farm after the bartender at the local tavern dumped him dead drunk into the wagon, and having had problems with it myself in my younger years, I recognized Lisa as an addict rather than a criminal. Most of us know someone, or know of someone, who has slipped on that same path. I believe the incredible stresses placed on Lisa as the responsibilities were piled on her by INS were too much. She sought some kind of relief. The drugs brought that relief. At least at first. But then, in the typical path of addiction that I knew too well myself, the underlying reasons for seeking some kind of chemical relief were replaced by the demands of the chemical itself. She was addicted. And when that happens the person underneath is replaced by the addict. Reason, ethics, morality, everything normal, fade away before the demands of the drug. Eventually the drug that was the Reliever becomes the drug that is the Destroyer. And Lisa Stubbs, who was hands down the best United States Immigration Inspector I ever had the privilege of working with, became Lisa Stubbs the dirty cop.

But not to me. If there is a villain to be found in this, it is INS itself, which was notorious for using up people and then discarding them. Lisa was just one more body the bureaucratic INS juggernaut chewed up and spit out as it lurched mindlessly through it's Byzantine journey of addled ineptitude. I don't care what the INS or the FBI or the prosecutors say about Lisa and her fall from grace and public trust. Far too often those folks are on the other side of the hill from reality. No, I'm not buying their line. Despite everything, Lisa Stubbs will always remain in my mind as the best damned INS inspector I ever knew.

She was released from prison in September of 2004.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir ... mighty scarce.  
Mark Twain

### Chapter 21

### On The Ped Gate Again

The Yuma/San Luis part of the lower Colorado River Valley is a climactic schizophrenic. Or maybe bipolar would be a better description. Hellish summers. Paradisal winters. By the middle of November the oppressive summer heat has backed off. An Indian summer like winter season has settled over the lower Colorado River Valley. It always brought a grateful smile to my cold country bred I'm-never-gonna-get-warm Minnesota soul .A lot of my co-workers complained that the nice weather also brought a flood of snowbirds with the concomitant overcrowding and traffic congestion that 'ruined the place'. Foolish people. I knew better. For two big reasons. Minnesota winters. And Yuma winters that were really more like summers to a recovering Minnesotan.

It was one of those lovely mid-November San Luis winter late afternoons when a young woman walked up to my pedestrian gate at San Luis. She presented a Border Crossing Card that identified her as being Julia Silva Martinez. I took the card and studied it. The young woman looked very much like the photo on the card. No problem there. The problem was that the young woman presented the classic profile of an illegal entrant on the pedestrian gate. She stood rigid as a Civil War statue in an eastern courthouse park, with a stony face that looked as though it'd been a very long time since she'd even thought about cracking a smile. In my mind it triggered a visual image of I ain't never smiled and I ain't never gonna. Hardly like the gregarious, emotive, convivial and often jovial folks I knew many Mexican and Mexican-American Hispanics to be. The Red Flag of Doubt went flying up my enforcement flagpole.

Now, before you go off and start in on that buzzword 'profiling', think about this. Almost everybody who came through the pedestrian gate in San Luis was Hispanic. How could you profile a Hispanic when everybody was Hispanic? Not to mention that many if not most of the officers were Hispanic, too. Can a Hispanic profile another Hispanic when everybody is Hispanic? Kind of like Peter Piper Packed a Peck of Pickled Peppers. At San Luis, the fact was that a non-Hispanic, of almost any flavor, was a lot more likely to get attention than a Hispanic. Three pop into my mind right now that ended up being major narcotics seizures. All were Caucasian gringos, and all got my attention because they were so unusual in the San Luis-everybody-is-Hispanic enforcement environment.

It was behavior that got my attention about the young woman who said she was Julia Silvia Martinez. There are a number of factors that raise the Red Flag of Doubt in a border officer's mind. Behavior is right up there at the top of the list. But no single factor is generally definitive. A cluster of factors is what we always were looking for. Substantial corroboration. And that mostly resulted from further investigation after the initial tentative unfurling of the ol' Red Flag of Doubt. So I asked Ms. Martinez to repeat the information on the Border Crossing Card. She got it right. First and last names, including patronymic and matronymic. Date of birth. She got that right, too. But, as she answered my questions, she retained that same stony statue in the courthouse park demeanor. Her face was a stolid mask. So I handed her a pen and a piece of paper.

"Su firma, por favor"--would you please sign your name? She signed the paper. The comparison to the signature on the Border Crossing Card was very close. She might have made it through then. But the body doesn't always do what our conscious mind wants it to do. The young woman's hand started to slightly tremble. I asked to look at her purse. There was no other ID in her nearly empty purse. Now there were a couple of corroborating factors. No secondary ID, which was typical of impostors. An empty or nearly empty purse, which was also typical. There was a wallet in the purse. It, too, was nearly empty. Just a few business cards. One of them was from a travel agency in New Jersey with several phone numbers written on the back.

I studied the New Jersey card, then looked at her. By then the young woman's autonomic nervous system had wrestled control from her conscious mind. Her hands went from a slight to a very noticeable trembling. I took her into the adjacent Immigration office, and as we walked told her in a non-threatening tone of voice that this was no big deal, and that she's wasn't in very much trouble. I often did that with my INS pops, and it generally really was the case--unless the person had some kind of serious criminal record. Then I turned her over to the INS officers on duty. A short while later one of them told me she had 'broke' and that the young woman said her real name was Amalia Torres.

Just a week later, at midday on another wonderful San Luis Indian summer day in the declining years of the 20th Century, the Sister Act showed up in the peds lane. The first woman was an obvious imposter, but, as usual, she was double checked for corroboration. Knowing that poor referral choices only destroyed your credibility and led to the likelihood of referrals being blown off, I tried to be pretty certain the person sent into Immigration actually was a violator of some kind. More and more frequently I actually verified that before sending or--after losing a few runners--escorting them into the INS office. Too many cases where people I thought were violators were let go by less than thorough INS officers. Especially at Nogales in the late 80's and early 90's.But it sometimes happened at San Luis, too. So I became more cautious. And more thorough. And my batting average--the referral success rate--showed it.

Anyhow, I determined that this woman was an imposter and took her into the Immigration office a few feet away. On returning I noticed a second woman still standing before my ped gate. That was odd. Most people would have moved over to the adjacent INS lane and moved on through into the U.S. The Red Flag went up again. I had to wonder--had this woman been coached to go for the blue shirts, the Customs officers, instead of the white shirts, the INS officers? So the level of suspicion was already elevated when I returned to the gate. Sure enough, she turned out to be another imposter and in turn was also escorted into the Immigration office. A little while later an INS officer confirmed that the two women were in fact imposters. But more than that. They turned out to be a pair of sisters, Ofilia and Alicia Cazares. This was one sister act that didn't turn out so well. At least not for the sisters. Not this time, anyhow.

But there was always tomorrow.

The statue in the park profile fit the Sister Act, too. But that look was by no means definitive of all violators. A couple of months after the Sister Act, still in San Luis's wonderfully mild winter season, another young woman arrived at the pedestrian gate. The young woman appeared to be in her early 20's. She presented an I-586 Border Crossing Card identifying her as Aracali Armenta. The card was an old one, and the photo had been taken when the subject was a preteen. Unable to tell from the photo whether this in fact was her, I asked the young woman to sign her name on a piece of paper. The signature was very different. That still didn't prove that she was an imposter. Signatures could possibly change a great deal from childhood to adulthood. My own signature seemed to actually have gotten worse, which I wouldn't have thought possible. (I was one of the very few people in my old high school to have actually flunked remedial handwriting and been told by a frustrated teacher that I'd 'better learn how to type'. The woman's differing signature wasn't sufficient corroboration that she was an imposter. Not when compared with her demeanor. This young woman was calm, relaxed and cooperative. She was smiling through the entire interview process.

That was what eventually got her. Too much smile. Were I a new officer then, she probably would have fooled me and gotten by. But I'd already seen a few of those toothy, beatific smiles. I called them negative reassuring smiles. They were meant to be positive reassuring smiles, but experience had too often painted them in a reality based negative light. Too much smile is too good to be true. So I took the woman in, and turned her over to an INS officer I knew to be an outstanding enforcement man, Mike Goodwin. Mike broke her before I had even left. She said her 'real' name--you never were sure about this, either--was Anna Nuñez.

Sometimes it just isn't your day. That was the case with the David Mejia who wasn't. A year had passed since the young woman had smiled one smile too many at me on the peds gate. A year and plenty more Immigration pops on peds gone over the INS enforcement dam. Around noon on a late December day, a young man walked up to the pedestrian gate. He had the classic statue in the park look. But he also looked like the photo on the I-586 BCC he presented. He had done his homework and correctly answered my questions on the biodata on the I-586. The signature did him in. Not only was it distinctly different from the one on the BCC, he reversed the order of the two family names on the card. Into Immigration he went, where David Mejia who wasn't soon became Bernaradino Mendiola who was.

For some people there just aren't any your days. A little earlier on the morning of the same day, a No Day had walked up to my ped lane. A young woman. Statue in the park fifty footer (meaning I spotted her coming through the door). She presented a BCC with the name Raquel Dominguez. The trouble was that the person in the BCC would have been in her early thirties, but this woman looked to be at least ten years younger. Appearances can be deceiving, for more reasons that one--as Bobby Bare once observed in the lyrics of a old country song-- _I never went to bed with an ugly woman, but I sure woke up with a few_ Without commenting on whether or not this might be personally autobiographical, I do recall asking the woman if she had any other identification. She said she didn't. So I asked her questions about the information on the Border Crossing Card. Good God! This poor girl was hopelessly unprepared. She couldn't come up with the date of birth on the BCC. She couldn't even get the complete name right. So Osvelia Lezama (her 'real' name) made the quick trip into the Immigration office and the unexpectedly quick return leg of her journey. This was one person who I wonder ever did make it into the U.S.

These late December actions from the fading 20th Century, along with the Sister Act and Ms Torres, are pretty much typical of the Immigration pops that happened just about daily when working the pedestrian lanes. Altogether, in my three tours at two locations on the border, there were many hundreds of them. If you add the pops of my co-workers during the same time frame, the number would soar into many thousands. Though I had a large number of mostly INS related enforcement actions on the pedestrian gates at Nogales, I have no record of them. Unlike San Luis, Nogales did not require witness statements on each Immigration enforcement action. So, except for a very few that I remember, I have little information on working the Nogales pedestrian gates.

Not so with San Luis. There, INS required witness statements. Together with my San Luis Customs witness statements, I have a large stack of INS witness statements and other enforcement related INS information from my days at that port of entry. On the pedestrian lanes they generally fell into several categories. Most were the daily typical pops like the ones described above. But not all. There were others. Serious offenders. Runners. NCIC wanted felons. Narcotics. You could also break them down by types of deception, documents and behavior. I could also add another category. Falling through the cracks. Which is an oblique way of saying somebody--usually in INS, but not always--screwed up again.

On a warm October afternoon a Hispanic male walked up to the pedestrian lane. He pulled out a I-551 Resident Alien Card. I ran his name in the computer and found out that the guy had been caught the previous year at San Luis trying to smuggle 66 pounds of marijuana through the car lanes. He was arrested back then time and carted off to jail. That should have been a deportable offense, yet the guy still had his I-551 residency card. I sent him into U.S Immigration for their consideration. I never heard what they'd done about him.

And that was mostly because a second guy came through my lane just after this guy. He also came up as a hit in the computer. This guy had an I-210 Red Top card, a provisional residency card issued pending a decision on his amnesty petition. He had also been caught at the port with marijuana. And he also still had his Immigration card. This guy turned out to have some misdemeanor local warrants--which didn't show up in our computer, which only contained felony warrants. He was arrested and carted off to jail. On the same day I was again working the pedestrian lane and had just got the computer working when Alberto Ramos walked up. He presented a tattered paper I-94 immigration document, which apparently was a replacement for a lost I-551 Resident Alien Card. I ran his name and came back with a NCIC arrest warrant from the Yuma Sheriff's Office for marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia. I called up the secondary office for backup, then removed Ramos to the adjacent INS office as a precaution against flight, took his documents and double checked the record. The man's social security card number matched the SSN in the record. Same guy. New Yorker John Bilotti, an Army veteran and former Cochise County deputy sheriff, showed up to assist, and Ramos was taken to the Customs secondary office where he was patted down and then secured in a detention cell. The senior inspector on duty was Bobby Washington, a tree-tall dapper black dude from Washington D.C. whose nickname was 'Stealth'. Bobby was negative about the warrant, thinking that the Yuma County Sheriff's Office might not come for him since the warrant was only a misdemeanor. Which brought up the question of why it would be in NCIC in the first place. Only extraditable felony warrants are supposed to be put into NCIC.

I had heard this kind of misconception about warrants before, mostly because some of the officers hadn't been adequately trained in the computer system and how it worked. I'd already had one serious argument with a different senior inspector, Dean Morgan, over the same subject. He misinterpreted the "Mis" field on the NCIC screen. He thought it meant misdemeanor. I knew that it meant miscellaneous, and that only felony warrants were entered into NCIC. Bobby thought the same thing as Dino, and remained unconvinced, so I did a little further checking on Mr. Ramos. I soon found that he had actually been deported a few months earlier. As such he was an INS felon and prosecutable by them. This was double checked with INS and met with a resounding confirmation. Do not let this guy go, they said. INS would prosecute and he would do jail time. The man had several offenses in California besides the one in Yuma County. No one had an explanation for how a deported felon with an NCIC want on him still had his Immigration document. This information was passed on to Bobby, who took a somewhat more positive tack and who did some checking on his own and found that the county SO would accept and transport Ramos on the Yuma County charges. Which meant that Mr. Ramos was going to get a triple whammy. He would be hit with the Yuma County charges, do whatever time was involved with that, then be turned over to INS for prosecution and do that time. And then he would be deported.

If I hadn't checked Ramos' name in the computer, he probably would have walked on into the U.S. and--given the long string of prior offenses--very likely continued his criminal behavior. Ironically, the computer had been down just prior to his coming up to my lane. I'd just managed to get it up and working again when Ramos walked up to me from Mexico.

It was not Mr. Alberto Ramos' lucky day.

Body odor can result in the loss of otherwise happy customers.

Amtrack training manual

### Chapter 22

### Runners

It was the first week of October and the summer sun was still beating down on poor heat blasted San Luis. I was always grateful to be indoors for the half hour stint at the air conditioned pedestrian gate that was part of the regular inspectional rotation. At least that's what I expected. But the laid back cool off respite hopefully awaiting there proved elusive. That week I had a thumping heart rate pair of runners. The first was an ordinary looking young dude who walked up to me on the pedestrian gate and who seemed somehow not right to me. Not right? Not right? Sure, that's a pretty nebulous term and unscientific as hell, but any veteran officer will tell you that there is often a feeling of something not being quite right that is the first sniff of something going on. A computer check of the guy's name came up with nothing. No lookout. No warrant. Not even any of the ubiquitous DEA background advisories--Subject May Be A DEA Suspect–we so often saw pop up on the computer screen. But the guy still seemed not right to me. Maybe he just seemed too cooperative and polite. Though it was frowned on by the Bosses to do criminal record checks on primary, I did a quick one anyhow. The hombre came up with a serious criminal record and had done time in the slammer. Still, there was nothing firm, nothing definitive that gave reason to detain him. Yet that feeling remained. Something still seemed not right. Then I noticed that the birth certificate he presented as identification--along with what looked like a valid Arizona driver's license--seemed like it might be bogus. I first showed the birth certificate to a nearby Immigration officer and asked him what he thought. The INS officer was disinterested. He just shrugged. But I decided to send the guy to the Immigration secondary office to check him out in more depth with their extensive databases.

I told the guy to go into the adjacent INS secondary office and handed him a referral slip to take into the office. The young man was exceedingly cooperative and polite--too much so, it occurred to me too late. In a twinkling the guy grabbed his documents, ducked under the turnstile, and hightailed it back to Mexico like a sprinter out of the blocks. He was gone before the surprise had even left our faces. His criminal history was still on my computer screen, so we knew who he probably was. A subsequent INS check revealed what might have put wings to the guy's feet. There was a local warrant for his arrest that didn't show up in the computer. But I suspect that there was more to it than that. Maybe he was a deportable criminal alien. Or maybe there was another crime he'd done we knew nothing about but he thought we did.

A few days later another guy walked up to me on pedestrian. I ran in his name in the computer and he popped up on the computer screen as a TECS hit for having been deported for criminal activities. Don't recall exactly what he'd done, but it probably was narcotics trafficking. The man had somehow gotten a new 1-551 Resident Alien Card. Strange. How'd he get the card? Strange, but not unheard of. This wasn't the first one I'd seen. He might have turned informer and gotten the card as part of the deal. Or maybe somebody in INS got sloppy. Or maybe it was more sinister. Like maybe some corrupt INS officer sold it to him.

I told the guy to go into Immigration. As soon as he was adjacent to me--being acutely aware of the runner a few days earlier--I took him by the arm and physically escorted him into the Immigration office. I took him up to the INS counter, behind which a senior Immigration officer was sitting, and told the officer what I'd seen on the computer and that he had better look at this guy. I also told the INS officer that I'd sent the guy's record to the INS office printer that was linked directly to the pedestrian computer. Then I went back to the pedestrian gate a few feet away and made out a referral slip, which I hadn't done yet because of concern over getting the guy into the INS office and not losing him as a runner. After I made out the referral slip, I pointed out the computer readout on the guy to the Immigration officer on the adjacent pedestrian gate. The INS officer's eyes bugged when he saw the record and he jumped off his seat in agitation. Together we hurried into the Immigration office to hand the referral slip to the officer on duty and see if he needed some assistance with the guy.

The man wasn't there. I asked the Immigration officer inside where he was. The officer said that he'd told the fugitive to take a seat--the place was very crowded--and wait his turn while he dealt with those ahead of him. Then he had returned to the routine paperwork he was filling out for other people already in the office. I was bloody livid and almost blew my stack. He'd put routine paperwork ahead of a deported felon trying to sneak back in the country? Good God! My red faced agitation finally got the officer's attention. Then he started looking for the guy. But he wasn't there. The guy had simply walked out while the Immigration officer had his face buried in routine paperwork. This runner didn't even have to run.

He'd just walked away.

It would take years, but it eventually turned out that the Immigration officer involved with Mr. Walk-Away-Free was more than just sloppy. The officer's name? Jose Magaña. Everyone called him Joe. He probably grew up hard and he was always a tough case and often difficult to work with. But at least some of the time he was a hard nosed and reliable enforcement inspector. Then something happened. Maybe there were too many bills. Maybe he'd been passed over for promotion. Maybe he was just terminally burned out. Whatever it was, in 2007 and again in 2008 Joe took that fatal step over the line. He was on a one way street and there was no going back. He was no longer one of us. He was now one of them. Joe Magaña was busted in a government sting for accepting bribes to pass illegal aliens through the Port of San Luis. Joe thought he was secretly dealing with illegal aliens and alien smugglers. He was. Partly. But it was a government sting and also involved were confidential informants and undercover agents. That was it for Joe Magaña

He was arrested in May of 2008.

But years before Joe's fall from grace, when Mr. Walk Away Free made his easy escape that day, I was pretty stirred up. A deported felon who still has a U.S. residency card is a big deal with INS. He should have gone straight into a detention cell. Part of if was my fault for assuming that the INS desk officer properly understood the situation and would take appropriate action. He was after all a supposedly seasoned senior inspector. This was the third or fourth apprehension of this type that I made and the others hadn't been lost. They'd all gone to jail and were then eventually deported. The personal result of this incident was for me to realize that I'd have to adopt the same kind of attitude that I had reluctantly initiated at my previous duty station. Counting on your fellow officers to do their job did not always work. It depended on individuals. From then on at San Luis I always sought out the more reliable INS officers to handle cases I brought in. And, if none were present or available, I would actively see to it that someone in INS was paying attention. If I had to, I would cuff the guy myself and take him directly to the INS detention cells. That would definitely get INS' attention.

Unless you are one of those rare individuals whose idea of relaxation is to count flyspecks on a peeling paint wall or watch idly as the mercury rises towards Hades Hot on your Sonoran Desert thermometer, San Luis is physically not the world's most interesting place to be. The view from the secondary lot was of fences and the sides of humble buildings and a swatch of stark low desert terrain. Almost any distraction was welcome in a place like that. So, when on just another ho hum decidedly unscenic October morning a van came driving in from primary, I welcomed the diversion. It was an Arizona plated GMC van. I plucked the referral slip off the windshield and scanned it. Primary officer E.K. Cannon, an easy going retired U.S. Marine and Viet Nam vet and one of the port's few charcoal shaded faces, said he thought the roof should be checked. I asked 31 year old driver Manuel Serrano the usual Customs questions. Serrano replied that the van belonged to his father-in-law and that he was only traveling locally between the U.S. and Mexico to shop. While I was talking to him I ran a K910 Buster density meter over the roof. The readings were normal. Nothing to alert me so far.Only later would I learn that the van contained no papers--title, insurance, registration, etc.--of any kind. That certainly would have alerted me.

I instructed Serrano to open the front and the rear of the GMC and then to wait in front while I inspected it. I used the Buster on the sides of the van. Normal. I tried the Buster on the floor. Again, normal. It wasn't looking very positive so far. The next step in my routine secondary was to check the gas tank. Oh-oh. E.K. must have intuited this one, after all. Though not in the roof, it looked to be loaded. The routine inspection just took a big ol' quantum jump into the not so routine. The two visible mounting bolts on the gas tank both clearly showed signs of having been recently worked on. The straps on the tank had also been moved recently, so that the shiny area that had been under the straps previously--and had consequently not been road soiled as the rest of the tank had been--could be seen in several places. At that moment CEO Don Trusty was walking past and I asked him to run his K-9 Rock on the van. As he was beginning his run I started towards the front of the van and the driver.

It wasn't especially unusual for gas tanks to have been removed for repair and for a subsequent drug searching inspection by Customs to prove negative. So I decided not to grab the man and maneuver him indoors. Doing that to people and having the subsequent inspection prove negative was not a good move from all kinds of perspectives--negative public perceptions, peer criticism or supervisory disapproval, not to mention personal self censure. I chose to use a middle ground approach, whereby I went up to the man holding out his ID, an INS issued Border Crossing Card with his picture and date of birth on it, as if to give it back to him and let him go. When I got to him I asked him to go into the nearby Customs office. Serrano complied and started for the office. Everything was cool so far. This one was still up in the air. It might end up like most. A negative inspection and the person sent on his or her way into the U.S.

Not this time. After all, this was the border, where anything could happen and often did. You could call it the Border Law--If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Probably Will. In a twinkling things went from under control to chaos. Just before I got the dude up to the door into the Customs office, Serrano exploded in flailing elbows and windmilling legs and bolted rabbit quick around the east side of the Customs secondary building. As a precaution I'd intentionally blocked with my body the quickest route back to Mexico via the west side of the building. If he'd run in that direction I might have been able to stop him. If he went the other way, it seemed a good bet that one of the several officers on the primary lanes could catch him as he ran past. I took off after him, hollering at the others to stop him. The officers on primary heard the yelling. Several responded. One was too far away. A second came whisker close to catching the man. A third probably could have stopped him. But, as I was running behind and yelling, I saw the intercepting officer stumble, teeter almost gracefully for a second and then tumble over into a heap. So much for Manuel Serrano. Other officers also gave chase but were too far away to have a hope of catching him before he lumbered back into Mexico. He puffed right by the startled Mexican Customs officers and was shoe leathering it in a hurry for parts unknown in Mexico before they could react.

While this was going on, CEO Don Trusty's dog Rock went nuts over the GMC van's gas tank. Hardly a surprise, given the driver's heart thumping dash for the border. We drove the van onto a lift at the back of the secondary lot and dropped the tank just enough to find the compartment with its packages and stick a probe into one of them. The residue on the probe looked and smelled like marijuana and a field test confirmed it. After Customs special agent Miguel Contreras arrived we completely removed the tank and opened the compartment. Unlike most compartments, this one wasn't sealed with a metal plate that was fastened to the tank with Bondo. It only had cellophane plastic over the opening, which was roughly 12 by 8 inches and was on the upper front of the tank. Within the compartment there were thirty packages of marijuana wrapped in brown plastic tape. The compartment was so big that the entire upper 7/8 of the gas tank was actually compartment. Only the lower one eighth contained gas.

Customs agent Contreras believed that they would eventually catch the driver, Manuel Serrano-Pereda, whose guilt had been so eloquently proven by his own fast moving Mexico bound feet. He mentioned another, similar, case were the fugitives were caught.

"They always come back" (to the U.S.), Contreras said.

Not this time. In September of 2006, Judge Tom C. Cole of the Yuma Country Superior Court dismissed the ten year old case without prejudice, apparently while clearing out the court's unresolved backlogs. The guy is probably still around, but if he crosses into or lives in the U.S., it sure as heck won't be under the name Manuel Serrano-Pereda.

Serrano's escape did it. I ratcheted up the defensive paranoia in my tactical behavior in secondary even more on the cautious side to head off any reoccurrences. He was the last load driver that was able to successfully boogie away from me.

Another port runner incident. A late afternoon towards the end of October. An old blue Pontiac drove up to primary. The officer typed in the license plate number and the Pontiac popped up on the computer screen as a TECS hit. Two or three of the secondary officers heard the TECS alarm go off in the secondary office and hustled up to the primary lane to escort the Pontiac back to the secondary inspection lot. One of them got 24 year old driver Francisco Reyes driver's license and birth certificate from the primary officer. Another officer directed Reyes to drive the old Pontiac into the secondary lot. As Reyes slowly drove towards the rear he pushed open the driver's side door. One of the inspectors escorting the car--Bob Schroeder, a Viet Nam vet and former nurse--started to move towards the car to tell him to close the door. Too late. Reyes leaped out of the car and jackrabbited for Mexico. Several officers lunged after him, with youthful, athletic,'Big Ed'McCandlish--who would one day be on the other side of the law himself--getting close enough to the guy to attempt a tackle. But Reyes had the slippery moves of a running back on the open field, stiff armed McCandlish as Big Ed went at him, deflected the tackle and slipped past him into Mexico. He zipped right by the Mexican Customs officers and disappeared into San Luis Rio Colorado.

No bloody wonder he took off. The old Pontiac had 72 pounds of cocaine hidden in it. We never heard what happened to load driver Francisco Reyes. But we all knew that the smugglers would not view the loss of 72 pounds of cocaine with even the slightest hint of a glimmering of understanding. Reyes' future prospects weren't the brightest.

He might have been better off if we'd caught him.

February 1997. Another foot chase. This guy we saw run up the southbound lanes. We told one of the K-9 handlers--they were carrying radios and we weren't--to call the Border Patrol and we went running out to the edge of the southbound lane. It was night and there were a lot of people around and we lost sight of him. Not for long. Pretty soon he came back hauling butt for Mexico. Not far behind was a Border Patrolman on a bicycle. The BP officer jumped off the bike and went at the guy. There were a lot of people on the sidewalk going south into Mexico and both of the runners crashed into them. The illegal broke free and kept on for Mexico. Then a BP cruiser came tearing down the street and swerved to the curb ahead of the guy. He jumped out and caught him about a half dozen feet from Mexico. The other BP officer was soon there, too, and they quickly had the guy under control.

This all took place very close to Mexico. Still in the U.S. Not much. Just a foot or two. It could have escalated into an international incident. But the Mexicans officers stayed calm and acknowledged that it was a U.S. matter--if only just barely.

Another runner. On the pedestrian gate. This guy looked like a gringo. Light skinned. No field worker tan. Reddish blond hair. No ID. Claimed to be a U.S. citizen. He spoke English, but with a noticeable Hispanic accent. The lack of an ID prompted me to send him in to be checked by US Immigration. He didn't think that was such a hot idea and he started to balk, so I took him by the arm and moved him towards the US Immigration officer standing next to me. I released the guy to the grasp of the Immigration officer. As the guy--a young dude wearing a baseball cap and ordinary looking clothes--moved past the Immigration officer, he abruptly ripped himself loose and bolted through the Immigration officer's lane and back towards Mexico. He was gone in a swift footed twinkling.

At about 5:30 or 6:00 in late October I was working a car lane when the border did its typical Jekyll-Hyde thing. Vesuvius blew again. The usual weary leaden routine shattered. The air suddenly filled with yells and scampering feet. An old AMC junker had pulled up to another lane where Troy 'Big Bird' Palmer was working. Palmer noticed the back seat of the car looked strange. He pulled open the back door and looked at it more closely, then looked into the trunk. New felt stretched across the width of the trunk behind the rear seat. The rest of the trunk had dirty, old lining. The felt behind the seat was fresh and new and concealed the rear of the back seat from view. Troy probably knew by then that he had a load. He double checked by going to the rear door, reaching in and pulling the seat's back rest forward. Then he saw the brown tape-wrapped packages that are the hallmark of the load. Palmer grabbed the driver and started to muscle him into the secondary office before he could abscond.

Oops. Not quite. As Palmer neared the building, the young man--a plump Hispanic about 5'5 compared to Palmer's lofty 6'3"--broke free and ran for Mexico. Another officer, a K-9 dog handler named Ron Van Why, who, despite his name was half Tohono O'odham Native American and looked it, gave chase. Van Why was a very obese young man who looked like there wasn't even a slight chance of a serious foot race in him, but the tubby dude was surprisingly quick and agile. He darted after the fleeing Hispanic and darn near got him. But the frantically loping kid got by both Palmer and Van Why and made it into Mexico.

This had become an all-too-common scenario. A man was caught with a load and hotfooted it for Mexico before he could be secured inside the secondary building. Everybody nearby gave chase and tried to catch him. They all were hollering to stop him, yelling drugs or drogas (Spanish for drugs). In this case Palmer was yelling mota, which was another slang word for marijuana. The Mexican border officers heard the yelling, saw the running kid and were ready for him. They grabbed the kid just as he ran across the border and bustled him into their secondary office.

Knowing they had the kid, the supervisor on duty began to negotiate with the Mexicans, hoping to at least get a name. At first the Mexicans said they were interviewing him and gave a name to our negotiating officers. Then the Mexicans changed their story. Now they were saying that they hadn't been able to stop the guy at the border and he had gotten away. What? When we had all seem them catch the kid? And when they had already given us a name? We wondered just what the devil that meant--had the kid's smuggling organization paid them off, did somebody with influence make the right connection, were the Mexican officials themselves involved? What was going on? We just never knew what the hell to make of our Mexican opposite numbers.

Deep and pervasive border corruption in Mexico. True a decade earlier. Still true. Mexican generals were ordered to move their military to the border areas by President Felipe Calderon in 2007 to cleanse the corruption from border police forces. The generals' assessment?

"....corruption is so deep that cleansing the forces could take years."

' _Tis a fine line indeed. But once over it, there's no going back._

Anonymous

### Other Good Folks Gone Bad

When we began with U.S. Customs one of the very first subjects in our training was the question of corruption. Anti-corruption rhetoric began at the Customs academy in Brunswick, Georgia, and continued to be drummed into the minds of the officers at their duty stations. And not just the larger issues about corruption. We were cautioned against receiving any kind of gift or gratuity beyond the most trifling. Small things could open the door to much more serious situations in Customs' eyes. A small gift or a personal relationship could be used to leverage favors from border officers. And those favors could lead down a very dangerous road. Of course such seemingly innocuous things happened, but on the front line we mostly jumped to the chase and talked about the possibility of fellow inspectors being dirty. That generally meant one of two things. The officer was passing loads or illegals. Or the officer was selling immigration documents.

Like anywhere else, there was a gossip pipeline. Certain officers were suspect in the minds of their collective border brethren. But as the years passed we were surprised to learn that, though the suspected officers sometimes were actually found to be dirty, there were amongst us others who few would have thought could be corrupt. Such was the case with Big Ed McCandlish and Lisa Stubbs who are mentioned elsewhere. But they weren't the only ones. One was Gus Ramirez. Another was Manny Silva. And there were others. Too many others.

Gus Ramirez was a good-natured senior INS inspector who my was back fence neighbor in Yuma. I never saw him get angry or abuse anyone and he seemed to be a solid senior inspector who did his job with professional thoroughness. Not a star. But a very long way from being a dud. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of him as being dirty. Nor did I ever hear anyone else offer such an opinion about him. Gus was one of those solid types that everyone else depended on. Or, at least that's the way it seemed. But things very often aren't the way they seem. And so it was with Gus Ramirez.

The news about what happened to Gus came from 'Junior,' Ron Mann Jr., who was on a TDY to Nogales after I'd transferred there from Yuma. Junior was on the San Luis Enforcement Team and was roving in front of the entry booths at San Luis when he discovered a couple of load cars in Gus Ramirez' lane. The drivers implicated Gus, saying that they had been told by the smugglers that Gus would pass them through without any real inspection. Gus was confronted and admitted his complicity. He was charged, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. To this day, I have no clue as to what happened. Gus had come out of straightened circumstances as a kid and with the comfortable salary, secure job and good benefits of the INS senior inspector job, should have had it made. He had realized the dream of many border Hispanics--financial security close to home. There was some whispering that Gus's personal life had led him to some dubious contacts in Mexico. Possibly that is what lead him down that same slippery slope the others had tripped on. Whatever it was, his career was shot. Gus was convicted and went to prison. He was released in September of 2003.

But, like Lisa Stubbs, I still find it difficult to think of him as being a criminal.

The same is true of Manny Silva. Manny was a slight, quick little man who'd been a fast food manager in San Luis before coming to Customs. The financial security and professional career close to home had drawn him to Customs, like so many others. Unlike many others, Manny hit the ground running. He had a pleasantly upbeat attitude, never complained or criticized, and was always the first to pitch in and help with whatever task came up. Though at times he went over the line and became obsequious, his willingness and positive attitude more than counterbalanced that. When Manny was working, you knew that at the very least he'd do his share of the work--and probably a good part of what the others should have been doing. And need we mention that many of those 'others', who were lazy and inefficient and basically non-existent as enforcement officers, generally went on to being promoted and eventually to a comfortable retirement?

Manny did have one problem. A big problem. A turbulent home life. We never could quite figure out what was going on in his personal life. But we did know that he was often upset by it. One day the trouble got serious. Very serious. He was busted for domestic abuse. Law enforcement officers are in a particularly vulnerable position when it comes to allegations of domestic abuse. A conviction for domestic abuse will immediately cause an officer to lose his or her job. Though undoubtedly of well meaning intent, the law has another, sinister, side. It makes a dandy weapon for spouses to use against their law enforcement husbands or wives. And there are some vituperative and manipulative spouses more than willing to use that weapon. Even the most well intentioned laws often have unexpected negative consequences.

When Manny was arrested on allegations of domestic abuse, he claimed that was what had happened. His wife was manipulating the law to jerk him around. True? Untrue? Looking back, I can't say. But at the time we all took his side. One of the port officials--about whom, ironically, there were serious rumors of him abusing a former spouse--intervened with the local cops who were going to confiscate Manny's firearm on the basis of his wife's allegations. The port official would have none of that and, following Customs procedure, took the weapon himself. Manny went onto administrative duty while his case was under investigation. That meant he could not carry a firearm and couldn't do any of the functions that required an armed officer, but he could do administrative duties. That was hardly unusual. There was almost always one or more officers, either male or female, on administrative duty for various reasons, chief among them domestic abuse and/or violent or allegedly violent domestic confrontations.

Whatever the reality behind the charges was, Manny was cleared by both the local police and Customs internal affairs. He got his gun back and returned to full duty. When I transferred out of San Luis to Nogales I thought he was well settled in and on his way to a successful Customs career. When I heard the news, I was as shaken by it as when I heard about Lisa Stubbs and Gus Ramirez. Manny had been arrested.

And not for domestic abuse. He was busted for alien smuggling. At his trial investigators testified that he had also let drug smugglers pass through. In January of 2002 he was sentenced to 34 months in prison. He was released in July of 2004.It's still difficult to grasp. The man had it made, but still managed to blow everything to pieces. A life in ashes. Still, to this day it's hard to think of him as being a criminal.

The fine line is very fine indeed.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Earl Warren

### BIG DOG

It was late afternoon. The unwelcome beginning of the hot season. An ancient but very sharp looking '79 International Scout pulled into the secondary lot. I walked over to the Scout and immediately recognized both the vehicle and the occupants as having come through the lane of my trainee, Laura Ball, the previous evening. The driver, 19 year old Alejandro Lopez, and passenger, 18 year old Luis Medina, both appeared the same way they had the night before. Driver Lopez--a big, chunky young man--was open, friendly and almost jovial. Passenger Medina was quieter and less emotive, but nevertheless appeared relaxed. Their behavior might have gotten them through, had I not begun using a Buster density meter on the vehicle's driver side panels. The vehicle itself was a prime load vehicle--older, recently refurbished and looking extremely clean.

The interior was all freshly done, as were the bed and sides, having been repainted and the bed coated with a spackled appearing kind of material that is common in vehicle truck bed refurbishings. This model of the International Scout was a kind of combination utility vehicle/pickup, with a cab similar to more recent vintage extended cab pickups and a shortened pickup bed in the rear, as well as being a 4-wheeler. The Scout was very sharp looking and obvious meticulous care had gone into refurbishing it. Ball and I were very suspicious of the vehicle the night before and gave it a thorough search on primary. It'd looked like a very good candidate for a load vehicle and we didn't want to take any chances on sending it to secondary and having a lazy or tired or overworked inspector there blow it off. So we gave it a diligently thorough going over on primary before releasing the vehicle. We were able to do that because we had the luxury of time--it was a slow evening and there wasn't much traffic.

Laura and I remembered the Scout from the night before and that we'd searched it very thoroughly. I was at first disarmed by that fact and by Lopez' friendly, open behavior. But the high 50's Buster readings contradicted Lopez' behavior. We removed both the driver and passenger to the secondary office and asked a nearby military dog handler, a sergeant, to run his dog on the Scout. While he was doing so, I also asked Customs' K-9 handler, diminutive, peppery Sherry Jenkins to run the vehicle, not having much confidence in either the sergeant or his K-9. The military K-9 indeed did not do much with the vehicle, though the sergeant walked away and said that he thought "....there is something here". Just at that moment Jenkins ran the Scout with her dog, Shilo. This dog was anything but diffident. Shilo went nuts on the Scout, attacking the fenders and biting and scratching at them. I blanched when I saw that. This could be a real problem if the car wasn't loaded. Shilo had really blasted into the Scout, scratching so fervently that the dog damaged the paint on the fenders. But the alert and response--alert meaning a change in behavior, response meaning the animal actually moved to a spot and began to bite and scratch--was so strong that Ball and I and Jenkins all were immediately convinced the vehicle was loaded. The scratched fenders would almost certainly turn out to be a non issue.

We wasted no time in going back inside and quickly removed the driver and passenger to the search room. With the help of other officers, they were patted down, their personal effects placed in evidence baskets and then the pair plunked into holding cells. Oddly, Lopez continued to not appear nervous. That took me aback a bit. It was not normal behavior for a load driver once he'd been caught. While I was searching him, he reacted with a body jerk and a _hey!_ when my hands went over his privates. Odd for a man in the process of being busted to show such prosaic homophobic behavior. Did he just not comprehend what he was facing? The other young man, Medina, had caught on. He was showing signs of nervousness. Medina was stonily stoic and guarded. Which was more typical of what we usually saw from a guy just busted with a load.

We went back to the Scout and looked for direct proof of the vehicle being loaded. There was a slight space on the top of the truck bed's wall. A long, thin probe made from a car radio antenna was shoved inside and moved back and forth. It stuck something solid. We forced the probe into the unseen solid object and could feel the hidden object yield to the probe. We pulled the probe out and scanned it for traces of contraband. No obvious physical evidence, no bits of plant residue. Nothing to the eye. Not so to the nose. The distinct odor of marijuana saturated the probe. That was enough to verify the presence of marijuana and the duty Customs agent was called by the office senior. Laura was joined by a second trainee, former National Guardsman Louie Torres. Louie had been sent to assist and observe by his own training officer, Chris Vermilyea--a superb officer who in the near future would become a Customs agent. We drove the vehicle to the search compound in the rear of secondary and awaited the arrival of the agent. When he did arrive--he was one of the top supervisory agents, one of the Big Dogs, in the Yuma RAC (Resident Agent in Charge) office--things began to get strange. Mr. Big Dog was now on the scene.

This guy started right off by saying that a valuable vehicle like the International Scout might indicate that they should turn the vehicle and load over to the San Luis Police Department. This seemed odd as hell. The vehicle was only worth about $500. It was after all nearly twenty years old, even if it did look sharp. And the San Luis Police were generally only called when the amount of seized narcotics was small. The Scout promised to be a big load. The large area of high Buster readers on the vehicle, and the meticulous care that had been taken with it by the smugglers, all shouted that this not a trifling load. It was either a lot of marijuana or there were hard drugs in the Scout. I took exception to what the agent wanted to do, but there was no talking to this guy. Big Dog's mind was set. Only later did I learn that this was typical of him and that he didn't want any port cases, so he made every attempt to dump them. As he in fact was doing just now. Anyhow, San Luis PD was called and two officers, Margaret Mendez and another, responded. They waited while several Customs officers--a third trainee, Frank Gonzalez had joined Ball and Torres--began to work on the vehicle. Also there was the military handler and CEO Jenkins. We removed a molding strip and saw packages through a screw hole. Then we made a few tentative attempts at trying to find access plates, stopped to think it over and decided that the plates had to be inside the Scout's cab.

At the back of the interior of the cab, which had about two feet of space behind the front seat, was a tiered shelf. It covered the entire rear and most of sides of the storage area behind the seat. Frank Gonzalez and Louie Torres climbed into the cab with screwdrivers and ratchets and removed the shelving. Behind was the same freshly renovated 'spackled-looking' area as the truck bed. Frank and Louie scratched over it with a sharp edge and immediately saw fresh Bondo. A few well placed hammer blows and the access plates became visible and then broke loose. Louie and Frank began working on both sides of the Scout, removing marijuana packages from the hidden compartments. While this was going on, I told Inspector Laura Ball--a very muscular and buff young woman--to go get a Buster and start checking out the rest of the vehicle for the possible presence of more hidden compartments. Laura did just that and almost immediately received high buster readings over the front tires in the fender wells. I removed some bolts and ran my homemade probe--made from a car's radio antenna with the end sharpened to a point--through one of the holes. It hit something solid. Forcing the probe into the hidden object again came back with the telltale reek of marijuana. The inspectors who were emptying the compartments in the Scout's cab were about to have a second set of compartments to work on.

But where were the access plates for these new compartments? Laura and I looked around at the interior of the engine compartment. It stood out just as dramatically as the exterior of the Scout. The engine compartment had also been recently refurbished. Fresh black paint covered the entire engine. I'd seen a load vehicle a few months back that was loaded from the interior sides of an engine compartment, so I was pretty sure that was where the access plates would be. They were. We set in with our tools and removed the various parts that were along the sides of the interior of the engine compartment. Then we scratched the sides of the engine compartment and again saw the telltale signs of fresh Bondo. Light tapping with a hammer and the second set of access plates popped lose. Inside were a bunch more marijuana packages. There were 51 packages in the four compartments weighing a total of 126.1 pounds. It was a good load. Not a stunner.But a good load. Even a whoop-it-up good load.

At least to us. Not so for Mr. Big Dog. While we were weighing the marijuana he started making abusive remarks to the inspectors. He especially singled out the referring officer, Immigration inspector Cliff Bradley. That surprised us. Bradley was just about universally considered to be an exceptionally fine officer. He hadn't gotten much information from the driver on primary. Big Dog berated him for that, and also for his witness statement not being done in what Big Dog considered to be a timely fashion. What? This was the guy who was dodging handling the load in the first place and dumping it on the San Luis PD. Big Dog also took some nasty oblique shots about Customs inspectors in general needing to know about asking questions that would be helpful to the agents in either obtaining confessions or convictions. I took direct exception with him on both counts. Who the hell did this jerk think he was, anyway? We all knew he was dumping the work off onto the San Luis police because he was too lazy to do it. And then this jerk had the gall to cop an arrogant I'm-a-special-agent-and-you're-dog crap attitude?

It should be no surprise that it was the two San Luis officers who actually broke the driver. Despite his self important bluster and high ranking position, Big Dog had not bothered to learn how to speak Spanish during his years with Customs. The two local Hispanic cops had to do the translating. One of the San Luis officers told me that the driver was fairly easy to break and that he told them that he was to be paid $1600 for driving the marijuana across the border. He was to drop the car in the lot outside nearby King Market. He also said that the night before had been a dry run to see whether or not the Scout would get sent to secondary and that it had not been loaded then. You can bet the bank and the kids' college annuities that Laura and I breathed a big sigh of relief on hearing that.

Lopez also said that he was a friend of a guy who had driven a load car through a few days earlier and who had run the port back to Mexico when he had been referred to secondary. The Mexican cops caught him, found fifty pounds of weed in a floor load and brought charges against the driver. Lopez said that he was going to use some of the money from his load to help his friend get out on bail, and also that helping his friend was one reason for his agreeing to be the driver for the Scout load. The kid said that the two load cars were from the same smuggling organization, which apparently was fairly large and well connected. They had a number of shops to build compartments and detail the cars and do the mechanical work on them. This group, Lopez said, generally had spotters placed over on the Mexican side near the Mexican secondary area, and the spotters kept an eye on load cars moving through the port. This was a confirmation of something that we already pretty sure of--that spotters were watching us.

The passenger, whose confession was not really pushed by the interrogators, was eventually set loose. But only after the revocation of his Border Crossing Card by INS-- which was probably the work of the professional and thorough Bradley, who Big Dog had so recently excoriated. San Luis officer Margaret Mendez took custody of the prisoner, the vehicle and the marijuana. Mendez would later come over to Customs herself and become another fine Customs officer. She was a very short, stocky and gutsy woman who you could count on to be Margaret-on-the-spot when things got hot. She wasn't afraid of mixing it up. She got the nickname of Choo Choo or Chooch because she charged right ahead like a choo choo train into difficult situations. Yet she was also a wife and a mother and typically an easy going and friendly person. Big Dog probably insulted her along with all the others that night.

We all knew that there were extenuating experiences an agent dealt with that could make processing loads for them very difficult. An already overburdened workload. Inability to get the County Attorney's office to prosecute. Limited manpower and resources. The mind numbing routine most port cases were for agents. But that was no excuse for Big Dog to swagger around the port and treat the officers with such imperious arrogant derision. I'd seen Queen Elizabeth while I was stationed in Bermuda and even the by-God-for-real Queen of England didn't project the Imperium Big Dog did. Fortunately, such behavior among the local Customs agents was rare, though many of them did have submerged similar arrogant attitudes and sometimes treated inspectors in a demeaning fashion. One of the most blunt was a former Border Patrol officer, a self important mixed race dude who had a big ego and a low opinion of Customs inspectors. Others were friendly and uncritical in direct relations with inspectors, but bad mouthed them behind their backs. Ironically, one of them was the husband of one of our best officers.

On the other hand, there were agents like Clark Richards and Cliff Erickson and David Fry and Steve Mercado, along with recently arrived female newcomers Tara Parez and Lori Janasco, who combined competence with down to earth attitudes and treated the inspectors with respect. When bulldog faced former Marine Ray Kelly became Commissioner of Customs not long after that, he changed the procedure for hiring Customs special agents. Rather than inexperienced and often self absorbed middle class kids right out of college who had no law enforcement or border experience, he started a policy of selecting agent candidates from among the most effective Customs inspectors. That went a long way towards building more mutual respect and cooperation between the agents and the inspectors. Kelly is now the police commissioner of New York City. The Customs service now has a bunch of good agents who were formerly good inspectors.

And nobody gives a rat's ass about whatever happened to Big Dog.

You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is.

_Ellen DeGeneres_

### Chapter 23

### The Gas Tank That Almost Got Away--

### And The Unlucky Mexican Minister

Towards the end of July, a few minutes before midnight, I went out to lane #5 to relieve Inspector Chris Bassett so he could go home. I was on the midnight 12-8 shift and Bassett was on the afternoon 4-12 shift. I wasn't due on the lane until 1:00 AM, but the person who was to relieve Bassett wasn't there yet. CEO Ron Van Why pointed out that someone should relieve Bassett, so I did. Relieving early was something I often did. For a couple of reasons. It built good relations. A tired inspector was always happy to have a few minutes shaved off the weary end of his or her shift. The second reason was altogether different. It was a window of opportunity. Shift change was one of the weak spots the smugglers targeted. They knew that the line inspectors at the very end of their shifts were tired, focused on going home and were often only marginally alert. Shift change was a window of opportunity for the smugglers.

But also for us.

Bassett had hardly left the lane when Christopher Andrews, a tall, lanky 19 year old Anglo kid, drove up to the lane in a maroon Arizona plated 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I asked the kid a few questions and received odd answers that immediately got my interest. He said he was homeless, had been kicked out of his home in Yuma and had been living in a motel in San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico, because it was 'cheaper'. The skinny kid also said he had just bought the Cutlass and had not yet transferred the title into his name. The drug smuggling indicators were piling up. But I was thrown off at first because, although Andrews didn't smell like booze, he was acting and talking sluggish and logy. I figured he was blitzed on some tranquilizer or painkiller. I thought was kid was stoned and I was looking at a DUI. As a test of that, I asked him to get out of the vehicle to open the trunk. He did, and he stumbled a bit upon climbing out of the car. Fairly typical of a DUI. But his answers to my earlier questions made me wonder if there wasn't more to this kid than his just being sluiced on some kickass alternative reality drug. This could well be a load.

About then I noticed that Senior Immigration Mike Goodwin was on the adjacent lane with his K-9, Chico. Goodwin was unique to San Luis, and not just San Luis. There were not many like him at other places. He was a trained INS K-9 handler with a dog that was officially supposed to sniff out hidden aliens but in fact was also trained to seek out drugs and was sometimes used for that purpose. This caused some huffing and puffing interagency squabbling, Customs supposedly being the only agency to use drug drugs. But the frontline reality was that Goodwin was a hard working, conscientious and effective inspector, and was not infrequently called upon by Customs officers to run cars when no Customs dogs were available. Goodwin often worked a car lane as a primary inspector, while having the dog with him in the inspection booth for those eventualities when a dog might be called for. Mike was another of those inspectors that Grandpa would have called a downright crackerjack--meaning he was damned good.

Goodwin was on the lane next to me and was just getting ready to leave. His shift was over at midnight. I asked him to run the Cutlass with Chico. Goodwin made a sweep of the vehicle. Negative. That surprised me a bit because I was thinking the Cutlass was probably loaded. I thanked Mike and returned my attention to checking out the car. Goodwin started to leave and unleashed Chico a few feet away to let the dog run back to his cage in secondary as the animal customarily did. But Chico didn't do his usual happy dash for his cage and the ride home. Instead of four footing it for his cage, as Goodwin expected, Chico turned around and went back to the Cutlass. He went up to a door and showed interest. Mike walked over and let him in. As soon as Chico got inside the car on the passenger side he began to scratch, then sat down, which was the kind of alert he was trained to show. Goodwin motioned to me that it was a strong alert, and I took Andrews into custody and escorted him to the secondary area. CEO Van Why, who I had not realized was working a double shift and would also be on the midnight shift, had come up to primary, seen what was happening, and drove the vehicle into secondary while I took Andrews into the search room. I patted the kid down, secured him in a cell and went outside to the secondary inspection area where Van Why, Goodwin, and several other inspectors were swarming over the car. Van Why also ran his dog Fenway on the vehicle, receiving a strong alert to the dash area.

We'd had a startlingly good sized coke load in a dash the day before. The signs of tampering on the dash on that big money load had been obvious. Not so with the Cutlass. Unlike the coke dash load, the appearance of this dash was at least superficially normal. No obvious signs of tampering. Van Why raised the hood and noticed that a screw hole was visible in the fire wall where a bracket had formerly been attached. He draped his hefty bulk over the fender, leaned in closer to the fire wall and squinted into the hole with the high intensity beam of his mini flashlight. There it was. A package was visible inside the screw hole. We shoved a sharp pointed probe into the package and it came back with bits of marijuana. We got a bit more, put the bits of marijuana into a field test kit, crunched the chemicals together in the kit and watched the chemicals yield the typical purple of a positive marijuana response. Then we called up the special agent on duty to report we'd come up with a load. The duty agent was rousted out of bed and soon on the way to the port.

The agent on duty that night was Tara Perez, a Puerto Rican Hispanic who was one of my personal favorites among the agents. She was tiny, diligent, determined and treated the inspectors with respect. But weary Tara was under a tremendous workload and looked as though she was so tired she could barely function. She watched with bleary eyes as Van Why and I began what promised to be a fairly simple process of removing the marijuana from the dash. Not so. This one was a bitch. The packages were very difficult to remove and both myself and Ron were heavily scratched up while tearing apart the dash and jerking the packages out of the ragged sharp edges of the compartment one by one. Then we came to the last package and got stuck. It was visible but seemingly irretrievable without the use of some heavy duty cutting tool like the Jaws of Life. After fighting to jerk the recalcitrant packages out of the compartment for a good while Ron and I were thoroughly disgusted by now and probably wouldn't have objected to the idea of dynamiting the last obstinate holdout package out of Cutlass' dash..

Only then did it penetrate our thick skulls that there might be another access than by literally tearing apart the dash as we'd done in our adrenalin fired fixation with getting at the dope. There was a plate running along the top of the fire wall where the windshield wipers were. We put the screwdrivers and wrenches to work and the plate came off in no time. And there was the package. In plain view and a snap to remove. In our initial glandular jubilation over finding the dope, we hadn't stopped to think of a simple premise. How had the smugglers planned on removing the marijuana? Would it have been this awkward? Tear the damn dash to pieces as we had done? Not hardly. This one hit me like a ton of bricks, too. How could I be so bloody dense? These guys thought things through. They built their compartments carefully, with the intention of using them over and over. Both the placing and the removal of the dope were though the simple method of removing the windshield wiper plate. After that I never neglected to ponder the question of access before beginning to tear apart a hidden compartment.

The marijuana in the Cutlass totaled 33.4 pounds. There were ten packages. I weighed and labeled the dope and secured it in a narcotics storage locker. Bone tired agent Tara Perez questioned Andrews. He lawyered up, saying he didn't want to talk without a attorney. Perez arrested Andrews and transported him to the Yuma County jail and what would prove to be the beginning of a journey that would end with a two year prison term.

After Tara left with her prisoner around 4:00 in the morning, the port was silent and empty. No traffic at that time of the year at that hour. A couple of little elf owls twittered and flitted from post to post near the secondary lot while I headed back to the Cutlass. I had learned--as usual, by the hard way--to double check load cars for the possibility of having missed some of the dope. It actually did occur sometimes, it had happened to me, and the seizing officer who'd missed the dope was consequently embarrassed by her or his oversight. So I began a slow and thorough double check of the car to make sure that we hadn't missed anything. Several other officers drifted back to the car while I was working on it, there being little else going on at that hour of the morning.

Besides myself, Van Why was there, as was Senior Inspector Paul Belt, a man of about my age who had been at San Luis for something like twenty-five or thirty years, and who was very knowledgeable and even a former supervisor, but who now was in the last stages of terminal burn out; Joe Rodriguez, a new inspector recently retired from the Marine Corps; Steve Ponce, a former Yuma County Sheriff's Deputy and a somber dude well versed in finding hidden compartments; and the supervisor, the burly and always talkative Mario De La Ossa. Whenever old pals Paul Belt and Mario were together, a marathon talk fest was almost sure to follow. This was no exception. The B.S. session was already rolling in full gear just next to me while I looked over the Cutlass.

While this bunch of relaxed, gun toting dudes were into what sounded like a kissing cousin of a gossiping backyard gab fest, I stuck the long-handled mirror that is one of the staple tools of the line inspector under the car and shined a high intensity mini-flashlight beam on it to take a look at the gas tank. Holy Christ! The damn thing looked like it was loaded! The gas tank had recently been worked on. There were fresh scratches visible on the tank, the mounting straps and the tank bolts which held the tank in place on the car frame. Those were are all high value indicators of a loaded tank. But when the vehicle had already been found to contain hidden dope in a different location in the car? It was a NBA slam dunk loaded tank.

"Hey", I said to the Gossip Pack. "I think the tank is loaded, too."

All eyes were on me. A moment of stunned silence. But only a moment. Everything exploded in another of those corybantic wild border moments. The laid back mood of a moment earlier with a bunch of relaxed clucking officers dissolved into the adrenalin fired excitement that animates inspectors, even the most jaded and burnt out ones, when a load is found. Inspectors were instantly down on their knees, looking at the tank and tapping and thumping on it. Others were inspecting the tank with mirrors. The opinion, after all the looking and tapping and thumping, was just what I'd said.

"This baby is loaded".

Tara Perez had to be called a second time, and a very worn down Tara told us to remove the dope without her being present. She had to take Andrews to court in just three hours for his preliminary hearing--arrestees had to have their preliminary hearings within 24 hours of arrest. Perez said she would call the port before court and get the final amount.

We drove the car to the hydraulic lift area and raised it up, unfastened the tank and dropped it. What was this? The smugglers hadn't even bothered to cover the access plate on the top of the tank with the customary Bondoed piece of metal. There was nothing over the access plate. The top was open to the air and the marijuana packages plainly visible inside. A smaller tank of about two gallons capacity had been placed inside the larger tank, allowing the balance of the tank to be used to smuggle contraband. 29.1 pounds in 9 packages were removed from the tank, raising the total amount of the seizure to 62.5 pounds of marijuana in 19 packages.

It struck us as very odd. The tank was so obvious, even sloppy, yet the dash was done with great care and expertise--considerably more so than the large cocaine dash load of the day before. Was the tank an afterthought? The tank was old and must have been used before. There were no fresh marks on the top where the compartment opening was, and the metal was old and rusted. It sounded like somebody in the smuggling organization had gotten greedy, or incautious, or both. Another facet of this seizure went beyond the odd to the disturbing. Though the tank had as much marijuana as the dash, and was actually open on the top to outside air, neither Goodwin's or Van Why's dogs alerted to the gas tank. Even after the tank had been found to be loaded--but before it was removed to the lift and dropped--Van Why's Fenway still did not alert. Van Why brought the dog back to car, tried to point him towards the tank, but the dog still only wanted to go for the dash--and that after the dope had been removed from the dash, but still was in the tank. Now just what in the devil did that all mean?

A sobering thought. Had Chico alerted to the tank in the first place, there is a strong possibility that the dash load might have been missed. Another sobering thought. The load car had come through a few days earlier through a particularly obnoxious and almost universally disliked port character assassin's lane. It was a good bet it was loaded then. I was sorely tempted to blast him about it. But missing loads was something that we all knew happened to everyone, and no one really wanted to know the specifics about themselves. Including me. I have no idea where they came up with the statistics, but Customs told us that the line inspectors caught 10-30% of the loads. That meant that for every load car that was caught, six to nine went blissfully down the road uncaught.. Lingering over those statistics could drive you nuts. No one is exempt from those uncomfortable statistics. I choose not to say anything to the guy. The next time it might be me. Besides....I'd damn near missed the loaded gas tank myself.

If had missed the gas tank load, it probably would have been found during one of the periodic sweeps the K-9 units did of the seizure lot. You can bet I would have heard about that. But what if those K-9's, both good dogs, who swept the seizure lot also missed the tank load, as had Van Why's and Goodwin's actually had? Then somebody who bought the old car at a Customs auction a while later might have been in for a real big surprise.

Which actually happened at the port not long after that.

One evening a curious and improbable chain of events unfolded at San Luis that left us with a mixture of surprise and disgust by the time it ended. It began when a Mexican plated Chevy Astro van was referred to secondary because all of its previous crossings had been at the huge and crazily busy port of entry south of San Diego, San Ysidro. The secondary officer was muscular longtime National Guardsman and multi-ethnic (Mexican and Native American) Customs Inspector Francisco 'Pancho' Soto. Pancho noticed that the passenger side panel above the running board was very hard. He took the driver and passenger--a middle-aged, ordinary looking Mexican couple--inside the adjacent Customs secondary building while he asked CEO Adam Chavez to run his dog Cabo on the car. Chavez did, and Cabo alerted to the vehicle and responded about as strongly as it is possible for a dog to do. Cabo actually crawled under the van--despite the Astro being a low slung vehicle--and began to bite at the bottom. Chavez had a hard time getting the dog out, having to literally drag him out by his collar. A super nova couldn't have been any more obvious. The Astro was loaded.

Pancho and other officers patted the man and woman down and put them in detention cells. Adam and Pancho took the van back to the rear of the lot to the intensive inspection area and drove the Chevy onto a hydraulic lift and raised it a few feet. They looked at the vent holes in the natural compartment behind the bottom panel of the van and saw they were filled with Styrofoam. No packages were visible. Pancho and Adam probed the holes. Nothing. But they kept at it, knowing something had to be there. The overwhelmingly intense alert by a superb drug dog like Cabo with a handler equally as good made it a foregone conclusion. Pancho got a drill from the tool shed and pushed the bit into the metal compartment at a different spot. He hit a marijuana package right away. Nothing unusual so far. Apparently just another marijuana load. But, when the marijuana was removed from the compartment, things began to get strange. The marijuana was very hard. Too hard. As though it had been baked. These were marijuana bricks that actually did seem like genuine bricks. Pancho and Adam looked at each other quizzically. Something was wrong.

"This is old dope", Adam finally said with some confusion. The marijuana had been in the van for a while. Maybe quite a while. It wasn't even in the distant neighborhood of being fresh. Soto queried the vehicle's history and found under the VIN--Vehicle Identification Number--that the van had been a load vehicle previously seized in El Paso. 150 pounds of marijuana was removed from it then. The Astro van was later released for sale at a government auction. The man driving the van--who, to make things that much worse, turned out to be an ordained minister--had bought the vehicle at an auction without the slightest idea that the van had a number of marijuana packages still hidden in it. He was in fact totally innocent. The minister and his wife were brought back out of the detention cells and profusely apologized to while the supervisor on duty explained to them what had happened. At this point the minister was probably mostly just relieved it had all been a mistake. But, mistake or not, the dope was still dope and had to processed as an ordinary seizure.

We were doing just that and were about to release the van back to the minister. A couple of fairly new officers--Fernando Castillo and Ronnie Mann Jr.--were out doing the routine mandated inventory of the vehicle for Soto while Pancho was inside hurrying to finish the seizure paperwork. Adam Chavez just happened to be going by the Chevy with Cabo when the dog pulled him over to the van. But not to the panel where the marijuana had been. Things were about to go from bad to worse. Cabo went up under the dash and threw another strong alert. Castillo pulled the dash apart and found more packages, while Mann Jr. pulled down the roof upholstery looking for more marijuana. As new and inexperienced officers, the excitement of the moment grabbed them and they pretty well trashed the vehicle. Soto soon heard about it and came out to the van. He tried running the air conditioning system and found there was no air flow through the vents. Pancho opened up the vent system and found even more packages. By now the damage to the vehicle was pretty extensive. When Customs had finished with the Chevy, the minister was outraged over the van's trashed condition and refused to accept it without some kind of compensation. And who could blame him for that? This guy was a genuine innocent. He was the only load driver I ever saw who without a shadow of a doubt wasn't a real load driver by the wildest stretch of anyone's imagination.

But that was not all. Customs, like much of the government, was a finger pointing Blame Game agency. A bunch of office sitters from San Luis on to Nogales and Tucson were about to try to blame Soto for everything, even though the original seizing port of El Paso was really the source of the mess. And that did not even touch on the subject of how the van had come through San Ysidro so many times and not been busted. The bean counters were getting very upset over the possibility of having to pay out a couple of thousand dollars on a tort claim for vehicle damage, way out of proportion to the importance of the event. It was the kind of thing that made inspectors cynical and bitter towards the desk jockey bureaucrats. We, as the guys wearing the boots on the ground, had the same kind of disdain towards the desk jockeys as front line soldiers did towards rear area troops. I was the union steward present at the time, so I went in with Soto to represent him during the initial interview by management. The following day Soto and several National guardsmen assigned to Customs at San Luis worked on getting the vehicle back in shape. I thought they did a pretty passable job. It was over. Pancho learned a lesson from this one. Keep firm control of your load vehicle and don't let anyone mess with it without your direct permission.

And the need to check and double check loaded vehicles for missed dope got a quantum jump reinforcement permanently seared into our brains.

We wanted freedom from Communist Cuba--freedom--to be ourselves--to be criminals

### Chapter 24

### The Las Vegas Connection

It was 6:30 on what promised to be a typically spectacular desert sunset June evening. As the sun began to set, the usual depressing barren deep desert look of the sea level country around San Luis shaded into a mesmerizing scene reminiscent of when Dorothy woke from her black and white dream into the multicolored world of the land of Oz. That's the way San Luis was. Barren tedium. And then, seemingly out of nowhere---blam! In this instance the blam! came in the form of a blue Nevada plated 1992 Daihatsu that drove up to San Luis' lane number two. Inspector E.K. Cannon was manning the lane. A quiet, affable black New Mexican who came to Customs after surviving Viet Nam and thirty years in the Marine Corps, Cannon had a careful eye. He thought the group of four in the car seemed out of place. The two young men and two young women were from Las Vegas and told the skeptical Cannon they had come to San Luis just to visit. E.K. suspected otherwise. Visit impoverished, ramshackle San Luis? From Las Vegas? He referred them to secondary and was just calling back on the port telephone system to advise of their approach when he saw the car hesitate next to secondary, then continue on through the exit without pulling into the secondary lot. Cannon's law enforcement border antennae went into red alert. Port runner!

Just then K-9 handler Don Trusty was coming up to primary. Trusty was another retired U.S. Marine and had also brought the military characteristic of situational awareness into his Customs career. He immediately picked up on what was happening, pulled his portable radio from the holder on his utility belt and notified nearby law enforcement agencies of the fleeing Daihatsu. At the same time that he was doing that, Cannon was on the intercom advising the secondary inspectors of the fleeing vehicle.

The Daihatsu had picked the wrong time and place to make a run for it. Just a few moments later, while we were still mentally digesting what had happened, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles came driving slowly from the north with their flashers going full tilt like a laser light show at a rock concert. The San Luis Police and the Border Patrol had caught the Daihatsu and several of their cruisers were convoying the vehicle back to the port. A half dozen jacked-up but wary inspectors went to meet the vehicle, two of them carrying Stop Sticks--a long, triangular device containing spikes that will puncture a tire when run over--in case the vehicle attempted to flee for Mexico. We were half expecting the Daihatsu to make a wild dash for the border. That might sound like something out of the movies, but it really did sometimes happen on the border.

Not this time. It didn't happen. The convoy of Border Patrol and San Luis Police vehicles escorted the Daihatsu into the secondary lot where it dutifully and anticlimactically parked. We went up to the car and driver Anabel Zamora launched into an extemporaneous attempt at defense--she hadn't understood what Cannon had instructed her to do. Maybe. Such misunderstandings did actually sometimes occur. But that didn't explain the disappearance of the referral slip E.K. had slipped under the Daihatsu's windshield wiper. It was gone. Gone with the wind? Or gone because Zamora grabbed it off the windshield?

Like Cannon in his initial primary assessment, we didn't think this group of young folks were what they claimed to be--just ordinary tourists who didn't understand border procedures. Hard experience had taught us not to jump to conclusions, but there was not one among us who didn't think some kind enforcement action was about to happen. All four of the individuals were taken into the secondary office while Trusty ran his sturdy K-9 Rock on the car.

While Trusty was running the vehicle, I began interviewing the two men in the group. One, George Gonzalez, claimed he was Cuban and was a naturalized American citizen. The other man, Abraham Pulido, claimed to be an American citizen of Mexican ancestry. Neither of these two guys had any identification of any kind on them. Coming through an international border with no identification? And not just one, but two of them? Sure seemed like they were hiding their real identities. Which brought up a pair of likelihoods. Either they were not the U.S. citizens they claimed to be. Or they were fugitives. I wrote down their names and birth dates and did a name search in the Customs computer database. I was a touch surprised to see George Gonzalez' name immediately come back as having a NCIC--National Crime Information Center--warrant out for his arrest. The originating office of the warrant was Las Vegas. The Las Vegas charges were for trafficking in methamphetamine. Had this guy with no ID given me his correct name and date of birth? Thinking that this might be a different person, George Gonzalez being a long bloody way from being an unusual name, I double-checked. It was positive. The identity was confirmed by physical description, mother's maiden name and, the ultimate game winner, by social security number. There was going to be at least one major arrest out of this.

A little further checking found that there was also a warrant out for a man named Abraham Pulido, but under a different date of birth than given by the guy who said his name was Abraham Pulido. I couldn't at first confirm this one way or the other by SSN or other means. But he appeared to us to be lying, so we had INS do a check on him. Unlike us, INS had the technical capability to take fingerprints and run them through the national fingerprint databases. We often called on them to verify the identities of suspects. In this case, though, they were able to come up with the information on Pulido even before the fingerprint check came back. INS found that Pulido had a very long and very serious criminal history and had been previously deported. Now get ready for some mind numbing government hoo-hah. Pulido, being a Cuban, couldn't actually be deported. He had to be given a waiver and allowed to remain in the U.S. The deportable criminal alien couldn't be deported because he was a Cuban criminal alien. At least that was the way the INS officer explained it.

Both of these guys were burly, sturdy types. Thickset and powerful looking, being perhaps 5'10" and tipping the scales over 200 pounds. If they had decided to fight somebody likely would have been hurt. We were willing to mix it up if we had to, but we were Customs officers, not street cops, and physical confrontations at the port were fairly infrequent. There were a number of tough former Marines among us, so Pulido and Gonzalez would have likely been in for a rough time of it if they'd decided to try to fight their way free. They didn't. The pair of sturdy dudes submitted peacefully to being patted down and secured in detention cells. Even so, it was with a sigh of relief that we turned the keys on the locks of the detention cells behind them.

This was not the end of the evening's events. The other way around. It was just the beginning. CEO Trusty hurried in while the men were being patted down with the unsurprising news that his dog had alerted to the vehicle. Though a number of officers were involved with the Daihatsu, I became the secondary officer more or less through default. Meaning nobody else wanted to do the tedious hours long paperwork involved with a narcotics seizure. Inspector Tom Schmunk came in a little later and said that he'd seen packages in the fender well. I went out to the car and used a Buster on it, but didn't get readings beyond the middle range of 40's to 50's. 50's readings usually meant loads. But, once in a great while, they didn't. Though Tom was hands down the best inspector we had at the port and I trusted him implicitly, this was going to be my seizure and I was obligated to see the dope with my own eyes. So I took a look at the plastic lining inside the fender well. The screws had recently been removed and it was just as Tom had said. By prying back the edge of the lining I could see packages inside the fender. About that time Don Trusty brought out a field test kit and I cut into a package, retrieving the mantric green leafy substance ubiquitous to official seizure narratives. The substance, of course, field tested positive for marijuana when the chemicals in the test kit went to the familiar positive purple. I drove the Daihatsu back to the screened search area in the rear of secondary where a well worn hydraulic lift and a shed full of tools metallically awaited their imminent use. I left the car there, behind a closed, screened gate, while we waited for a Customs special agent to respond to the port.

After the case agent arrived and he had finished preliminary interviews with the four suspects, Trusty, myself and the agent--the rock solid Steve Mercado--went out to the car and began to search it thoroughly. We found packages of marijuana in the front passenger side fender, but not in the driver side, although the screws there showed clear indications of having been recently removed. A computer check showed that the car had come through San Luis just a week earlier, so we thought it likely that it had also been loaded then and that the driver's side fender, now empty, had been loaded during the earlier run. Another factor to consider, and we knew that the smugglers did think of things like this, was that a primary officer with a Buster was much more likely to check the driver side fender than the passenger side.

We also found packages in both rear doors. We searched some more and found no more and were starting to think that was probably it. Not so. Things were about to change when I opened up the trunk and pulled back the lining on the sides. More packages were visible on both sides. We took the packages out of the passenger's side first. Then, as we started on the driver side packages we stopped in our tracks. A pair of odd shaped smaller packages were stuck up behind the gas tank filler pipe. I pulled them out and instantly had that border got one! high. These two little packages were very hard to the touch. Much more so than pliable semi-spongy packages of marijuana. Hard drugs. I took out my knife and carefully cut into one of these packages. White powder. Either cocaine or methamphetamine. Probably the latter considering that Gonzalez already had an NCIC want on a methamphetamine charge.

We took the drugs to the secondary office and weighed them. 27.9 pounds of marijuana. The two little packages weighed 1.1 pounds and tested positive for methamphetamine. Not a whopping seizure for sure, but not a trifling amount for San Luis at that time. It made a fairly small seizure into one of some consequence, for methamphetamine was of great interest to the agents because its abuse was exploding everywhere. When special agent Steve Mercado saw the methamphetamine, he instantly reevaluated the case and called down more agents. Two others showed up, and the three of them spent a lot of time interviewing the four suspects. It turned out that three of the four apparently were Cubans, and that Pulido might possibly have more than one identity. At the very least his fingerprints confirmed him to be a previously deported alien with a long criminal record.

This group of four was by no means a scummy looking bunch. As we so often observed of drug smugglers, they were clean cut and looked like workaday ordinary people. This particular group actually looked and acted like prosperous, even gregarious, middle class young people. Driving a fairly nice car of relatively recent vintage--three or four years old--confirmed that impression. If they'd had local plates and passed themselves off as being locals, they might well have made it through. And they probably did. At least, somebody probably did. The computer record showed that someone had passed through the port successfully a week earlier in the same car.

Mercado and crew arrested all four of the people in the car. I wasn't privy to much of what was going on, but it appeared that the group had at least some involvement in the management of a smuggling ring. Both men had long and serious criminal histories. This was one of those infrequent times when the people who were caught smuggling drugs were something other than mere hapless cash starved mules. Of the four, the two women, Anabel Zamora and Cecily Higginbotham, were convicted of lesser marijuana violations and didn't have to do hard prison time. Abraham Pulido drew a two year sentence in the state prison for marijuana smuggling. George Gonzales was convicted of smuggling the methamphetamine. His fate was very likely much harder and he probably ended up in a federal prison.

But the evening wasn't over yet. A second car came into secondary not long after the Daihatsu. In it were two men, one of them 'gringo looking'. This car also was from Las Vegas. A K-9 alerted on it and Tom Schmunk found marijuana debris in the car. Debris, but not enough to do much about it. The resolutely determined Tom Schmunk was not about to give up easily. He was convinced there had to be a connection between the two cars. Tom kept digging until he finally found a receipt on one of the men from a motel in San Luis. On the receipt was the name of Anabel Zamora--the woman who was the driver of the loaded Daihatsu. Tom's persistence had found the connection. Finding no warrants for their arrests, but knowing the criminal histories and fugitive status of the two men in the Daihatsu, Tom sent this pair to US Immigration to check their status. Maybe they were also deported criminal aliens. Or maybe a fingerprint check would turn up a different identity. Tom's suspicions were confirmed when the gringo-looking dude broke away from the INS office and managed to jackrabbit back into Mexico. This irritated the hell out of Tom, who was muttering about Immigration screw ups for the rest of the night. He got no argument from me. Just about the same thing had happened to me more than once. We both knew there wasn't much we did that was any more frustrating than to work hard to make a righteous pop and then have some half assed fellow officer screw it up by either cluelessly missing what was going on by slothfully losing an absconder.

What the hell could you do when your own coworkers were the problem?

Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it.

Mark Twain

### Chapter 25

### Big Ed

"Big Ed got lucky at the casino", Fernando Castillo said. "Won a couple of thousand bucks."

"Again?" I replied in a mixture of admiration and amazement. My own experience with casinos was anything but positive. I might as well just take out a match and set my money on fire and save the effort of losing it a little at a time. Besides, the cacophonous hubbub and cancerous clouds of cigarette smoke of the casinos didn't exactly make them my favorite place to hang out. But not Big Ed. He thrived on the atmosphere of the casinos. And he was good at it, too. As his frequent winning attested.

Or so it seemed.

Big Ed was called Big Ed because he was. Big. Ed. Edward George McCandlish III, out of New Jersey. He was in the Army during the First Gulf War where he lugged around a machine gun on his broad shoulders. Ed was about 6'3", a muscularly lean weight lifter, and single. He had dark curly hair and was a good looking late twenties man in the full prime of life. The señoritas salivated over him. Ed never seemed to lack for female companionship. I once had a car drive up to my lane from the Mexican side of San Luis and the pretty young woman driver ask whether 'Beeg Ed' was there. Ed had found a cheap place to live near work and, with lots of overtime, was making a comfortable salary as a journeyman line inspector in a relatively low cost of living area in Yuma County. There were Indian casinos nearby in both Arizona and California where Ed could indulge his passion for gambling. The big gambling meccas in Nevada were within an easy day's drive as well. Ed had it made.

Or, again, at least that's the way it seemed.

I worked with Ed for two or three years at San Luis. He was the first inspector I met when I transferred in from Bermuda. We were always on friendly terms .Ed had the reputation of being a very good dope man. He regularly pulled down sizeable loads from the constant stream of cars entering the Arizona Port of San Luis from Mexico. Generally, we liked and respected him, though Ed was definitely on the unpolished side. At times he seemed to be dull and crude, but then he'd surprise you. Like the time the subject of old Film Noir movies came up during the wee hours one winter night before the early morning crush of farm workers in their ancient rust bucket cars hit us. Ed astonished me with his intimate knowledge and appraisal of old actors and films like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. I thought this other side of Ed was pretty cool. I like it when people surprise you with unforeseen insights and depth. Makes life more interesting and puts flesh onto the bare bones of humanity. But not always.

Sometimes that flesh turns out to be necrotized.

There was the day we found the photos. An alarm bell should have gone off in my thick head that day, but I only managed to hear a faint buzzer. A couple of young Hispanic men were referred to secondary for an Immigration check. They parked in the secondary lot and, since it was a more or less routine check, were directed by Troy 'Big Bird' Palmer to walk across the exiting traffic lane to the nearby INS office. The two headed for the INS office. As they neared the door to the INS building, one of the two suddenly exploded in movement and hotfooted it for Mexico. There was the usual chaotic yelling and scrambling attempted pursuit. No one could react quickly enough. The guy sprinted the several dozen feet to the border and vanished. Hardly an unusual sight for us. Some of the absconders were so blasted fast that it seemed the Mexican National Athletic Association ought to station someone at the border and grab the homebound sprinters and recruit them for the National Track Team.

The Olympic Sprinter got everybody's attention. People don't just go suddenly blasting off from us on the border just because they're overcome with an extemporaneous urge to go for a good brisk run. The guy had been in a Ford Bronco. Some of us went over to it and began searching the vehicle. The driver of the Bronco, who was also the owner, was in our custody. Either he hadn't run or he'd been caught. The guy was detained while we tried to figure out what was going on. It didn't take long before we figured out part of it. In the back of the Bronco was a backpack. In the backpack was a plastic bag. And in the plastic bag were a couple of pounds of marijuana. Not much dope. Not by our dope drenched border standards. Just a couple pounds. Yet that was probably enough to make a guy boogie off for Mexico before we found the stuff. But that wasn't all. We found something else. Photos. Among them was one that showed Ed McCandlish along with at least one of the two men who had been in the Bronco. And to give the incident even a touch more of the border Byzantine, it turned out that the dude who owned the Bronco was the brother-in-law of another San Luis Customs Inspector, Luz Galarza.

Luz was a local, and those kinds of complicated border relationships were to be expected with locals. I doubt very much if anyone suspected Luz of anything. Alarm bells actually might have gone off about Ed with some folks. But not in my thick head. At first I was stuck on his reputation as a good dope man. How did that jibe with being corrupted? But then I started to notice a certain sloppiness to his work, despite the fact he was still pulling in plenty of loads. The subject never really jelled with me one way or the other, but the Ed book was far from closed in my mind.

Time passed. Ed decided he'd had enough of the border. He got both management and the union to back him on a requested transfer to Miami. No problem. Miami was a huge multi-faceted Customs facility with a constant personnel gobbling hunger for more bodies. Ed had a good reputation among us. He got his transfer. We bade him farewell and he was on his way, one among many other officers transferred to and from the border to other Customs locations. I lost contact with him after that, but every once in a while heard a snippet of news about him from other inspectors. Things seemed to be going well for him in Miami. His face was fading away, becoming just another opaque memory in the kaleidoscope of faces who continually passed through the border. Then it happened. I don't recall for sure, but again it might have been Fernando Castillo who laid the bombshell on me. The fading opaque memory of Ed blossomed in luminous confusion. Who really was Big Ed, anyway? He had been busted. In Miami.

For drug smuggling.

I went online and found a Miami Herald article on part of what had happened. One day in October of 2000 he was followed home from work by special agents. They busted him. Ed was hauled off and thrown in the slammer. He was held in jail until an indictment was unsealed in early January. Big Ed had been caught in a sting that read like a movie script. Special agents obviously had information that Ed might be corrupt and set up an elaborate scheme to catch him. An undercover operative posing as a narcotics trafficker cut a deal with Ed where the guy would come through Customs in Miami from South America with 15 kilos of cocaine. Ed would be paid $15,000 to let the dope pass. He also agreed to let 25 more kilos pass at a later date. Supposedly the sting went so far as to actually fly the undercover operative to South America and then fly the operative back to Miami. I have no idea how this worked in a big, frenetic place like the Miami international arrival terminal, but somehow Ed passed the guy through Customs with what he believed to be 15 kilos of cocaine. The operative didn't actually have the cocaine, but Ed thought he did. Nor did Ed actually receive the promised $15,000. It was what Ed's lawyer called "a dry conspiracy". Within a couple of weeks he was arrested and thrown in jail. And it wasn't just the cocaine. Ed allegedly had also sold or given Rohypnol (the date rape drug), Ecstasy (the party drug) and Valium to undercover agents. Big trouble for Big Ed.

I wasn't able to track down the court records of the final disposition of Big Ed's case, so I contacted Ed's defense lawyer in Miami, Yale Galanter. Galanter is the same guy who popped up on national T.V. in Las Vegas in 2008 as O.J. Simpson's defense lawyer. Galanter's reply to my query about Ed's fate? Typical lawyerese.

"We worked out a deal that Ed was pleased with."

After this book was first published in 2009 I heard from another former inspector, Frank Alshouse, who said that Ed was hit with a four or five year prison sentence.

The following is an excerpt from a statement made by James Wong, the head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Professional Responsibility in San Diego.

"The smugglers have binoculars and spotters, you name it," said Wong. "They scan the line looking for a weak inspector, someone, for example, who likes to flirt with women. And then they will send a test person, a chatty female. She shows up and says, 'My friend needs to visit a doctor, but she doesn't have papers, can you help?' They will get friendly, and before you know it, they own the employee."

I remember the pretty young girls looking for "Beeg Ed". Looks like they might have found him. Somebody found him. Big Ed stepped into a real life Film Noir movie of his own making. And, thinking back to his love of those old Film Noir flicks, maybe that wasn't such a big surprise after all. Despite everything, I still like Big Ed. Maybe it was because in my younger days I got uncomfortably close myself to that very fine line between the light and the dark side. I backed off from it.

Big Ed didn't.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

### Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the dumbest of them all?

It was in the late 90's. One of those mild, sun spangled southwestern Arizona March days when a winter battered Minnesota native like me wanted to get down on my knees and thank the Good Lord for Arizona in the wintertime. Nice day for me. But not for the lady in the BMW. She was a 49 year old Anglo woman from San Diego driving a California plated silver 1980 BMW. The woman drove the BMW up to Customs Inspector John Bilotti's lane. Bilotti, an alert Italian American from the greater New York City megapolis, a former soldier and Cochise County Sheriff's deputy, asked her a few questions and decided that "....her story was bullshit". The car did not belong to her. She had borrowed it to come to San Luis to go to the dentist and save $3000 in dental bills. From San Diego? Why not drive the few miles from San Diego to Tijuana where there were bunches of Mexican dentists eager for American clients? Instead she drives a couple hundred miles to dusty dentist challenged San Luis? That kind of story bought an instant one way ticket to the secondary lot and a thorough search.

Bilotti tapped on the quarter panels. They felt way too hard. That did it. John walked the BMW back to secondary where he handed it off to the closest inspector, tubby Chris Bassett, a man who was unhappy with Customs work and always saying there was no good reason for him to be on the border. Bilotti handed the usually diffident Basset the referral slip and Basset got a brain sizzling barnburner of a reason to be there in another of those explosive Whoa-Buddy! border moments. Chris got a big shot of border reality in a hurry. 207 pounds worth of border reality. 207 pounds worth of _cocaine_ border reality.

The aging BMW was loaded to the gills with cocaine. It was all over the place. In the quarter panels where Bilotti had tapped and felt hardness, under the rear seat, behind the rear seat, even in the back of the front seat. The hopelessly clueless gringa driver decided she would invoke the Fifth Amendment. The previous week a lookout had been posted for a silver or gray 1987 BMW with California plates supposedly carrying cocaine. This had to be the lookout vehicle. The source of the lookout was one of the most reliable of the agents. We all had to ponder this one. This was a large, very high dollar load of cocaine. Millions of dollars worth. Wasn't this a suspiciously inept choice of a driver and a 'story' for such a load? It was like preparing a gourmet meal and then serving it with Gatorade. The size of the load--207 pounds of cocaine--had to point at a professional smuggling organization. But the particulars of the load? They were rankly amateurish. It didn't make any bloody sense. This really was a strange one.

Then things got even stranger. The next day a man came into primary looking for his car. This guy said he was the owner of the BMW seized the day before. What? The owner and he was looking for his car? The same car we'd caught with 207 pounds of cocaine in it? What the hell was with this guy? Did he just take a header off the dumb truck? I don't know the particulars of what happened with him, but did hear that he was held for awhile, then eventually let go. I wasn't there at the time and only heard a vague account of what happened. Not much detail to what I heard. But then this same guy showed up yet again the next day in the car lanes driving another car and verified that he had indeed taken a header off the dumb truck. At least one inspector, A.J. Chavez, an energetic and alert dog handler who often roamed the car lanes with or without his K-9, recognized him. The man drove up to the lane manned by Immigration Inspector Gus Ramirez--an officer who himself would one day himself be busted for narcotics smuggling. Chavez spotted the guy and went over to Ramirez' lane. Apparently at Chavez' urging, the man admitted to being the owner of the seized BMW from the day before. That automatically sent him to secondary. Ramirez offered his after-the-fact assessment that this guy's story, too, "....was bullshit".

In the secondary lot Adam Chavez was running his K-9 on another vehicle when his dog Cabo, a superb and very strong drug dog, pulled away from the vehicle Adam was working him on and literally dragged Chavez over to the one sent back by Ramirez. We could hardly believe it. The car was loaded! Seizing officer Frank Alshouse later pulled 66 pounds of marijuana from it. The hopelessly inept driver was a perfect match for the clueless Anglo woman driving the loaded BWM. The dude was stoned on Rohypnol. He had one tablet on him and admitted to having taken others before crossing. I think we were all surprised by the extreme bumbling amateurishness of this guy, especially considering his connection to the high dollar cocaine load. Again, it just didn't add up.

Not then. Not to me. I was still not very border savvy. But since then at least a half dozen officers I knew at San Luis have been convicted of passing loads. In retrospect, it seems a solid bet that an internal conspiracy--meaning a corrupt officer--very likely might have been involved with these loads. The male load driver came through Gus Ramirez' lane and Ramirez would later do prison time for passing loads. And it was the roving Adam Chavez, not Ramirez, who recognized the driver and was instrumental in the car being sent to secondary. The female cocaine load driver in the BMW might have mistakenly gotten into the wrong lane and come face to face with the decidedly uncorrupt John Bilotti. Her dumbass story made sense if the reality was that she expected to be passed safely through the port without inspection by a different officer. From a distance Bilotti and Ramirez, along with several others at the port, looked very similar. But it's still just conjecture. To us, the line officers. There are those who know. The smugglers and maybe our own agents. And this thought lingers in my mind. Those half dozen people I knew at San Luis who were later busted for corruption?

I didn't suspect any of them.

Not long after this was another day for clueless narcotics traffickers. The first was a kid who had stolen his mother's car. Since the same kid had been busted several months earlier at San Luis attempting to smuggle marijuana, and had spent some time in the county jail over it, his mother probably didn't jump with maternal jubilation over him ripping off her car. She reported it stolen and it was entered in the TECS computer system as a NCIC stolen vehicle. When the kid--a chunky, light haired gringo around eighteen years old--came through primary, the car popped up on the screen as an NCIC stolen vehicle after the primary inspector entered the plate number in the computer. Officers responded to the TECS hit on primary and the kid protested that it was his mother's car and that it really wasn't stolen. It was really just a family squabble. Well, that was possible. We'd seen it before. We didn't know yet that the innocent acting kid was actually a prior load driver. And TECS hits didn't always turn out to be accurate. So we took the car to the secondary lot, plunked the kid in the secondary office and set to figuring out just was going on.

It was routine to run a K-9 on an NCIC stolen vehicle, so the portly but very quick witted and agile CEO Ron Van Why did his run on the car with his keen nosed drug dog, Fenway. Perhaps to the surprise of the inspectors--the kid was after all driving his mother's car--Fenway alerted to the car. The bumbling chunky kid confessed almost immediately, admitting that he had twenty kilos of marijuana. And that was what it was, forty-some pounds of marijuana hidden in the spare tire well and stuffed into the trunk liners of the car. Within just a few months, this kid had made two bungled criminal attempts at smuggling dope through San Luis. This kid didn't have the sense of a sack of wet beans. He wasn't exactly looking at a bright future as a drug smuggler. Nor was his long suffering mother likely to have been any too happy with him, either.

This was another TECS hit. Several of us responded to lane 6, where the hit had registered. Senior Immigration Inspector Campos was out on the lane, along with a man hovering next to an aging Ford LTD. The man, an older person dressed in the rough clothes of a farm worker, was standing next to Campos while the officer wrote out a referral slip. I was the second officer to reach the area, but the first, Steve Ponce--a former Yuma County Sheriff's deputy who came to Customs because it "...paid three times the money." over the Sheriff's Department--was still circling around behind the car in his cautious former cop wary way. If the guy tried to split for Mexico, the athletic Ponce would have laid him out. Otherwise, it was playing out like the typical TECS hit that we saw just about every day. We responded to the hit, took control of the car and driver and followed up with whatever enforcement action was appropriate. More often than not that meant no action. Most TECS hits were duds that sailed off into the enforcement sunset without any action. So we didn't get real fired up about them.

But some were different. This was one of them. This TECS vehicle had broken down in front of primary. Campos said it sat there for a while before the driver got someone to help push it through. Push a TECS hit up to the primary booth? It seemed wildly improbable that a man would have a load car break down on him in front of primary and then have the chutzpah to push the damn thing through. But, as I walked up to Campos and looked at the guy, I noticed that he had that veiled apprehensive kind of look to him that was associated with many of the drug smugglers we encountered. Though TECS hits more often than not proved not to be loaded, the guy's behavior made me feel reasonably sure that this was a load vehicle. I was the closest, so Campos handed me the referral slip. But Ponce had really been there first. So I handed it to him and Steve became the seizing officer. We took the stone faced driver into the secondary office and Steve took the old LTD back to the secondary lot. Don Trusty ran the Ford with his dog, Rock. The K-9 alerted to the gas tank. Steve and Don took the LTD back into the screened lift area at the rear of the secondary lot and hoisted the vehicle up on the hydraulic lift. They quickly found the compartment in the gas tank, saw packages inside it and promptly called the duty agent.

After an agent arrived they opened the compartment in the gas tank, took a sample and field tested it. Marijuana. A total of around fifty pounds. The compartment was the opposite of what we usually saw in gas tanks. The smugglers had taken a small tank of about two gallons capacity and fitted it inside the regular gas tank. The little tank was hooked up to the gas line, and the bulk of the gasless gas tank was filled with marijuana. Steve called it 'a cheesy job'. I didn't hear whether the older man driving the Ford confessed or not. He undoubtedly was just a mule. Somebody down on his luck, desperate for cash, or just lazy or maybe greedy, who had agreed to take a risk. How many times after we popped him had he wished he had just walked away back into Mexico and left the car in front of primary after it stalled?

I had to wonder about this worn down, hard times guy. What in the world went through his mind when he made the decision to push the load car up to the primary booth? He had no idea that the Ford was a TECS hit and that the steamroller of fate was about to roll him over. What was he planning on doing if he got the Ford past the primary officer? Call a tow truck? Push it down the road to wherever the drop off location was? Get somebody to push or pull him there? Borrow our phone to call up the smugglers and ask them what he should do next? Or maybe his thinking was moving along a whole different path. Like wondering what the smuggling organization would do to a load driver who screwed up. This guy had been stuck in smugglers' limbo. He was stalled outside primary, but still in the U.S., with a load car that wouldn't start. What to do? Walk away and have to face some grim faced and very unsympathetic smugglers? Or cross his fingers and try to make it through with the dope?

He probably made the right choice.

I was nearby at another time when Steve Ponce had another rattle brained load driver. This guy was way over the hill blitzed. He drove blind drunk up to Ponce's primary lane. Steve was a former deputy sheriff who'd been involved with numerous DUI's. He also had all too often seen the bloody and sometimes fatal results of drunken behavior. The hard eyed Ponce wasn't likely to cut a drunk any slack. This guy was toast from the beginning. The procedure at San Luis was to send a suspect DUI vehicle to secondary, where the San Luis Police Department--or, sometimes, the Yuma County Sheriff's Office--would be called and an officer would respond to physically administer the DUI test. Steve might have just referred the car to secondary for a DUI test and be done with it. But he was often a thorough and effective officer, and he did a quick primary check of the vehicle before sending it back to secondary and the eventual sure DUI arrest of the chemically addled driver. Steve started checking out the car. There was an unsealed cardboard box in the back seat. Steve took a curious peek inside. I think he actually jumped back in utter surprise. The box was full of marijuana packages.

Steve later told me the story. The guy was supposed to drive the car to a location in San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico, where the marijuana packages would be loaded in the gas tank for a cross border smuggling attempt. Steve checked out the gas tank and saw that it indeed was set up for smuggling, with a compartment taking up most of the gas tank and an access plate to it underneath the back seat. Since it hadn't been loaded up yet, there was nothing in the compartment. The dope was still in the cardboard box in the back seat when the befuddled drunk drove up to Ponce's lane. But what really set the usually laconic Steve to chuckling was that the driver had stopped to lift a glass or two on his way to have the dope loaded into the tank. One or two turned in one or two too many. He got himself pretty well blitzed before continuing on to the dope shop. He got drunk. He got lost. He took a wrong turn. And ended up eyeball to eyeball with Steve Ponce. The feckless drunk didn't even know he'd driven into the U.S. Like they say in the public service ads on TV.

Drinking and driving don't mix.

I was on the San Luis pedestrian gate when a Hispanic dude sidled up to me and said he wanted to talk to someone in Customs. He didn't show me an ID. At first he was very vague and talked in Spanish about having been 'unfairly' deported from the US. That sounded like an INS matter to me, and I told the guy as much. Then the guy did a magical transformation into pretty good English and bluntly informed me that he wanted to trade being a snitch for regaining his resident status. That put a whole different complexion on things. I took the guy into the Customs secondary office where the duty senior notified OI, the Office of Investigations. A while later seasoned border veteran Special Agent David Fry responded to the port and began to question the would be informant.

The guy told the agent his name was Solis. Fry did a routine query of the man's name and found that the guy had an active felony warrant out for his arrest from Maricopa County in Phoenix. He went from being an almost snitch to a free trip to the local slammer. I later heard that Solis apparently was wanted on charges relating to the sale of heroin, and that he very well might have been high on the drug when he came into his unhappy conjunction with U.S. Customs. He probably knew there was a warrant out on him. He would have had to have had some pretty high powered inside information to sidestep a felony warrant for a previously deported felon. He apparently convinced himself he did. He didn't.

Heroin use doesn't isn't known to contribute greatly to lucid reasoning.

Behind an able man there are always other able men.

Chinese Proverb

### The Day Of The Big Loads

It was a sun battered August Saturday. Miserable, 110 and rising, beat you down hot, as the lower Colorado River Valley almost always was in the summertime. We used to joke that if you died in San Luis and went to hell you wouldn't know the difference. To which others might respond that someone from San Luis would probably ask the Devil to turn off the air conditioning. Yet in the midst of this stifling midsummer heat at the Port of San Luis things were going to get even hotter. All hell was about to break loose. The smugglers ran a blitz on us. In little more than half a day five loads of dope were caught and God knows how many others got through.

The opening play of the game was pretty routine. A single fifty pounder. One fifty pounder was more or less a typical load day. This marijuana fifty pounder came through in the morning towards the end of the midnight to eight shift. Later that same day, between noon and four PM, three more loads were caught. Two of these loads were not the typical San Luis marijuana fifty pounders. One was 110 pounds of methamphetamine in the gas tank of a newer model Ford pickup, another was 75 pounds of cocaine in the gas tank of a car, the other fifty-some pounds of marijuana hidden in several places in a car, including a tire. In the early evening another 95 pounds of cocaine was caught, again in a gas tank, this time in a Chevy Astro van. I was working the four to midnight shift, so the only one of the five that I actually saw happen was the Astro van cocaine load.

These loads were not the semi-amateurish sneak it through stuff we often saw. Nor did they fit the common load driver profile of young Hispanic males. These people were well dressed, couples or families with little kids. Two of them, the Ford pickup and the Chevy Astro van, were done so expertly that they almost certainly would never have been caught had they not been the subjects of prior information. Both vehicles were TECS hits. I was there when the Astro van was put onto the hydraulic lift. No one was yet certain whether the vehicle was loaded, though a K-9 supposedly had given a tentative 'maybe' alert to it. We were dubious about these 'maybe' alerts. There were times when a 'maybe' alert was the ploy of a lazy or sly K-9 officer who was hedging his or her bets. There was one sly guy at San Luis who damn near made it his own personal specialty.

But it was still a possible alert and we had to check it out anyhow because it was a TECS hit. Someone punched the hydraulic lift button and the Astro Van lurched up a few feet into the air and hung there. We hit the lock lever on the lift and took a closer look underneath. Nothing. No indications of tampering on the gas tank. At least on the cover. The van's gas tank had a stock factory plastic cover over it and there were no signs of the plastic cover having been removed. A half dozen inspectors, including some very knowledgeable veterans, looked closely at the tank cover and could see no signs of tampering.

The Ford pickup earlier that day had been very similar. TECS hit, plastic cover on the tank, no signs of removal. Yet it had been loaded. Inspectors who were there said that the K-9 alert to the Ford Pickup had also been very 'iffy'. Knowing that, we broke out the ratchet set and removed the bolts holding the gas tank's plastic cover to the van and dropped the cover. I don't recall whether anybody hollered then or not, but at the very least our pulse rates were about to skyrocket. As soon as the cover was loosened and dropped, the actual gas tank bolts holding the tank to the frame became visible. No doubt of it. These bolts most certainly had been recently removed. This was going to be another load. And, judging by the day's previous loads, it would probably be coke or meth.

The tank proved to be nearly a twin to the Ford pickup from earlier in the day. We were certain it was the work of the same smuggling group. Very likely it was also the same skilled mechanic who had altered both tanks. The tanks appeared almost identical when the plastic covers were removed. Both of them had the bottom 1/5 of the tank cut off--very professionally done--and a plate welded over the top of the 1/5 tank. Then the entire tank was welded back together. With the plastic covers off, both tanks had very neat, professionally accomplished braze (welding) marks all the way around them. A filler tube ran down to the bottom 1/5 where the gas was. The upper 4/5 was all compartment, with an open access plate on the side facing toward the outside of the vehicle. When the plastic cover was installed over the tank the access plate was hidden from view. Somehow the smugglers replaced the nuts and bolts on the cover without leaving any tool marks on them.

Whoever these guys were, they'd scored at least twice against our enforcement defense. There were no indications of the gas tank having been recently removed, which was one of the first things we looked for. And the tapping on the bottom of the tank to listen for the telltale solid sound of a loaded tank was defeated both by the plastic cover and by the bottom fifth of the tank being filled with gas. Whether or not they had also been successful in throwing off the narcotics detection dogs was something we suspected but could not confirm. Together with relatively prosperous looking, innocent appearing families traveling in newer model vehicles, the smugglers had come up with what was a very promising smuggling offense. Did it work? Yes, despite the fact that we caught some of the loads. They were caught because they were already lookouts. And another question. Was there even more to the smugglers' offense? Something sinister?

Like just about everywhere that humans walk and talk, the port had its own internal grapevine. It didn't travel at the speed of light, but sometimes it seemed to come pretty close. We already knew that the methamphetamine loaded pickup truck caught during the day shift had very nearly been released. Though a TECS hit, the K-9's had not given much of a response. Methamphetamine and cocaine could sometimes elicit only a kind of vague response from a K-9. The response of the K-9's to methamphetamine in particular was something of an unknown, because at that time the dogs had very little front line experience with that drug. The other coke load was in a gas tank, too. But it had visible signs of the tank being been recently removed. And it also tapped solid from underneath.

Inspector--soon to be special agent--Anita Trujillo, another of San Luis' multi-ethnic inspectors (Apache and Mexican), confirmed what I already suspected. Anita was often at odds with many of our fellow officers, but I worked well with her and she was another of those officers I trusted to do a thorough job of searching a vehicle. I always paid attention to what she said. Anita had referred the methamphetamine load from her primary lane when the Ford pickup came up as a TECS hit. She was working at the port in the afternoon when the three loads were caught. Anita said she had several other TECS hits that day almost identical to the meth load. The hits were out of Douglas, Arizona, from a highly reliable source, and all referred to an organized smuggling group identified by Customs intelligence. Trujillo said that the other TECS hits she referred back to secondary were sent down the road after being supposedly checked with negative results.

We had heard that the methamphetamine load had also almost gone down the road. We had also heard that the same almost happened to the coke load in the car. And they were both lookouts. Though we didn't like the thought one bit, it seemed pretty likely that a number of loads made it successfully through the port on the Big Load Day. Another nail was pounded in that coffin of suspicion when one of the people in the methamphetamine loaded pickup said that they had come through San Luis the day before, been referred to secondary and been subsequently released by the secondary inspectors. I didn't hear whether the pickup was loaded the first time through or not. Chances are good it was.

A lot of the jaded border veterans concluded that the port had been blitzed and that most of the dope had actually got through. To Anita, and me, and several others, there should have been several more busts, considering all the TECS hits connected with the busted loads that had gone down the road after secondary inspections failed to detect contraband. The reason? The easy answer--sloppy, lazy, burned out or just plain overworked and worn down secondary inspectors. Or--and we hated to think about this subject, too--what might have been the sinister part of the smugglers' game plan. Inside help.

Being successfully blitzed was bad enough. But there was more. One of the coke loads was driven by an ordinary looking Mexican woman who had a legal Border Crossing Card. She had three little kids with her. Mommy the cocaine smuggler walked. She wasn't even arrested. They sent her and the kids packing back into Mexico. This stunned even the jaded among us. We asked why they let her go and were told it was because she was not a resident of the US. What? She tried to smuggle almost a hundred pounds of cocaine and they let her go because she wasn't a legal resident of the United States? Of course there had to be more to it than that. Possibly she gave the agents some very promising information and they made a deal with her. If that was the case--and I had encountered this before--then no one was talking about it.

But that probably wasn't what happened. The woman very likely knew next to nothing about the smuggling organization. Mules were not often part of the smuggling in-crowd. Maybe the agents just didn't want to mess with the complications that could muck things up when they busted a woman with three small kids. Maybe they were overloaded with arrests from all the loads that day and figured she was just a mule and prosecuting her would be pretty much pointless. I'd encountered that before, too. It would save the taxpayers the expense of her trial and incarceration. Made some sense. But she could also become the poster girl for recruiting load drivers. If Customs wouldn't arrest her for the attempted smuggling of a hundred pounds of cocaine, where was the risk in anyone becoming a load driver?

It made us wonder. Thousands upon thousands of people are in American jails because they were caught with a few grams or a few ounces of cocaine or meth. Thousands more are in prison on long sentences for having a few pounds or kilos of cocaine or meth. Yet a person who tried to smuggle nearly one hundred pounds of cocaine into the United States wasn't even prosecuted.

Maybe Justice really is blind.

Sorry, I'm allergic to bullshit.

Will Smith

### Chapter 26

### The Deterrent That Isn't

A word about prosecutions. This book is mostly about my and my coworkers' border experiences. I'm not trying to provide an exhaustive survey of border issues. And that includes the subject of prosecutions. But you should know that there is by no means a uniform policy concerning the prosecution of drug smugglers. It varies widely from place to place. It varies widely from agency to agency. It varies from person to person. It even can vary with a single person--an agent is overloaded and worn down and lets go a case he or she otherwise might have prosecuted. Like it or not, a whole bunch of smuggling cases go unprosecuted.

A 2007 Arizona Daily Star article detailed some of what those of us who were on the border already knew all too well. In Arizona, as a general rule, the federal government would not prosecute drug smugglers caught with under 500 pounds of marijuana. Imagine that. 500 pounds. In actual fact there was a case the same year in Arizona where a person attempting to smuggle nearly 450 pounds of marijuana was not prosecuted. The reason for the failure to prosecute is bedrock basic. Lack of resources. As the border manpower force has been steadily increased, and the numbers of drug seizures have concomitantly increased, the resources for prosecuting the smugglers have not increased. The feds simply cannot handle the increased case load. Long ago they established what they call thresholds. Like the 500 pound minimum in Arizona. That seem like a lot? I recall that in Miami some years back the federal threshold on marijuana smuggling prosecutions was several thousand pounds.

In some places, and at some times, this has been alleviated by local and state law enforcement agencies picking up the slack and initiating prosecution of the smugglers. We were fortunate when I worked at San Luis that close cooperation between agencies and availability of resources translated into almost all of the smugglers being prosecuted. Times have changed. The local agencies have run out of resources, too, and now often avoid taking on the burdensome costs of prosecution and incarceration. At Nogales around the time of 9/11 I watched while a guy coming out of Mexico got busted with seven pounds of heroin hidden in the tailgate of his little pickup truck. We were absolutely astounded when both the feds and locals declined prosecution. He was released back into Mexico. You probably could have heard his sigh of relief all the way to Hermosillo as he stepped over the border into Mexico. That one was the straw that broke the camel's back for us, coming after a string of prosecution denials on what we considered to be righteous busts of substantial loads. And not just marijuana. Hard drugs, too. The phones started ringing off the hook at the federal prosecutor's office and a whole bunch of other places. The federal prosecutors backtracked in a hurry. Too late. The guy was long gone back into Mexico.

Part of the solution is for more federal and state money to go into funding the prosecution and incarceration of the smugglers. But, until that time.....the driver of that under five hundred pound border pot load you saw so dramatically getting caught on the evening news? What they don't tell you on the news is this. While the kid down the block from you caught with a couple of pounds of weed might get some jail time, and the young black dude in a decaying urban center with a couple of ounces of coke might pull some time, or the meth addict selling a few crystal rocks to feed his habit with likely see the inside of the slammer, the busted border smugglers face a very different law enforcement reality. The chances are very good that a border smuggler caught with hundreds of pound of marijuana will walk. And sometimes even the hard drug smugglers get a free ticket home.

Like the guy with seven pounds of heroin.

### OXYCONYIN, ETC.

I transferred back to Nogales from San Luis in the summer of 2000. It'd been nearly ten years since I was last there. Nogales was and still is Arizona's biggest port of entry, straddling the border in several Nogales locations some 75 miles south of Tucson. While I was gone during the decade of the 90's, the old Grand Avenue Port of Entry was rebuilt and renamed the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry after former Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini. The rebuilt port wasn't much of an improvement. Not from the point of view of a working inspector. Though a block of much needed administrative buildings had been built over the port of entry, and there were some agreeable quality of life additions inside the buildings, the outside working space for the line inspectors was anything but employee friendly. The working areas under the overhanging administrative buildings were smelly, dark, cold, windy and had little view of anything besides concrete and fences. The old port, at least, had an open view of Grand Avenue and the perambulating nearby flow of pedestrian traffic. The vibrant pulse of the border, the pageantry of daily life, the twinkling nighttime lights on the hills on the Sonoran side of Mexico, were all immediate and palpable to the working officers back then. I thought it was a cool place to work. But with the new DeConcini Port of Entry the place had a kind of dreary Soviet apartment block look that depressed the spirit. Customs hadn't given much thought to workplace quality of life issues outside of the offices. It didn't bother me much personally. I was there to catch dope, not to ogle the view. But as a union steward, I found that kind of insensitive management attitude to be both offensive and antediluvian. Not that anybody gave a damn about what I thought about it.

The Mariposa Port of Entry, which was on the western fringe of Nogales and handled all of the commercial traffic--as well as a couple of lanes with four entry booths for car traffic--remained mostly the same. The cargo facility had been enlarged and huge truck inspection and X-ray units added that hadn't been there during my first tour in the late 80's.It was noticeably busier from a decade earlier. But the car entry facility at Mariposa still had the wonderful expansive view of the surrounding mostly undeveloped grassy buff hills rolling off into the distance in all directions. It was far more pleasant than the depressing concrete claustrophobia of DeConcini.

Irrespective of the negative aesthetic changes at the DeConcini Port of Entry in downtown Nogales, the work of a line Customs officer on the car lanes was pretty much the same as at San Luis. What was really different about Nogales was the pedestrian traffic. San Luis had a single pedestrian entry point with two entry gates. Nogales had three different pedestrian entry points. Mariposa, which was on the outskirts of Mexican Nogales, and where only a few pedestrians made the long walk on a man made causeway over a deep ravine that both separated and connected the two countries. The second crossing was the Morley gate, which was the original main street and entry point from years earlier and had been replaced by the Grand Avenue Port of Entry. Morley had been kept open for pedestrian traffic between the two halves of the old downtown. The third crossing point was inside the ground floor of the big government building at DeConcini, where throngs of pedestrians crowded through the two to four open gates throughout much of the day. Especially on weekends and holidays.

And that was the big difference between San Luis and Nogales. San Luis had plenty of pedestrian traffic, but it was almost totally made up of locals going back and forth between the two halves of San Luis. Nogales had that, too. But it also had hordes of American tourists, particularly on the weekends. The tourists in the Yuma/San Luis area, who were mostly winter visitors to the mild winter climate there, almost universally used the small nearby tourist friendly port of Andrade/Algodones across the border in California. But in Nogales they came by the hundreds and even thousands, from Tucson and Phoenix and God knows where else.

And not all of these tourists were what they claimed to be.

Many people came to Nogales to shop the pharmacies in Mexico for the prescription drugs they needed to maintain their health. These folks often came from long distances and I was told many times by them of the considerable savings they made by buying the Mexican drugs. They claimed the medications were essentially the same as the ones they bought in the U.S., but were much cheaper. Many of these people were senior citizens on fixed incomes with very serious health problems. Though the importation of drugs from Mexico was a touchy subject, and the legalities were by no means clear, it was pretty much our policy to allow these people to pass into the U.S. with reasonable quantities of prescription medications. That more or less meant around a three month supply of a medication for an individual's direct personal use. That was the rule of thumb general procedure. But there were exceptions. There were always exceptions. The exceptions were where things could get confusing. And also sometimes very interesting.

There were those who had a large variety and a substantial quantity of medications which we believed they were taking into the U.S. for resale. When we identified such people, and a border wise officer's questioning would sometimes do so, they were not allowed to bring anything into the U.S. beyond a reasonable quantity of personal use medications. Some of these people were Curanderos, a kind of folk doctor who often subsisted within immigrant communities. They practiced a species of medicine that may or may not have been safe or effective. But they certainly were not licensed to sell or prescribe prescription medications, which they did right along with herbs and potions and other folk remedies.

There were a few crossers who were runners for groups that ran illegal pharmaceutical supply houses working mail order businesses from both sides of the border. Customers would order the drugs from the U.S., the orders would be filled in Mexico, then the drugs would be smuggled into the U.S. and subsequently mailed throughout the U.S. Occasionally we would catch one of their couriers trying to slip the drugs across the border, either on foot or in a car.

And then there were the drug addicts. A few were heroin users like we often saw at San Luis. But mostly they were addicts of a whole different sort. These were prescription drug addicts. Lots of them. These people were far more common than I would have thought. They were overwhelmingly Anglo, and also predominantly female. Unlike the bedraggled heroin ravaged lost souls we saw at San Luis, the typical prescription drug addict was a reasonably prosperous looking, tastefully dressed and often attractive middle class adult Anglo woman in her late 20's to mid 40's from Tucson or Phoenix. Almost all of them had originally been prescribed pain killing or other mood altering medications by licensed American physicians. Begging the question of the legitimacy of the medical conditions leading to the original prescriptions, the fact was that these people had stepped onto the slippery slope of addiction. They eventually became addicted and were unable to legally obtain the quantities of drugs they needed to maintain their addictions.

So they came to Nogales, where on the Mexican side just about anything on your shopping list was available for the right price. At the top of the list were prescription drugs. A host of Mexican pharmacies were within easy walking distance of the border crossings at DeConcini and Morley. The places were usually thronged with customers, most of them senior citizens buying the cheaper Mexican prescription drugs for legitimate medical reasons like heart conditions or diabetes or ulcers. But mixed in with them were the prescription drug addicts who would buy their Darvon, Percodan, Xanax, Valium, Hydrocodone, Soma or whatever drug it was that they needed, then try to sneak it back into the U.S. Some would declare the drugs. Many would not. The Mexican pharmacies, of course, were fully aware of what was going on. They were in business to make money, not to evaluate a customer's medical legitimacy or the validity of American drug and importation laws. Let the gringos sort it out for themselves.

Most of us did not think of the prescription drug addicts as being criminals. No more than you would think of a perambulating boracho--a drunk--as being a criminal. For the most part, I didn't even think that about load drivers or the heroin addicts I saw so often at San Luis. Not likely that I'd demonize a bunch of ordinary middle class women who had a prescription drug habit. But we still were charged with enforcing Customs laws. And those laws said that anything obtained in a foreign country and subsequently brought into the United States had to be declared. That was especially true if a Customs officer directly asked a returning traveler what they were bringing into the U.S. And most especially if the questions were directed at specifics such as prescription medications.

The laws, policies and procedures governing the importation of medicines were about as clear as a silt clogged backwater Louisiana bayou. Complete with unseen enforcement alligators that could bite you in the unwary butt. The word vague doesn't begin to describe it. I found that out myself the hard way when I tried to research the subject and found that those in the Tucson and Washington offices, who were supposed to know about this subject, in fact didn't. Nor did they want to be bothered with the question. I was basically told to mind my own front line Customs officer business and not trouble the Big Folks for something as trivial as trying to ferret out the facts. That left me in the limbo of confusing policies, which differed not only person to person and place to place, but even within the same port during different time periods. Confusing? You bet.

But what I did learn was that, though all foreign drugs were supposed to go through a rigorous FDA government importation procedure, a written FDA policy allowed people to bring up to a one month's supply of a personal use prescription medication without a prescription. And that included pain killers and mood altering chemicals. Besides the prohibited Schedule I illegal drugs, the only exceptions were the old Enforcement Drug du Jour, anabolic steroids. And the new one, Rohypnol--the 'date rape' drug. OxyContin, another Enforcement Drug du Jour, would soon come to loom on the drug enforcement horizon, too. But more of OxyContin later

The typical prescription drug addict was often easy to spot. A well dressed, middle class Anglo woman from Phoenix or Tucson who'd come to Nogales alone or sometimes with a friend or two, often on a weekday. No kids. She would declare cheap tourist kitsch and maybe some antibiotics as her only Mexican purchases. We would ask the woman if she had any other prescription drugs she had purchased in Mexico. I would explain the FDA rule and tell her that she could legally (not mentioning that it was actually a kind of murky semi-legality) bring in a month's supply of almost all Mexican medications. A lot of them would then 'fess up and haul out the Darvon or Soma or Valium or whatever it was they had. I'd let them keep a month's supply and tell them to take the rest back to Mexico. Or they could trash the excess pills. It was up to them. Most of them didn't have a large quantity of drugs, so it wasn't much of a problem. At one time we would take the excess pills and, together with another officer as a witness, just pour them down the toilet. Later on we stopped doing that and simply told the people they had to take the pills back to Mexico or trash them.

Of course, there were exceptions. Plenty of them. Some women still refused to declare the drugs after being given the opportunity. Sometimes we'd have them fill out a Customs 6051 entry form where they had to detail their purchases in Mexico. After they'd signed the form, we would again ask them to declare all of their purchases in Mexico, specifically asking about prescription medications. If they still maintained they had none, we'd begin a search of their bags and purses. Often those searches came up with undeclared prescription medications. The person thus caught was then subject to a fine based on Customs administrative procedures, which were partially dependent upon the nature and the severity of the deception. In theory. In fact the offender was almost always let off with just a warning. Some ports of entry might have made a bigger deal out of such things, but Nogales was a very active drug and illegal alien smuggling port and we had more important things to do than burn up a lot of time processing a seizure from a Phoenix soccer mom who had a couple of bottles of undeclared Valium.

All seizures were time consuming and took an officer out of the regular rotation, which left the entire shift short handed for the duration of the seizure process. So we verbally spanked the perpetrators' hands and let them go. And often--very often--officers simply looked the other way over a bottle or two of extra painkillers and just waved the folks on through. How important was it? To many officers it really was more of a game than a serious enforcement process. Most of us were focused on looking for hard drugs, drug smugglers, criminal deportees and wanted felons. And most of the rest were either too tired and/or too burned out to care. .

On top of that, management frowned on spending much enforcement effort on soccer moms when almost literally all around us at Nogales were substantial quantities of illegal drugs and numbers of illegal entrants. What was a manager going to do? Report to her/his superiors the weekly seizure of twenty five bottles of Valium and Soma from a dozen Tucson and Phoenix women? Or the seizure of fifty pounds of cocaine, twenty pounds of methamphetamine, a half ton of marijuana and the arrest of a half dozen NCIC fugitives, including two or three deported felons trying to sneak back in the country? Not a hard choice for any manager with any hope of career advancement in mind.

So the soccer moms almost always walked.

I thought of it all as just a kind of game and often joked with the people I caught trying to smuggle in the undeclared prescription pain killers/mood alterers. But then I started noticing a new drug that I hadn't heard of before. OxyContin. People were buying it in Mexico and bringing it into the U.S. And legally, given the written FDA policy allowing the entry of one month's supply of any non-proscribed drug even without a prescription. I asked my co-workers and the front line supervisors about the drug. I was told it was just another painkiller and to treat it like the rest of the painkillers. Let it pass, as long as the amounts were not large.

But I kept seeing people bringing in this drug, many with more than one month's supply. Most of the officers were letting the people pass with the drug. I grew uncomfortable with what was going on. The people bringing in the OxyContin didn't fit the soccer mom profile I had in my head about prescription drug addicts. These people were as likely to be male as female, often younger, and didn't have that well fed and well dressed prosperous appearance the soccer moms did. Some of them appeared very devious to me. Others looked beaten down and almost desperate. Some had nervous, shifty eyes that darted around like they were expecting Armageddon to arrive any minute. It made me jumpy just looking at them. A lot of them complained of having very serious chronic back pain. I inquired further with Customs to find out more about OxyContin. Like before, I was stonewalled by Those Above and could find out next to nothing within the behemoth Byzantine labyrinth that was Customs management.

So, one evening at my home, I plunked myself down at the computer, went online and looked up OxyContin. Good God! They called this stuff synthetic heroin! It was an extremely potent painkiller developed to ease the suffering of late stage cancer patients and people with a high level of chronic back pain. It was also very highly addictive and considered a extremely dangerous drug. It had begun as a drug of abuse in--of all places--Appalachia. They called it Hillbilly Heroin. Miners and loggers and farmers and hard working country women with injured backs had been prescribed the drug and many had become addicted. Some of the poor rural cash strapped people among the prescription recipients, as well as some criminally leaning fringe dwellers, discovered that the drug could be sold for serious money on the black market. Some of the addicts had taken to grinding up the pills and snorting the stuff like cocaine. OxyContin related emergency room visits and deaths were rising meteorically across the nation. Even a single bottle of a one month's supply was worth several hundred dollars on the black market. And this all started in Appalachia an easy half day drive from where U.S. Customs had its headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C. All the desk dwelling suits in D.C. managed to completely miss it. They were clueless.

And here we were blithely letting people pass through nearly every day with this stuff!

So the prescription drug game became much less a game and much more a serious law enforcement business. A heroin-like drug was not something you just blithely blew off. The port's enforcement posture tightened up, and that naturally spread to the other painkillers being smuggled through the port. As we tightened up, the opposition--meaning the serious smugglers and the people who sold the painkillers in Mexico--changed their tactics. We started seeing the painkillers hidden on people's bodies. And we also started seeing painkillers in sealed bottles that were labeled as antibiotics or aspirin or vitamins or other innocuous substances. We found out that pharmacies in Mexico would offer to put the painkillers in the innocuous bottles and seal them right there in the pharmacy. They also would sometimes offer to write prescriptions for the drugs, or refer the customer to a nearby doctor who would write the prescription. Not that it really made any difference. A Mexican written prescription was not valid in the United States. Nor was a U.S. written one that was filled in Mexico. But the people thought they were valid--and that even included some of the U.S. border officers.

We were put in the somewhat awkward position of occasionally having to cut open sealed medicine bottles from Mexico. There were likely some people who saw this and thought what we were doing was ridiculous or imperious and that we had lost all sense of perspective. But the fact was that there was always a considerably elevated suspicion on the part of the searching officer before anyone started opening up pill bottles.And we did find the painkillers mislabeled as any number of other substances. Still, only in the most egregious circumstances did we pursue an administrative or criminal penalty. It did happen. If we found OxyContin. Or Rohypnol.

Or anabolic steroids.

Steroids were a whole different story. The profile for a steroid smuggler was of a young Anglo male from Tucson or Phoenix. I use the word profile intentionally, knowing that it is a buzz word for the politically correct. There is nothing wrong with profiling, so long as the reasoning behind it has to do with objective facts rather than stereotypes and preconceptions. All law enforcement officers, and just about everyone else at one time or another, use profiles of some kind. If you have information that two tons of marijuana is being smuggled in a single vehicle, you're not going to be looking for Volkswagens. Nor, if you're looking for steroids, are you going to be pulling aside septuagenarian grandmothers and pregnant perambulating grocery shopping moms in equal numbers with out-of-area male teenagers with sheepish expressions on their post-pubescent faces.

So, when we saw a male teenager, or a small group of them, from Tucson or Phoenix, who were acting or looking a bit dicey and said they had come to Nogales to 'just look around', we thought we'd have a look around, too. In their bags, their pockets, their shoes and, if the situation indicated the search--the place of choice--their crotches. For some reason I never quite could fathom, the attempted smuggling of small amounts of personal use anabolic steroids was viewed by Customs as being far more serious than the smuggling of the addictive painkillers. We didn't spank the hands of the kids with the steroids and let them go with a month's supply of the drug. They had to be made an example of with at least an administrative penalty and fine. Criminal charges could even be brought against them. Ironically, for a while we were hauling these lanky white kids into the office for administrative and/or criminal proceedings involving small amounts of steroids while at the same time we were waving through other people who had one or more bottles of the high dollar heavy hitter Hillbilly Heroin painkiller, OxyContin. The strange thing about these kids who tried to smuggle in steroids was that--with one notable exception in San Luis that I remember--none of them looked like weight lifters. They were mostly skinny, lanky kids with toothpick biceps. Hope springs eternal.

There were puzzling times on the pedestrian gates. One thing that used to amaze me was how people would lie, even when they didn't need to. Many times people would respond negatively to questions about purchases, only to have those purchases show up in a cursory search of bags and purses. Stuff that was legal to bring in the first place. Why lie about something like that? One of the mysteries of human nature. And one more reason for a Customs officer to become a hardcore skeptic.

### This Is My Story And I'm Sticking To It

One day a woman came to the pedestrian gate who was the stereotypical soccer mom painkiller smuggler. Late 30's, well dressed, prosperous looking, alone, from out of the area and coming in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. She declared various purchases, including several bottles of antibiotics and vitamins. She was a fifty footer Stoneface. Meaning she was obvious even from a distance and was a textbook example of the kind of emotionless guarded behavior often associated with deception. So I asked a few more questions of her. The answers were vague. Vague enough that I decided to open one of the sealed bottles. She blanched when I did that and sputtered with the beginnings of an angry outburst. It didn't last long. The pills inside the bottle were not what was on the label. The same was true of the other bottles. And the number of pills in the bottles far exceeded what the labels indicated. A bottle supposedly with fifty pills instead contained two hundred. I looked at her quizzically after opening the last bottle. The stoic mask, mixed with suppressed sputtering anger or maybe self righteous pique, remained set in stone on her face. She also looked to me like a lit fuse that was sparking towards an explosion.

"So what do we really have here?", I said.

"Read the labels", she said with a voice that was a perfect match for her face. This woman was going to be hard case. And pointlessly so, at least in our eyes.

"Just tell me what they are", I repeated. "You probably can bring at least some of them into the U.S.".

"I told you. Read the damn labels!"

This soccer mom wasn't about to budge from her story. I knew what some of the labeled pills were supposed to look like and knew that these were not the same, but didn't recognize what the smuggled pills actually were. Another officer hunted up a copy of the PDR--Physician's Desk Reference--but we were unable to identify the pills from the PDR. I was inclined to just let her go with the legal amount of enterable pills, were she only willing to admit what the pills were. But she wouldn't. Her persistent lying was starting to irritate us. We thought about making a formal seizure and administrative penalty out of the situation. We didn't. For two reasons. We didn't know what the drugs were--we had been unable to identify them with our reference books or phone calls to local pharmacies. And we really didn't want to be deflected from more serious enforcement activity. The end result was that we wouldn't let the woman take any of the pills into the U.S. without telling us what they were. She'd taken the 'this is my story and I'm sticking to it' stance and defiantly refused to relent. So we took her to a bathroom and watched while she flushed them all down a toilet .You can believe that didn't make her happy. Must have cost her at least several hundred dollars. And pointless. So long as they weren't proscribed substances, we would have let her take a month's supply of each of the pills, had she only been willing to identify them. But sticking to a lie was apparently more important to her than telling the truth. Even though it cost her dearly.

The fairly sizeable quantity--several hundred pills--of the drugs the woman had tried to smuggle, along with her unrepentant bull headed behavior, prompted me to enter her name in the Customs database as a possible smuggler of prescription drugs. It wouldn't have surprised me one bit if she didn't come back the next day, do the same thing in Mexico and this time breeze right by some CBP inspector who wasn't about to bother some God fearing, law abiding, good-looking honest lady with a bunch of antibiotics and vitamins. There was certainly no reason to take a few seconds and check out her name in the Customs database. The secretly drug hungry soccer mom would be cleared to go and would be soon on her way back home where she could remain chemically blitzed for a few more weeks. Then the drugs would be almost gone.

And it would be time for another touristy excursion to the Nogales pharmacies.

### Chapter 27

### Operation Lively Green

The Cancer Of Border Corruption Creeps North

The Naco drug tunnel resulted in several dozen convictions, one of the more recent being the convicting and sentencing of Francisco Valle-Hurtado of Naco, Sonora, in late May of 2008. The judge hit him with 25 years behind bars. But that wasn't the end of it. In October of 2011 yet another major Naco drug tunnel defendant, Victor Alvarez Flores, pled guilty to conspiring to smuggle 16,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States and was sentenced to 11 1/4 years in prison. Flores was initially set to be tried a decade earlier but absconded to Mexico. Mexican authorities eventually apprehended him and he was extradited to the United States. The other Naco drug tunnel convictions were of mostly Hispanic civilians from both sides of the border who were connected to the drug smuggling ring that masterminded the tunnel. There aren't many road connections heading north from Naco, and one of them passes a quarter mile from my home. Most likely some of the Naco drug loads drove through the mesquite studded desert grasslands a few hundred yards from my old home place. Close enough. But things got even closer. There was another, more recent, drug smuggling case in southern Arizona involving dozens of convictions. This one wasn't based on a drug tunnel. The operation that resulted in the arrests and convictions was conducted by the FBI, with substantial involvement by numerous other law enforcement agencies. The code name of the operation was Lively Green. Operation Lively Green. And who were the several dozen convicted perpetrators?

Government employees. Federal, state and local. And most of these people were uniformed officers. Including one of my former coworkers.

U.S. Army National guardsmen, including several recruiters in Tucson, U.S. Marine recruiters from Tucson, airmen from Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, a U.S. Immigration Officer from the Port of Nogales, a former Nogales police employee, several Arizona correctional officers and a U.S. Bureau of Prisons correctional officer. Many were Hispanic, but there also blacks and plenty of whites among them. Men and women. Kind of an evil twin version of equal opportunity gone bad.

The Department of Justice news release about Operation Lively Green reads like an opening scene from an adventure movie's fanciful script. On August 22, 2002, a twin engine King Air aircraft touched down at a clandestine airstrip near the town of Benson, Arizona. Only a few miles north of Tombstone, the place is in the very heart of the storied Old West. An old railroad settlement that still shudders every day with the frequent roar of passing transcontinental freight trains, Benson is blessed with superb panoramic vistas and stunning views of range after range of soaring jagged-tooth mountains. To the west are the towering Santa Catalina mountains of Tucson where less than a century ago jaguars still lurked. To the east are the Dragoon mountains--where the grave site of the famous Chiricahua Apache Indian chief, Cochise, still remains undiscovered after nearly a century and a half. When the King Air taxied to a stop surrounded by this dramatic historic landscape, three Arizona Army National Guard vehicles, including two Humvees, drove up to the aircraft. In full Army National Guard uniform, several soldiers assisted in the unloading of sixty kilograms--132 pounds--of cocaine from the aircraft and transferred it into their National Guard vehicles. These same uniformed soldiers then drove the cocaine loaded government vehicles to a resort hotel in Phoenix where they turned the cocaine over to a level narcotics trafficker. They received payment in cash on the spot. What they didn't know was that the trafficker was actually an undercover FBI agent, and that the King Air airplane was operated by other law enforcement officers. It was a sting. And they just got stung.

Cochise might have found that ironically hilarious, considering his own troubles with the duplicitous behavior of U.S. Army soldiers--particularly one Lt. Bascom--in his own time.

The Benson incident was close to home, Benson being a town that I often pass by on the way to Tucson, and where I occasionally played in a country band. But even closer to home was the conviction of John Castillo. Castillo was an INS officer at the Port of Nogales where I worked. Though I had retired by the time Castillo was busted, the smuggling activities involving Operation Lively Green were already going on when I was still there. For all I know, I might have unknowingly actually witnessed one of my coworkers passing a load while I was still at Nogales. It was something we all knew happened, though we hated to think about it. It was especially hard to take when the person who actually was caught passing loads, like Castillo, was someone you knew.

Castillo was caught in another sting that was part of Operation Lively Green. An undercover agent, who Castillo thought was a narcotics trafficker, paid Castillo to twice pass through a truck that Castillo believed to contain cocaine. That was in early 2002, at the Mariposa Port of Entry only a couple of hundred yards from where I got my first big drug load years earlier and at almost the exact spot where I got the last load of my career just a month or so before Castillo passed the loads. And he didn't just pass loads. In the summer of the same year, Castillo sold an undercover FBI agent INS documents intended for the use of undocumented entrants.

Lively Green, which went on as an active undercover operation for a couple of years from roughly 2002 to 2004, was a shock. A uniformed officer culture shock. These people weren't marginal offscourings from the fringes of society. They were uniformed officers of the military services and state and federal corrections and U.S. Immigration. They were smuggling drugs from the border and from Tucson, often while in uniform and sometimes in government vehicles. And there were dozens of them.

A number of them were military recruiters based in Tucson. The same guys who were driving drug loads from the border in their free or unscheduled time were going into local schools and recruiting young people to join the military. And these guys kept on with their recruiting efforts long after they were first identified as smugglers. The FBI didn't want to compromise the ongoing investigation into further indictments in Operation Lively Green. A lot of Tucson residents were outraged when the facts became known. Drug traffickers in the schools recruiting kids for the military? And with the complicity of the FBI? You can imagine the permutations of that idea once it became public knowledge. I am not faulting the FBI, since there has been no public report of these recruiters dealing drugs to the kids in the schools. But the idea of them even being in the schools was unsettling to many, even though no harm might have been done.

It all began in December of 2001 in the most unlikely of places. A pleasant and well maintained strip mall on the south side of the roaring traffic of busy Speedway Avenue in Tucson. The local Ronald McDonald House was just down the street. The mall housed a recruiting center for the armed services, including the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. An undercover operative showed up at the mall to investigate reports that a military recruiter, Sergeant Darius W. Perry, was taking bribes to alter the test scores of potential military recruits. According to a number of government press releases and newspaper articles, after the undercover operative contacted the suspect recruiter, Sergeant Perry, about altering test scores, in another scene that was like something lifted out of a fanciful Hollywood movie, Perry actually tried to sell him cocaine out of the trunk of a government vehicle parked in the small lot outside the recruiting station. .

Perry had just unknowingly sowed the seed from which Operation Lively Green would grow.

A military recruiter selling cocaine from the trunk of a government vehicle in a parking lot outside a military recruiting center? Preposterous as it might sound, it is true. But--remember. This is the border. Tucson is an hour's drive up I-19 from Mexico, and is the closest big town in southern Arizona to Mexico. Something drug-and-border related happens in Tucson just about every day. Arrests .Shootings. Stash houses. Trials. Chases. Load cars. Always something. Perry's offer of cocaine gave the FBI the idea for Lively Green. How many others might be willing to become involved in trafficking in cocaine? Undercover operatives posing as narcotics traffickers suggested Perry and another military recruiter, Mark A. Fillman, might want to use their official positions and uniforms to assist in moving narcotics. The two agreed, and also agreed to recruit other officers. It probably succeeded beyond the FBI's wildest expectations. It must have also shocked and dismayed them. More than sixty people, mostly uniformed officers, would eventually be implicated. Almost all of them would transport narcotics from Nogales or Tucson to Phoenix or Las Vegas. One military recruiter, Rodney Mills, once himself recruited into the phony cocaine trafficking ring, thereafter was responsible for recruiting six more people into the growing circle of corrupted government employees. And the circle of corruption kept growing wider. The word must have got around that there was quick, easy money to be made with no questions asked. And these uniformed officers, though hardly teetering on the edge of poverty, sure weren't sage Wall Street investors rolling in money. The temptation, for far too many, was just too great. And that is something we all should worry about.

A Mexican reporter, Maria Idalia Gomez, remarked at a media conference in mid 2007 in Phoenix that drug corruption would eventually ooze north from Mexico into the U.S. It was only a matter of time. Her statement could just as easily have been placed in the past tense. Operation Lively Green was already history. Drug corruption had already moved north of the border. But what she probably meant was that the pervasiveness of drug corruption would permeate into the very soul and fabric of America, as it already had in Mexico. Not a very pleasant forecast for the future.

And not wild-eyed paranoia. Not to me. Not when I remember uniformed officers I knew who were pretty much ordinary folks like you and me. Personable Manny Silva, busted for alien smuggling. Richard Tallamante, an intelligent guy we called Mapache (racoon), also busted for alien smuggling. My former co-worker and a one time accomplished drug buster, Ed McCandlish, caught dealing pills and trying to pass a cocaine load in Miami. My easy going neighbor in Yuma, Gus Ramirez, busted for passing a load. Military veteran Alan Mouzon, a handsome linebacker built young black INS officer, busted for passing loads. Tough long time San Luis border officer Joe Magaña, busted for alien smuggling in May of 2008. John Castillo, caught in a Lively Green sting in Nogales in 2002. Mike Anderson, a Immigration officer at San Luis who always helped me with INS stuff I was checking out. I liked the guy and was stunned when in 2006 he was sentenced to 9 years in prison for multiple offenses, including passing loads. And then there was the brilliantly promising U.S. Immigration officer, San Luis INS Port Director Lisa Stubbs, her life ruined by the stress of work and a drug habit that lured her into trading immigration documents for narcotics. And there were others. With few exceptions, I would never have predicted any of these folks to one day be corrupted.

I'm inclined to believe that the root causes go deeper than just the individual weaknesses of those corrupted. Lively Green should serve as a wake up call to America that the menace of drug corruption has now arrived. It's more than just individuals. The problem has become systemic.

It has already insinuated itself into the blood and sinews of our national being.

Lively Green, like the other drug smuggling cases mentioned here, continued to dangle loose ends for years after the actual operation. In July of 2007, a former U.S. government employee formerly from the nearby town of Sierra Vista--where my wife was an elementary teacher--signed a plea bargain agreement with the government. Christine P. Thomas admitted to taking bribes to alter the scores of Army National Guard applications, and admitted to participating with Army recruiters in the scheme. In March of 2008 the last two defendants of the dozens indicted and convicted received their sentences in a Tucson federal courtroom. 24 year old Mark Shipley was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation, plus repayment of the $3000 he was paid to run 132 pounds of cocaine from Tucson to Los Vegas. Former Arizona Air National guard airman 37 year old Joy McBrayer-Graham, a single mother of four, was sentenced to four years of probation. She was also ordered to repay $3000, the amount she was paid to drive 132 pounds of cocaine from that clandestine air strip in Benson.

During 2007 three of the convicted Lively Green soldiers--or, more accurately, their lawyers--came up with a rationale intended to mitigate their sentences. You could call it the Nuremberg Piggyback Defense. The three ex-soldiers, Manuel Vaughn, Dustin Huyck and Francisco A. Martinez, claimed that they were just following orders when they participated in cocaine smuggling. Just following orders. They blamed an Army recruiter, Sergeant Robert L. Bakerx, for either ordering or intimidating them into involvement with the criminal cocaine smuggling ring. You can imagine that a lot of legal experts and plenty of other people started chortling over that one.

Here is an excerpt from an attorney's sentence memorandum filed with United States District Court, District of Arizona, on behalf of yet another defendant.

Here, the defendant was not involved in any of the preparation of the transportation of the drugs and only received money on a single occasion. He was asked by his superior officer to perform the requested tasks. As is well known, in the military, subordination of requests by superior officer is not taken lightly and often results in harsh punishment. In this case, defendant ****was merely following orders of his superior officer.

Those of us who have been in the military and in law enforcement find this pretty darn hard to swallow.

More than sixty people, mostly uniformed officers, civilian and military, were charged as a result of Operation Lively Green. Most have pled guilty. Others, though suspects, have not been indicted. Darius Perry, the Army National Guard recruiter who started the whole thing in 2001 with his offer to sell cocaine out of the trunk of a government vehicle, was sentenced to five years in prison. Typical of the others, Sergeant Charisse Smith, a Davis Monthan Air Base airman among the roughly dozen or so implicated D-M airmen, was sentenced to twenty months in prison and a dishonorable discharge for transporting cocaine from Nogales to Tucson in a government vehicle. The other sentences ranged from probation to five years in prison. Very light, considering the offense and the offenders almost all being uniformed officers. One of the suspects, another Army recruiter, Raul Portillo, was caught in a trafficking incident unrelated to Lively Green. Portillo disappeared and remains a fugitive. He is probably hiding in Mexico.

There were some other factors related to Operation Lively Green. The one already mentioned about known drug trafficking military recruiters being allowed to visit Tucson area schools. And there were allegations of FBI misconduct in allowing some of the drug conspirators too much latitude during their dealings in Las Vegas. There are also allegations that FBI misconduct might have been the reason for the relatively light sentences. Valid or not, the allegations are extraneous to the essence of what Operation Lively Green means to the America. The widespread drug-related corruption of officials is no longer confined to Mexico.

It has now spread to the United States.

There is a subtle kind of corruption that resides everywhere on the border. An example? One officer I knew at San Luis, who was a Nogales native, preferred to be assigned to San Luis rather than Nogales because he knew his brother in Nogales was involved in drug trafficking. Another officer told me he once allowed a Somerton police officer to bypass an K-9 inspection lane because he knew the man and he was a fellow law enforcement officer. That same police officer was later caught with a substantial amount of marijuana in his personal vehicle while attempting to bring it through the San Luis Port of Entry. Those kinds of things face every officer every day on the border. And if you're a local with contacts on both sides of the border? To say it is complicated is one hell of an understatement.

### Special Agent Jovan Deas

Here is the US Attorney's Office, District of Arizona news release about Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) Special Agent Jovana Deas.

HSI NOGALES SPECIAL AGENT PLEADS GUILTY TO OBSTRUCTION AND OTHER FEDERAL VIOLATIONS

TUCSON, Ariz. – On February 1, 2012, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent Jovana Deas, 33, of Rio Rico, Ariz., entered a guilty plea, before visiting United States Magistrate Judge E.S. Swearingen, to all 21 counts of an indictment.

At the change of plea hearing, Deas admitted to abusing her position as an HSI special agent to illegally obtain and disseminate government documents classified as Official Use Only. Some of the sensitive information Deas unlawfully accessed was later discovered on a laptop computer of her former brother-in-law by law enforcement in Brazil. Her brother-in-law is associated with a drug trafficking organization in Mexico, which has ties to drug traffickers in Brazil. Deas further admitted that she illegally accessed, stole, and transferred sensitive U.S. government documents to unauthorized individuals, and that she obstructed HSI investigations. Deas also admitted that she lied to a HSI Special Agent when asked why she was making computer inquiries about a specific person who was a target of another agent.

Deas' guilty plea included a total of seven felony violations, each punishable by up to five years in prison, and fourteen misdemeanors, each punishable by up to one year in prison.

Deas became a U.S. government employee in June, 2003, as a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer assigned to the Nogales, Ariz. port of entry. In 2008, she became an HSI special agent assigned to the HSI Nogales office.

The indictment to which Deas pleaded guilty also charges her sister, Dana Maria Samaniego Montes, 40, of Agua Prieta, Mexico with violations of federal law. Samaniego Montes is a fugitive believed to be residing in Mexico. She is a former Mexican law enforcement official with alleged ties to drug trafficking organizations.

Deas is scheduled to be sentenced on April 11, 2012, before United States District Court Judge Cindy Jorgenson.

The investigation of Deas was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) agents at the FBI's Southern Arizona Corruption Task Force (SACTF). SACTF agents were assisted in this investigation by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Department's Consular Integrity Division and the Brazilian Federal Police. The prosecution of Deas is being handled by James T. Lacey, an assistant U.S. attorney in Tucson.

CASE NUMBER:CR 11-1572-TUC-CKJ

RELEASE NUMBER: 2012-024(Deas)

Deas was sentenced to 30 months in prison in June of 2012.

####

### Chapter 28

### Glossary of Border Terminology

Aggie. U.S.D.A. Officer (United States Department of Agriculture).

BCC. Border crossing card.

Blitz. Similar to a sweep, with or without the use of K-9's.

Body Cavity Search. Only done in a medical facility by medical professionals.

Bondo. A polyester resin product used in auto repair that when mixed with a hardener turns into a putty which then sets and becomes rock-hard.

Brick. Name for the brick-shaped marijuana package commonly found in loads.

Buster. K910 Buster Density Meter.

BP. Border Patrol.

CBP. Customs and Border Protection. Overall name for the combined border agencies.

CEO. Canine Enforcement Officer. A dog handler.

CI. Customs Inspector, generally a journeyman inspector.

Compartment. A structure built into a car or truck by smugglers to hide narcotics.

Controlled Delivery. When a loaded vehicle is surreptitiously followed by officers.

False Claim. Somebody falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen.

Follow-Out. Same as a controlled delivery.

Frisk. A quick body search done for the presence of concealed weapon. This can be done on anyone, regardless of gender.

ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Combined investigative agencies.

II. Immigration Inspector.

Imposter. An individual attempting to use someone else's immigration documents.

INS. Immigration and Naturalization Service.Name used before the 2002 merger.

Hit. When a person or vehicle entered into a computer generates a displayed record.

Line. The front line. The nexus where an officer officially meets border arrivals.

Load. A quantity of narcotics hidden in a car or truck.

Loaded. A vehicle containing narcotics.

Lookout. Advance notice of possible enforcement action on a person or vehicle.

Natural Compartment. A factory-created open space in a car.

NCIC. National Crime Information Center.

Pat Down. A physical body search of a clothed person. Always gender-specific.

Pedestrian Gate. Entry point for people walking into the U.S.

Peds. Nickname for the pedestrian entry gate.

Perp. Perpetrator.

Pop. Slang term for an enforcement action, usually an apprehension of some kind.

Post-primary. The area between primary and secondary.

Pre-primary. The area between the primary booths and the Mexican border.

Primary. The entrance booths on the vehicle lanes coming from Mexico.

Rotation. The standard working schedule for a line inspector. Usually ½ hour on a car lane, ½ hour on pedestrian, another ½ hour on a car lane and an hour or so in secondary.

Secondary. The parking lot and inspectional area just behind the primary booths.

SCI. Supervisory Customs Inspector.

SI. Senior Inspector.

SII. Senior Immigration Inspector

Strip Search. A visual and physical search done only under carefully controlled conditions with the closest supervision and approval. Always gender-specific.

Sweep. Running a K-9 along a line of cars.

TECS. Treasury Enforcement Communication System.Computer-based.

Truck Dock. Commercial entry facility.

### About the Author

Before he was born author Jim Whitesell's family came to Minnesota from Indiana during the Great Depression. Growing up in what he called 'the Big Tundra' Jim had his own Great Depression when he watched icicles forming in heroic dimensions on the eaves of his family's home during the real, real, real long Minnesota winters. Jim was none too impressed with Minnesota's long winters and to this day can hardly stand the sight of an icicle. Being a democrat (with a small 'd') he voted with his feet. He now lives in a mountain valley desert grassland in far southeastern Arizona less than a half marathon's jog from Old Mexico. Whenever a wandering nostalgic thought for his frozen Minnesota roots pops up he jerks open the freezer door on his refrigerator and sticks his head in it for a couple minutes. That does it.

So much for nostalgia.

Jim was in the Army and Jim was in Viet Nam. But Jim was not in Viet Nam in the Army. Which is kind of the story of his life. Plenty of adventures. Plenty of misadventures. Dangling loose ends, hard to categorize and pin down. Lots of stuff all jumbled up, some of which he sure ain't talking about even to this day. He did however manage four years of college and a couple of more or less normal careers. One as a newspaperman in frozen-toed Minnesota and the other as a Customs and Border Protection officer on the Mexican border in heat-blasted Arizona. After something of a forced marriage, those two careers mated and out popped Border Tales.

Jim has a lovely wife, Betsy, who he probably doesn't deserve, and a bunch of kids and grandkids, most of them in Phoenix. Jim and Betsy make lots of trips to Phoenix.

Jim is also working on several more books.

Here is a sample chapter from one.....

### DIABLO'S RAID

by

James Whitesell

Copyright 2012 James Whitesell

PROLOGUE

Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII

"It's a crime against humanity!"

So thundered a fire eyed President Ronald Reagan from his imperial seat in the American Century White House. President Reagan was damn well serious about it. And also dead-on right in the eyes of much of the world. Most were calling it an unjustified and brutal Soviet shoot down. And not without good reason. On this one even the creaky old somnolent Gods peering down from their Olympian perches would have cast their votes with the Gipper. The Soviet action was flat out coldly brutal. And a gloomy adumbration for what was to be a month full of brutality and violence. The month. September. The year.

1983.

A Matrix

It began in the nascent baby steps of the month. The Soviets provoked the world into a eyeball-to-eyeball international crisis when they shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air 007, killing 269 people. Bad enough in itself. But among the dead was a rabidly anti-communist U.S. congressman from Georgia named Lawrence McDonald who was a cousin of the famous WWII General George Patton. President Ronald Reagan's political blood pressure skyrocketed and the always shaky cold war international nerves got even shakier. Later that month, though very few people knew about it, things got really scary when the Soviet satellite missile defense early warning system malfunctioned and falsely gave a pair of incoming missile warnings. A quick thinking Soviet officer named Petrov recognized the error and alerted his bosses before they hit the buttons to launch their by-the-book mandated nuclear retaliation. The earth was saved from blundering into a nuclear war. It was a close one. Way too close--even though the world remained ignorant that it came within a nuclear whisker of being incinerated.

But the world did know what happened when another international incident that bloody month of September exploded. Literally exploded. Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's bloody thugs turned on their own to extort protection money when they set off a bomb in Arab owned Gulf Air 771, killing all 112 on board. The bastards got their money. And in the same month the obdurate Catholic rebels of Northern Ireland caught the Brits with their punitive pants down when they pulled off the biggest prison escape in British history. Thirty nine hardcore IRA prisoners broke out of Britain's maximum security Maze Prison and were gone like Druids' smoke into the murky world of the Irish resistance. It was one hell of a turbulent month, September of 1983. And not just human caused turbulence. Tropical Storm Octave hit the arid state of Arizona with a biblical deluge that created utter chaos the length and breadth of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater's home turf. The whole state had an environmental nervous breakdown. It was, as one meteorologist put it...

"....one hell of a muddy mess."

The heavens were in churning cyclonic tumult. The cause was a meteorological shotgun wedding of a pair of colliding weather events. A Pacific weather system slid down the rugged California coast from the north and began moving inland into Arizona. To the south a tropical storm named Octave petered out off Mexico's Baja coast. Octave might have been out of steam but he sure wasn't out of water. There was moisture aplenty left in this old man of the sea. The California storm front sucked that moisture up like God's own vacuum cleaner and pumped it east into Arizona with such force that Arizona experienced the costliest natural disaster in the state's history. The rain continued for days on end. Fourteen people died as a direct result of the storm, the Prescott railroad was permanently washed out, the Gila River Bridge at Yuma was left high and dry when the flooding river cut a new channel, and Interstate 19 south from Tucson to the Mexican border was washed out. Severe flooding hit almost everywhere. Roads were closed, communities isolated all over Arizona and the paranoid bibliophiles were dusting off their ark building blueprints. It wasn't just the storm of the century. It was the Granddaddy storm of a whole bunch of centuries

And a tiny group of terrified desperate people found themselves fighting for their lives plumb in the middle of that Granddaddy Arizona storm of the centuries.

The Ancient Matrix

In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

It was somewhere in the piney Animas Mountains of Hidalgo County. What's today the 'boot heel' of the state of New Mexico, but was then briefly part of Old Mexico after the long dark centuries of foreign Spanish rule. John James Johnson, a rugged Kentucky born adventurer of the self reliant and hard bitten sort loosed on the expanding western frontier by Anglo America, was among the sprinkling of Americans living among the Native Americans and Mexicans of the Mexican southwest. In 1835 and 1837 the besieged desperate Mexican frontier states of Chihuahua and Sonora, forced to the edge of financial and cultural ruin from increasingly destructive Native American depredations, took the gruesome step of initiating a bounty system on the scalps of Apache Indians. The bounty grabbed the interest of a lot of people, including John James Johnson. He just was one among many. At first. But, unlike the many, Johnson was one of the few who made the sanguinary leap from mere interest to action.

Bloodily premeditated action.

In 1837, posing as traders with a pack train of laden mules, Johnson and a group of Missouri adventurers invited a band of Mimbreno Apaches into a trade parley. In a startling contrast to the complicated ancient blood feud with the Mexicans, Apaches had been on mostly good terms with the Americans. The Mimbrenos cautiously came in to trade. After a day or two of haggling and bartering, when the beguiled Indians were clustered together mulling over trade goods, the Americans let loose on them with rifle fire and a small hidden canon filled with scrap metal. At least twenty of the Indians died, including their chief, known by the Spanish name of Juan José Compas. Johnson scalped the dead Apaches, then quickly fled to Chihuahua City where he showed up at the doors of the State of Chihuahuas's bounty office with the blood hardly dry on his grisly trophies. The Mexicans paid John James Johnson for the Apache scalps.

One hundred pesos.

Apache retaliation was quick and brutal. A party of trappers on the nearby Gila River, led by a man named Charles Kemp, was murdered, as were a dozen men on a luckless passing wagon train. Tit for lethal tat. Was it then over? No. It wasn't the end. Only the beginning. The Apache had a long memory.

Far longer and beyond anything that even they could imagine.

Jesús Teran

Jesús Teran could plainly see the United States from his humble sun bleached adobe cottage on the hungry side of the border in the dusty little border town of Naco. The jaggedy peaked mountains radiating off to the north were all in the U.S. But it was the San Jose Mountains just south of Naco, barely five miles in length but rising to tower three thousand feet above the town at a cool 7500 foot elevation, that drew Jesús Teran. The steep mountain slopes were home to a succession of habitat zones, each with its own home boy resident species of trees. Teran was a wood cutter who ranged the slopes to cut wood for marketing across the border to the wood hungry stoves and backyard barbeques of the Americans. On the middle slopes he cut oak and pinyon. Higher up he cut ponderosa pine. On the lower slopes he cut mesquite. Some of the mesquite he sold for fireplace wood. But most of it he burned down into charcoal to sell to the Americans for their barbecues. It was not a fat life, but a man had to do something to eat, and wood cutting was as good as most things open to a Mexican not lucky enough to be one of the few born into the privileged world of the Mexican elite. At least he, and his large family, had enough to eat. And there was no strutting patrón's butt that he had to kiss. He might be poor. But he was free. Jesús Teran was a man of dignity and self respect.

Jesús stood amidst a scattering of manzanita and black oaks heavily laden with ripening clusters of bitter tasting acorns. Teran and most of his compadres found them impossible to eat. Not so the gray squirrels and other critters of the mountains that dined with relish on the drooping bounty of the black oaks. And no one denied the graceful beauty of the oaks, bitter though their fruit may be. This was one of Jesús' favorite spots to linger and look and muse, a bluff a thousand feet above the browning expanse of the San Pedro valley. Below him the desert grasslands of the valley spread off into the distance to disappear over the rim of the horizon. Looking to Jesús' whimsical mind like a last minute addition by the Almighty, clumps of soaring mountains seemed like they were plunked down haphazardly all around the San Pedro Valley. And far beyond. The scientific minded used the geologic term of 'basin and range' to describe the topography of alternating broad valleys and towering sky island mountain ranges. Such words were alien to Jesús and as barren as the womb of his octogenarian grandmother. This place? Basin and range? Those were just words, hopelessly inadequate to describe what lay before his eyes. This was God's country. Jesús did not neglect to be grateful for it.

Teran stared off to the north. There were the American towns of Bisbee and Sierra Vista, the filthy smokestacks of the copper smelter at Douglas and the little moving flashes of silver light that were automobiles on the American highways that seemed to be continually in motion. Like a mechanical ant hill. Teran shook his head slowly. So many Mexicanos, especially those poor souls from deep in the downtrodden stagnant innards of the country, were obsessed with getting to the United States. Not Jesús Teran. He'd been north and he didn't like it. Why were the stressed out Americanos always in such a hurry? Life was too fast, too complicated, the culture too foreign, the pressures on the family too fragmenting. Was America efficient? Yes. English was the language of the engineer. And, Spanish? It was the loving tongue. The flowing vibrant river of the lover and the poet and the mystic. In his days of exile in the mechanical soulless Yankee north Jesús realized the urgings of his inner self. He didn't belong there. Jesús had to live in a Spanish speaking place with ancient roots bound up in both the land and the people. He went back home. And there he stayed.

Jesús was content to eke out a living as a woodcutter in Mexico, where he could raise his children in the traditional ways and not see them turn into some kind of strange mutant--such as had happened to the children of two of his older brothers who had gone to Phoenix. He shook his head again. What was he to say to swaggering nephews who sported vulgar tattoos, flashed gang signals and spoke in a gutter patois that was neither good Spanish nor good English? It was those same nephews who tried to get Jesús to join the growing numbers of border Mexicans who supplemented their meager incomes by backpacking bundles of marijuana over the border. Teran flatly said no. He was an old fashioned man who wanted no part of drug smuggling of any kind. He considered it to be dishonorable. Jesús would remain a simple woodcutter on the slopes of the San Jose Mountains. He fed his family, there was not an ounce of fat on his body, his muscles were as hard as the ironwood he sometimes cut and he always had enough money for a cerveza or two at the cantinas in Naco or nearby Cananea. It was good enough. Yes. Good enough for a simple man of the earth like Jesús Teran.

Jesús shrugged, shouldered his axe and turned to move up the slope. He instantly froze in utter astonishment. Looming right behind him, barely three feet away, was a tall and lean weather beaten gringo. The long-haired man was holding a knife, but what really struck Jesús Teran in those last few terrible moments was the man's eyes. They were like a wild animal's. The razor-sharp knife flashed in the sun.

Jesús Teran was not quick enough with his axe.

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