Border Tales » drugs

Two more corruption arrests

bordertales — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:56:05 +0000

A new year, and the corruption busts keep coming. Wednesday was a busy day when it came to arrest ing CBP officers. In Yuma, Arizona, a 41-year-old CBPO and his wife were arrested on bribery charges after allowing 600,000 fake ecstasy pills to be smuggled through his inspection lane during what turned out to be a sting operation.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, a Brownsville CBPO was busted for allowing unauthorized immigrants to be smuggled into the country, along with more than 30 pounds of cocaine to be smuggled into the country through his lane.

And earlier in the month, a former Border Patrol Agent stationed in Arizona, Jose Luis Sanchez, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to smuggled marijuana into the country (press release after the jump) while Salomon Ruiz, 34, and Leonel Morales, 30, cousins who were both Border Patrol agents, pleaded guilty in separate hearings to accepting bribes from drug smugglers to guide loads of cocaine into the country. They were arrested in December in Texas.

With the violence in Mexico, particularly in border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, the pressure seems greater than ever to find a corruptible border agent. The Department of Homeland Security may have met its hiring goals with patrol agents, but have they met their goals with internal affairs agents is another question.

CUSTOMS OFFICIAL AND HIS WIFE CHARGED WITH ACCEPTING BRIBES TO SMUGGLE DRUGS INTO U.S.

YUMA, Ariz. – U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer, Henry M. Gauani, 41, and his wife Flora A. Gauani, aka Kitty, 46, both of Yuma, were arrested without incident on Tuesday night and charged with Conspiracy to Accept a Bribe by a Public Official for their part of a scheme in which over 600,000 fake ecstasy pills were allowed to pass through the San Luis, Ariz. (Yuma) Port of Entry (POE) into the United States.

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According to the complaint unsealed today in federal court, an informant had told federal authorities that the Gauanis (aka Mr. and Mrs. Wong) had allowed undocumented Chinese aliens to pass through Henry Gauani’s POE inspection lane sometime in the past. The complaint also alleges that the Gauani’s entered into an agreement with this informant during which they would facilitate bringing in ecstasy pills through Henry Gauani’s inspection lane at the San Luis POE.

The complaint alleges that the Gauani’s were paid $8,000 to allow 100,000 ecstasy pills to enter into the U.S. through Henry Gauani’s inspection lane in December 2008. However, the pills were not real. As part of a joint investigation by federal law enforcement, the Gauanis were arrested on Tuesday, January 27, 2009, after allowing another shipment, of what they believed were an additional 500,000 ecstasy pills, to pass through his inspection lane. The Gauanis believed that they were to be paid $25,000 for the latest part of their scheme. The approximate street value of the 600,000 ecstasy pills they thought were being smuggled into the U.S. is almost $11 million in U.S. currency.

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From the Brownsville Herald

Federal authorities arrested an officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection after conducting an investigation into his alleged involvement in the smuggling of drugs and undocumented immigrants, officials said.

Sergio Lopez Hernandez, 40, a 12-year veteran with the agency, was arrested Wednesday while on duty at the Free Trade Bridge at Los Indios. Federal authorities also raided his residence in Brownsville. More than $85,000 was found in a safe inside the house, said Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Lopez Hernandez became the subject of surveillance and undercover operations after federal agents received reports in October that he had been allowing vehicles with undocumented immigrants and illegal drugs to enter the country at the Los Indios bridge, a criminal complaint filed in federal court states. The officer allegedly received $500 per undocumented immigrant he allowed to pass through his vehicle checkpoint.

From the McAllen Monitor:

Agents admit to accepting bribes from smugglers

January 30, 2009 – 6:06 PM

Jeremy Roebuck

The Monitor

McALLEN — Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents have pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges, prosecutors said Friday.

Cousins Salomon Ruiz, 34, and Leonel Morales, 30, admitted in separate hearings to accepting more than $23,000 from drug traffickers to help guide cocaine loads into the country.

Ruiz, an agent stationed in McAllen, entered his plea at a hearing Friday, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

According to court filings, he took $14,000 over a two-year period to distract authorities while smugglers brought 25 kilograms of cocaine across the Rio Grande near La Casita, a small community east of Rio Grande City.

Ruiz admitted in a taped confession to monitoring radio traffic and activating Border Patrol sensors to ensure no other agents would enter the area.

At some point, he also introduced the smuggler he worked with to his cousin, Morales, a Border Patrol agent stationed in Zapata County.

Federal agents arrested Morales last month after investigators caught him negotiating how he would escort a 20-kilogram cocaine load through the county in exchange for $9,000. He pleaded guilty to bribery charges Jan. 6.

Attorneys for both men did not return calls for comment Friday.

They face up to 15 years in a federal prison at separate sentencing hearings set for this spring.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, January 8, 2009
FORMER BORDER PATROL AGENT SENTENCED TO 15 YEARS IN PRISON FOR DRUGS AND BRIBERY
TUCSON , Ariz. —Former U.S. Border Patrol Agent Juan Luis Sanchez, 32, of Rio Rico, Ariz. , was sentenced today to 15 years in prison by Chief U.S. District Judge John M. Roll. Sanchez pleaded guilty on May 20, 2008 , to drug, bribery and worker’s compensation fraud charges. Although Sanchez was sentenced separately for each count (15 years—drug charge, 15 years—bribery charge, and five years for the worker’s comp charge), the sentences will run concurrently for a total 15 years in federal prison. Sanchez transported marijuana in his Border Patrol vehicle on six separate occasions from the mid-2002 through January 28, 2004 . The loads ranged in size from 376 pounds to 921 pounds. Sanchez estimated that he transported at least 3,000 pounds of marijuana over the course of the conspiracy and received a total of $45,000 in bribes. Sanchez also admitted to fraud relating to worker’s compensation benefits he received following an on-duty vehicle accident that occurred after the drug trafficking activities, but prior to his arrest. Sanchez admitted that by March 2008, his medical condition had improved, such that he was no longer entitled to benefits, but that he failed to notify the U.S. Department of Labor of the improvement in his condition. The investigation in this case was conducted by the Southwest Border Corruption Task Force in Tucson (comprised of law enforcement officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – Office of Professional Responsibility, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security – Office of Inspector General, Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation Division and the Tucson Police Department) and by the Santa Cruz Metro Task Force, U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Department of Labor – Office of Inspector General. The prosecution was handled by Mary Sue Feldmeier, Assistant U.S. Attorney, District of Arizona, Tucson . CASE NUMBER: CR-05-1005-TUC-JMR RELEASE NUMBER: 2009-008(Sanchez)

Another corruption arrest

bordertales — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:00:40 +0000

To clean up some old items from the draft file:

Not that it would surprise some people, but the corruption cases along the border keep piling up.

I was surprised a recent case out of Texas didn’t get more coverage, seeing that the Homeland Security Department’s press release mentioned that Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs helped investigate, not to mention that it was a DHS/Office of Inspector General (the overarching internal affairs unit for the department) press release.

Jorge A. Leija was arrested on drug charges right around Halloween. He was not charged with accepting bribes, but a DEA agent testified that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he let in a lot of cocaine: more than 1,300 kilos, or about 3,000 lbs.

The story appeared in the Monday, November 10 edition of the NY Times.

November 10, 2008

Border Inspector Accused of Allowing 3,000 Pounds of Cocaine Into U.S. Over 5 Years

By ANDREW BECKER

A veteran customs inspector recently arrested in Texas on drug charges helped traffickers smuggle about 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the country over five years, according to a court document filed last week.

The inspector, Jorge A. Leija, 43, allowed smugglers to drive cars loaded with cocaine through his entry lane at the Eagle Pass border crossing, about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio, without inspection, according to testimony by an unnamed Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

Mr. Leija was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars from January 2001 to October 2006, the agent said at a bail hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Del Rio, Tex.

Court documents said Mr. Leija was also paid $30,000 to make false statements on an application he submitted in September 2003 to obtain an American passport for another person.

Mr. Leija worked as an inspector for 11 years, said Rick Pauza, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Laredo, Tex.

Late last month, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Leija on charges of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine and making a false statement. He was arrested on Oct. 30.

Mr. Leija had been placed on administrative duty more than two years before his arrest and assigned to a desk job, said his lawyer, Richard F. Gutierrez.

Mr. Leija’s arrest is the latest in scores of corruption cases the past few years involving agents along the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

The cases have come as the Border Patrol and other agencies that police the border have significantly increased their ranks. Internal affairs investigators are being added to address corruption, but the problem, officials have said, could get worse before it gets better.

Ronald D. Moore, the special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general’s office in Houston, which helped investigate the Leija case, said the office “takes very seriously allegations of public corruption involving Homeland Security employees and works with other law enforcement agencies to ensure that those who violate the public trust are brought to justice.”

Based on the drug enforcement agent’s testimony, Magistrate Judge Dennis G. Green ordered Mr. Leija held without bail, citing his frequent travel to Mexico and “the huge amount of cocaine involved.”

Mr. Leija, a naturalized American citizen born in the Mexican state of Coahuila, told investigators that he traveled to Mexico three or four times a week to visit his children. He earned an annual salary of nearly $62,000 at the time of his arrest, according to the detention order, but owed more than $50,000 in credit card debt and car payments.

Mr. Leija faces a sentence of 10 years to life in prison and a fine of up to $4 million if convicted. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 20.

Extraditions at record pace

bordertales — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:36:48 +0000

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Ken Ellingwood writes about the “record” number of extraditions of drug suspects and other wanted criminal suspects from Mexico to the US.

Ellingwood writes,

The government of President Felipe Calderon is extraditing drug suspects and other fugitives to the United States at a record pace, reflecting a quiet but seismic shift in Mexican policy that many analysts say could help dismantle trafficking gangs.

Calderon’s administration has handed over more than 150 criminal suspects since coming to power in December 2006.

The extradition rate is double what it was before Calderon took office. And it represents a radical policy change from a decade ago, when Mexico, sensitive about its sovereignty, rarely handed suspects over for prosecution in the United States.

I’d heard something similar about a month ago, and checked in with different sources. I was pointed to a web site for the US Embassy in Mexico City that details the breakdown of extraditions. As of August 2008, about 48 percent of the extraditions involve drugs, while 33 percent are for murder. Overall, more than half the extraditions are for offenses other than drug trafficking, including murder, sexual crimes against children, rape and kidnapping. Most of the fugitives returned are Mexican nationals.

These figures are up from 40 percent of extraditions involved drug trafficking while down from 37 percent involving murder from figures that appear to be about a year old.

See: http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/eataglance_law.html

The overall numbers are certainly up — Mexico extradited only four people in 1995, for instance, compared with 83 people last year and about 70 this year, as Ellingwood reports (the latest figures I have from August are at 57 for the calendar year). A telling number, however, is that 51 extradition cases remain before Mexican judges (at least two involve the Villarreal brothers, as mentioned previously here.)

What I don’t know is if the actual rate of extraditions has increased, as Ellingwood reports. Are the number of extradition requests increasing as well? Or are the requests static and the number of approved extraditions increasing?

Anyway, there has been a trend upward in extraditions going back to 2000. As this State Department press release points out, 2003 saw a record, too. The fact is, we’ve heard about new records before:

NEW RECORD IN EXTRADITIONS FROM MEXICO TO THE U.S.A.

Ambassador Garza salutes increased bilateral effort to bring criminals to justice

Mexico City
October 16, 2003

With two accused drug traffickers and one person charged with money laundering extradited from Mexico to the United States today, the total number of extraditions rose to 28 so far this year – exceeding the record of 25 in all of 2002.

“The cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials means that more of those who should be tried for their crimes are going to face justice,” U. S. Ambassador Antonio O. Garza, Jr. said Monday. “The number of extraditions in the last two years represents a major change; we still have a long way to go to ensure justice can be done on both sides of the border but Mexicans and Americans are showing their commitment to this goal.”

The Ambassador expressed his gratitude for the cooperation from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and the Secretariat of Foreign Relations in facilitating the arrest and extradition of the 28 accused criminals. He noted that, from 1995-2000, the average number of extraditions per year was 11, and to date more than twice this number have been extradited in 2003.

“All crimes for which we seek extradition are serious – murder, attempted murder, rape, kidnapping, narcotics, sexual assault of children, money laundering and major fraud,” the Ambassador said. “Mexicans and Americans want to see those responsible behind bars.”

Since the Mexican Supreme Court prohibited the extradition of defendants facing life sentences in October 2001, the only cases in which the United States seeks extradition are those for which U.S. prosecutors give assurances that they will not seek the penalty of natural life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. (Death sentences are excluded under the U.S.-Mexico Treaty.)

Source

Source: US Embassy, Mexico City Web site

The big change, as Ellingwood mentions, which is a major factor in the increase in extraditions, occurred in 2005 when Mexico’s Supreme Court changed the country’s law that prohibits extraditions for cases that could result in life in prison in the U.S. without the possibility of parole.

Narco-Mexico, update

bordertales — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:16:22 +0000

Old news, but here’s an update on SoS Rice’s Puerto Vallarta visit last week, courtesy of Reuters

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico (Reuters) – The United States and Mexico will launch a new effort next month to battle Mexican cartels that are smuggling drugs into the United States, their two foreign ministers announced on Thursday.

Funding for the new program has not yet been released. But Rice said the money would be sent as soon as letters of agreement governing the funds were finished.

“We all want the disbursements to begin and we expect that to happen, really, quite soon,” she said at a press conference.

The Merida Initiative, as it is called, will pay for inspection equipment like scanners, helicopters and surveillance aircraft as well as canine units to support interdiction. It will also finance training and technical advice to support law enforcement operations in Mexico.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has sent some 36,000 troops across Mexico to try to restore law and order, has called on Washington to release the equipment quickly.

Bush, who leaves office early next year, proposed the initiative as a three-year program totaling $1.4 billion. He has asked Congress to approve another $500 million for the fiscal year that ends next September

M3 Report 10/23/08

bordertales — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:30:53 +0000

Life on the border…

Courtesy: National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers/ http:www.nafbpo.org

The M3 report translates a nice bit of writing about life on the border from La Prensa, in Mexico City. Read it after the jump. But, with news of the arrest of Jesus Zambada Garcia, the brother one of Mexico’s most notorious narco kingpin suspects, Ismael Zambada, comes some hefty weaponry/jewelry, as posted by the M3 report. The little vignette and the usual carnage round-up after the jump.

Check out that bullet-blasting bling:

Jesus Zambada Garcia and some friends?

La Prensa (Mexico City) 10/23/08 – part of nationwide “o.e.m.” newspaper group -

(Note: the Tia Juana River, usually dry, crosses the border from S.E. to N.W. just to the west of the border crossing point between Tijuana, Baja Calif., and San Ysidro (San Diego), Calif. , said to be the world’s busiest; the wide and shallow river bed provides an open area rife with law enforcement problems. The following is a full translation of a feature article describing some of the goings-on in there)

“Zacatecan migrants, lost souls who roam the banks of the Tijuana River.”

The United States is on the other side of the yellow stripe painted on the concrete bed of the Tijuana River, a dry river. On the north of the line, United States Border Patrol Agents who patrol in dazzling white colored light trucks keep a permanent watch. To the south of the line, the lost souls spend the night in vigil, in front of the glare of the stadium lights which protect the American Dream.
On the Mexican side of the border fence, the principal Tijuana drainage canal collects a gallery of deportees and vagabonds, of smugglers and drug addicts removed from the opposite side. The majority are undocumented individuals who were returned to Mexico after serving jail sentences to the north. According to United States law, they are “criminal aliens.” Within that group there are restaurant workers who were arrested for being drunk as well as seasoned criminals, freed after several years in jail.
“Most of us are here because they kicked us out of there” says Juan Saucedo, 29, who shares a Coco Krispies cereal box with other residents of the area. He is known as “Zacatecas”, the name of the Mexican state which he abandoned at 14 years of age to head toward Long Beach, California.