Thread: Corrupt public workers a thorn in side of Southern Arizona

Corrupt public workers a thorn in side of Southern Arizona

07:23 PM MST on Sunday, May 29, 2005

By Michael Marizco mmarizco@azstarnet.com / ARIZONA DAILY STAR

At least 55 government employees, including military personnel, have been arrested or indicted or pleaded guilty in Southern Arizona in the past year on charges ranging from drug- or people-smuggling to public corruption, U.S. District Court records show.

And while that number makes up a small percentage of the thousands of government employees and military personnel in Southern Arizona, the numbers are worrisome, said Raymond L. Vinsik, director of a federal anti-drug analysis and intelligence center known as the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

The state, with its border with Mexico and large-scale smuggling operations, pre-sents a unique opportunity for people in public positions to make easy money from illegal activities, Vinsik said.

Corrupt government employees using their positions for illegal gains in this key smuggling region has become a rampant problem, he said.

"They're in a position of trust. They're crooks," Vinsik said.

The FBI will not say how many public corruption cases against government employees, public officials and members of the military are open this year because many of those are still under investigation. But from Oct. 1, 2001, to Sept. 30, 2002, 34 of them were indicted on corruption charges involving crimes in Southern Arizona.

"Which is not a number you would see in very many places in the United States," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brian D. Filbert, head of the Southern Arizona Corruption Task Force in Tucson.

The recent corruption cases involve government employees including federal border agents and port inspectors, corrections officers, various state employees, a police officer and military personnel.

The majority of those involve drug smuggling, he said.

"This is something that we see over and over again. It's an ongoing, significant issue," Filbert said.

Huge number of entrant arrests

More than half of all illegal- entrant apprehensions in the United States last year happened in Arizona, and with more than 1 million pounds of drugs seized last year, Arizona was second only to Texas for the amount of illegal narcotics seized, records show.

That provides a strong temptation in Arizona to those looking for fast money, Vinsik said.

In the largest recent criminal case here, 24 people including Arizona Army National Guardsmen, a federal port inspector, U.S. Air Force personnel, a Nogales, Ariz., police officer, and federal and state prison guards were caught up in an FBI cocaine sting dubbed Operation Lively Green.

Seventeen of them pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court two weeks ago.

Seven people from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base also charged face up to 30 years in prison on cocaine-smuggling charges. All believed they were working for a cartel moving drugs from the border to Las Vegas, authorities say. Some reportedly bragged to undercover FBI agents that they smuggled drugs and people across the Arizona-Mexico border or had family members who did so.

When more people are charged in that sting operation, as the U.S. Justice Department says will happen, it's going to replace last September's Motor Vehicle Division scandal as one of the biggest public corruption cases in Arizona history.

Thirty-four people were indicted on charges of making and selling fraudulent driver's licenses in that case.

According to the federal indictment in the case, state employees accepted bribes of up to $3,500 for unlawfully providing state identification cards and driver's licenses for years. They included 26 current and former employees of 10 MVD offices in Southern Arizona and the Phoenix area, and eight others suspected of brokering the sale of fake state-issued ID cards.

Some have pleaded guilty, and prosecution is pending for most in that case, said Sandy Raynor, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix.

Those people received more than $70,000 in bribes, and the three-year investigation churned out more than 100 fake driver's licenses.

People-smuggling cases

Then there are the individual cases charging Homeland Security immigration agents and soldiers with smuggling people across the border.

Border Patrol agent Christopher Bemis, 24, met a 15-year-old girl in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, three years ago. According to a federal search warrant from February, he paid for her to be smuggled across, picked her up at a gas station in Douglas and lived with her from last June in Sierra Vista until she was arrested on domestic-violence charges earlier this year.

Bemis was indicted last month on charges of harboring an illegal entrant. He no longer works for the Border Patrol.

Last January, National Guardsman Adrian Adolfo Santacruz, 29, admitted to a Border Patrol agent he was trying to smuggle the two Mexican men in the car with him. Santacruz was wearing his uniform when he was stopped at the Interstate 19 checkpoint. His case is pending.

Yet another, this one an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was indicted earlier this month on charges of trying to smuggle a woman and her 10-year-old son into the United States. The agent, Ramon M. Sanchez, 41, is not in custody but faces a maximum eight years in prison.

"Ruining someone's life"

Corruption cases involving public employees can be complex and take years to investigate, officials said.

The corruption task force requires corroborating information to open an investigation; the threshold to open an investigation has to contain more than rumor, said FBI spokeswoman Deborah McCarley.

Simply being accused can ruin a person's career, she said.

"You're really talking about ruining someone's life," she said.

Whether the task force's existence is any deterrence is not known.

Take the case of 10 Fort Huachuca soldiers accused of running drugs form Sierra Vista to Tucson.

The six-month FBI investigation ended in October 2001, with the 10 soldiers arrested a month later on charges of selling the drugs to undercover agents.

But no sooner did that case finish than Operation Lively Green began within the next two months.

The 24 charged in that case were accused of using their power to run cocaine past highway checkpoints and sell it to undercover agents for a few thousand dollars.

Being a federal agent willing to look the other way while someone runs a load of drugs or illegal entrants by you is extremely profitable, said Vinsik, of the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

"Here, a corrupt immigration official is worth a lot of money," he said. "Once they're bought, they stay bought."

Corrupt members of the armed forces or prison guards aren't bought for their knowledge or access as for their uniforms, he said.

At the federal level, little is known about what is being done to keep agents honest.

Six years ago, the General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office, made recommendations that the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service adopt integrity programs that would require agents to disclose their financial holdings to ensure they weren't living beyond their means.

The agency also recommended agents be moved from inspection station to inspection station to prevent smugglers from bribing them to use the same checkpoint or port of entry lanes and recommended that agents not be permanently assigned partners.

But those agencies folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and it is not known if the new agency took those recommendations with it, said Richard Stana, director of homeland-security and justice issues for the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Homeland spokesman Russ Knocke would not discuss what measures the department uses to ensure the integrity of its agents. He said corruption cases in the department are rare and "do not reflect the character and quality of the professionals working within the department."

For more Arizona news, visit www.azstarnet.com or www.azfamily.com.

I think it was James Kilpatrick who once suggested that drug lords should be hung in public and their bodies left up for all who might contemplate those crimes to see. Maybe it is time.

How many of these OFFENDERS are of MEXICAN decent?

Are ILLEGAL?

This is not a racist question.........it's COMMON SENSE