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Graft takes root along border

EL PASO, Texas — Bribery of federal and local officials by Mexican smugglers is rising sharply, and with it the fear that a culture of corruption is taking hold along the 2,000-mile border from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego.

At least 200 public employees have been charged with helping to move narcotics or illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexican border since 2004, at least double the illicit activity documented in prior years, a Los Angeles Times examination of public records has found. Thousands more are under investigation.

Criminal charges have been brought against Border Patrol agents, local police, a county sheriff, motor-vehicle clerks, an FBI supervisor, immigration examiners, prison guards, school-district officials and uniformed personnel of every branch of the U.S. military, among others. The vast majority have pleaded guilty or been convicted.

Some schemes have displayed considerable sophistication among Mexican drug lords, and their success shows a discouraging willingness by public employees to take tainted money.

Their man in the FBI

Perhaps the most revealing example of smugglers' savvy was their cultivation of the highest-ranking FBI official in El Paso, Special Agent in Charge Hardrick Crawford.

FBI agents thought they had turned alleged drug kingpin José Maria Guardia into an informant, but Guardia was working as a double agent for the Mexican drug lords. He drew Crawford into a personal friendship, and provided a job for Crawford's wife, a country-club membership for the couple and family trips to Las Vegas.

In August, after the relationship became public, Crawford was convicted on federal charges of trying to conceal his friendship with Guardia. He could be sentenced to up to five years in prison and fined half a million dollars.

Drug rings once planted a mole in a federal agency, and officials worry others are lurking. The rings have entangled U.S. agents in sexual relationships. And they have amassed files on individual U.S. agents, with details about their finances, families and habits.

"They hire guys to watch the narcotics agents," says Lee Morgan II, who retired as the head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Douglas, Ariz., this year. "They know what time we get up in the morning. When we go to work. What kind of car your wife drives."
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The Mexican criminal networks can afford lavish payoffs. Bribery payments have topped $1 million.

Security dilemma

Officials warn that the risk of public corruption will grow as Congress and the Bush administration respond to public demands to improve border security. Customs and Border Protection, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, wants to add 10,000 employees to its work force of 42,000, most of whom are already stationed along the Mexican border.

"If you increase the number of people on the border, you are going to get more corruption," said James "Chip" Burrus, assistant director of the criminal-investigation division of the FBI.

Stepped-up border security also makes corruption all the more necessary to smugglers.

"As we tighten up on the border, it will make it harder for the traffickers to get across," said Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney for Texas' Western District. "You have to be creative about getting your poison into the U.S. Obviously, corrupting the officials is a part of it."

Critics blame sloppy hiring practices, inadequate training and weak internal controls. Agents are vulnerable because morale in the agency is "pathetic," stemming in part from illegal immigrants' phony allegations against agents that have unfairly ruined careers, said T.J. Bonner, head of the union for Border Patrol agents.

Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar rejects those claims, saying morale is good thanks to more staffing and better equipment. Wages for public employees in the poor border economies are respectable; Border Patrol agents start at about $35,000 a year and can exceed $65,000 with overtime.

Aguilar said the Border Patrol had increased ethics training at its academy and set up anticorruption programs in the field, and he said it conducted new background checks on its agents every five years. But such efforts sometimes stand little chance against the greed of weak agents and the power of smugglers with money to spread around.

"They are going to try to find ways to breach our enforcement efforts," said Aguilar. "They will try to flank us, tunnel us, fly over and to corrupt our efforts."

While corruption is growing, the number of internal investigators overseeing a vastly expanding workforce is stagnant or even shrinking. Others complain that infighting within the Department of Homeland Security has hobbled enforcement. (All the major border agencies are part of Homeland Security.)

Shortage of resources

Michael Maxwell resigned this year as head of internal affairs for the Citizenship and Immigration Service after clashing repeatedly with Homeland Security over a shortage of resources. When he left, 3,000 allegations of misconduct, including 100 reports of bribery, were uninvestigated, he said.

"Nobody is seriously addressing corruption," Maxwell said. "The corruption is pervasive."

The narcotics networks sometimes receive direct help from local Mexican governments. Last year, federal prosecutors in Arizona charged Police Chief Ramon Robles-Cota of Sonoyta, Mexico, a small town near the Lukeville border crossing, with drug trafficking and bribery.

His swings into Arizona were chauffeured by one of his officers, Julio Cesar Lozano-Lopez, who admitted in federal court that he drove his chief into Arizona twice in 2005 to meet with Border Patrol agents and spread bribe money around. The chief is in federal custody in Arizona, awaiting trial.

In a 2005 wake-up call about the scope of border corruption, a major FBI-led sting in Arizona netted 71 guilty pleas by National Guard members, state prison guards and a federal inspector. Known as Operation Lively Green, the sting demonstrated that large numbers of government employees at the border were willing to take a bribe.

But nobody in government has measured all the criminal cases across every jurisdiction, agency and state.

The Times examined case files, public announcements and other public records dating to 2004 and interviewed officials in every U.S. attorney's district along the border as well as local and federal law-enforcement agents and key county prosecutors.

Nearly half of the cases were associated with Lively Green and another major FBI sting in Arizona, code-named Double Driver, which caught 26 Arizona Department of Transportation clerks in 2004 who were issuing fraudulent driver's licenses.

Even excluding those stings, the number of indicted individuals still shows a steady growth: 17 in 2004, 35 in 2005 and 52 so far in 2006.

Human traffickers

In the past, border corruption was mainly associated with narcotics. But increasingly, immigrant smugglers — who command huge fees from people trying to cross illegally into the U.S. — are also making payoffs.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 called attention to the risks posed by human smuggling: Though no terrorists are known to have slipped across the Mexican border yet, many law-enforcement officials are deeply worried that corrupt inspectors might let it happen.

Mario Alvarez and Samuel McClaren, senior U.S. Border Patrol agents in El Centro, Calif., helped launch a program that jailed dozens of such human smugglers. In March, they were told to come to El Centro headquarters to receive an award. Instead, they were arrested in front of stunned fellow agents.

They eventually pleaded guilty to taking cash bribes to release immigrants from detention centers and then falsify reports that they had returned the individuals to Mexico. They were caught when another Border Patrol agent obtained a telephone call list from a captured smuggler and found their number on it.

The escalating corruption among federal employees has drawn charges that Homeland Security's screening and training of new employees is sloppy.

But even the most ambitious review of job applicants won't necessarily ferret out all the problems. Many convicted agents have said financial pressures and other personal dilemmas drove them to cross the line. Smugglers often know how to push the right button.

A Border Patrol agent, part of a narcotics and immigrant network in El Paso, explained to a judge last year how smugglers sought to recruit him.

Agent Aldo Erives said the drug dealers knew that he hitchhiked to his classes at a local college.

"Come on," he said they told him, "you can buy a car if you pass a load through the checkpoint."