THE BORDER REPORT

The Associated Press has a wrap-up story on corruption within the border law enforcement agencies that is billed as an investigation but does little more than touch on spot cases of rot within the ranks of border cops. On a closer inspection, the numbers The AP uses actually make agencies like the Homeland Security Department look pretty good.

Corruption stories are enticing no matter what jurisdiction you cover them in and there’s even a formula in journalism to explain them away. First, you take a raw number, in this case, 21 indicted agents, and you divide it by last year’s, eight. Call that a 2.5 increase, or if you really want to slam an agency, “250 percent.” Then you fill in the rest of the story with quotes and conjecture and oíla! Journalism award, here we come. It’s a little bit horrible because it’s extremely misleading to the casual reader.

In this case, The AP was especially egregious because the headlines of the issue doesn’t match the content inside the story. The story claims border cops are ‘being charged in numbers not seen before.” What they neglect to mention is that the number of federal agents on the U.S.-Mexico border has never been seen before either. Any reasonable person would expect the number of corruption cases to increase when the number of agents increase. This is not new; what is new and what interests me, is that the support structure for the increased number of federal agents doesn’t increase. It’s easy to put “boots on the ground,” but more agents leads to more criminal engagements, arrests, corruption, sloth. For example, here in Arizona, the Office of Inspector General, which investigates federal agents, has had five investigators for years now. The Border Patrol keeps growing, we’re at double the number of agents from three years ago but we have a stagnant number of corruption investigators looking into them. If one were to take The AP’s numbers at face value, then the agencies are looking pretty good; they’re catching more agents with less proportionate manpower. I worry less about those agents who’ve already been indicted and a little more about those who haven’t.

Here’s an August 2008 federal search warrant into a corrupt inspector I dug up the other day. I like it because the inspector and his wife worked the system together.

The Wong Guy for the Job

Henry Gauani was a Customs and Border Protection inspector at the San Luis Port Port of Entry in western Arizona. He was already being watched, the federal warrant says, because he’d been smuggling five to seven Chinese nationals a week through his port of entry lane. He called himself “Mr. Wong” and he worked the smuggling scam with his wife, Flora, AKA “Mrs. Wong.” Or “Kitty.” I don’t yet know what his cut was on the jobs, but Chinese aren’t cheap. They’re paying as much as $50,000 a head to be smuggled across the border here.

The FBI’s Corruption Task Force turned a snitch on him last summer; the guy approached Gauani, asking to run 500,000 Ecstasy pills through Gauani’s lane for $10,000. Henry asks for $20,000. Flora bumps it up, $25,000, then volunteered her husband to drive the load through himself for $50,000 (Henry wasn’t quite the pushover I thought he was, he later offers to run the load himself for $25,000).

The snitch negotiated the deal down to the 100,000 pills for $8,000. Not sure why though I suspect the FBI wanted to show Henry’s propensity for greed and not allow him to build a “Hey, your Honor, this was a one time deal,” defense.

With Flora coordinating the pass-through on a push-to-talk radio, the snitch drove through Henry’s lane. Henry let him in and never swiped the guy’s visa through his scanner. The pass completed, Flora and the snitch met at a Starbucks in the Yuma Palms Mall. Agent Stan Huff was inside and passed the snitch two cups, one a cup of coffee, the other an empty Starbucks cup in the other with the $8K rolled up inside.

“This recording revealed that Flora Gauani was upset that CI was not giving her a monetary bonus for her involvement,” the agent noted somewhat wryly in the warrant.

The case is being heard in federal court in Phoenix. Henry and Flora must be out on bond; they don’t turn up in Federal Bureau of Prisons records.