Corruption Tales
Dec 6th, 2006 | By Michel Marizco | Category: General News, Organized Crime, Politics
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THE BORDER REPORT
Arizona papers haven't paid much attention to the latest findings about corruption among Homeland Security Department agents but they should.
Most DHS news stories written in this state are glowing sentiments of the hard work of securing America's border. But while some - maybe most - agents are diligently working to secure the border, their colleagues are hard at work:
Running migrants and drugs north (U.S. Border Patrol), taking cash bribes (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), stealing money from traveler's luggage (Transportation Security Administration), sleeping with known felons (ICE), exposing themselves to kids (ICE again), running drugs on airplanes (Air Marshals), selling falsified documents to illegal immigrants (Border Patrol), emailing dirty pics to kids (more ICE) and on and on.
Fun stuff.
Homeland's Office of Inspector General semi-annual report to Congress was made available this week and details some creepy trends in corruption cases in the beleagured department.
Adding in the first six months of the fiscal year, there were more than 500 Homeland Security OIG arrests last fiscal year. I'm sure a large number of those involved corruption stemming from Hurricane Katrina. The report doesn't say how many involved scams stemming from Katrina but it's a fair bet there were quite a few entrepeneurial souls in the hurricane's aftermath.
What else can you expect when FEMA's solution to dealing with the hurricane was handing out gobs of money to shut down criticisms of racism and ineptitude?
But that doesn't take away from bribe-taking, gun-running, document-selling, drug-smuggling and everything else the Homeland agents were arrested for in the past year.
Certainly, corruption along the border is nothing new. In Arizona, U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton is convinced that it is only growing worse, fraying the already fragile trust that American citizens have in federal agents.
Sometimes we don't want to know anymore. Operation Lively Green, the most ambitious bribery investigation in Arizona history, was finally stopped this year after agents realized they could snare cop after cop after agent after agent for eternity.
"There was no end to it," said one federal agent involved in the investigation. "We could have gone on popping them forever."
He spoke on condition of anonymity so his bosses wouldn't get upset with him for talking to The Border Report.
In his earthy, true tales book, The Reaper's Line, retired ICE resident-agent-in-charge Lee Morgan airs his own predictions about corruption rising as his old agency is re-molded, re-shaped and re-folded right back into the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The re-instating of the defunct agency is another shell game being played by Washington.
You see, in 1999, the Government Accountability Office created a list of suggestions for INS to follow in hopes of cracking down on corruption. They included keeping agents fluid, moving them from one lane to another at the ports of entry, not assigning permanent partners and the like.
The recommendations were ignored, the World Trade Center fell, INS was fragmented into Homeland, and suddenly the old bosses were wearing new uniforms.
Because the recommendations applied to INS, Homeland officials felt they didn't apply to the new agency.
And that leaves us with the situation we face today.
