An American Lion

Jaguar, Belize

Judith Miller has a look at what’s going on with the Mexican Drug War. It should not surprise anyone to discover that American law enforcement and judicial figures are on the take from the Mexican drug lords:

Corruption indictments and convictions linked to drug-trafficking organizations, known in police parlance as DTOs, are popping up in FBI press releases with disturbing frequency. In April, for instance, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas announced that Sergio Lopez Hernandez, a 40-year-old Customs and Border Protection inspector, had been convicted of drug trafficking, alien smuggling, and bribery. Hernandez pleaded guilty to accepting over $150,000 in bribes and to conspiring to sell cocaine and bring illegal aliens into the country.

Or consider the case of border inspector Margarita Crispin—“precisely the kind of border corruption case that alarms us,” says William Abbott, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s criminal branch in El Paso, Texas. In 2005, he says, a federal informant tipped off the Bureau that Crispin was deliberately ignoring traffickers who moved drugs and other contraband through her border post. Then, in the spring of 2006, a van that had just gone through Crispin’s lane sputtered out of gas. The driver abandoned the vehicle and fled back across the border into Mexico—and when other inspectors opened the van’s doors, they found nearly 6,000 pounds of marijuana in plain sight. Crispin couldn’t explain why she hadn’t noticed the stash when she had examined the vehicle, according to an FBI press release on the case and an official who worked on it.

Another year of surveillance uncovered evidence of Crispin’s drug-cartel connections. Though she lived simply in El Paso, she socialized with known drug traffickers in Mexico and had bought two expensive homes and several luxury vehicles there through straw purchasers. Crispin was then arrested. After pleading guilty in 2008 to conspiring to import drugs and abusing the public trust, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $5 million in assets she was estimated to have stolen.

I have to interject and question the word “stolen.” That’s the wrong word. Crispin was a gatekeeper, and she was paid to look the other way. The money that she was paid to do this was for services rendered. She did not “steal” anything, unless you consider that she was stealing her pay from the United States government. I don’t think that what they were paying her to be incompetent, corrupt, and incredibly stupid amounted to five million dollars. Drug dealers do a lot of things, but they really don’t steal. They trade in a commodity and they expect to get paid for it. When they do steal, they enforce fairly rigid codes. If Crispin were a thief, the drug lords she was working for would have killed her outright.

Government investigators believe that Crispin had been working for the cartels for at least a year before she applied to become an inspector. In other words, federal screening failed to detect that, at the time she applied for her job, the cartels had already recruited her to facilitate their cross-border trafficking. At one point, federal investigators say, Crispin claimed to have wanted out of her arrangement with the cartels. “But we think she was kidnapped and forcibly taken back to Mexico to remind her of whom she was working for,” Abbott says. Having family in both Juárez and El Paso, cities within sight of each other across the border, Crispin found herself trapped.

Abbott says that the Crispin case is atypical. But the potential damage, he stresses, is huge. “You have the mule: an illegal immigrant who carries five pounds of marijuana in his backpack across the border through the desert. Compare that with the border inspector who waves through five completely loaded vans, as she did.”

Federal screening? The same Federal screening that allowed Major Nidal Hasan to be a Major in the United States Army and hold a Secret clearance? That Federal screening?

Fairly useless, don’t you think? Especially when there’s enough money to corrupt a saint and when there is family under threat of being slaughtered? Well, I dispute part of that account as well. If the drug lords had to compel this woman to work for them, she would never have ended up with five million dollars in assets across the border. Someone compelled to look the other way, under threat, ends up with nothing because the drug lord would have her killed when she stopped being useful. Crispin was rewarded because she was a willing participant who profited from her own corruption. She was not stealing their money—she was being paid for the service of looking the other way.

Anyway, it’s good to see Judith Miller practicing random acts of journalism, but I wish someone would have helped her with the usage of that word “steal.” For that, I blame a lack of editing on the part of her editor. That’s a mistake I would probably have made as well. This post probably contains my usual mix of mangled verbiage. We are conditioned to think that crooks steal; drug dealers are the opposite of thieves, in many regards. They are rigidly honest about what they sell, what they charge, and who they pay off. Cops steal from drug dealers; drug dealers just want to sell their products and get paid, without being ripped off.

This is a good look at the problem, however, so, pay no attention to my nonsense.