Battle for the border: is the U.S. Customs going after the messenger instead of dealing with the message of corruption?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 9, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer

He had no doubts. After six hours of intense questioning, Eloy Fernandez-Fernandez one of the U.S. Customs Services top confidential informants on the Southwest border, persisted with his story. Asked again to describe every detail of a drug payoff he claimed to have witnessed, the 47-year-old former Mexico federal judicial police officer reeled off the tale he had related earlier during the hot Arizona afternoon.

A squat, heavyset man with powerful arms and neck, Fernandez had been through similar debriefings many times. For nearly a decade he had worked undercover for U.S. law-enforcement agencies - first the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then the Drug Enforcement Administration and finally for Customs. Fernandez had been at the center of some of the biggest border-corruption cases ever mounted by Customs and he'd. shown great tenacity when dealing with potentially vicious Mexican cartel leaders. On one occasion, after a carefully planned sting operation had gone badly awry, Fernandez had returned to the narcotics traffickers and persuaded them during a tense meeting to use him yet again to navigate, or "load organize," their cocaine through a port of entry and into the United States.

To his handlers, Fernandez was pure gold. "Rock steady, always forth-right and honest - everything always checked out with him," says one. "Guys like Eloy are always very unusual," remarks another. "We have a lot of informants but they are not of the ilk where they can worm their way right inside. Basically, most of our informants have peripheral knowledge or they're low-echelon players who are only able to supply limited information, and when their drug organization is no longer functioning their value is over. Eloy was of a different order altogether."

Now Fernandez was being debriefed not by law-enforcement officers but by Insight. From that interview a series of complex events was triggered that eventually led to Fernandez's arrest - an arrest that raised growing doubts about the integrity of Customs and the Treasury Department's Office of the Inspector General, or OIG. It also has prompted federal lawmakers to raise further questions about Washington's determination to combat alleged drug-related corruption of American law enforcement along the Southwest border.

During the interview with Insight in September in a downtown Yuma, Ariz., motel, Fernandez insisted that in the fall of 1992 he had seen Mexican police official Salvador Hirales Barrera bribe Rudy M. Camacho, Customs' Pacific regional commissioner, and Joe Vasquez, a former Customs' inspector. The payoff, he said, took place in Tijuana. Through two days of interviews he remained consistent in his retelling of the incident right down to the details of the clothing worn by the alleged coconspirators.

Three weeks before Insight's interview, Fernandez told exactly the same story to a California-based investigator for the Treasury Department's OIG, Steve Dimemmo, according to Treasury and Customs sources.

Since 1992, Dimemmo has shown an interest in Camacho. He approached Fernandez among others in 1992-93; but at the time, Fernandez says, he had no knowledge of who Camacho was. Later, another source apart from Fernandez - again, a Mexican national - leveled bribery allegations against the Pacific regional commissioner. Dimemmo then recontacted Fernandez in 1996 after hearing he had made bribery accusations against Camacho to a handler.

With two people making serious claims against Camacho, Dimemmo initiated a probe in early September. To the fury of the OIG, Alan Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego and U.S. Customs Commissioner George Weise, Insight disclosed the existence of the inquiry into these allegations and also revealed details about separate, ongoing Customs internal-affairs investigations into two other high-ranking West Coast port-of-entry officials, Jerry Martin and Art Gilbert (see "Megacorruption at the Border," Nov. 11).

Camacho, Martin and Gilbert were among eight Customs officials subjected to a 17-month probe by the Border Corruption Task Force. No evidence of graft or misconduct was turned up by the FBI-led force which wrapped up its inquiry in August, prompting Bersin, President Clinton's designated "border czar," and Weise to claim a clean bill of health for the U.S. Customs Service.

Frustrated with allegations once again being made against Camacho and others along the border, Weise and senior executives at Customs' headquarters in Washington held several discussions about "how to pull the teeth of stories like yours," a Washington-based Customs source tells Insight. "What to do about them became a high priority." In one November meeting, Weise says he saw "the lingering allegations of corruption in our workforce" as a matter of "grave concern," according to an internal Customs E-mail message from Weise.

Whether any connection exists between the commissioner's irritation and what befell Fernandez a few days before the presidential election is not clear. What isn't in doubt is that Fernandez's days as an informant came to an abrupt halt.