Posted on 10/07/2016 9:15:42 AM PDT by Elderberry
Want to run drugs, smuggle migrants and get away with it? Join America’s biggest law enforcement agency.
Special Agent Gus Gonzalez leaned back in the front seat of his truck to get a better angle with his camera. It was December 5, 2011, a chilly day for a stakeout in subtropical South Texas. He’d been waiting for hours in the parking lot of an Academy sporting goods store in Brownsville. A few miles away, across the river in Mexico, a war over drugs and money raged. U.S. residents, paid by the cartels, were supplying most of the guns and ammunition.
Gonzalez and his partner, both agents with a federal law enforcement division called Homeland Security Investigations, had gotten a tip that two men they had been investigating would be buying bulk ammunition that day at the store, so they had staked out the parking lot to take photos and gather evidence. The day dragged on and the suspects still hadn’t shown. But now, Gonzalez couldn’t believe what he was seeing through the viewfinder of his camera.
It was Manny Peña, a career U.S. Customs inspector. Back in Gonzalez’s days at U.S. Customs, he had worked side by side with Peña at one of Brownsville’s international bridges. He watched as the stocky 38-year-old with close-cropped hair rolled a shopping cart over to a white Chevy truck, then dropped a new Remington rifle into the bed and walked away. It didn’t look right. “I think Manny just made a straw purchase,” he radioed to another agent. Suddenly, Peña turned and started walking toward him. Peña’s car, it turned out, was parked just a few spots away. Gonzalez ducked down in his seat. As Peña pulled out of the parking lot, Gonzalez skimmed through his photos, caught the white Chevy’s license plate number and called it in.
A Border Patrol checkpoint along U.S. 77 near Sarita. Gonzalez’s chance encounter with Peña at the sporting goods store would eventually cost the longtime customs inspector his job. The irony was that Peña had been caught by an agency that wasn’t even investigating him. In the previous two years, at least three other federal law enforcement agencies had opened investigations into Peña, who was an employee of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
CBP’s internal affairs office had built a file on Peña with allegations that included displaying a “lack of candor” — federal law enforcement parlance for not fully disclosing the truth — and for “harbor[ing] a UDA,” an undocumented alien, who happened to be his wife, a Mexican citizen. A CBP disciplinary board had initially recommended firing Peña because of the findings, but his punishment was later reduced to a 14-day work suspension, which he finished three months before he was spotted at Academy.
Another investigation, opened in 2010, involved accusations far more serious. According to records obtained by the Observer, a task force led by the FBI amassed evidence that Peña was “conspiring” with other customs officers to smuggle drugs and people across the border. The FBI task force “conducted several [redacted] operations,” during which Peña was seen meeting with “a known Gulf cartel member,” according to a summary of the investigation. In court, prosecutors later described “numerous incidents” at the international bridge in which Peña “allow[ed] people to go through without being properly checked.” For such serious charges, Peña might have gone to prison for a long time. But by stumbling into the gun-running sting, he handed prosecutors a more expedient case to take to trial, which they did in July 2012. He never answered for the alleged corruption, only for lying about the gun purchase.
Despite Peña’s protests that the rifle was a communal purchase to be shared with his hunting buddies, he was convicted, sentenced to five years’ probation and fired. Peña declined to comment for this story. It was just dumb luck that after 12 years on the job, Peña was brought down by officers who weren’t even looking for him.
Why was he allowed to work under a cloud of suspicion for so long? The answer lies within the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (OIG), which sounds like one more obscure corner of federal bureaucracy, but is the agency ultimately responsible for investigating corrupt and abusive agents. OIG opened a case on Peña in March 2010. But officials there mishandled the case so spectacularly — first by failing to investigate, then by lying about the work they’d done, and finally by trying to cover up their lies — that they became FBI targets themselves.
As unwittingly as he’d stumbled into that stakeout in the parking lot, Peña also became part of a much larger investigation. Though the probe barely made headlines outside Texas, it would draw congressional scrutiny and expose the deep dysfunction within Homeland Security’s internal affairs apparatus, put high-ranking federal agents in prison, and implicate top Homeland Security leadership in Washington, D.C.
Excerpted.(long article,much more at link)
There is just so much money out there that corruption is rife.
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