ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER
Forging Ties in Tijuana

FBI Special Agent Mike Eckel, left, is one of the Bureau's five border liaison officers. He meets about once a week with counterparts like Alejandro Lares of the Tijuana Police Department.


Amid the car horns, engine exhaust, and constant flow of people on foot and in cars, Special Agent Mike Eckel inched through traffic at the San Ysidro Port of Entry—the world’s busiest land border crossing—on his way from San Diego to Tijuana. Although the Mexican city can be a dangerous place for Americans, in his role as one of the Bureau’s five border liaison officers, Eckel makes the trip about once a week.

“The idea behind the border liaison program is to build relationships and to exchange information with Mexican law enforcement,” said Eckel, who speaks fluent Spanish. “We try to take geography out of the equation so we can share intelligence and help each other and bring criminals to justice on both sides of the border.”

In the past, such relationships were difficult to cultivate in Tijuana because of the level of corruption there, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. “But the tide is turning,” Eckel said. “There is less corruption now, and the FBI and other federal entities have established solid working relationships with our Mexican partners.”

Less than an hour after crossing the border, Eckel sat in a small office in a busy Tijuana police substation. He was speaking with officer Alejandro Lares about the Nevada murder fugitive and other matters, including suspected cartel members who live freely in San Diego, where they have committed no crimes. Lares, who has been on the Tijuana force for four years, has served as the liaison officer for U.S. law enforcement for the past year.

“Today, the cartels have less power than they had in the past,” Lares said, largely because the Mexican federal government has exerted its military presence in the area. “We are moving in the right direction,” he added, but acknowledged that the crime and corruption associated with the drug trade will never disappear completely.

Thanks to drug money, the cartels have enormous power—and they use it to bribe, intimidate, and murder. To get what they want from police and government officials in Tijuana and elsewhere along the Mexican border, the cartels offer “the silver or the lead”: the silver being money and the lead being bullets.

Even well-intentioned public servants who refuse outright bribes might be compelled to look the other way if their lives—or the lives of their families—have been threatened. “And these are not hollow threats,” Eckel said. “They will kill you.”

But efforts such as the border liaison program and the determined, collaborative work of law enforcement on both sides of the border are making a difference.

“Sharing information is the key,” Eckel said. “By being able to gather intelligence and quickly analyze and share it, we can actually save lives. I have seen that happen.” Working with the Mexicans as well as other U.S. partner agencies, he added, “We help keep each other safe. We all get along extremely well, because our lives can depend on it.”

Next: A Drug Buy in El Paso
From: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/august10/border_081610.html

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER
When Violence Hits Too Close to Home

Emerging from the port of entry’s administrative offices into a sunny San Diego morning, Special Agent Dean Giboney spoke in fluent Spanish with the man whose temporary U.S. visa he had just helped renew. The man was smiling, happy to be out of Mexico, even though he understood that being on U.S. soil was no guarantee of safety from the Tijuana drug cartel that has put a price on his head.

The kidnappings, beatings, and murders that mark the extreme drug-related violence of Mexican border cities such as Tijuana and Juarez have increasingly spilled over the border. Agent Giboney is hoping the man—we’ll call him José —can provide information that will help in the Bureau’s efforts to dismantle the cartels and the criminal enterprises they fuel.

A few years ago, José started working for the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) in Tijuana to earn extra money. But when he saw how routine the act of murder was for the cartel—leaders thought nothing of having even their own people killed for real or perceived insubordination—he started to fear for his life and contacted the FBI to help him flee the country.

Sources like José are just one of many ways the Bureau gathers intelligence to combat border crime. Agent Giboney is particularly interested in gaining information regarding fugitives in the Los Palillos case, one of San Diego’s most notorious examples of so-called “spillover violence.”

Los Palillos—the “Toothpicks”—was a rogue spinoff from the AFO. From 2004 to 2007, the San Diego street gang carried out a brutal crime spree in which 13 people were abducted and nine were killed. Bodies turned up in cars, on jogging paths, and inside houses in quiet, residential neighborhoods.

The group’s leader, Jorge Rojas-Lopez, is serving a life sentence without parole for the crimes, and several of his henchmen are also in prison. But five members of the gang are still at large.

Rojas-Lopez—a former AFO member—was fighting the cartel for a piece of the billion-dollar drug trade, but he was also fighting for revenge, because the AFO had ordered the murder of his brother.

“This level of extreme violence is very typical of the way the cartels operate south of the border,” Giboney said. Unfortunately, Los Palillos is not an isolated case north of the border, either.

What explains this level of brutality? “The cartels and the gang members they employ want to be Al Pacino in the movie Scarface,” Giboney said. During raids on the homes of cartel members, he has seen movie posters of the machine-gun-wielding Pacino, who played a vicious drug kingpin. “They want to live that lifestyle—the nice cars, going out to clubs, throwing money around. But once you’re in that lifestyle,” he explained, “it’s hard to get out, even if you want to.”

José understands how difficult it is to get away from the cartel. The “narcos,” as he calls AFO members, are powerful as well as ruthless, and their influence is felt at every level of Mexican society. “Whatever they want to know about you they can find out,” he said. “They will stop at nothing to protect their interests, even if it means crossing the border.”

Next: A Trip to Tijuana

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER
Public Corruption: A Few Bad Apples

In the surveillance footage taken hours before his arrest, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer Michael Gilliland can be seen nonchalantly waving a car through his lane at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego. He was knowingly allowing illegal aliens across the border, and he would do this several more times throughout the evening. His actions that night would earn him nearly the equivalent of his annual salary—and eventually a five-year prison term.

Gilliland, a former U.S. Marine and veteran Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer with 16 years of experience, has been in jail since 2007. But his case continues to illustrate the pervasive problem of corruption along the Southwest border and the damage that can occur when officials betray the public's trust.

Although the vast majority of U.S. government employees working on the border are not corrupt, as one senior agent who investigates such crimes noted, “Even one bad apple is too many.”

Of our 700 agents assigned to public corruption investigations nationwide, approximately 120 of them are located in the Southwest region. We work closely with many federal agencies, including CBP and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The result has been more than 400 public corruption cases originating from the Southwest region—and in the past fiscal year more than 100 arrests and about 130 state and federal cases prosecuted.

About This Series


FBI.gov recently visited the Southwest border region for a firsthand look at what the Bureau and its law enforcement partners are doing there to combat crime.

We have 12 border corruption task forces in the Southwest, which consist of many state and local law enforcement agencies as well as our federal partners. Recently, we established a National Border Corruption Task Force at FBI Headquarters to coordinate the activities of all regional operations.

At our Border Corruption Task Force office in San Diego, Special Agent Terry Reed—who headed the Michael Gilliland investigation—points out the “Wall of Shame.” Displayed are pictures of a dozen former officials convicted of public corruption offenses in the San Diego area. They are a diverse group of men and women from a variety of state and federal government agencies. They were all in it for the money, sex, or both—a fact not lost on the drug cartels.

“The cartels have developed into very sophisticated businesses,” said El Paso Special Agent Tim Gutierrez. “Despite their brutality and violence, they use sophisticated tactics.”

The cartels actively engage in corrupting public officials. They recruit by exploiting weaknesses, sometimes gaining intelligence through surveillance methods usually employed by law enforcement. Cartel members have been known to observe inspectors at ports of entry using binoculars from the Mexican side of the border. Maybe an inspector has a drinking or gambling problem. Maybe he flirts with women and could be tempted to cheat on his wife. Maybe an employee is simply burned out on the job.

“If you’re an inspector and you are legitimately waving through 97 out of 100 cars anyway,” Gutierrez said, “and you realize you can make as much as your annual salary by letting the 98th car go by, it can be easy to rationalize that.”

“The cartels are always looking for the next Michael Gilliland,” Agent Reed said. “But using our combined investigative and intelligence gathering skills, the task force has been very successful in rooting out corrupt public officials at the border.”

Next: When Violence Hits Too Close to Home

Resources:

- http://www.fbi.gov
- CBP Officer Pleads Guilty to Alien Smuggling and Bribery (8/05/10)

On the Southwest Border

The Southwest border, by the numbers: 2,000: approximate number of miles the U.S. Southwest border shares with Mexico; $18-39 billion: estimated number of illegal dollars that flow annually from the U.S. accross the Southwest border to enrich Mexican drug cartels; 2,600: number of drug-related muders in Juarez, Mexico in 2009; 28,000: number of drug-related muders in Mexico since 2006; 93%: estimated amount of all South American cocaine that moves through Mexico on its way to U.S. customers; 701,000: kilograms of marijuana seized during the first five months of 2010 in the Southwest border states (Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas); 6,154: total number of individual seizures of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine during the first five months of 2010 in the Southwest border states; 12: the number of FBI border corruption task forces operating along the Southwest border; 1: the number of corrupt border guards it would take to allow a terrorist carrying a weopon of mass destruction into the U.S.

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER Corruption, Drugs, Gangs, and More

The U.S. border with Mexico extends nearly 2,000 miles, from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas. At too many points along the way, criminals ply their trade with surprising ease and devastating results.

Drug cartels transporting kilos of cocaine and marijuana, gangs who think nothing of kidnapping and murder, traffickers smuggling human cargo, corrupt public officials lining their pockets by looking the other way—any one of these offenses represents a challenge to law enforcement.

Taken together, they constitute a threat not only to the safety of our border communities, but to the security of the entire country.

During the next several weeks, FBI.gov will take you to the Southwest border for a firsthand look at their efforts there to fight crime. They will take you to San Diego—home of the world’s busiest port of entry—and across the border into Tijuana. They will also visit El Paso, Texas, whose sister city in Mexico—Juarez—has become as deadly as any war zone thanks to the drug cartels.

In articles, pictures, and video, they will chronicle the Bureau’s efforts to combat border crime through our participation in drug, violent crime, and public corruption task forces; our extensive intelligence-gathering efforts; and our vital partnerships with Mexican law enforcement.

Despite their continuing successes, however, much work is left to be done.

Assistant Director
Kevin Perkins
“With such a great expanse of territory to cover,” said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of our Criminal Investigative Division, “there are places where the border is permeable. In some areas of the desert, people can cross illegally at will, and they do. The U.S. government has built fences and other barriers that our adversaries are continually trying to defeat, and in some cases they are defeating them,” he added. “Either they're tunneling under, flying over, or actually cutting through the various defenses we've put up.”

The cartels make billion-dollar profits trafficking drugs. Gaining and controlling border access is critical to their operations. They maintain that control through bribery, extortion, intimidation, and extreme violence. Some areas on the Mexican side of the border are so violent they are reminiscent of the gangster era of Chicago in the 1930s or the heyday of the Mafia’s Five Families in New York. In Tijuana, for example, a man who came to be known as "The Strew Maker"—El Pozolero—worked for one of the cartels dissolving hundreds of murder victims in acid to dispose of the evidence. In Juarez, decapitated heads of murdered cartel members have been displayed on fence posts to intimidate rivals.

“We think al Qaeda is violent,” said one of our senior agents in El Paso, “but the cartels here are often just as willing to resort to extreme brutality and bloodshed to carry out their objectives.”

The disturbing level of violence sometimes overshadows the national security risks along the border, Perkins said. “Unfortunately, there are border guards who are corrupt—people who can wave vehicles through checkpoints. Those vehicles could contain narcotics or illegal aliens, but they could also be pieces to the next dirty bomb brought into the country by terrorists. We are working very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Goleta Man Indicted in Connection with Murder-for-Hire Plot Targeting Bel Air Resident and Others

LOS ANGELES—A federal grand jury returned an indictment this morning charging a Goleta man with soliciting the murder of his former business partner and others, announced Steven M. Martinez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI in Los Angeles; André Birotte Jr., United States Attorney in Los Angeles; and Leroy Baca, Sheriff of Los Angeles County.

Eugene Darryl Temkin, 50, of Goleta, California, was arrested at his residence on July 14, 2010, without incident. At that time, a criminal complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles outlining the scheme by Temkin to hire a third party to murder his former business partner, the man’s wife, and the man’s business partner.

According to the criminal complaint, the investigation began in late 2009 when a source provided information to detectives indicating that Temkin planned to hire a professional killer to murder his former business partner. Over the following several months, undercover law enforcement personnel, posing as professional killers for hire, met with Temkin to discuss how the plot should be carried out. According to the complaint, Temkin wanted the victim forced to pay him $15 million to settle his portion of a failed business venture, and then wanted the victim, his wife and his business partner murdered. Throughout the undercover meetings, Temkin proposed various forms of murder and torture to be exacted on the victims by the undercover law enforcement officers, whom he believed were professional killers.

During the final undercover meeting, which occurred July 8th in Encino, California, Temkin paid the undercover agent the first installment of a $30,000 fee to carry out the murders. According to the plan agreed on by Temkin and the undercover agent, the murders were to be carried out in Spain, where Temkin believed the victims were vacationing, according to the complaint. Temkin provided to the undercover agent, photographs of the victims, as well as other identifying information. Temkin also gave the undercover agent the information he would need to deposit the $15 million into a bank account Temkin established in his name in Montevideo, Urguay.

The indictment charges Temkin with one count of soliciting a crime of violence, one count of attempting to interfere with interstate commerce by threats and violence, and one count of using interstate facilities in the commission of a murder-for-hire.

Temkin is currently being held without bond at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, and is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on August 2, 2010.

If convicted on all counts, Temkin faces a statutory maximum sentence of fifty years in prison.

This investigation was conducted by detectives with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and agents with the FBI. This case is being prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.

An indictment contains allegations that a defendant has committed a crime. Every defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.

FROM:

FBI Los Angeles
Contact: Public Affairs Specialist Laura Eimiller
(310) 996-3343

San Diego awarded $16 M in grants from U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security


Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (AP)
The city of San Diego was awarded $16.2 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for emergency preparedness and anti-terrorism efforts, it was announced Thursday.

The grants were among $832.5 million in Urban Areas Security Initiative, or UASI, grants announced Thursday by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to 64 metropolitan areas.

Last year, San Diego was also awarded $16.2 million in UASI grants.

According to San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders' office, the city will use the money to strengthen an emergency communications network and improve the region's ability to respond to a chemical or biological attack.