Shooting the messenger in the war on drugs

Jorge Reyeros also was convicted of accessing a U.S. Customs Service computer without authorization. He is facing a prison sentence for his crimes of up to 30 years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

On the surface, there is nothing remarkable about Reyeros’ story. He appears to be just another number in the war on drugs. But according to former U.S. Customs inspector John B. Conroy, Reyeros’ indictment in 2000 for his crimes should have happened some four years earlier – which is when Conroy first blew the whistle on his activities.

For Conroy, the Reyeros case is emblematic of how law enforcement itself has been corrupted by the war on drugs. The press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office describes Reyeros as a “former United States Customs Service inspector.” U.S. Customs was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security over the course of 2003, several years after Reyeros’ criminal activities came to light.

However, the fallout from the Reyeros case continues to this day for Conroy -- who claims his whistleblowing in the case is one of the driving reasons he was ultimately forced out of Customs.

What follows is Conroy’s tale of the Reyeros case and how it contributed to destroying his career. Conroy worked with Reyeros at Newark International Airport in the 1990s.

Buckstop

For starters, Conroy stresses that Reyeros was far more than a Customs inspector. In fact, he says from 1991 to 1998, Reyeros served at the Newark International Airport as the supervisor of a major narcotics and currency squad -- a unit dubbed the Outbound Currency Enforcement Team, or Buckstop.

Buckstop was designed to inspect outgoing passengers and cargo to stop currency (often drug money) from being smuggled out of the country.

Conroy also became part of the Newark airport Buckstop team in the mid 1990s; Reyeros was his boss.

“I was the union rep at the airport, and one of my inspectors came to me and said he needed to get off the Buckstop team,” Conroy recalls. “No one wanted to swap with him, so I did.”

That was in 1995. Over the course of the next year, while working as part of Buckstop, Conroy says he began to notice a number of problems related to altered computer entries, inappropriate procedures and Reyeros’ insistence on overseeing searches of the passengers and cargo on southbound flights of Colombian airline Avianca.

A year later, Conroy says he had seen enough to go to Customs management, Internal Affairs and even the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General to report his suspicions.

No one did anything about it, he claims.

However, some four years later, another federal agency caught two “Colombian gentleman” in a wiretap, Conroy says, “discussing the Customs manager they owned at Newark.”

They were referring to Reyeros, Conroy adds.

Only then did Customs take action.

Conroy describes what happened in April 2000 in the wake of that wire interception in an e-mail he sent to Narco News. At this point, Conroy had already retired from Customs -- forced out, he claims, because of his whistleblower activity.

Two IA (Customs Internal Affairs) agents came to my home in Florida and took an 18-page statement, including details about racial and religious profiling (carried out at the direction of Reyeros) -- including searching Catholic priests and protestant ministers with Roman collars for mission money, and then seizing it as “drug proceeds” for Buckstop -- plus falsification of (Customs computer) records to diminish the number of blacks (shown as) being strip searched and patted down on outbound searches, ... plus fake “KTP,” or Keep the Peace, stops on whites to keep the blacks from complaining.

He (Reyeros) targeted blacks going home to African, taking the village food money off these travelers. One seizure was $10,038, and included the small bills in the man’s pockets. None were over $15,000, and these were being used to “pad” Buckstop results. He falsified (computer) records by juggling racial statistics, or wiping race fields out when we entered them, or changed the race, to reduce the number of blacks being shown as “searched” and to show more Latinos and whites. Blacks at the time made up more than ... 95 percent of our strip searches.

He also inflated local records of how many bags were searched on Avianca and certain southbound Continental flights, didn’t use the provided X-ray van.... He was doing all this, apparently, to stay in charge of Buckstop, by producing $$ seizures, while trying to avoid doing (searching) Avianca flights. And when we did THEM (Avianca passenger and cargo searches), when the supervisor (Reyeros) was not around, we would hit $240,000, $275,000, etc., concealed.

Seaport

In 1998, Reyeros was transferred to a new job. He was put in charge of another narcotics unit, this time at the Newark-Elizabeth Seaport. That’s where Internal Affairs finally caught up to him.

The press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office describes how he was stung:

The evidence at trial showed that Jorge Reyeros ... who had been employed by the U.S. Customs Service since 1973, used a Customs computer on April 12, 1999, to conduct research concerning a company that his co-conspirators, including (brother) Juan Reyeros, intended to use to import a shipment of approximately 400 to 500 kilograms of cocaine. The co-conspirators were unaware that the company, which was called “TJ Import Produce,” had been invented by Customs agents a few days earlier as part of an investigation into the possibility that a Customs employee was assisting narcotics traffickers.

One of the narcotics traffickers, Hernan Uribe, a/k/a “Nacho,” 47, of Medellin, Colombia, was extradited from Colombia and arrived in the United States on Dec. 13, 2004. Uribe pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William G. Bassler on Dec. 14, 2004, to participating in the 1999 narcotics conspiracy. Uribe testified at the trial of his co-defendants on Dec. 16, and 21, 2004.

Uribe’s sentencing is scheduled for June 14, 2005, at 10 a.m. He faces a statutory minimum penalty of 10 years in prison, a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and a fine up to $4,000,000.

The fourth defendant named in the Superseding Indictment, Rafael Garavito-Garcia, is a fugitive.

Conroy explains how the scam worked.

“Reyeros used the Customs computer to vet (screen out) import companies that were going to have their cargo searched to assure that the cargo (including the cocaine) got through Customs,” he says. “His people in Colombia fed him information on a proposed import company they wanted to use, and Reyeros would search and see if the company would trigger a search. There are only so many companies that import goods from Colombia, so he had a small universe of companies to look at that met the criteria (for shipping the cocaine).”

Conroy adds that because Reyeros was a supervisor of a narcotics team at the seaport, he also could override a search order or put it in the hands of people he knew would “miss” the illegal cargo.

“It was a near foolproof system for smuggling coke,” Conroy adds.

He says Customs foiled the racket by tricking Reyeros into using a phony importing company set up by Internal Affairs. The gig was up, and Reyeros was busted in July 2000, some four years after Conroy first attempted to put an end to his scheme.

If another federal agency had not stumbled onto Reyeros’s racket due to a wiretap, and subsequently put pressure on Customs to act, Conroy says it is very possible that Reyeros would still be gaming the system to this day.

Conroy points out that one of the cocaine-smuggling charges against Reyeros dated back to 1997, when he was still heading the narcotics unit at the airport.

From the press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

In addition, Jorge Reyeros was charged with participation in a separate 1997 conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, as well as three counts of accessing without authorization and exceeding his authorized access in 1997 to a computer of United States Customs Service (as that agency was formerly known).

Reyeros was acquitted of that 1997 charge. However, the fact that it was part of the indictment to begin with leads Conroy to believe that Reyeros was not only allowing drug money to leave the country while stationed at the Newark airport, but that he also was likely using the Customs computer system at the airport to facilitate the importation of cocaine through his connections.

“They just didn’t have enough evidence on that charge to get a conviction,” Conroy adds.

Ironically, Reyeros kept his job nearly a year longer than did Conroy, who retired in September 1999.

Conroy says he was essentially forced to retire after being put “back on the piers to haul cargo, intentionally, I believe, to injure me, and force my retirement, as I had a known cervical spine injury (fractures).”

Conroy says he did file an Equal Employment Opportunity discrimination complaint concerning his treatment by Customs, but the case was dismissed in May 2004. He says he never pursued the matter in the courts, “because the system is set up to retaliate against whistleblowers, so there is no point going through that system.”

He adds, “No matter what the best intentions of the leaders of these (law-enforcement) agencies are, it is the people under them, in the management ranks, who are completely out of control. So any change in the system that is implemented (by new leaders) will be corrupted from the start.”

Conroy quips that he was not completely accurate in saying that Customs management totally overlooked his warnings about Reyeros back in 1996.

“I wasn’t ignored completely….,” he explains. “After I went to management ... they did write me up on disciplinary charges and transferred me to the seaport to unload cargo and hurt my back.”

Strangely, Conroy adds, his Customs work-record file does not now reflect any of those disciplinary actions.

“It looks like my file has been sanitized,” Conroy says.