hand.  The average passage takes a few seconds, but when something catches the eye, the dogs are called out, everything is taken apart, and once or twice an hour somebody is lead away in handcuffs. “It’s instinct,” says Isbell. “You can’t replace that with computers.” A 26-year veteran of the force with a reputation as a straight shooter, he brags about one of his top men. “Some people look and they don’t see.  He sees everything.  He was having lunch one day and glanced up and through the window he saw a guy driving by who had already cleared primary and was on his way out.  And something struck him—the guy was laughing—and he ran out, stopped the guy, and made a seizure.”^[1]  

To the unpracticed eye, the scene outside Tom Isbell’s window looks like a model of border control efficiency, but the Supervisory Inspector sees something else.  On a pedestrian bridge a hundred yards to the south is a man wearing a ski mask, watching him with binoculars and talking on a cell phone.  “They wait until the traffic is backed up,” says Isbell.  “Then they call in their shipments from the side streets.  We have a mandate not to hold up traffic more than twenty minutes and they know we’ve got to open the gates and start waving people through.”  The man in the mask probably also knows each of the inspectors on sight, knows their habits, and knows which one is least likely to check under the seat of your pickup.  So he and Isbell, two professionals in a deadly game, square off on a daily basis in the battle to seal the southern border to the flow of drugs.  Ask him who’s winning and Isbell will tell you.  “We intercept maybe five percent.”^[2]  

In truth it may be a lot less than that. For all of Tom Isbell’s considerable diligence, there  is mounting evidence that some of the people around him have not been so vigorous. An investigation of corruption at the highest level of the San Diego office has been underway in fits and starts since 1990. The probe was triggered quite by accident when a Customs Service dog handler unexpectedly showed up for work a little early one day.  His Labrador, “Snag,” freaked out when they passed an empty tanker truck in the lineup.  A supervisor stepped in and said the driver