Department launched an internal investigation.  The District Director was confronted with a sample of the evidence, and he decided to take early retirement.  At this point, the inquiry was dropped.  Apparently the Inspector General knew as much as he wanted to know about this business.^[6] But Mike Horner—Semper Fi—was not so easily deflected.  Although his files had been confiscated, he had thoughtfully made triplicates, and a copy ultimately fell into the hands of a reporter from the L.A. Times.  A congressional inquiry followed, and the investigators discovered that the situation in San Diego, bad as it may have been, was far from unique.  There were charges of cover-ups and corruption at high levels and low from one end of the Mexican border to the other. Over a hundred individuals had been prosecuted or disciplined in the previous 39 months and a hundred more were under investigation.^[7]   Said Tom Isbell, “As lax as we were in San Diego, we looked like an iron wall compared to the rest of the border.”^[8]

But anyone who expected this stunning exposé to have an impact on the flow of drugs was ignoring the fundamental equation of the smuggler’s art.  At a given point in space and time, the only thing that separates Mexico from the United States is the up-turned hand of a Customs inspector.  He gets paid about $45,000 a year.  If he decides to augment his annual income, he can literally double it with a single flick of the wrist. In February of 1995 an inspector at Calexico was booked for looking the other way while traffickers brought in six tons of cocaine, and three months later a couple of inspectors in El Paso were charged with helping to move 2200 pounds over the line for a reported slice of the pie worth $1 million—peanuts, after all, since the load itself would have gone for fifteen times that much.^[9] By 1996 the pace was picking up. The Justice Department reported 110 new investigations into border corruption involving the I.N.S. alone.^[10]

Tom Isbell and Mike Horner would be the first to tell you that the vast majority of border agents are honest, hard-working