professionals who have never taken a dime in their lives. This is undoubtedly true, but it was also true of the Chicago Police Department in the 1920s.  As Al Capone would say, you don’t have to corrupt everybody.  That’s a waste of money.  You just corrupt the ones you need.  And it’s always cheaper in the long run to pay off a handful of people at the top.

The wide open spaces between the country’s official ports of entry are manned by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and until 1994 they were essentially shoveling sand into the wind. The line of demarcation at San Diego was a rusting chain-link fence so riddled with holes you could see crowds of young men assembling around the gaps every evening at sunset, and down at the shore there was no fence at all. You could simply walk from one country to the other along the beach. But by the end of 1993 the Clinton administration had installed a ten-foot wall of steel landing mat from seaward of the low tide line running east across the mesa to the base of the San Ysidro Mountains.^[11] And there it stopped. Since it was still possible to walk around the end of the fence, the lawmen brought to bear high-tech military weapons like electronic motion sensors, aerial surveillance, and night vision goggles.  Stripping agents away from the Canadian border, they were able to increase their presence on the southern frontier by a third.  But as the clamps were tightened around San Diego, the battle lines simply moved east into Imperial County.

“You can see the shift to new routes,” says Sheriff Oren Fox. “We’re inundated with dope. You can’t believe it.” Fox is a big man, oversized and rugged like the vast county he has patrolled for the past 20 years. An easy-going grizzly, he never needs to raise his voice.  His only symbol of authority is the silver star on his belt buckle. “I’ve worked narcotics since ‘59. We’ve never seen this amount of marijuana seizures. It’s amazing. They are just shoving it through in an effort to tie up the Customs, DEA and the Border Patrol.  They’re willing to sacrifice loads of drugs, and people, and cars and trucks.  And they’re getting a lot