There’s a fire in the Treasury building. Get down to Washington at once.”
The voice on the phone was unmistakable, a mad collision between Hell’s Kitchen and Harvard Yard. My chief Washington patron, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, was calling me from the capital.
“Don’t wait another second,” Senator Moynihan said. “Just come.”
This was June 25, 1996. President Clinton had nominated me as undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement, and I was awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate. It was a big job that would have me overseeing the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Customs Service; the Office of Foreign Assets Control; the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN); and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
Suddenly the Treasury building next door to the White House was in flames. Materials used in a restoration project had ignited. The fire didn’t threaten the whole building, but it did extensive damage to the roof. The people above me in the hierarchy happened to be away. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was at the G7 Summit in Lyon, France. Larry Summers, his top deputy, was somewhere else. Confirmed or not, I had to respond.
Among Moynihan’s many talents was the ability to sniff out a power vacuum. Moynihan, along with fellow New York senator Alfonse D’Amato, was a member of the Senate Finance Committee, where I’d been questioned during my confirmation hearings a few weeks earlier. The day after the fire, around midnight, the Senate confirmed my appointment. There was no turning back now. Before I knew it, I was standing on the White House lawn, reporting on $46 million in damage to the pre–Civil War Treasury building next door, which is featured on the back of the ten-dollar bill, sounding very much like I belonged there. I had barely unpacked my suitcase, and I was already learning the ways of Washington.
* * *
I hadn’t gone looking for the Treasury job. I was back from Haiti, back to work as president of IGI in New York, and back at home with Veronica in Battery Park City—and happy about all of that—when I got the call from Robert Rubin, the secretary of the Treasury.
“I need someone with law enforcement experience in here,” he said.
I knew the job would mean moving down to Washington without Veronica. She had her life in New York City and her own career selling medical supplies to physicians and hospitals. She couldn’t just pick up and leave. We’d need two apartments and the patience for weekends back and forth. But Rubin had recruited a highly impressive management team, and now he wanted me to be part of it. Deputy Secretary Larry Summers, who’d been chief economist at the World Bank, went on to be Treasury secretary and then president of Harvard University. Timothy Geithner, who served in several undersecretary and deputy-secretary roles, later became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then Treasury secretary himself under President Obama. Rubin’s chief of staff, Sylvia Mathews (Burwell), ran global development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation before returning to Washington as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and, later, President Obama’s secretary of health and human services. Michael Froman, who followed Mathews as Rubin’s chief of staff, held several economic and national-security posts in the Obama administration, including U.S. trade representative. Summers’s chief of staff, Sheryl Sandberg, went on to become chief operating officer of Facebook and the best-selling author of Lean In. These were all top-notch talents on the rise.
People don’t normally think of Treasury as a law enforcement hub. But, in fact, when I showed up there, nearly 40 percent of federal law enforcement officers were in the Treasury Department. The Secret Service protected the president and battled counterfeiters. ATF had the mammoth duty of enforcing America’s firearms and explosives laws while also regulating tobacco and alcohol, grabbing moonshiners and cigarette-tax cheats. The Customs Service was responsible for controlling just about everything that anyone wanted to bring into the country—keeping illegal contraband out and collecting taxes and duties on legal imports. The Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network enforced foreign sanctions and took other actions to keep international finance legal and fair. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center trained all of federal law enforcement except the FBI and DEA. After 9/11, the bureaucracy would get scrambled, and most of those agencies would be pulled into the new Department of Homeland Security. But that was still six years away. In the mid-1990s, all those people reported to the undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement.
The previous undersecretary, a former law professor named Ronald Noble, also had an impressive résumé. At Treasury, he oversaw the internal review of the ATF’s performance at Waco. Along with his other duties at Treasury, Noble had been vice president of the Americas for Interpol, the international police organization. Headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol helps law enforcement agencies in 190 countries combat cross-border crime. At a 1996 general assembly in New Delhi, India, I was elected to replace Noble as vice president of the Americas. Ironically, three years later, I would cast the deciding vote to elect him Interpol’s first American secretary general.
Interpol is a fascinating organization—and increasingly important as crime has grown more global over the years. I worked closely with Toshinori Kanemoto, a senior Japanese law enforcement official who was the organization’s president, as well as the other board members. I learned a lot about international crime and formed valuable relationships with international law enforcement that would prove helpful for years to come. As police commissioner I would also assign New York police detectives to Interpol headquarters in France and another to Interpol’s central bureau in Washington to act as our liaison. But that was all in the future. Now, Noble was leaving Treasury to return to New York University School of Law and Rubin was looking for a law enforcement type to replace him.
I was excited about learning the federal side and overseeing such a diverse portfolio. There was a world beyond New York City. Haiti had opened my eyes. I was going to be responsible for a fascinating range of agencies. Thankfully, Paul Browne agreed to come along as my chief of staff.
This was a trying time for the enforcement side of the Treasury Department and for federal law enforcement in general. Washington was still reeling from the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, a shocking case of domestic terrorism. The federal building had been bombed the previous year, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680 others. The two men who carried out that attack, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, claimed they’d been seeking revenge against the federal government for deadly standoffs in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Waco, especially, had been an issue for Treasury. The fifty-one-day siege on the Branch Davidian compound was sparked by a failed raid involving agents from the department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
During the first week of July 1996, after months of investigation, federal agents in Arizona arrested twelve members of the Viper Militia. Speaking from the Rose Garden, President Clinton was clearly pleased with the ATF, thanking “the law enforcement officers who made the arrests in Arizona yesterday to avert a terrible terrorist attack. Their dedication and hard work over the last six months may have saved many lives.” He even singled me out. “I’d like to offer a special congratulations to the gentleman to my right, Ray Kelly, the undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement, for his role in that endeavor.”
“A lot of evidence has been gathered in this case,” I told the White House press corps, “and as the indictment alleges, they conspired to blow up some federal buildings. They possessed automatic weapons. And this is a serious group, no doubt about it.”
Janet Napolitano, the U.S. attorney in Phoenix who later was elected governor of Arizona and after that served as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, had done a great job managing the investigation. She didn’t seem so happy about my being the spokesperson only weeks into my new job. But the Treasury Department press office had asked me to speak.
As I got my bearings at Treasury, the event on everyone’s mind was the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. The opening ceremonies were set for July 19, and security was severely disorganized. The eyes of the entire world were on Atlanta, yet no one seemed to be in charge. Coming from the NYPD, I’d had a fair amount of experience overseeing large public events—entry screening, credential control, perimeter access, all the nuts and bolts of keeping people safe at high-profile gatherings. I couldn’t believe how haphazard everything in Atlanta seemed. The U.S. Olympic Committee also didn’t have the people on the ground to get the job done. Their notion was that security was going to be a cooperative, collective effort with no one in charge. It was asking for trouble.
As the games were set to begin, the Olympic Committee called on Treasury to provide reinforcements in Atlanta. They were desperate to throw together a recognizable and cohesive security force. We did what we could to help, rounding up uniforms for Treasury law enforcement people and sending Customs inspectors, too. I went with President Clinton and much of his cabinet on Air Force One to the opening ceremony on July 19, 1996. Jimmy Carter, who lived in Georgia just a couple of hours away, met us there. As the Treasury Department representative, I had a seat next to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
The first week of the Olympics proceeded without a security hitch. Then, on July 27, an explosion went off at Centennial Olympic Park, killing one person and injuring 111, and the weakness of the security plan was plain to everyone. The scene in the park was bedlam. The investigation was a multiagency mess. The initial suspect, a security guard named Richard Jewell who’d discovered the pipe bombs before they detonated and heroically cleared many people out of the area, was falsely implicated by the FBI. The real culprit, Eric Rudolph, was a seething extremist angry about abortion who hoped his pipe bombs would force a cancellation of the Olympic Games. It took three more bombings in 1997 for the FBI to identify Rudolph as a suspect. He wasn’t captured until 2003.
* * *
Only after I settled in at Treasury did I really come to grasp how huge the territory was. Monitoring all those individual agencies under a single departmental umbrella could be a bureaucratic nightmare. There were so many moving parts, it was hard to see the whole. Each agency had a different mission and different constituencies. The ATF had to balance its crime-fighting duties with the hair-trigger sensitivities of gun-rights advocates. The Customs Service was half trade facilitator and half border defender. FinCEN had to navigate between the investment community and Wall Street. The Secret Service did have duties relating to counterfeiting but essentially had a constituency of one. Keep the president safe and happy; everything else would take care of itself.
I had to wrap my head around all this. The only way I knew how was to bore in deeply, learning the intricate details of the various operations—and start meeting with the personnel. By and large, I discovered, these people were really good at what they did. But sometimes they hadn’t gotten the direction and supervision they required. The ATF, I decided, needed more of that. The local agents were involved in investigations that had little to do with alcohol, tobacco, or firearms. They were conducting raids with local police against crack-cocaine traffickers. They liked the excitement of traditional police work, which I understood and shared. But that had very little to do with their core mission of regulating alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. For law enforcement operations I separated the agency into east and west divisions and ordered detailed briefings on all their major operations.
We made a careful study of Secret Service motorcades. Were twenty-five or thirty vehicles really required to escort the president from the White House to Capitol Hill? Despite some grumbling, the agents agreed to trim the vehicle count—at least a little—thereby easing traffic flow in Washington. I knew nothing in Washington was forever. I told Paul that the minute we turned our backs, they’d be lining up the tinted-glass vehicles for another long convoy.
With such a diverse portfolio, it was hard to sit in Treasury headquarters and know exactly what was going on in the field. There was no way to stay abreast just by meeting with agency liaisons. Less than two years after being sworn in as undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement, I was getting restless in the upper-middle bureaucratic ranks of the nation’s capital. I was itching to run an operation closer to the ground. So I did something hardly anyone ever does in status-conscious Washington: I asked for a demotion.
* * *
The commissioner of Customs, as the head of the U.S. Customs Service was known, was George Weise, who had come to the agency from Capitol Hill with a strong interest in trade legislation and establishing new user fees for the shipping industry. “Power to the ports” was the slogan of the moment. A Customs commissioner always has to balance the needs of law enforcement and trade promotion. Both are clearly important. The Customs Service generated $20 billion a year in import fees for the U.S. Treasury, a huge sum that was second only to the Internal Revenue Service. But by the summer of 1998, controversy was swirling around Customs on issues such as drug smuggling, racial profiling, and personal-search policies. Weise decided to resign for a private-sector job.
To help find his replacement, I set up a committee of three assistant Treasury secretaries whose judgment I trusted—Elisabeth Bresee, David Medina, and James Johnson. We collected résumés, interviewed fourteen candidates, and settled on three finalists. I passed those names to Secretary Rubin, who didn’t like any of them.
I thought about what to do next. Should we start the process over again? Should we round up more candidates? Should we take a second look at some of those who didn’t make the round of finalists?
It seemed like an interesting job. The Customs commissioner was responsible for twenty thousand employees, 328 ports of entry, and an agenda of challenging issues such as personal search.
“What about me?” I asked Rubin when I went to his office to discuss the matter.
“Let me think about that,” he said.
As he reflected, I proposed this scenario: promote James Johnson from assistant secretary to undersecretary. Johnson was a Harvard College and Harvard Law graduate who’d overseen some complex prosecutions as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan. He and I would swap levels. Instead of him reporting to me, I’d report to him.
Rubin went for the idea, and it worked for me. I had learned I was much better suited for running an operational agency like Customs than being inside a sprawling, multilevel oversight bureaucracy. What I enjoyed most—and what I was best at, I thought—was rolling up my sleeves and running things, not being three or four levels removed. Plus, I liked my report-turned-supervisor, Undersecretary Johnson.
I still had to get my new nomination as Customs commissioner confirmed by the Senate. For a second time, I was asked to appear at the Dirksen Senate Office Building before the Finance Committee. It was almost exactly two years since my last confirmation hearing. Once again I stood before a panel that included my home-state senators, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse D’Amato.
The hearing was more a formality than anything else and took on a lighthearted tone when D’Amato gave his lengthy opening statement. The senator decided to tell everyone how we knew each other as teenagers in Island Park. In great detail, he recalled the years we both volunteered for the beach patrol and how I was later promoted to lifeguard, a position he said he never attained. The senator went on like that, recounting various embarrassing moments from the ancient myths of Long Island’s South Shore. He ended strong: “Here we are, having, once again, Ray Kelly before us with an opportunity to safeguard our children once again, and this time to safeguard our borders in the fight against the flow of drugs that come across the borders.”
I appreciated the fulsome endorsement. Senator D’Amato certainly delivered for New York in Washington.
I’ll admit I did bury Sammy Latini’s swimsuit and shoes in the sand, as the senator claimed I had. Actually, it was worse than that. I buried a whole set of Sammy’s clothes. But, in my defense, it was only after Sammy had hidden our clothes during a skinny-dipping jaunt.
When I moved into my new office at Customs Service headquarters in the Reagan Building three blocks from the White House, I could tell immediately: this was my kind of challenge. I jumped in and grabbed hold of the place. The agency had a far-flung mission, some hugely dedicated employees, and a bevy of critics, inside and outside government, who were ready to pounce. The IRS had just been decimated in three days of hearings before the Senate Finance Committee. Republicans on the committee showed no mercy. Customs was next in their sights. Despite the warm welcome during my confirmation hearing, I had no doubt they’d be just as tough on us.
The best strategy, I believed, was to highlight the good things the agency was doing, then get ahead of the critics and make improvements on our own.
Customs inspectors, who are now part of Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security, were the official federal presence at America’s 328 points of entry—international airports, seaports, and major border crossings—recovering money owed to the United States and preventing contraband from coming in. It’s a big country and a big job. When you come back into the United States from abroad, these are the people who check your bags. Customs inspectors are everywhere, and this can pay great dividends.
They find cocaine and heroin in the cargo holds of commercial airliners and in the bellies of third-world drug mules. They discover blood diamonds masquerading as costume jewelry and the ivory tusks of endangered elephants. If it’s illegal and there’s profit to be made importing it, Customs inspectors are the ones who are supposed to find it before it gets here—and arrest the people trying to bring it in. At times, a single find in a single suitcase can lead, one investigative step at a time, to a sprawling international criminal conspiracy.
That’s how Customs inspectors and investigators helped to break up a Jamaican-led narcotics ring that bribed FedEx drivers to distribute 121 tons of Mexican marijuana to East Coast markets. Working with the Drug Enforcement Administration and FedEx executives in Memphis, our people seized 2 tons of marijuana, 18 firearms, and $4 million in cash and other assets. The 101 arrests included 22 FedEx employees. The FedEx drivers sold out cheaply, for bribes of less than $2,000 a week. “They thought they had built a foolproof system,” I said when the arrests were announced. “They were mistaken.”
Customs agents also did huge damage to the Mexico-based drug cartel founded by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Operation Impunity, we called that probe. Fuentes had died in 1997 from the botched plastic surgery he’d hoped would make him unrecognizable. But his organization was as potent as ever, using a fleet of planes and sophisticated communications technology to bring tons of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana into the United States. We turned informants. We leveraged cooperation from the governments of Mexico and the Dominican Republic. We were able to identify key players up and down the cartel. We ended up with dozens of people in custody in Chicago, Miami, and Texas. “The drug smugglers in this case used an incredible array of sophisticated electronics equipment,” I said when we announced the arrests. “It took our best to beat their best.”
The Customs Service and Treasury’s other enforcement agencies could be a hugely valuable resource in the war on drugs—and not just because of cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics we confiscated at the airports and borders. On May 18, 1998, Secretary Rubin announced the culmination of “the largest and most comprehensive drug money laundering case in the history of U.S. law enforcement,” Operation Casablanca. It was the tireless Brian Ross of ABC News who broke the story. For more than three years, Customs agents targeted banks and other financial institutions that were used by Mexico’s Juárez cartel and Colombia’s Cali cartel. Indictments were brought against three major Mexican banks and officials from nine other Mexican financial institutions, all of them directly involved in helping the cartels hide their huge profits. Nearly two hundred people were arrested. Drug importers face two major challenges: getting the drugs to the people who consume them, and hiding the money they earn. Over the years, law enforcement had focused mostly on the product side of the equation, but the money part was just as important. The kingpins could usually keep their distance from the street-level smuggling and selling. But they would never separate themselves from the profits of their illegal enterprise. We could have taken the money laundering even further. But the numbers were getting so huge and so many Mexican banks were involved, we worried about destabilizing the nation’s entire economic system. We were also concerned that too many people were learning about the operation, and that the details might leak. We made our arrests and brought Operation Casablanca to a close.
It wasn’t just narcotics operations we were focused on. In September 1998, Customs agents, coordinating with police in twenty-two states and a dozen countries, busted an Internet child-pornography network called the Wonderland Club. More than one hundred thousand sexual photographs of naked boys and girls—some of them younger than two years old—were seized. Nearly a hundred people were charged, including a University of Connecticut professor. “The volume is enormous,” I said when we announced the operation.
There really was no form of criminality an alert Customs employee couldn’t sniff out, and that included terrorism. It was Customs inspectors who captured Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian al-Qaeda member known as the Millennium Bomber. He’d lived in Montreal, received extensive terrorist training in Afghanistan, and had big New Year’s Eve plans: he was going to plant powerful explosives at Los Angeles International Airport, ringing out 1999 with a dramatic and deadly blast.
On December 14, Ressam hid the explosives and bomb components in the wheel well of a rented green 1999 Chrysler 300M luxury sedan and drove aboard the MV Coho ferry at Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, for the ninety-minute ride to Port Angeles, Washington. He passed through the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint without a problem. But after the ferry docked in Port Angeles around 6:00 p.m., U.S. Customs inspector Diana Dean thought Ressam was acting “hinky.” She asked him to step out of the car as another Customs inspector searched the trunk. In the wheel well, he discovered ten green plastic garbage bags containing a total of 118 pounds of a fine white powder, two lozenge bottles filled with the primary explosives HMTD and RDX, 14 pounds of aluminum sulfate, and two 22-ounce olive jars with 2.6 pounds of a secondary explosive known as EGDN, twice as powerful as TNT. There were also four timing devices, small black boxes containing circuit boards connected to Casio watches and nine-volt batteries. The devices were rigged so that when a watch alarm rang, an electrical charge would pass from the battery to a small lightbulb, which had its glass covering removed, exposing the filament. The bulb would heat, then ignite and detonate the other bomb ingredients in a chain reaction. As one of the Customs inspectors escorted Ressam from the ferry, he broke free, leading the inspectors on a six-block chase. They grabbed him as he tried to force his way into a car stopped at a traffic light. One month later at Customs headquarters we held a major awards ceremony for all the inspectors involved.
Explosives experts said later the material in the wheel well could have produced an explosion the size of forty car bombs. After a nineteen-day trial at U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Ressam was convicted on eight terrorism-related charges and is now serving a life sentence at the federal prison known as ADX Florence in Colorado, or just “Supermax.”
No one in U.S. law enforcement had much experience yet with murderous zealots like Ressam, trained in the ways of terror and dedicated to mass destruction. But looking back, his plans for the new millennium certainly seem like an early precursor to the kinds of plots we would become extremely familiar with in the coming decade in New York.
* * *
All along, I was working to bring greater administrative order to the Customs Service. We had many talented people, but when I became commissioner, the agency was disorganized. Nothing was uniform—not the cars, not the guns, not even the uniforms. They were different from posting to posting, from port to port. One hundred and eighty ports had their own websites. We shut those down. We put in the first Customs-wide web strategy.
All this disorganization wasn’t just untidy or bureaucratically complex. It was costly and potentially dangerous for the inspectors and the public. Customs was an agency whose mission involved establishing a national system for bringing goods into the country by land, sea, and air. It made no sense for some ports of entry to be governed by strict regulations and others to have hardly any at all. It wouldn’t take long for savvy importers—both the legal and illegal kinds—to begin exploiting variances like that. We wrote up standards and enforced them.
We brought in a director of training. Eleven thousand of our twenty thousand employees carried guns. Yet we had no records documenting which, if any, of them had been trained to shoot. We sent them to the shooting range and kept records on how people did. That might sound routine now. At the time, it was anything but.
You couldn’t live in Washington and work in federal law enforcement and not notice the awesome political power of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover may be dead and buried, his name known to young people only from a building sign, but the bureau he left behind still has major influence in the executive branch and Congress. Part of the reason for that, I concluded, was the eighty FBI employees assigned to various committees on Capitol Hill. Customs, I thought, should try to copy that strategy. We didn’t get anything close to eighty. But with a little pressure, we got three or four agents on the hill, and those congressional liaisons began developing some fruitful working relationships with senators, congressmen, and their staffs. I knew that would pay dividends over time. I forged a relationship with Senator Robert Byrd and got his support for our funding initiatives. It didn’t hurt that Customs would have a training facility in Byrd’s home state of West Virginia.
The biggest criticisms Customs faced had to do with who was stopped when coming into the country and why—an early international preview of my own future battles in New York over our so-called stop-and-frisk techniques.
Some of this was fairly routine: watching people through two-way mirrors, picking out the guy wearing the heavy overcoat on the seventy-degree day, going over and saying, “May I speak with you for a moment, sir?” Not surprisingly, the flights carrying the most marijuana and cocaine came from Jamaica, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. From time to time, someone would complain that we were picking on Jamaicans or Colombians or Dominicans. Then we’d do some extra screening of flights arriving from Norway and find nothing.
Politically, Customs was always being squeezed on the personal-search issue from both the left and the right. The long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia John Lewis, a former aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists were raising objections of racial profiling, saying Customs agents were singling out their targets according to demographics more than activity. That wasn’t official policy, but I wanted to know if it was happening in the field. At the same time, conservative activists complained about intrusive government overreach, asking why federal employees literally had their hands in people’s pockets. Meanwhile, drug-war supporters were pushing for more aggressive interdiction. Drug-war opponents thought any interdiction was futile. Caught in the middle was the Customs Service. And we were constantly being dragged into court.
When I arrived there were multiple lawsuits pending on alleged personal-search abuses, mostly at the Mexican border and at airports. With lax standards, the Customs Service was constantly being sued by people who claimed their rights were being violated. Some of the claims seemed crazy. Some probably had merit: agents pumping people’s stomachs at the border, singling out attractive women for strip searches—taking intrusive measures without much logic or justification.
I thought we needed some objective outside analysis. Sometimes agencies will listen to credible outsiders more willingly than they’ll listen to their own. But the investigation had to be led by someone with deep credibility on both sides of the political aisle. There weren’t too many people like that in Washington. I put together a team to take a fresh look at the issue and, hopefully, bring some rationality to Customs’ policies.
Thanks to the recommendation of New York attorney John Connorton, I found my point person in Constance Berry Newman, who was undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. She was smart, trustworthy, and balanced, a politically savvy African American Republican. She must have learned something about the halls of power running the Smithsonian Institution.
Her group and my staff came up with a flurry of new initiatives designed to confront the search issue.
We reduced the searches by 75 percent and increased the drug finds by 25 percent. We beefed up supervision and set up specific search criteria. Who to search, how to search, who should make the decision—all of that had been entirely free-form. We finally got some rules spelled out. Under federal law, Customs agents needed only “mere suspicion” to search someone coming into the country. That was a very low standard—far more lax than the “reasonable suspicion” generally required of regular police.
We still conducted aggressive searches when we had cause to. Sometimes that was necessary. But we were guided by rational policies. Supervisory approval became a must. Stomach pumping wasn’t used as a fishing expedition anymore. Again, some of this was very basic. But someone had to lead it.
When the government’s General Accounting Office issued a detailed report on Customs Service searches, Illinois senator Dick Durbin declared: “I commend Commissioner Ray Kelly for his work to address concerns that have been raised, and I look forward to working with him to ensure no one is stripped of his or her civil rights or dignity by being unfairly selected to be searched by the Customs Service.”
He’d been one of our tougher critics. Given where we’d started, I considered that progress, I assured Senator Durbin.
“Customs is searching fewer innocent travelers of all races and genders, and more effectively targeting those carrying contraband,” I said proudly. Sitting next to me at the press conference and lending his support: John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights leader who had raised many of the original concerns.