Northside Corruption

Dirty feds exist on both sides of the border, we are reminded:

A veteran inspector with U.S. Customs and Border Protection was arrested this afternoon at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing on bribery, drug trafficking and human smuggling charges, the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego said.

Lorne Leslie Jones, 46, of Chula Vista, is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and bringing in illegal aliens for financial gain, according to a criminal complaint unsealed today. He is also charged with aiding drug traffickers smuggle more than 9,300 pounds of marijuana into the country.

Jones, a former marine who became a U.S. Customs inspector in 1994, worked at San Diego-area border crossings in San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, where he’d been assigned as a canine officer since 2005, said assistant U.S. attorney Edward Weiner.

I probably read about a half dozen of these stories a year, give or take, and usually in off-the-beaten-path publications. I wonder how many American federal agents are charged with corruption on a yearly basis; there's got to be a lot more of this going on than the few cases I'm reading about. You'd think a broad rundown of the frequency of and efforts to combat corruption on the US side of the border would be a logical topic for a long piece by one of the many media organizations who've run out of new drug-war stories to tell.