GAO Tells of Break-In at One of Its Offices by Customs Agents

WASHINGTON — A team of U.S. Customs Service agents broke into a General Accounting Office in July, 1987, in an attempt to steal GAO files the agents believed had been requested by their boss, the assistant customs commissioner for internal affairs, according to a GAO investigative report.

In what the report described as an “illegal break-in,” a customs internal security agent used a ladder to reach a transom, climbed through the window and let two colleagues into a GAO audit office on the second floor of Customs Service headquarters. The agents removed two copies of a GAO report--not then public--concluding that customs largely had been ineffective in its efforts to halt the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

After being presented with one of the documents, Assistant Commissioner for Internal Affairs William F. Green told an agent that they had taken the wrong one, the report says. Green, top watchdog for the Customs Service, refused to discuss the matter last week.

After investigating the incident late last year, Gerald E. McDowell, chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, called the break-in “egregious” and said “the evidence . . . suggests that the agents committed theft offenses” under District of Columbia and federal law, according to a Dec. 12, 1988, letter by McDowell to the Treasury Department, of which the Customs Service is a part.

But McDowell refused criminal prosecution on the grounds that the case lacked “jury appeal,” in part because of doubts as to whether government reports “have any monetary value within the meaning of many theft statutes.”

Green, who was told of the break-in a few days after it occurred, was formally reprimanded last summer, according to an Oct. 23 memo from then-acting commissioner and now Deputy Commissioner Michael H. Lane.

But shortly before he left office July 31, former Customs Commissioner William Von Raab challenged findings of the Treasury Department inspector general and removed the reprimand from Green’s personnel file, according to Lane’s memo.

Frank A. Algozzini, the former chief of customs office security, who supervised the break-in, was demoted $2,000 in pay grade, Lane’s memo says. Algozzini and his two accomplices also were reassigned recently by Lane from internal affairs to the office of enforcement, leaving them in sensitive investigative jobs at the agency.

In a telephone interview, Von Raab described the break-in as “terrible” and said it showed “an excess of zeal” and a “desire to please” on the part of the agents involved. But he said the agents had done nothing illegal, a view he said was endorsed by the Customs Service general counsel.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not excusing or condoning their conduct,” Von Raab said.