Three Transportation Security Administration officers and two police officers are among 20 people arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiring to distribute tens of thousands of oxycodone painkillers for illegal sale from Florida to Connecticut, according to U.S. Attorney of Connecticut David B. Fein.
According to court documents, TSA and law enforcement officers accepted cash and gift cards to allow large quantities of the prescription drug and large sums of money to be transported between Florida and New York airports.
“In these times no one needs to be reminded about how dangerous it is when officers who have sworn to uphold the law accept money to ‘look the other way’,” Fein said.
“Operation Blue Coast” began with an arrest at a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, on April 8, in which DEA officers recovered 6,000 oxycodone pills from a man who traveled from Florida to Connecticut., officials said.
According to court documents, the man revealed that he traveled back and fourth several times a week over the course of a year, buying drugs in Florida and transporting them to Connecticut through commercial airlines and by automobile. He said he sold the drugs to traffickers in Connecticut for a profit…
According to the DEA, to transport up to 8,000 pills per trip, the man said he paid off the arrested TSA officers who screened the passengers and luggage at the Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Westchester County Airport in White Plains, New York. He told the DEA he also paid more than $20,000 to TSA officers in New York to make sure he could pass with large sums of cash, the profits from his drug trafficking.
Looks to me that human resources management in the TSA and a couple of police departments are doing about as thorough a job of checking out their employees as, say, the average voter in New York and Florida does at choosing their Congress-critters.
That’s not meant as a joke. Signing off on the Patriot Act and similar repressive laws that limit the liberties of ordinary citizens and then turning the management over to administrators who wouldn’t have noticed they had crooks on the payroll if the DOJ hadn’t sent them a memo – ain’t exactly funny.