LIBRARY
U. S. CUSTOMS SPECIAL AGENTS, America's Senior Investigators
Dave Ellis
Published 2004
I have tried to present this slice of Customs history with a 535 page chronicle of my own investigative and management experiences, many good - some bad, which begin before WWII and even continued into the Reagan Administration after retirement (except for the Carter years). Most of the many types and classes of Customs investigations are presented to illustrate how a knowledge of investigative techniques, procedures and applicable laws, combined with hard work, a sixth sense for detecting facts supporting suspicions - with some good luck - produced the high quality investigations by which Customs Agents delivered the investigative part of the Customs Mission during that era.
Combined with this personal history is an insight into the secretive manner by which major changes were made during the Johnson Presidency as Commissioner Phillip Nichols quietly displaced the Bureau of Customs bureaucrats and created a Customs Service managed mainly by field experience executives. Also included are some 150 pages of annual reports and other correspondence between the Supervising Customs Special Agents and Treasury Secretaries, beginning in 1874.
David C. Ellis
3409 Shady Valley Drive
Austin, Texas 78748
$39.00
Plata o Plomo
“Silver or Lead”
James Kuykendall
Published 2005
Told in first person by someone who was there. This is the story of the kidnapping of DEA Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, and of the failed attempt to find and rescue him. It is also the story of the grim discovery of his body, along with that of his friend, Alfredo Zavala, and of the oft times thwarted chase of the major narcotics traffickers beleived to be responsible for this murder. The Mexican government's bizzare cover-ups are not so easily explained. It is an almost unbelievable true story of crime and corruption.
Shod With Iron
Life On The Mexican Border With the U.S. Border Patrol
Buck Newsom
Published 1983
“I arrived in the Border Patrol with all my teeth, a new saddle, and a hard-on. I still have the saddle.”
Buck was a Border Patrol Inspector who spent most of his career on the Texas/Mexican Border with an early assignment at the old Amado Station in Arizona. Many good stories about his work. ca: 1940s-1960s.
Later he owned the “Horse Concession” in Big Bend National Park.
Let Me Finish This Beer and We’ll Go Catch Somebody
Ev Turner
Published 2011
“This instance epitomizes a creed I live by, especially in Law Enforcement. “If you got a little luck, shit’ll do for brains.” Most, if not all, Egotists cannot embrace this hypothesis. Pragmatist can embrace no other. This isn’t to say skill, experience, knowledge, and dedication, don’t play a part. They do increase the odds.”
In 1957, the author was working for ASARCO at their zinc smelter—a backbreaking, bone-dissolving, lung-eating job for eleven dollars and twenty-cents a day. It was one of the better paying jobs in the plant, but the author was open to any employment offer. A newspaper article introduced him to his next profession as a U.S. Border Patrol Inspector. Unknown to him, this would be the beginning of a career in Federal Law Enforcement lasting for almost three decades.
From serving with the Border Patrol, Customs Agency Service, Customs Office of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, to Customs Patrol, Turner shares to readers how he served in line positions for twenty-eight years, never as an assistant nor deputy. Let Me Finish This Beer and We’ll Go Catch Somebody lets readers experience life in somebody else’s shoes through vivid retelling
Agency of Fear
Edward Epstein
Revised edition (December 1, 1990)
President Bush has made the war against drugs the number one issue on the contemporary American political agenda. In this revised edition of his classic book, available for the first time in paperback, Edward Jay Epstein argues that the president has adopted the strategy of his forbear, Richard Nixon, in using the drugs war to blame foreigners for the crisis in America's cities, and to provide a smokescreen for unrelated political activity designed to bolster executive power. The drugs crackdown has seen an almost hundredfold increase in the federal budget for narco-politics in the fifteen years since Agency of Fear was first published, while statistics on drug-running have been massaged. Epstein points out that, despite the massive budgets and public relations brouhaha, drug importation, as measured against wholesale price, has in fact grown.
About the Author
Edward Jay Epstein is the author of ten books including deception: The Invisible War between the CIA and KGB, The rise and Fall of Diamonds, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth and News From Nowhere.
The Three US-Mexico Border Wars
Tony Payan
Published 2006
“In this text for policy makers and concerned citizens, Payan describes how the war on drugs, the war over the enforcement of immigration laws, and the war on terror have affected relations between Mexico and the U.S. and their shared border. Particular attention is paid to the conflict between the U.S. government's efforts to close the border and the desire of residents of local communities to keep it open.”
“Tony Payan's book is an excellent primer on the myriad policy issues facing the United States and Mexico as they grapple with the opportunity and tragedy of their common border. Payan's lucid prose illuminates past and present on a frontier that has evolved from a collection of unguarded desert outposts, to an urbanized battleground of cultural conflict.”; Hector Tobar author of Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.
Available at
Mexico
George Grayson
Published 2009
"Characterized by exhaustive research, rare in-depth knowledge of the subject outside
Mexico, and compassionate wit, George Grayson's new book confirms him as one of the
most distinguished scholars of Mexican politics and history. No other publication
to date has unpacked and analyzed so thoroughly the labyrinthine and brutal underworld
of Mexico's feared drug cartels and their complex relationship with the country's
authorities and society." --Dr. Francisco E. Gonzalez, Riordan Roett Chair in Latin
American Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
"William and Mary Professor George
Grayson ranks among the most knowledgeable and insightful analysts of Mexican society
and politics writing today. His new book on Mexico's bloody and brutal drug cartels
constitutes a major contribution to the growing body of research on the "drug thugs"
who are making billions by trafficking drugs in Mexico and through their country
into the United States while wreaking havoc on both sides of the border. His detailed
case studies of Mexico's major drug "cartels" or organized crime families active
in the lucrative illicit narcotics trade - the leadership and internal dynamics of
the major criminal organizations, the rivalries and shifting alliances among these
ruthless groups, and the shockingly violent tactics they employ against each other,
the Mexican government and the Mexican people - make for a fascinating but sobering
read.
Concisely written and painstakingly documented, Grayson's book is a must for anyone
interested in understanding what is happening in the United States' besieged southern
neighbor and the implications that Mexico's current crisis holds for American society,
American security and U.S-Mexican bilateral relations." --Bruce M. Bagley, University
of Miami
Available at
Devil’s Highway
Luis Urrea
Published 2001
In May 2001, 26 Mexican men scrambled across the border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. American Book Award winning writer and poet Urrea (Across the Wire; Six Kinds of Sky; etc.), who was born in Tijuana and now lives outside Chicago, tracks the paths those men took from their home state of Veracruz all the way norte. Their enemies were many: the U.S. Border Patrol ("La Migra"); gung-ho gringo vigilantes bent on taking the law into their own hands; the Mexican Federales; rattlesnakes; severe hypothermia and the remorseless sun, a "110 degree nightmare" that dried their bodies and pounded their brains.
In artful yet uncomplicated prose, Urrea captivatingly tells how a dozen men squeezed by to safety, and how 14 others whom the media labeled the Yuma 14 did not. But while many point to the group's smugglers (known as coyotes) as the prime villains of the tragedy, Urrea unloads on, in the words of one Mexican consul, "the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border." Mexican and U.S. border policy is backward, Urrea finds, and it does little to stem the flow of immigrants. Since the policy results in Mexicans making the crossing in increasingly forbidding areas, it contributes to the conditions that kill those who attempt it.
Confident and full of righteous rage, Urrea's story is a well-crafted melange of first-person testimony, geographic history, cultural and economic analysis, poetry and an indictment of immigration policy. It may not directly influence the forces behind the U.S.'s southern border travesties, but it does give names and identities to the faceless and maligned "wetbacks" and "pollos," and highlights the brutality and unsustainable nature of the many walls separating the two countries.
Available at
Drug Lord
Terrence E. Poppa
Published 1990
Pablo Acosta, born in abject poverty in Mexico, became drug czar of Ojinaga across the border from the Big Bend country of Texas. He launched his career by smuggling marijuana and heroin into the U.S., later adding cocaine, and forging an alliance with Colombian drug traders. At the peak, he may have controlled 60% of the coke trafficked into the U.S., according to Poppa.
The author shows that Acosta consolidated his power by murdering rivals, corrupting local police and soldiers, distributing money to the poor and contributing generously to civic projects. Eventually, however, he became a coke addict; his iron entrepreneurial grip slipped; and he was tracked down and killed in 1987 by an international narcotic strike force.
Poppa interviewed the drug lord in 1986 for the El Paso Herald-Post and bases this
enlightening book in part on those talks. Photos not seen by PW.
Available at
FOBA neither endorses nor recommends these works. Reading, for those interested.
Richard is Missing
Dennis Harlan
Published 2005
After more than a quarter century Dennis Harlan finally tells the true story Of brutal murder, intensive investigation and speedy resolution that crisscrossed the U.S./Mexican border for 10 days and involved Mexican Federales, the Del Rio Police Department, Val Verde DA's Office, Texas Rangers, U.S. Customs and the F.B.I.
Harlan takes great care to honor individual men and women in law enforcement who helped in the investigation, but pulls no punches in a chapter entitled "The Tail That Wagged the Dog," when he describes the ego bolstering and degeneration of camaraderie that's become more prevalent in this branch of government.
Harlan's blow by blow accounts taken directly from the case history that was his responsibility to write, reveal the professionalism with which he managed the case while dealing with his underlying feelings of loss about his compadre.
Richard is Missing is a great read for law enforcement officers, both veterans and those new to the territory, and for anyone with an inquiring mind and a keen eye for well documented accounts of true crime in a volatile locale that's close to home-very close to home.
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