Customs agent failed to inspect hundreds of ships-faces prison time
NORFOLK VA Sept 26 2018
Over the course of about three years, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told his bosses he’d inspected more than 260 ships as they traveled through Portsmouth.
The real number, according to court documents, is closer to 35.
Carl James Jr., 38, who no longer works for the agency, pleaded guilty last week to making a false statement on a government form. He is set to be sentenced Jan. 11 in U.S. District Court in Norfolk and faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Defense attorney Nicholas Renninger said his client accepts responsibility . He was simply overwhelmed with his work duties, he said.
“He found himself in a difficult situation where he was unable to meet demands,” Renninger said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Kosky did not respond to a request for comment.
According to court documents, James, who lives in Chesapeake, was an agricultural specialist assigned to Virginia International Gateway. He was the only such customs official at the marine terminal in Portsmouth. It was his job to inspect vessels for invasive species, contaminants or diseases that could harm the agricultural or natural resources of the United States.
But, the documents said, he wasn’t very good at his job.
James’ bosses launched an investigation in November 2017 after he filed a report indicating he’d inspected the OOCL Chongqing, a container ship. The report listed an inaccurate email address, and when another customs official contacted the ship to get a working one, he learned it had never been inspected.
The report also listed the wrong number of crew members on board and said the inspection was conducted more than six hours after the ship had left port. The chief officer’s signature also did not look right, documents said.
From there, CBP officials broadened their probe. They began looking at all of James’ reports and reviewed an internal database of inspections he claimed to have conducted.
“They quickly discovered a large discrepancy,” Kosky, the prosecutor, wrote in court documents.
Kosky said James was expected to inspect about 100 ships a year and that the database indicated he had inspected 267 ships in a little less than three years. The investigators, however, could only find 51 reports.
There were problems with several of those filed reports as well. Court documents indicate investigators reached out to officials with the ships listed only to find many had not been inspected.
Investigators eventually confronted James about the discrepancies. He confessed to lying about some of the details he entered into the database. He also admitted to falsifying six reports in 2015, three in 2016 and seven in 2017.
PilotOnline
