“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. And then there was this case in 1989, when a con man from Malaysia co-opted two employees of the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich in a huge scam, where they wired twenty million dollars to the New York branch of an Australian bank. The order was forged, but no one knew that. So the twenty million was zapped over to Australia, where it was drawn down quickly to a bunch of different accounts, and it just disappeared into the ether, leaving no trace. By the time Swiss Bank Corporation discovered what had happened, the money was pretty much all gone.”
“So if someone had the computer passwords-?”
“Are you kidding, Sarah? Christ, someone clever could steal all of a bank’s money, make it go belly up inside of a day. I think I should take a look at the Manhattan Bank’s computers, don’t you?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
If you were a drug smuggler seeking to get, say, a few thousand kilos of cocaine into the United States, you would probably resort to one of the time-honored methods devised by the drug cartels. You might conceal the goods in hollowed-out bars of aluminum stacked high in the cargo of a Venezuelan ship entering the Port of Newark. Or you might move the cocaine by truck across the Mexican border, buried in a shipment of roofing material.
If you were careful, and your shipping documents were in order, the odds would be in your favor.
But if instead you were smuggling in relatively small quantities of contraband, whether drugs or explosives or weapons-grade plutonium, there is another, far safer way.
You would simply use an international express package delivery service such as DHL or Federal Express or Airborne. Millions of packages enter the United States every day, roughly a hundred thousand sent by overnight express, and they are hardly ever subject to inspection.
“Express consignment operators,” as the U.S. government formally designates international express courier services, are strictly controlled by the lengthy list of rules set out in Volume 19 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Part 128. They must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. Customs Service that their shipping facilities are secure, and that everyone who works for them has been subjected to a thorough background security check.
John F. Kennedy International Airport in Idlewild, New York, is the single customs entry point, the funnel through which all express packages from Europe must pass. In order to speed up the customs procedures, most of the express consignment shippers transmit a manifest in advance, by computer, to enable U.S. Customs to clear the planeload of packages in advance. After all, the U.S. Customs Service cannot possibly inspect even one of every thousand packages that pass through JFK.
Etienne Charreyron, the bomb-disposal expert in Lièges, Belgium, whom Baumann had hired to construct the fusing systems, sent two parcels on two separate days through DHL in Brussels. Each package contained a custom-designed fusing system, concealed in the hollow body of a Sony CFD-30 CD/radio/cassette player.
Charreyron knew the basic route of packages sent by DHL. He knew that Brussels was DHL’s European hub. He knew that a package sent from the DHL office in Brussels was sent via one of DHL’s private 727 jets, in which it was stuffed into one of six or seven large containers, or “cans,” as they’re called in shipping terminology. Each can might contain one to two thousand packages.
He knew that the packages containing the fusing mechanisms would arrive at one or two o’clock in the morning at JFK Airport, go through customs, and be loaded on a DHL jet to Cincinnati, DHL’s U.S. hub, by nine in the morning. By the next day they would be in the hands of the man who had ordered them. In all, the transit time would be two business days.
Charreyron had done his homework, and he had chosen a good, low-risk way to send the detonators. But he had not figured on Senior Inspector Edna Mae Johnson.
Johnson had worked for the U. S. Customs Service for thirty-six years. A stout black woman of ferocious intelligence and unwavering attention, she was known by friends and admirers as Eagle Eye, and by many who got in her way by less admiring nicknames, most of them unprintable. Her husband of forty-odd years had learned the hard way not to bother trying to pull one over on Edna Mae.
So had the licensed customs brokers who dealt with her each night when the express consignments came in. They all knew that when Inspector Johnson was on duty, nothing would ever be allowed to slide by. Everything would go strictly according to Hoyle. With a fine-tooth comb-no, with a goddam microscope!-she went through the manifests, the airbills, and the commercial invoices (the official U.S. Customs form, actually called a Customs Entry, which listed a package’s contents, value, and use), looking for any discrepancies.
A few of the customs brokers swore that finding a discrepancy gave Edna Mae an orgasm. If she found one, you could bank on the fact that she would make things right, even if it meant holding an entire planeload.
Two words everyone in the courier business most feared were “break bulk”: this meant to make the shipping company open a container and spend three hours or so sorting through the two thousand packages for that one miserable little letter envelope whose paperwork was fouled up. Inspector Johnson certainly did not hesitate to break bulk. There were those who suspected she rather enjoyed it. When a customs broker groaned, she’d snap, “Well, I sure as hell didn’t make the mistake. And you call yourself a business!”
So if you were in the express consignment business and Edna Mae Johnson was on for the night, you made extra sure to do things right. You made sure that the things they always wanted to inspect by hand-animal products, drugs, vitamins, foodstuffs-were put in a separate container, so you didn’t delay thousands of other packages.
And you made sure that the declared value on the airbill matched the declared value on the Customs Entry. And you made sure that no single shipment exceeded 550 pounds, that no single piece exceeded 124 pounds, that the total of the length, width, and height of a piece didn’t exceed 118 inches.
If you didn’t, Edna Mae Johnson most certainly would.
Actually all the paperwork on the DHL express consignment that night was perfectly in order. Inspector Johnson reviewed the manifest-she always worked from hard copy, because she was convinced that mistakes were made when the computer screen was used-and found nothing to object to.
As she continued processing the paperwork, she returned to her computer terminal and called up the consolidated Customs Entry. She saw a message flash on her computer screen: INTENSIVE.
The automated system was programmed to assign, completely at random, the designation “Intensive” every once in a while to an express consignment. “Intensive” meant that a hold was placed on the plane’s cargo while a physical inspection was done.
She looked up at the customs broker and said, “Well, Charles, this is not your night. This shipment’s going to hold.”
“Oh, God,” the customs broker moaned.
“Come on now, you’d better get to work and notify DHL. They’ve got some offloading to do.”
Six large cans were removed from the DHL jet and transferred to a customs holding area. There, DHL employees were instructed to break bulk. A team of dogs was brought in to sniff the parcels. No explosives were found, but one DHL package sent from Florence, Italy, was discovered to contain seven large white truffles, packed in perfumed soap chips in a desperate attempt to conceal the truffles’ pungent fungal aroma.
Inspector Johnson picked out a few dozen parcels and had them put through the mobile X-ray van. Several of them she instructed DHL employees to slit open. She did a visual inspection, satisfied herself that the contents were as described on the airbill, and had DHL employees reseal them with bright-yellow tape that informed the recipients that the parcels had been opened by U.S. Customs.