Part 8

Polcuch sensed it would be a mistake to insist on going to the hotel room. He said, “Maybe the guy’s right, Truls. This place looks safe enough. Let’s do what he says.”

Halvorsen agreed with apparent reluctance. And then the youth said, “I want the money we spent for bus fares, too.” He explained to Lew Doo that it had cost $138 to come from New York by bus and he thought this money should be repaid.

Lew Doo made no protest. He agreed to pay the extra money. Halvorsen and Polcuch left the place and headed for the waterfront in a taxi. When Polcuch was certain they were not being followed, he gave the driver the name of their hotel.

Polcuch explained the situation to the agents at the hotel. It was agreed they would go to Clay Street and conceal themselves near the entrance to No. 854, where they could see the clubroom windows. They were not to make a move until Polcuch signalled from the windows or called for help over the concealed radio transmitter. While it appeared Lew Doo was working alone, he might have confederates with him when they returned to the clubroom. It was best to have help near in case there was trouble.

From the hotel, Polcuch and Halvorsen went to the Greyhound bus station and took the brief case from the locker. They returned to No. 854 at approximately 2 P.M., and Halvorsen was carrying the brief case when they walked into the clubroom where Lew Doo was sitting alone.

The Chinese said, “Let me see the stuff.” He took out a sack and examined it closely, even to the stitching. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and slit a small hole in the bag. He poured out a pinch of the powder and tasted it--and then he nodded in satisfaction.

Lew Doo lifted the other sacks from the brief case and said, “I paid for ten bags and you have only eight. Where are the others?”

Polcuch tensed. This was a critical moment--and the question he had been waiting for the Chinese to ask. He glanced at Halvorsen.

“I’m sorry,” Halvorsen said evenly, “but two of the bags got wet on the ship and we had to throw them overboard. The stuff was ruined.”

For several seconds Lew Doo stood and looked first at Halvorsen and then at Polcuch as though trying to read their minds. Polcuch, the veteran, knew the entire case was hanging by a thread. If Lew Doo backed out now, the mission was a failure. If he didn’t take the final step and hand over the money, there wouldn’t be enough solid evidence to hold him for twenty-four hours. It was now--or perhaps never.

Suddenly the Chinese shrugged and the muscles around his eyes relaxed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He counted out $1,338 onto the top of the table and then began placing the sacks into the briefcase.

Polcuch picked up the money and counted it. His hand darted beneath his jacket and he pulled a snub-nosed revolver from a shoulder holster to cover the startled Lew Doo. “Don’t move,” Polcuch ordered. “I’m an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department. You are under arrest.” Slowly he backed to the window overlooking Clay Street and signalled to the agents below. Within a few seconds they came pounding up the stairs and into the room. But there was no fight in Lew Doo.

Lew Doo was charged with conspiracy to violate the narcotics laws of the United States. He pleaded not guilty, but he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. In Hong Kong, British police raided the room on Cameron Road and smashed the ring operating from the Crown Colony.

This was the end of the ordeal for Halvorsen, the young man who had brought himself to a halt on the edge of a chasm of crime. But it was a happy and prosperous ending because the U.S. Customs Bureau awarded him a check for $1,000 for his role in helping smash the smuggling ring.

* * * * *

The case of Truls Arild Halvorsen is only one of countless thousands of smuggling cases recorded in files which now are gathering dust in the archives of the Customs Bureau, the oldest agency in the Federal government.

The Bureau of Customs--or the Customs Service, as it is often called--is the nation’s border guard. For more than 170 years it has had the primary responsibility for policing the foreign trade, collecting tariff duties on imports, and exposing conspiracies which would defraud the Treasury of the United States.

The Customs Service was organized hurriedly in the first days of the Republic, when the original Thirteen Colonies voluntarily surrendered certain rights to the Federal government in order to “form a more perfect Union.” One of the most important of these rights was the collection of duties--for without this income the new-born government could not have existed.

The need for revenue was so great in the nation’s beginning that Congress rushed through legislation authorizing a Customs Service even before the organization of the Treasury Department. And when Alexander Hamilton assumed his duties as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he found the month-old Customs Service already at work collecting revenues. The Service was incorporated into the Treasury Department as a division of the Secretary’s office, and it continued as a division until 1927 when it was given the status of a bureau, directed by a commissioner appointed by the President.

Since the day in July, 1789, when George Washington submitted to the Senate the first list of Customs collectors, the nation’s overseas trade has grown from a mere trickle to a multi-billion-dollar flood. The administration of the Bureau has become more complicated and its operations more diverse as the commercial intercourse between nations has grown.

In size, the Customs Bureau is one of the smaller Federal agencies, having approximately 8,500 employees. But being the senior service in the Federal government, its past is a mirror of the nation’s history. It is a history tinged with violence and intrigue, because there has never been a time when its agents were not engaged in a running war with smugglers--from Jean Laffite and his band of cutthroats in the bayous of Louisiana to the criminals who direct today’s multi-million-dollar traffic in contraband.

Because it deals with commerce and travel, the operations of Customs touch every man, woman and child and every item of merchandise entering this country--from the tourist returning from Zamboanga to the aardvark headed for a zoo.

Customs has been damned as a nuisance and a bumble-headed bureaucracy. It has been praised as one of the most efficient and necessary units in the Federal government. Despite its long history, few Americans know anything about Customs beyond the fact that they must submit to an irritating baggage examination by an inspector upon arriving home from abroad.

What is Customs? Why was it organized? What are its duties? And why is it necessary?

Customs is a slender, dark-haired expert sitting in a small room in New York appraising the value of a treasure in diamonds. It is a chemist in a laboratory checking the quality of a foreign import--and its dutiable value--and arriving at a decision which may mean life or death for an American business in a highly competitive market. It is an inspector at an airport or on a pier examining the luggage of passengers to be sure they have complied with the law.

Customs is a tall man with a wind-burned face lying in the mesquite above the Rio Grande, watching patiently for the smuggler of heroin or marijuana he knows is coming his way. It is a burly man lowering himself into the dark hold of a ship to check the cargo and to search for contraband. It is a man giving an expert appraisal of the antiquity of a tapestry or the authenticity of a painting to be certain an importer is not being defrauded. It is a man checking the contents of a mountain of parcels arriving from overseas.

Customs is a man explaining to a tourist what he can do to save time and avoid trouble in his travels. It is volumes of complex rulings by the courts and laws passed by Congress governing the huge import-export trade. It is a lawyer standing in a courtroom arguing that an import is subject to much higher duties than its importer claims.

In the long years past, Customs was James Madison standing in Congress and urging his fellows to adopt a tariff act quickly in order to save the government from financial ruin. It was a band of men slipping through the bayous in search of Jean Laffite and the mountain of loot he was smuggling into New Orleans.