Smuggling

By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom -- dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy. Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.

A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was sentenced Friday to a seven-year prison term for conspiring to smuggle illegal immigrants and drugs through inspection lanes at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry. Luis Francisco Alarid, 32, was arrested in May on suspicion of permitting several vehicles filled with illegal immigrants and 11 kilograms of marijuana to enter the country. He admitted in his plea agreement to several similar smuggling attempts from February to May 2008, federal authorities said.

They can spot the smile on a suspected smuggler's face from 10,000 feet in the air, record full-color video of his run for shore and simultaneously track 5,000 ships spread over hundreds of miles of ocean. Flying above the Atlantic about halfway between Florida and the Bahamas, the latest addition to the government's anti-smuggling arsenal can track the trajectory of a boat leaving Cuba and compare it -- in seconds -- to every filed course plan for vessels on the water.

White-haired and missing several teeth, a 79-year-old retired steel salesman sat barefoot in a stained undershirt at his modest Cerritos home Wednesday, trying to explain how he had ended up at the center of a major federal smuggling investigation. It all started when Robert Olson took a trip in the 1970s to Thailand, where he said he picked up an ancient bronze ring and was required to buy it after it broke in his hand.

The U.S. Department of Justice has cleared a Border Patrol agent of any wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of a suspected smuggler whose death two years ago focused attention on increasing violence at the California-Mexico border. The 18-year-old who died, Guillermo Martinez Rodriguez, was allegedly throwing rocks at the agent, who shot him in the upper back on a dangerous stretch of the San Diego-Tijuana border in December 2005.

Fifteen illegal immigrants aboard a rickety boat were rescued by U.S. authorities off the San Diego coast Wednesday morning after an apparent botched maritime smuggling attempt. The dehydrated and sunburned passengers were taken off the 24-foot boat named "Seaulater" by federal authorities nearly a day and a half after leaving Rosarito Beach bound for Southern California, authorities said.

An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other "rogue" countries, the Washington Post reported Sunday. The now-defunct ring, which was led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, is known to have sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea. A draft report by former top U.N.

High-powered automatic weapons and ammunition are flowing virtually unchecked from border states into Mexico, fueling a war among drug traffickers, the army and police that has left thousands dead, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. The munitions are hidden under trucks and stashed in the trunks of cars, or concealed under the clothing of people who brazenly walk across the international bridges.

Palestinian officials said Tuesday that Egyptian forces blew up a smuggling tunnel with five people inside, killing at least two of them. Moaiya Hassanain, a Health Ministry official in the Gaza Strip, said three people were missing. Bodies of the other two had been recovered. Palestinians use dozens of tunnels under the border between the Gaza and Egypt to smuggle in weapons, cash and contraband. In recent months, 42 people have been killed in tunnel collapses.

Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who fled the country while under investigation for alleged immigrant smuggling have been arrested in Tijuana after a two-year manhunt, federal authorities announced Monday. The suspects, brothers Raul and Fidel Villarreal, were being investigated on suspicion of smuggling illegal immigrants in their government vehicles when they abruptly resigned and disappeared in June 2006.