Cocaine sting on Uncle Sam’s turf
It would have been shocking enough if two or three federal employees had somehow let themselves be sucked into a small-scale drug operation run through their access to the mail system.
A high-volume would-be drug ring involving more than a dozen employees of the United States Postal Service is something else altogether. But that’s what Justice Department officials claim to have uncovered, as per three federal indictments unsealed Tuesday in Atlanta.
As reported in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, U.S. Attorney John Horn, representing the Northern District of Georgia, said 16 USPS employees accepted bribes from a suspected drug trafficker to ship “multiple kilogram” quantities of cocaine through the mails into the Atlanta area. Among those charged in the indictments are postal employees from Riverdale, Snellville, Decatur, Jonesboro, Lithonia, East Point, Austell, Fairburn and several from Atlanta.
As reported in the Chronicle, the defendants are alleged to have been paid for providing special addresses to which packages of drugs could be shipped; the postal workers then took delivery of the parcels themselves for transfer to the drug dealer.
One problem: The feds had set up a sting operation, the packages contained no actual drugs, and the drug trafficker to whom they were supposed to deliver the dope was working with Uncle Sam. Oops.
“The allegations contained in these federal indictments are disturbing to say the least," David J. LeValley of the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office said in a news release. "The blatant abdication of the public trust through the criminal conduct of these 16 U.S. Postal Service employees, absolutely stains the established trust of their peers and those that went before them at the U.S. Postal Service."
It will be interesting to learn what led authorities to suspect that this many Georgia postal workers might be open to a large-scale drug operation run on taxpayer property and taxpayer time. Stay tuned.
Uneasy season
Regardless of whether the danger is real, concern about it is not unfounded. That’s what makes the Muscogee County tax assessors’ request for extra security from the sheriff’s office so disturbing — not that it’s unreasonable, but that it isn’t.
As reported by staff writer Alva James-Johnson, the negative reaction to some high property tax assessments (a reaction that, in many cases, was also not unreasonable) prompted Chief Appraiser John Williams to email Maj. Mike Massey Aug. 1 about “maximizing the resources available for security.”
The highly publicized citywide revaluation of properties, which in some cases resulted in massive assessment increases, “has created many more appellants who personally come to our office, many of whom are unhappy, to say the least. Some are irate, with questionable stability,” Williams wrote.
A large increase in the number of assessment appellants, of course, has multiplied the number of people who come to the City Service Center, which increases the odds of somebody being out of control.
That hasn’t happened, and we’re cautiously confident it won’t. It’s just a shame to have to worry about it.
This story was originally published August 31, 2017 at 5:18 PM with the headline "Cocaine sting on Uncle Sam’s turf."