The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Postal inspectors crucial in cracking cases.
When Steve Bannon was arrested Thursday on a yacht off the Westbrook shore, it was a group of U.S. postal inspectors who took him into custody.
While many were surprised that postal workers are part of law enforcement, they shouldn’t have been. Postal inspectors have been solving crimes, arresting fugitives, protecting children from exploitation and bringing security to the U.S. Postal Service since 1775.
Postal inspectors, originally called surveyors by Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first postmaster, are part of the oldest federal law enforcement agency, frequently working with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies and task forces.
“We were here before anybody else,” said Philip Bartlett, inspector-in-charge of the agency’s New York Division.
Any crime that involves the mail system, whether it’s a threatening letter, a bomb or anthrax sent to unwitting victims, fentanyl and other illegal drugs mailed to customers, mail carriers being assaulted or a post office being bombed, all involve the Postal Inspection Service, which has full law enforcement power. “We can arrest, we can do search warrants, we can serve subpoenas,” Bartlett said. They also carry weapons.
“We have a variety of different assignments we can work … fraud, narcotics, burglaries, bombs. … So it really keeps the job interesting,” Bartlett said. “What makes it unique is we’re not restricted to one or two types of crimes.”
“We enforce over 200 federal statutes” and serve on the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Elder Fraud Task Force, among other cooperative investigations, said Donna Harris, a spokeswoman for the service.
It was postal inspectors who solved the Unabomber case, arresting Ted Kaczynski in a Montana cabin in 1996, after he killed three people and injured 23 more, including Yale professor David Gelernter, who suffered injuries to his right hand and eye. “We were actually there, putting cuffs on Kaczynski during his arrest,” Bartlett said.
Less well known was the case of Cesar Sayoc, a Florida bodybuilder who mailed dud pipe bombs to critics of Donald Trump. He pleaded guilty in 2019, blaming mental illness and steroids, and was sentenced to 20 years. “That was a joint investigation with postal inspectors and the FBI,” Bartlett said.
Other crimes the postal inspectors investigate are more mundane: catching the thieves who steal credit cards and checks out of your mailbox.
Postal inspectors were involved in uncovering the original Ponzi scheme; in the Black Hand case, in which Italian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century were terrorized by a Sicilian gang; the arrest of Al Capone; and the financial fraud cases of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and televangelist Jim Bakker.
“I don’t mind saying it: We’re the best at doing fraud,” Bartlett said. “No matter what type of fraud it is, that’s what we do.”
Bannon is charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering, allegedly using an online fundraising site to bilk donors of more than $25 million given to help build a portion of wall along the Mexican border. Postal inspectors, assisted by agents from the Department of Justice and the Coast Guard, arrested him aboard a 150-foot yacht owned by a Chinese fugitive billionaire, anchored off Westbrook.
Bannon pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan and was released on $5 million bail.
Fraud cases aren’t simple. “They’re laborious,” Bartlett said. “There’s stacks and stacks of paper to go through to make these cases.” Some will take two or three years to solve.
Others, not so long. It took less than three weeks in April to arrest a person who was hoarding personal protective equipment “and then gouging everybody, marking it up 300 to 500 percent,” Bartlett said. “He was actually selling to a lot of nursing homes and assisted living [facilities] — places that really had a hard time getting that equipment.”
These days, a lot of schemes to trick people into giving up their money or their identity have moved from the mail to the internet, and a lot of illegal activity, including drug sales, takes place on what’s known as the dark web, an encrypted part of the internet that Google does not track.
“But if someone’s on the dark web and they buy illegal narcotics … often it will come in through the mail,” Bartlett said.
“Hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana comes in each year. We seize it and we destroy it,” he said. Even local drug dealers can get caught by the postal inspectors. They, as well as people involved in prostitution or illegal gambling and who deal only in cash, “will take the currency and try to buy postal money orders to launder the currency,” Bartlett said.
Postal inspectors may work on robberies, burglaries and assaults on mail carriers, which Bartlett said are “quite common. Here in New York we have several cases a month.” Mail carriers are taught ways to deescalate tense situations.
It’s not really a surprise that many were unaware of the Postal Inspection Service before Thursday’s arrest on Long Island Sound. “We’ve always been known as the Silent Service,” Bartlett said. “We’ve always worked under the radar.”
After 9/11, though, “we started to lift the veil of secrecy, so to speak,” he said. “We’re flat, we’re agile,” meaning there’s not a lot of layers of bureaucracy. “We can get things done,” he said.
Given President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward the Postal Service, it may have seemed ironic to some that the agency arrested his former campaign manager and adviser.
“We follow the criminal no matter where it is and no matter who it is,” Harris said.
“Law enforcement in general but definitely the Inspection Service, we’re nonpartisan,” Bartlett said. “We operate without any prejudice or bias. It falls right into the core values of our agency. That should be standard that the public should hold all law enforcement to.”