Feds Gone Wild; Reports Highlight Worst Crimes by Officials

June 4, 2008— -- An FBI special agent used an undercover real estate firm run by the bureau to sell her friend's house for $1.3 million, according to a new report by the Department of Justice's Inspector General.

Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Department's Inspector General reported investigators found evidence an official there may have swapped sensitive law enforcement information to white supremacists for drugs, sex and money.

A DHS airport security officer also stole $18,000 from his elderly mother, stopped paying her nursing home bill and ran up charges on her credit cards, the IG said.

Call it Feds Gone Wild: some of the most colorful busts of law enforcement's own officials, buried in otherwise dull reports to Congress, new editions of which landed earlier this week.

Every six months the top internal watchdogs for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security report to Capitol Hill on their current efforts, which range from financial audits and management reviews to investigations of wrongdoing into their agencies' own personnel.

The cases they cite are a sampling, which do not name the culprits, and tend towards the colorful, even shocking. Their latest reports do not disappoint.

In addition to the FBI's budding broker (dismissal recommended), the ex-DHS official (eventually indicted and arrested on drug charges), and the TSA's ungrateful son (pled guilty, sentenced to fine plus restitution, 60 days' confinement), they featured:

A Catholic prison chaplain who admitted to engaging in sexual acts with inmates who attended his Bible study class or clerked in his office;

A Border Patrol officer who married and lived with an undocumented alien, and a immigration official who lived with his illegal immigrant girlfriend and helped her obtain fake papers;

A senior-level immigration official who was indicted for taking bribes and tips in exchange for releasing immigration detainees;

A federal security agent who "for the past several years" stole money out of Automated Teller Machines;

A prison doctor and aide who scammed $2 million from Medicaid by running a bogus HIV therapy program for inmates;

A Border Patrol officer who ran queries of federal law enforcement databases on behalf of drug traffickers, and another officer who sold marijuana from his Border Patrol vehicle.

Former law enforcement officials cautioned not to jump to conclusions based on reports of a few bad apples. "The minority of bad people don't speak for the majority of people working hard, doing their job, day to day," said Brad Garrett, who served as an FBI special agent for over two decades.

"Unfortunately, people hear more about the bad news than the good news," he said. "But most people are law-abiding and do their job -- obviously, some better than others."