TSA Agents Caught Smuggling Cocaine and Heroin at Atlanta Airport

If you’re a drug dealer, sex offender, a child molester or have some other criminal record, and you’re having trouble looking for work, look no further than the TSA. They employ all sorts of people with shady backgrounds and questionable characters, to say the least. Who else would be willing to grope little kids and grandmothers and look at images of people’s naked bodies on their X-ray scanners?

And it’s all in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists. I’m sure that’s what Richard Cook and Timothy Gregory were thinking when they got involved in a drug-smuggling business at the Atlanta airport. Cook had made a deal with some drug dealers back in January that for every kilo of heroin smuggled through security, he’d get paid $2,500. In February, Cook left the TSA and handed the reins of his drug business over to co-worker Gregory, who received $1,000 per kilo of cocaine smuggled. Little did either of them know, however, that their drug bosses were FBI agents working undercover, and the cocaine and heroin were both fake.

Just last Tuesday, both TSA agents were indicted on charges they conspired to smuggle drugs. We still don’t know how this relationship between the Feds and the TSA agents was initiated. I find it odd and a little bit humorous that the Feds chose to pick on some of their own. Usually, they work undercover with non-government employed drug dealers and eventually catch them in the act. They even work undercover with Muslims or white supremacists, assisting them in a terrorist attack by providing them with guns, explosives, money or anything else they need in order to execute the attack only to “thwart” it at the last minute and have those involved arrested for terrorism. So why would they want to “expose” the TSA?

Not that I have any problem with that. We hear stories all the time involving the TSA “sexually assaulting” passengers, injuring them, laughing at the naked images on the scanners, strip searching children, etc. It’s definitely not surprising that a couple of TSA officers tried to make some extra money on the side by getting illegal drugs through security.

This isn’t the first time the TSA has assisted in the smuggling of drugs. Earlier this year in April, the Hartford Courant reported:

“Three Transportation Security Administration officers, two police officers and more than a dozen drug dealers in Florida, New York and Connecticut are charged in the smuggling conspiracy that delivered illegal Oxycodone pills from Florida to the Waterbury [Conn.] area. …Authorities said that the TSA officers — two in Florida and one in New York — were paid to help drug couriers move pills and the stacks of cash they generated through airport screening systems.”

And last year in LA, TSA screeners were found to allow luggage they knew to be filled with methamphetamines, cocaine and marijuana to pass through their “security” checkpoints in exchange for cash. These cases in Connecticut and California weren’t assisted by undercover agents.

Maybe this is why they went undercover in Atlanta. Maybe they’re trying to “crack” down on the TSA’s underground drug business at the airports and weed out those that they suspect of having potential to engage in such behavior. Whatever the case, the fact that our government engages in these types of sting operations is still troubling. They engage in breaking the law themselves, hoping to get others to do the same so that those people get in trouble. Nothing happens to the undercover agents because they were just “doing their job.” This case reveals what we already knew to be true about the TSA — that they employ moral delinquents. It also reveals that our government can engage in criminal activity with impunity as long as they get others to engage in it with them.