The case of Truls Arild Halvorsen is only one of countless thousands of smuggling cases recorded in files which now are gathering dust in the archives of the Customs Bureau, the oldest agency in the Federal government.
The Bureau of Customs—or the Customs Service, as it is often called—is the nation’s border guard. For more than 170 years it has had the primary responsibility for policing the foreign trade, collecting tariff duties on imports, and exposing conspiracies which would defraud the Treasury of the United States.
The Customs Service was organized hurriedly in the first days of the Republic, when the original Thirteen Colonies voluntarily surrendered certain rights to the Federal government in order to “form a more perfect Union.” One of the most important of these rights was the collection of duties—for without this income the new-born government could not have existed.
The need for revenue was so great in the nation’s beginning that Congress rushed through legislation authorizing a Customs Service even before the organization of the Treasury Department. And when Alexander Hamilton assumed his duties as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he found the month-old Customs Service already at work collecting revenues. The Service was incorporated into the Treasury Department as a division of the Secretary’s office, and it continued as a division until 1927 when it was given the status of a bureau, directed by a commissioner appointed by the President.
Since the day in July, 1789, when George Washington submitted to the Senate the first list of Customs collectors, the nation’s overseas trade has grown from a mere trickle to a multi-billion-dollar flood. The administration of the Bureau has become more complicated and its operations more diverse as the commercial intercourse between nations has grown.
In size, the Customs Bureau is one of the smaller Federal agencies, having approximately 8,500 employees. But being the senior service in the Federal government, its past is a mirror of the nation’s history. It is a history tinged with violence and intrigue, because there has never been a time when its agents were not engaged in a running war with smugglers—from Jean Laffite and his band of cutthroats in the bayous of Louisiana to the criminals who direct today’s multi-million-dollar traffic in contraband.
Because it deals with commerce and travel, the operations of Customs touch every man, woman and child and every item of merchandise entering this country—from the tourist returning from Zamboanga to the aardvark headed for a zoo.
Customs has been damned as a nuisance and a bumble-headed bureaucracy. It has been praised as one of the most efficient and necessary units in the Federal government. Despite its long history, few Americans know anything about Customs beyond the fact that they must submit to an irritating baggage examination by an inspector upon arriving home from abroad.
What is Customs? Why was it organized? What are its duties? And why is it necessary?
Customs is a slender, dark-haired expert sitting in a small room in New York appraising the value of a treasure in diamonds. It is a chemist in a laboratory checking the quality of a foreign import—and its dutiable value—and arriving at a decision which may mean life or death for an American business in a highly competitive market. It is an inspector at an airport or on a pier examining the luggage of passengers to be sure they have complied with the law.