Justice Medal Crackdown

n the parochial world of law enforcement, it takes a special kind of cop to admit his agency needs help. It takes an evangelist to get it.

Bobby Rutherford had to be a little of both to crack the drug smuggling rings that terrorized the Miami River in the mid-1990s. The river starts downtown and empties into the Port of Miami, providing easy access to the city for small barges and freighters. Smugglers saw it as a direct route to funnel drugs into South Florida.

As a veteran criminal investigator for the Customs Service, Rutherford knew the river, and he knew the smugglers' methods. But he didn't have the manpower or the budget to make a dent in their business. All he had was an idea.

Rutherford knew the riverfront was rife with people who had information on the smugglers. Some of these people were wanted on local criminal charges or immigration violations. If they could be taken into custody, Customs could leverage these charges to make them informants. But first they had to be arrested, which meant Rutherford had to get law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction to play along. Many of these agencies had their own personnel shortages.

In late 1998, Rutherford pigeonholed longtime colleagues in the Border Patrol and the Miami-Dade Police Department. Root out the drugs and we'll cut crime along the riverfront, he told them. Everybody will win. Then he chatted up their bosses. "You've basically got to go out and talk to other agencies and get them excited about wanting to do it," says Rutherford.

Soon eight agencies had signed on to the sting, dubbed Operation Riversweep. Uniformed agents from Customs and other agencies made dozens of arrests in the shipyards and developed top-notch sources. When the sting ended in early 2000, Customs had made 120 arrests and seized more than 13,000 pounds of cocaine and 21 freighters.

None of it would have happened without Bobby Rutherford. "He's a real bulldog," says Customs special agent Dennis McLean. "He sets himself on a course and very few people can sway him off it."

Rutherford, a 40-year-old GS-14, doesn't speak at press conferences. He doesn't go to high-level meetings, even when they involve operations he runs. He spends his time in the shipyards or out on the river, working cases.

But Rutherford's ideas are widely respected inside Customs and have had a profound influence on narcotics investigations in South Florida. Even officials in the Florida Office of Drug Control, which has occasionally chafed with Customs over joint operations, are quick to praise his abilities. "He's very, very knowledgeable about catching smugglers," says one.

He wasn't always. The son of an Air Force sergeant, Rutherford grew up in Memphis, Tenn., far from a teeming urban center like Miami. He earned a master's degree in international relations, but then decided to act on an interest in police work that had developed while he was an undergraduate at the University of Memphis. After a stint with the police department in Panama City, Fla., he joined the Customs Service as an investigator in 1987.

Rutherford dived into the details of his new job, learning the ins and outs of smuggling techniques. His great talent, says McLean, is connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated pieces of evidence. In Riversweep, he won the trust of the different law enforcement groups involved. "He got consensus because he was successful," says McLean.

Today, Rutherford and his staff still work six-day weeks, often 12 hours a day. "For what I do this is the best place in the country to be. It's a lot of fun."