In the final two years of an otherwise spotless career, Sally Yates ripped off the Immigration and Naturalization Service for $39,040.

Yates, who worked in the INS Portland District office, found the agency an easy mark.

So have hundreds of other crooked INS employees around the country, making it one of the federal government's most corrupt law-enforcement agencies, according to records and interviews.

In the past three years, the Department of Justice's inspector general has investigated more than twice as many INS employees as it has those of the comparably sized Bureau of Prisons. The same ratio applied to the agencies in terms of arrests for criminal misconduct, including fraud and bribery.

The INS and the inspector general's office launched a record 4,551 internal investigations last year -- one per seven workers in an agency that employs 32,000. That compares with one per 31 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms employees and one per 89 Secret Service employees.

INS officials dispute such comparisons and say the numbers are not out of whack, given the agency's size and the huge volume of people it deals with each year.

Yet, former Inspector General Michael Bromwich says the INS consistently outdid the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Prisons and the Marshals Service in terms of criminal activity.

"When I first became inspector general, I was astounded at the percentage of the criminal investigations caseload comprised of INS matters," says Bromwich, who held the job from 1994 to 1999. "That level changed very little over the five years I was there."

Since 1998, at least 294 INS employees -- including inspectors, agents and high-ranking officials -- have been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from immigrant-smuggling to sexual assault, bribery, extortion and drug trafficking, Department of Justice records show.

About 25 percent of the cases ended in guilty pleas or convictions. Others resulted in terminations or other disciplinary actions.

Thomas J. "T.J." Bondurant, the Justice Department's assistant inspector general for investigations, says it is not the number of crimes but their nature that disturbs him. "It's shocking, some of the cases we have made," says Bondurant, who is responsible for investigating INS wrongdoing and oversees 145 investigators in 17 offices.

"If not a scandal, it's embarrassing to us all -- and it should be embarrassing to us all. These are people that the government has put in a position of trust."

Smugglers, rapists and murderers
Those who have violated that trust include Jesse Gardona, who was a 15-year INS veteran. While a member of the Los Angeles anti-smuggling unit, in 1998 Gardona arranged to move about 10 undocumented immigrants from INS detention to an East Los Angeles drop house, where they were ransomed to relatives for as much as $1,800 apiece.

Gardona, 40, who split the money with an alleged drug dealer, faces as much as five years in prison after pleading guilty in September "to the very crime he was responsible for investigating as an INS agent," says Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.

Federal court records and the files of the Department of Justice's inspector general reveal cases spanning the country:

• Inspector Juan H. Villarreal, 34, was convicted in December 1998 of bribe-taking and rape by violating the federal civil rights of an illegal immigrant from Mexico in a Laredo, Texas, motel after he threatened to deport her if she didn't have sex with him.
• INS inspector Richard Lawrence Pineda, 42, was convicted in April of smuggling illegal immigrants and 3,500 pounds of marijuana through the San Ysidro, Calif., port of entry.
• John T. Shandorf, 33, supervisor at the INS' asylum office in Queens, N.Y., was convicted in May of taking $50,000 in bribes to approve 14 asylum applications.
• Kenneth L. Stewart, 35, a San Diego border patrol agent, was convicted this year of witness tampering after he covered up his assault of a suspect.

In Portland, Yates, 53, was a 26-year INS veteran in charge of four employees who handled paperwork, fees and immigration requests at the Portland District headquarters when she embezzled immigrants' application fees to feed a gambling habit. Court records show she covered her thefts by claiming paperwork was lost and then issuing temporary benefits.

"Her actions really slowed legitimate applications," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Stuckey, who prosecuted the case, although no eligible immigrant was denied benefits.

Yates pleaded guilty to one count of theft of government funds. At her sentencing in May 1999, she told U.S. District Judge Ancer Haggerty she was sorry.

"I never intended to hurt anybody," she said. "I always thought I was going to repay the money."

Haggerty sentenced Yates to a year in prison and ordered her to repay $39,040, which she paid out of her retirement money.

Internal controls weak
At least five times before Yates stole from the Portland INS, federal auditors and General Accounting Office investigators reported flaws in the handling of cash receipts at INS offices nationwide.

Applications and fees were not reconciled, mail rooms not secured, cash deposits not safeguarded.

In Chicago, an INS cashier embezzled $134,000 in cash held as security for immigration bonds. In McAllen, Texas, a detention officer made off with $12,000 in cash. And at an unnamed INS office, someone rifled the safe to the tune of $54,000.

"The District and Port collection process has weaknesses in internal controls that place collections at high risk of being misused, diverted or stolen," General Accounting Office auditors reported in October 1995.

But as recently as this year, The Oregonian found problems still begging to be fixed.

In a March report to Congress, the Justice Department's inspector general said $17 million in fee collections at INS ports of entry on the Southwest border were "highly vulnerable" to loss or theft.

Auditors noted that many of the same flaws turned up in a 1995 report, but went "uncorrected despite assurances from INS management that action would be taken."

Bromwich, the former Justice Department inspector general, says it's not the only time the agency has been slow to react.

"To reduce misconduct, the agency has to make it clear that it will not stand for it," he says. "You can't tell your personnel that you will get tough with them, fail to get tough with them and not have them notice the difference between your message and your actions."