Customs Service

The U.S. Customs Service raided TIC Gums Inc. in Belcamp yesterday, apparently searching for evidence in an investigation into alleged violations of U.S. trade restrictions with Iran.The company, which reportedly had $30 million in sales last year, makes a variety of gum-based food additives and other products, according to former employees, a company brochure rTC and a company official who was interviewed recently. TIC, which has 15 sales offices in the United States and Canada, is one of the largest suppliers of gum arabic, an additive in many consumer products.

I cannot believe that our mayor or any other city or state officials would even consider allotting up to $25 million for renovations at Lexington Market ("Lexington's update," April 7). As a retired merchant with 30 years' experience at Lexington Market, I suggest management give more thought to painting and to hiring a good Realtor to bring in gourmet cheese shops and a French bakery. The market should also offer incentives and stop the beer and liquor drinking among customers shopping in the market.

Joseph Ross Prevost, who as chief appraiser of merchandise for the U.S. Customs Service in Baltimore ruled that paintings by a chimpanzee were taxable, died Saturday of heart failure at the Charlestown Retirement Community. He was 94.His spent his entire career with the Customs Service here, beginning in 1922 and ending with his retirement in 1965. He was head of the examiners who determined the value of imported cargo for tax purposes.In 1958, Arthur Watson, the director of the Baltimore Zoo, imported a dozen paintings by Congo, a chimpanzee at the London Zoo, for an art exhibition here.

Dear Whomever is in Charge of Customer Service for DirecTV: All I wanted was to watch the game. I was back in my hotel room after a long day, and I figured, what better way to unwind? Now, the game wasn't available on the hotel channels, but I've got that League Pass service you offer and one of its perks -- supposedly -- is that you can watch the game right on the ol' iPad. So I got out the ol' iPad and I fired up the app and I retrieved the password and I tried to sign in and nothing happened, so I called you guys and the robot lady answered and told me to OPRIMA NUMERO DOS if I wanted to conduct my business in Spanish, which I didn't, so I didn't and I said yes when the robot lady asked if I was a subscriber and I gave her my phone number when she asked for it and then she asked me to tell her what I wanted, and I tried to explain twice but she didn't get it, so I told her I had a question about League Pass and she gave me this long spiel about how I could buy League Pass, which I didn't need to do, since I already had it, so I asked the robot lady to connect me with technical support and she said she would and that's about when she hung up on me, so I called again and I went through the whole thing again and this time I got to a human being who listened to my problem and what I had done to solve it, expressed remorse, then told me to do the same things I had done, which had not worked the first time, and when I did and it didn't work again, this person...

Westinghouse is hoping to sell its recently developed surveillance airplane equipped with military and commercial technology to the U.S. Customs Service for use in drug interdiction efforts.The electronics giant took Carol Hallett, Customs Service commissioner, aloft in the modified light utility transport plane yesterday. Reporters on the ground followed the flight on a screen at the company's plant at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.Hallett would not say during a press conference at a corporate hangar whether her agency plans to buy the plane.

Two Maryland women filed suit yesterday against the U.S. Customs Service, claiming they were improperly strip-searched by agents at Baltimore-Washington International Airport after they arrived on overseas flights. The suit filed by Minnie Colclough of Woodlawn and Gena Selby of Baltimore in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt seeks $6 million in damages and follows by a week a report by the investigative arm of Congress that found that African-American women returning from international trips were ordered by customs agents to remove their clothes or have their belongings X-rayed far more often than other passengers.

A senior inspector for the U.S. Customs Service assigned to Baltimore-Washington International Airport has been charged with accepting cash, sex and nude pictures from a convicted drug smuggler in exchange for helping her family through the inspection process. Harry William Holland, 47, of Rosedale appeared yesterday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel E. Klein Jr. He was released pending trial. Customs Service investigators became suspicious of Holland after he asked another officer to give his address at the BWI office to a Nigerian woman who had been arrested and found to have ingested about 1,360 grams of heroin, according to a press release from acting U.S. Attorney Stephen M. Schenning.

WASHINGTON - Federal agents are planning to fan out across the country this week in an effort to recruit U.S. businesses in the war on terror, urging companies to notify the government of suspicious customers. Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the Customs Service, said he had developed a list of about 100 items that authorities believe terrorists want to buy in the United States. Starting today, Bonner said, federal agents will visit the manufacturers, emphasize the need for vigilance and encourage them to inform the Customs Service at once if they are approached by anyone trying to buy these items for possibly illegal shipment abroad.

PHILADELPHIA - The NAACP's Federal Sector Task Force announced plans yesterday to highlight discriminatory practices it claims occur frequently within the Department of Defense. Task force members also vowed to continue challenging U.S. Customs Service officials on strip searches of blacks, particularly women, as they re-enter the United States. "You'll see the Department of Defense come under vigorous attack," said Leroy W. Warren Jr., task force chairman, at the quarterly meeting here of the 64-member board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

MIAMI -- U.S. government agents allowed a key Colombian witness against Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to leave the United States last month, prompting an internal investigation at the U.S. Customs Service and fears that the incident could jeopardize the drug conspiracy case against the ousted Panamanian leader, according to well-placed government sources.In independent interviews, the sources told Newsday that Boris Olarte Morales, a Colombian convicted on federal drug-smuggling charges in Oklahoma, had left for Colombia last month, reportedly cleared by the Customs Service.

I long ago made my peace with the fact that when you call customer service, you get a machine rather than a human. It's OK, really, I've dealt with enough monosyllabic, gum-snapping staff at various service counters to welcome those polite if automated voices. But lately the machines don't seem to want to deal with me either — whenever I call a customer service line, I get a gentle but firm recorded suggestion to maybe hang up and go online for whatever help I need. No problem, but what if you're calling because your wireless connection has died?

Margaret B. Tyler, a former Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. customer service representative, died Aug. 5 from complications of dementia at Cadia Rehabilitation in Millsboro, Del. She was 96. The former Margaret Beulah Knochel was born in Baltimore and raised in Highlandtown. She was a 1933 graduate of Eastern High School where she excelled in French, fencing and archery. She was married in 1939 to Oliver T. Tyler, an aeronautical engineer, who later became an executive with the old Glenn L. Martin Co. and the Boeing Co. He died in 1984.

A three-man team of trash men worked Tyler Avenue in Annapolis as if elegantly choreographed. The truck rolled ever forward as two men tumbled the ripe contents of can after can into the compactor, darting across the street, then stepping effortlessly onto the back of the truck for yet another block of smelly, sweaty work. "Don't let no one tell you it's not hard work," sanitation employee Joe Wallace said recently, resting his hands on his knees and swallowing gulps of hot summer air. "We're just trying to get done so we can get home.

More than 30,000 customers lost power as a result of the thunderstorms Thursday night, mostly in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and the majority had service back by late Friday morning, according to BGE Corp. Utility officials said on their web site Friday that they expect to have service restored to the vast majority of BGE customers by Friday night. They warned that additional storms are expected on Friday, and that likely would result in additional power outages to restore.

Our power was restored late Monday afternoon - about 65 hours after the storm. However, during the outage more than a dozen attempts to get information from Baltimore Gross and Eccentric about their priorities and a schedule for restoring power were all unsuccessful. BG&E policy seems to emphasize public relations over providing customers with solid information that might help them cope. This bias is evident on the outage web site, in their automated reporting system, and, most glaringly, by their employee's inability or reluctance to offer any details about priorities and a tentative schedule for restoration in a given neighborhood.

Coppin State University President Reginald Avery told an auditorium of roughly 300 students, faculty and staff Wednesday that he is accountable for the direction of the institution and that he will address concerns about his leadership head-on. Avery, who recently received a vote of no confidence from faculty, fielded about a dozen questions and comments, including that the university needs to improve staff training, better its customer service, provide higher salaries and add perks for loyal staff, amplify school pride and prioritize campus improvements.

Jamaican musician Peter Jackson has sued the U.S. Customs Service for $10 million, claiming that inspectors at Baltimore-Washington International Airport singled him out for a strip-search and X-rays for possible drugs in September 1997 because he is black.The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, comes seven months after Jackson, 27 -- a reggae artist who goes by the stage name Galaxy P -- filed a $2 million administrative claim against the agency. His lawyer, Marvin Ellin, said he filed the suit because the Customs Service ignored the administrative claim.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government launched a nationwide attack yesterday against a growing U.S. black market in Freon, a banned air-conditioning chemical that threatens the ozone layer but is being smuggled in large quantities along well-established routes of drug traffickers.The imported material, purchased for as little as $2 a pound and fetching as much as 10 times that on the black market, has been brought in from Russia, China, India, Australia and Britain, among other locations, and shipped through Mexico and Canada, officials said.

I read with interest Gregory Karp's article discussing the relative advantages and disadvantages of credit unions and banks ("Crowning a banking champ," Oct. 23). As the article correctly points out, both banks and credit unions offer consumers distinct benefits. Ultimately, however, banking today is all about getting services to customers, rather than the other way around. Consumers now want convenience along with stability. They want to make transactions quickly, get accurate and timely answers to questions and conduct business whenever it is convenient for them.

A crowd of more than 100 people, mostly seniors, gathered Tuesday evening to voice their concerns to the state's energy regulator about Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s performance following Hurricane Irene. "It was scary," said Eileen Sakin, part of a busload of AARP members who attended the meeting. "We had no lights on our street or in our whole neighborhood. " It was the Maryland Public Service Commission's final public hearing on BGE's storm response. Of the state's utilities, BGE had the largest number of customers in the state affected by Irene-related outages, more than 750,000.