“The agency’s strategy is to drag this kind of thing out, put the person through hell, and destroy them financially,” says Mark Conrad, a veteran of 27 years with Customs, including a stint as head of internal affairs for nine states. Conrad now teaches college and works part-time as a consultant for Ron Tonkin, Kleiman’s Houston-based attorney. “Very few people have the stamina to stick it out. And the agency’s attitude is, in the end, ‘The worst that will happen is we’ll have to write a check.’ ”

In this case, Kleiman has stamina that borders on obsession. She thinks she has something more as well: a smoking gun that demonstrates a cover-up at Customs. And if Kleiman’s charges about critical security problems are true, even after September 11, the impact of her whistleblowing may result in a federal investigation.

Kleiman knew on her first day at JFK that she had a problem. Having completed a five-month training course in Glynco, Georgia, that included extensive work in surveillance, self-defense, and shooting, she was thrilled to actually get down to work. Her good feelings quickly began to fade, however, when she was led to a small, dark office for a meeting with her new supervisor. “ ‘Customs is like the Irish mafia,’ ” she claims Flood, a 25-year agency veteran, told her. “ ‘Our form of affirmative action is hiring an Italian, so understand what your place is in this agency.’ ” He made it clear, she charges, that she would never really be one of them. That because she was a Jew, a woman, and a former prosecutor, they would never be able to trust her.

This began what Kleiman claims was a relentless, daily barrage of sexual harassment (“You need to get laid”), anti-Semitic invective (“Jew bitch,” “JAP”), and general abuse. Her desk, the supervisor told her, would be in “the ghetto,” an out-of-the-way corner where the two other Jewish agents sat, and where he said he put them together so he could “keep an eye on them.”

Kleiman’s charges are so outrageous that they strain credulity—and indeed, they seem to have been dismissed as unprovable by a number of agencies she’s appealed to. But they have been corroborated by at least one former colleague, Brian Aryai, who worked at Customs for more than a decade. Aryai said in an EEO deposition that he had known Flood for about ten years, and that on many occasions he had heard him make “statements of racist and discriminatory nature against Jews, Arabs, Iranians, African-Americans, Italians, Hispanics, and Asians.” He even said in his deposition that Flood regularly referred to Marvin Walker, the man in charge of all Customs agents at JFK, as “the nigger.”

In addition to her problems with Flood, Kleiman says, the agent designated to train her refused to deal with her. “He would put his hand in my face,” Kleiman says, “and say, ‘Talk to the hand, because I’m not talking to you today and I’m not gonna waste my time training a woman.’ ” He indicated, she claims, that he knew she wouldn’t be with the agency long. After all, “her people” only worked where they could make lots of money. There was a lively office pool based on how long she would last.

Things became even more tense, says Kleiman, when she went to Flood to report security lapses. “The things I was seeing were so critical to airport security,” she says, “that there was no way I could keep quiet. I got lost one day driving around a highly restricted area in an unmarked vehicle, and a passing Port Authority police car didn’t even stop me. They waved. How could you not report that?”

Because she would not play ball, Kleiman alleges, she was isolated from the rest of her unit. Her cases were taken away. Almost no one talked to her. After several problems with her government car—two blowouts, exhaust leaking into the passenger compartment making her sick—she was convinced that the vehicle had been tampered with. She was so spooked she started sleeping with her loaded gun.

This claim, too, has an almost unbelievable ring, but there is evidence that this was more than paranoia on her part. Aryai testified in his deposition that Flood came to him regarding repair work on Kleiman’s government car: “Mr. Flood asked that no repairs be authorized for her vehicle. Mr. Flood stated: ‘I want to make that whore’s life miserable. Fuck her; let her suffer in that car.’ ”

Aryai, who was working on car-repair requests at the time, testified he told Flood his request was not legitimate and constituted harassment. Aryai alleged that Flood then said, “We will see about this. I guess you like that jap. Is she spreading her legs for you?”

The louder Kleiman talked about the problems, the more extreme were Flood’s attempts to muzzle her. She says he even threatened her mother. It was like something from a bad B-movie. “ ‘I know your mother lives alone,’ ” she says he told her. “ ‘Bad things sometimes happen to old women who live alone.’ ”

That threat, according to Kleiman, was the result of the biggest case she handled in her tenure at Customs. While working on the currency case involving the Haitians, she began talking to a DEA agent in Florida to gather information. He explained how various smuggling schemes worked and told her about an ongoing drug scam that involved airline employees. Basically, a drug mule would be on a flight with an airline employee seated close to him. They’d pick flights that came in at odd hours and use outer gates at the airport.

When the plane landed, the employee would squire the drug mule off the plane and then use a key to open a locked exit door in a “sterile”—inaccessible—corridor, enabling the men to get into the main part of the terminal without having to go through Customs. The DEA agent told Kleiman to put a watch on the computer for a particular guy he believed had been doing this.

Several weeks later, Kleiman got a call from an INS employee saying there had been a hit on her guy. He was scheduled to arrive at Miami airport on American Airlines. He was grabbed and searched, but no drugs were found. Kleiman, however, didn’t leave it there. She pulled his travel records and saw a pattern: He was traveling between Haiti, Miami, and New York every few weeks. She left the flag on him in the computer system.

“I was always taught that if you do the right thing, you’ll be okay,” says Kleiman. But “my supervisors promised they would ruin my life, and that’s what they’ve done.”

It took only three weeks for Kleiman to get another call that he was traveling again. This time, he was coming into JFK. She instructed a Customs inspector—one of the uniformed people who open and check bags—to go onto the plane and grab him there. Sure enough, he had 46.2 pounds of coke in his bags, and there was an American Airlines employee seated right behind him with a key to the airport exit doors.

“This was a really big deal,” Kleiman says. “I was a new agent and I’d made this big arrest. And we got not only the drug smuggler but an employee involved in an internal conspiracy as well.”

Her joy, however, was short-lived. First, she claims, her supervisors let the American Airlines employee go. They told her they didn’t have enough to connect him to the smuggler. But that was only the beginning. She also says they wanted her report to indicate that this was a random arrest, that she had no prior knowledge of the smuggling method and had done no investigative work.

And, most important, according to Kleiman’s account, her supervisors wanted no mention that she had worked in any way with a DEA agent. In addition, there was to be no mention of the fact that when questioned, the smuggler had said he brought drugs into the country using the same means on a number of previous occasions.

All of the omissions were to prevent Customs from looking bad, from being embarrassed. If the record showed this kind of smuggling was happening regularly, it would look like Customs wasn’t getting the job done. And they certainly didn’t want it to look as though they needed the DEA’s help to catch a smuggler.

Kleiman says she was asked not only to change her reports but to give false testimony before a grand jury as well. She refused on both counts. Three days after she made the bust, she says, an intoxicated Agent Flood called her at home at a little before ten o’clock at night. After screaming obscenities, Kleiman says, Flood told her he was taking the case away from her.

“He told me I shouldn’t speak to anyone about the case, and if I did,” she charges, “something bad would happen to me. He then told me he’d speak to me in the office.”

The next day, she watched as all of her notes and case reports were shredded by another agent. Then he redid them. The day after that, she was called into a meeting with Flood. “ ‘Diane, you just don’t get it,’ ” she claims he said. “ ‘We’re not gonna let some junior Jew bitch agent take credit for such a big case.’ ” To persuade her to cooperate, she says, the threat was made against her mother.

After the imbroglio over the drug bust, Kleiman says, she approached Marvin Walker, the “big boss,” in a hallway and told him what was happening. She claims he refused to listen, and when she made repeated formal requests with his secretary to get a meeting, she never heard back. In his EEO deposition, Walker says that although he knew there were problems concerning Kleiman, he never attempted to get her side of things.

He also denies that she tried to meet with him. Walker says a meeting would have been pointless in any event because of her “narcissism.” He says a discussion of Kleiman’s behavior “would only elicit fervent denials, as well as her defense that all of her fellow employees were conspiring against her.”

He says that during her brief time at Customs, Kleiman “consistently illustrated a propensity to view all issues through filters which, in my opinion, made her ill-suited for the discipline, the latitude, initiative, and intellect of criminal-investigative tradecraft; the sole opinion that mattered was hers.”

Walker adds that he is “certain” Kleiman could excel in an academic setting but is just as convinced she “lacks the maturity of judgment to withstand any perceived slights to her authority or acumen.”

A different assessment comes from Tom McManus, who was Kleiman’s supervisor when she was transferred out of Flood’s group. During his EEO testimony, when McManus was asked how Kleiman did in his group, he said she followed orders and “performed well. There were no problems.”

The subject of her performance record at Customs is at the heart of the case. When Flood really cranked up the pressure to get her to fall in line, Kleiman says, he made an interesting threat: Flood told her that if he had to, he would retroactively redo her employee evaluations, all of which had, to that point, been positive. As part of the quirky setup at Customs, agents keep binders in their desks that hold their monthly evaluations. Shortly after the threat was made, Kleiman’s binder disappeared from her locked drawer.

The file reappeared in an EEO investigation a year later—and the original evaluations, Kleiman charges, had been replaced by more negative ones. And every single one had the same completion date—the day they were redone—next to the supervisor’s signature (it might be funny if it weren’t criminal). Essentially, she claims, they were forgeries. But Kleiman had the foresight to make copies of the original evaluations before they disappeared. “As things deteriorated, I knew that ultimately it would end up being their word against mine,” she says, her experience as a prosecutor undoubtedly coming into play. “My boss actually taunted me by saying no one would take my word over his. I knew he was probably right. So I made sure I had some proof.”

Once she was fired, Kleiman called the FBI. She contacted the inspector general’s office at both the Treasury Department (which oversaw Customs) and the Justice Department. She called the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Because of its involvement in prosecuting cases brought by Customs, the Brooklyn office referred her to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark. Wherever she turned, she says, she was, in one way or another, given the runaround. She was essentially chasing her tail.

“Choosing to blow the whistle is a life-changing experience,” says Doug Hartnett, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a private, nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to defending the rights of whistleblowers. “To understand how dramatic the impact is on these people, and the kind of price they pay for standing up, consider just one statistic. Over half the people who blow the whistle end up losing their house.”

In fact, in most instances in both government and the private sector, choosing to blow the whistle is in essence choosing to commit professional suicide. “The people who do this are rarely, if ever, made whole again,” says Hartnett. “But for these people, the ability to look at themselves in the mirror is more important than their career.”

Sharon Chavis is an old friend of Kleiman’s who works for the NYPD, and she has watched Kleiman experience this ordeal from the beginning. She has even tried to get her to drop the fight with Customs and move on. “But Diane is a very focused, driven person,” Chavis says. “When she grabs hold of something, she is like the proverbial dog with a bone in its teeth. She’s not going to let go.” In the months after she was fired, Kleiman was, by her own admission, falling apart. She couldn’t sleep, her social life withered. But a talk with another friend made her realize she had to take control of her predicament. She hired a lawyer in July 1999 and formally filed her EEO complaint in December that year. But as she tried to barrel forward, she slowly began to realize that neither her sense of purpose nor her sense of outrage was exactly contagious.