Opinion

INDIAN BUTTS: TERROR’S TAKE

NEW York law imposes a sales and ex cise tax on each pack of cigarettes sold by a licensed retailer. And ille gal profits from cigarette smuggling are funding terrorism.

Smugglers buy large quantities of untaxed product and bring it to where the excise and sales tax are the greatest – making New York City a prime black market.

Federal officials are acutely aware of the issue. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) has opened hundreds of illicit cigarette-trafficking cases; several have links to extremist groups such as al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.

A senior intelligence analyst with ATF, William Billingslea, wrote in Police Chief Magazine that “Because of the immense profit in the . . . trade, illicit cigarette trafficking now rivals drug trafficking as the method of choice to fill the bank accounts of terrorists and terrorist groups.”

In New York, state tax agents have joined with the state Tax Department to establish the “First Alert Program,” which has produced many of the leads resulting in arrests – including a Brooklyn husband and wife who smuggled cigarettes to fund the anti-American activities of a group of 200 terrorists.

Another part of the problem is Native American reservations across the state that insist their sovereignty gives them the right to sell tax-free cigarettes even to non-tribal members.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that New York was within its constitutional right to tax those sales (tribe members can still escape the tax). But the state has refused to enforce the law.

In the 12 years since that ruling came down, New York state has failed to collect a dime of these taxes. The lost revenue is $20 million a week, upward of $1 billion a year – a bad hit to the bottom line of New York’s budget. The taxpayers are left footing the bill.

And terrorists notice when the authorities turn a blind eye. In a 2003 case, federal prosecutors in Detroit reported a ring smuggling tax-free cigarettes from a Seneca Indians’ Cattaraugus reservation to Michigan – an operation that shipped hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hezbollah.

This should undoubtedly be a grave concern to New Yorkers, but where is Gov. Spitzer on this issue? In January, then newly elected, Spitzer expressed support in moving forward with collections, yet nothing has been done. Spitzer’s failure to address this issue is perpetuating terrorists’ ability to exploit the state’s illogical policy.

It’s high time we take a serious approach toward ending this extremely lucrative revenue stream that aids terrorists in funding attacks on us.

The solution is simple.

Both federal and state laws are already in place, and the courts have reaffirmed their constitutionality. What we need now is a governor with the guts to enforce them. The result of not enforcing the law has transcended the issue of Native American sovereignty into an issue of national security.

State Sen. Martin J. Golden (R, C-Brooklyn) sits on the Senate’s Crime & Corrections and Homeland Security Committees.