Opinion
October 11, 1988
Appeal from the Supreme Court, Queens County (Zelman, J.).
Ordered that the judgment is affirmed.
A quantity of cocaine was seized as the result of a United States Customs Patrol Officer's pat-down search of the defendant in a private room in the Customs area of the airport. A Customs officer who performs a thorough pat-down search as part of her border-patrolling activities, as here, must have some articulable suspicion to justify the intrusion, but the amount of suspicion required at that stage is minimal (see, People v Materon, 107 A.D.2d 408, 413). The defendant was traveling from South America by herself, and as such, "was a prime candidate for smuggling activities" (People v Materon, supra, at 415; see, e.g., United States v Rieves, 584 F.2d 740). She had just disembarked from an international flight originating in a drug-source area and appeared overly nervous to the well-trained eye of the 10-year veteran Customs officer. This conduct furnished the Customs officer with an articulable suspicion, which justified the minimally intrusive pat-down search leading to the drug discovery (see, People v Luna, 136 A.D.2d 571).
The issue regarding the sufficiency of the defendant's plea allocution has not been preserved for appellate review as she neither moved to withdraw her plea of guilty to the reduced charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the second degree under CPL 220.60 (3), nor moved to vacate the judgment of conviction under CPL 440.10 (see, People v Lopez, 71 N.Y.2d 662; People v Pellegrino, 60 N.Y.2d 636). Furthermore, by accepting a bargained-for plea to a lesser crime than that charged in the indictment, the defendant forfeited the right to challenge the factual basis for the plea (see, People v Pelchat, 62 N.Y.2d 97, 108; People v Caban, 131 A.D.2d 863). In any event, a review of the record, including the defendant's version of the crime as recorded in the presentence report, discloses that the defendant's plea of guilty was neither improvident nor baseless, and it was knowingly and voluntarily entered with the assistance of counsel (see, People v Harris, 61 N.Y.2d 9, 16-17; People v Caban, supra).
We have reviewed the defendant's other contentions and find them to be without merit. Mollen, P.J., Brown, Rubin and Kooper, JJ., concur.