In the drawers and cabinets of furniture being shipped from Puerto Rico to the Northeast, officials discovered something obviously out of place: 709 pounds of cocaine. According to Philly.com, U.S. Customs and Border Protection detected the largest seizure in the area in 10 years.
Hurricane Irma, which hit the island in September, sparked a rise in the number of shipments between the mainland and Puerto Rico. In the wake of this devastating natural disaster, officials said they have been keeping an eye on anyone who might want to take advantage of the situation.
“Customs and Border Protection knows that transnational drug trafficking organizations will take advantage of natural disasters, and in this case an island struggling to recover from a crippling hurricane, to smuggle dangerous drugs to our nation’s mainland,” Joseph Martella, the acting director of the Port of Philadelphia, told Philly.com. “Officers remain ever-vigilant to interdict narcotics loads, and we are pleased to have stopped this deadly poison shipment before it could hurt our communities.”
Over 700 pounds seems like a ridiculous amount of coke to try and hide behind some cabinets. The load of the illicit drug had a street value of $22 million. Imaging equipment officials used to scan the furniture revealed a “suspicious brick pattern,” which led them to investigate. Indeed, 256 bricks of white powder tested positive as la cocaina. “This seizure is an excellent example of how Customs and Border Protection officers leverage imaging technology to detect and intercept an immense amount of cocaine cleverly concealed in a shipment of furniture,” said Casey Owen Durst, Customs field operations director in Baltimore and the agency’s commander in the mid-Atlantic region.
709 pounds of cocaine is nothing in comparison to the total 7,910 pounds of illicit drugs Customs seizes on average every day. Still, that's a shit ton of coke.
