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Airport Smuggling: The Weird and Wacky
January 25, 2010 - myfoxdc.com
Drugs aren't the only things people try to smuggle through airports.
Inside customs at Dulles International Airport, officers seize
everything from illegal narcotics to the wacky and weird. They come
from the thousands of people that arrive each day from around the world.
Agents with Customs and Border Protection quiz passengers when they
come in. "Do you have any fresh fruits or meats in luggage?" is a
standard question. Some people fess up. Some forget they've still got a
piece of fruit from the flight. Some deny it until officers open up
their luggage and find meats and fruits most people have never seen.
"I have seen a lot of interesting things, that would be an
understatement," said Officer Jennifer Jones.
The contraband food and agriculture Officer Jones and her beagle Hudson
sniff out may be the most bizarre.
"We get a lot of the bush meat from Africa. Very often sometimes it's
very hard to tell what the meat was at one point," said Jones.
One officer found a full body smoked monkey. Its face and teeth were
still clearly visible. Another officer discovered in someone's luggage
two full length uncooked cow legs. Many of the meats are considered
delicacies in other countries.
Often officers say people want to bring something from their homeland
for friends or relatives.
"From South America they like to bring a roasted hamster called quwi,"
said Jones. "It still has the face and the teeth and the claws."
Suspect bags get searched and x-rayed. Once inspectors found a roasted
chicken, but that wasn't grandma's stuffing inside.
"It looked too full. The x-ray looked solid and they decided, let's
take a look at this. It didn't just look right and upon looking at the
chicken the contents happen to be cocaine inside," said Officer
Christopher Downing, a Customs Supervisor. In more than 20 years, he's
seen just about everything.
At BWI Marshall Airport, someone packed a bra. There's nothing unusual
about that, except the extra padding: two and a half pounds of cocaine.
"There's always more creative ways that people can sneaks stuff in,"
said Officer Ehtesham Khan. He's been on the job for about a year but
has seen his share of oddities.
Customs officers say often, drug smugglers have people on the inside at
factories who package drugs inside everyday items. In one case,
officers seized six boxes of powdered soup mix. They looked like they
came straight from the factory. It was powder all right, powdered
cocaine-- not soup.
Officers say these days there is no "profile" for someone smuggling in
drugs. They can be from anywhere and any age. In one case, a
70-year-old woman hid her stash in the pages of a magazine, proving
marijuana has no age limit.
When it comes to food and agriculture, 99 percent of the time officers
say it's an honest mistake, but if it's not you can be fined. If you're
carrying drugs, there could be jail time. Officers say finding the
contraband is part luck, part training and intuition.
"Something just doesn't seem right. The more you investigate the
funnier the story gets and you realize you have something," said
Downing.
Sometimes officers don't have to look hard to find something coming
into the country that shouldn't. Officer Downing recalled the time a
man arrived from South America with a deadly scorpion.
"I happened to look at the top of his hat and I asked what kind of
emblem is that on your hat. He said I don't have an emblem. We put the
hat down on the counter and low and behold he probably took an 8 to 10
hour trip with a scorpion on the brim of his hat the whole time and
didn't even realize it," Downing said.
One wrong move and the scorpion could have killed the man.
Banned food and agriculture gets inspected for invasive insects or
disease then destroyed. It's serious business. Entire crops or herds
can be wiped out. Yet people keep trying, like the person Officer Khan
found who packed a dead fruit bat.
"I was surprised, shocked. How could you bring a fruit bat in? What
would you do with it?" he wondered. Khan doesn't remember the
passenger's excuse, but the bat got taken.
It's easy to understand why some people would try to smuggle drugs or
bring back strange foods from their homeland, but sometimes there
doesn't seem to be a rationale explanation. Someone once wrapped a tree
in foil, with plastic leaves and flowers to make it look fake. Officers
weren't fooled.
It goes to show some people will go to extraordinary measures for the
strangest things.
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