The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per kilo. In the next stage they transported an average of 400 kilos to south Florida (incurring some additional expenses in hush money for local airport authorities) where mid-level dealers paid a wholesale price of $60,000 per kilo; thus in 1978 each 400-kilo load earned Escobar $8 million and Lehder, Ochoa, and Jung $5 million each in profits. Of course the mid-level dealers did just fine: after cutting the drug with baking soda each shipment retailed on the street for $210 million, almost ten times what they paid for it.

Soon Lehder was hiring American pilots to fly a steady stream of cocaine into the U.S., paying them $400,000 per trip. At one trip per week, in 1978 this translated into wholesale revenues of $1.3 billion and profits of $1 billion.

The profits and risks soared after that. The Jung in the quote is American George Jung, whose story was told in the 2001 film Blow. Read the rest of Escobar’s astonishing biography at mental_floss. Link

It’s time to unlock your body’s full potential.

1. Friends in High Places

In 2003, a 28-year-old Swedish man named Johan Adolfsson took a nine-hour flight from Thailand to Australia with eight extremely lethal snakes -four king cobras and four emerald tree boas- strapped to his inner thighs. His plan to cash in on the $3,500 booty for black market serpents was dashed when Australian officers captured him as he passed through customs at Sydney airport. Sadly, it too late for some of the snakes; all four king cobras died midflight.

2. Live by the Seat of Your Pants

The business of trafficking exotic animals is a multibillion dollar industry -and it’s more than just shoving reptiles into pairs of Dockers. In 2010, agents at Mexico City International Airport noticed a bulge moving under a nervous passenger’s t-shirt: Roberta Cabrera, 38, had 16 rare, 6-inch titi monkeys in pouches fastened to his chest with a special girdle. Two were dead. In separate incidents, airline passengers have also been caught with two pigeons, six lobsters, 14 songbirds, and 44 lizards crammed into their slacks.

3. Skirt the Issue

Mammals aren’t the only creatures customs officials have to watch for. In 2005, a 45-year-old woman was detained by customs in Melbourne International Airport after she’d arrived from Singapore. “During the search, officers became suspicious after hearing ‘flipping’ noises coming from the vicinity of her waist,” the Australian Customs Service later told the press. They found she had 51 exotic fish -all alive, hallelujah!- swimming in water-filled baggies hidden inside specially made pockets, which were concealed under her skirt.

4. Love Your Curves

In November 2010, two women were caught leaving a T.J. Maxx in Oklahoma with four pairs of boots, three pairs of jeans, a wallet, and one pair of gloves hidden in rolls of fat around their boons and bellies. All told, they’d squeezed $2,600 worth of loot under their excess body fat. The police officer on the scene later struggled to explain the situation to reporters from a local television crew: “These two were actually concealing them in areas of their body where excess skin was, underneath their, um, and their armpits, and things of that nature.”

5. The Cast System

People have been hiding objects inside of fake casts for centuries. In March 2009, a 66-year-old Chilean man one-upped his predecessors by wearing a real, functional cast that was entirely made of pure cocaine. A little more than two pounds of pressed blow, to be precise. What’s more, the cast was covering an actual injury; the Chilean had broken his own shinbone in a failed attempt to make his ruse seem believable. After the police in Barcelona caught him entering Spain, they rushed him to the hospital to treat his broken leg.

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The article above, written by Haley Sweetland Edwards, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

The smugglers were moving stolen electronics from Paraguay to Brazil. They had a plane. Whatcha going to do, officer? They can fly and you can’t.

Well, this Brazilian cop was determined to stop them.

-via Jalopnik

The Public Safety Department said in a statement Monday that 38-year-old Roberto Cabrera arrived on a commercial flight Friday from Lima, Peru, when authorities noticed the bulge and conducted a body search.

The department says Cabrera was carrying the 6-inch titi monkeys in pouches attached to the girdle.

Two of the monkeys were dead.

Cabrera was arrested on charges of trafficking an endangered species.

Cabrera told authorities he was carrying the monkeys in a suitcase but decided to put them in his girdle “so the X-rays wouldn’t hurt them.”

Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Lea Maimone)

See also: 10 Weird Items People Tried to Smuggle

The World Cup fever is everywhere, and everyone wants a piece of the buzz, including Colombian drug lords:

Fans worldwide have fashioned replicas of the World Cup trophy out of everything from papier-mache to plastic. But a lawbreaker in Colombia gets top prize for most original material: cocaine.

Airports anti-drug chief Col. Jose Piedrahita says that Colombian authorities found the unusual statue during a routine security check by anti-drug agents Friday in a mail warehouse at Bogota’s international airport.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Weird Items People Tried to Smuggle

1. Turtles and Snakes

(Image credit: Antara/Ismar Patrizki)

Officials at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, Indonesia saw shipping containers labeled “fresh fruit” bound for Hong Kong this past February. What they found inside were two tons of live reptiles! They seized 25 bags of Chinese rat snakes and 3,492 pig-nosed turtles. Export of these species from Indonesia is not illegal, but is regulated and the exporter apparently wanted to bypass quarantine laws. The snakes and turtles would most likely have been used to make soup and sex-enhancing drugs at their destination, according to officials.

2. Chihuahua

A man traveling from Bulgaria arrived at the Dublin airport after changing planes in Madrid. He looked nervous, so inspectors in Ireland selected him for a spot check. When they x-rayed his hand luggage, the image of a dog showed up. Screeners thought it must be a toy or statue, as the dog was standing up. But when they opened the bag, they found a live chihuahua! The dog had been in a small cage inside the bag throughout the trip. The traveler had planned to give the chihuahua to a friend in Ireland as a gift, but intended to bypass quarantine laws. The dog was seized and placed in quarantine.

3. Fish

The Asian arowana, commonly called the dragon fish, is considered lucky in many Asian cultures. However, the species is on the endangered list and is illegal to sell or import. Some people will pay a thousand dollars for a small specimen, or up to $20,000 for a large adult, which can grow up to two feet long. A 2005 sting operation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service led to the arrest of Andree Gunawan on charges of smuggling and selling endangered wildlife from Indonesia. Gunawan and six other people were also recently indicted in connection with the case.

4. Songbirds

In April of last year, a man named Sony Dong was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for bringing in live songbirds from Vietnam. Dong had been under investigation for a year after airport official found an abandoned bag containing 18 birds, five of which had died. This time, customs official were waiting for him to arrive on a flight from Vietnam. Observing that Dong had bird droppings on his shoes, they found he had swaddled 14 Vietnamese songbirds in cloth and attached them to his lower legs under his pants. All the birds survived the trip. Dong pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months and ordered to pay $4,000 for the care of the birds.

5. Monkeys

An unnamed man traveling from Lima, Peru to New York City was questioned about the marmoset he had with him. Passengers on his final flight from Florida to New York noticed a monkey had crawled out from under the man’s hat! Officials questioned the man on arrival and seized the monkey. It is not known how the marmoset had escaped detection at the airports in Peru and Florida. In another case, 28-year-old Gypsy Lawson was caught smuggling a rhesus macaque monkey from Thailand into the United States in 2007 by hiding the sedated monkey in her dress and pretending she was pregnant! Lawson and her mother, Fran Ogren, were convicted of violating the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws.

6. Butterflies

(Image credit: Kevork Djansezian)

Smuggled live animals bring lots of money, but even dead species can be profitable if they are endangered and illegal to transport. For many years, Hisayoshi Kojima was king of the smuggled insect business, in which he shipped both live and dead insects both in and out of the US. Unscrupulous butterfly collectors would spend thousands of dollars for a specimen of the rare Queen Alexandra’s birdwing from Papua New Guinea, which can have a wingspan of up to a foot. It is illegal to catch, kill, or import them. But Kojima found a way. It was a deal on the Queen Alexandra butterfly that ended a two-year undercover investigation into Kojima’s illegal insect trade in 2006. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison and fined $38,731.

7. An Entire Zoo

In animal smuggling, the case of Robert Cusack stands head and shoulder above the rest. In 2002, Cusack was arrested as he landed in Los Angeles after a flight from Thailand. Customs Agents were suspicious after a bird of paradise flew out of his luggage. Three more birds were found in the suitcase. They asked Cusack if he had anything else to declare.

“I have monkeys in my pants,” Cusack told the agents.

Cusack was found to have two pygmy slow lorises in his underwear. A further search found 50 rare orchids in his luggage. Cusack’s companion on the flight, Chris Edward Mulloy, was later charged with smuggling two Asian leopard cat cubs in his luggage -four years later, for some reason. Cusack told authorities that the animals had originated in Indonesia, and he was taking them to a wildlife refuge in Costa Rica. Cusack later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 57 days in jail.

8. Fake Holy Water

Warren Maynard was arrested in 2008 as he crossed the US-Candian border in Lewiston, New York near Niagara Falls with a hundred bottles of a clear liquid found by drug-sniffing dogs. The 50-year-old man declared to customs officials that the bottles contained holy water, which he had bought in Canada along with other religious items. However, tests on the liquid found the animal tranquilizer ketamine, a hallucinogenic drug often used in date rape, in 42 of the bottles. Other bottles tested positive for “general narcotics”. Maynard, who lived in Brooklyn at the time, was a citizen of Barbados with permanent residency status in the United States. He was turned over to immigration officials after his arrest.

9. Bushmeat

A report published this month says that the global trade in illegal bushmeat, or meat from exotic wildlife, is stronger than ever. An estimated five tons of it passes through the main Paris airport every week. In June of 2008, researchers observed while travelers were searched after 29 different flights from Africa. Of 134 people searched, 83 were found with livestock or fish, and nine were found carrying bushmeat.

The people with bushmeat had the largest amounts: One passenger had 112 pounds (51 kilos) of bushmeat — and no other luggage. Most of the bushmeat was smoked and arrived as dried carcasses. Some animals were identifiable, though scientists boiled the remains of others and reassembled the skeletons to determine the species.

Experts found 11 types of bushmeat including monkeys, large rats, crocodiles, small antelopes and pangolins, or anteaters. Almost 40 percent were listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

The exotic species can be found on menus in Paris restaurants, if you know where to look and who to ask. Scientists warn that illegally imported meat may be spoiled or can spread disease.

10. Human Corpse

Gitta Jarant and her daughter Anke Anusic were taken into custody in April of this year after they tried to take the deceased body of Jarant’s husband, 91-year-old Kurt Willi Jarant on a plane to Berlin. They brought the elderly man to the John Lennon Airport in Liverpool in a wheelchair. The women denied that he was dead and said he was just sleeping, although a post-mortem found he had been dead for around twelve hours. The women are suspected of trying to bypass laws governing the shipping of human bodies in order to take the man back to his home in Germany. Jarant and Anusic are free while awaiting trial for failure to report a death.

For strange historical smuggling stories, see: Sneaking Into Auschwitz, Mysterious Chinese Tunnels of the Pacific Northwest, and Escape Maps Hidden In Monopoly Pieces.

Would you have guessed that it’s a cleverly disguised bin used to smuggle marijuana across the border?

The Los Angeles Times has a gallery of some of the most unusual border busts ever, including pictures of people stuffed into engine compartments …

… secret hidey-hole under the car floor …

… and then there’s this beauty:

Yes, folks – that’s a man sewn into the upholstery of a van seat!

More at the Los Angeles Times: Link

(Photos: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

That was the problem facing a gardener who was driving his pick-up truck and tools across the border from Tijuana.   In this case customs agents made the diagnosis.

Link.  Photo: Splash News.

“Lifting up the feathers of the bird, in the chest area, police detected a handmade seam,” he said.

A vet extracted 11 oval-shaped plastic capsules containing 1.9 kilograms (4.2 pounds) of cocaine from one turkey.

A further 17 capsules with 2.9 kilograms (6.4 pounds) were recovered from the other, he said.

The turkeys survived the surgery to remove the cocaine and are recovering. Link -via Arbroath

An obese inmate in Texas has been charged after officials learned he had a gun hidden under flabs of his own flesh. [...] The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin. Vera admitted having the gun during a shower break at the county jail.

Link (Image: Houston Police Department)

Prison inmates are an innovative bunch (case in point: pruno), so it should be of no big surprise that they’ve found ways to smuggle contrabands into prison. But this method is surely unique: inmates at a prison farm in Brazil have been using pigeons to smuggle in cell phones!

Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the southeastern city of Sorocaba noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a small cloth bag tied to one of its legs last week. "The guards nabbed the bird after luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cell phone inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said Tuesday.

One day later, another pigeon was spotted dragging a similar bag inside the prison’s exercise yard. Inside the bag was the cell phone’s charger, Soramiglio said.

Link – via Discoblog

However, staff could not find any trace of either the helicopter or the package which it appeared to be carrying underneath it when they searched the Category C jail.

‘Using a mini-helicopter to get contraband into jails is unprecedented. When officers spotted it they nearly fell off their chairs’, a prison source told the Sun.

‘It could have been drugs or a mobile phone in the package. It is possible it was a dummy run.’

Maybe the helicopter flew out as well. Link -via Unique Daily