Cocaine Shipment at JFK Airport | To Catch a Smuggler

[music playing] We're headed to a warehouse. This one has a lot of European shipments, South American shipments, a lot of source countries for us for narcotics. So we're gonna see what we can find over here.

[music playing]

Albert, take a look at this. Ecuador. What is that? I don't know. Let's find out. It's, like, blankets. Ecuador is a big transit point now for dope coming out from South America. Heroin, cocaine, we used to get stuff in the embroidery of this, inside the lining. A lot of times, what they try to do is nickel and dime. So they'll put little baggies of coke inside of little handicrafts. You always got to check. You gotta cut it open. This one is what it is.

OFFICER RAMIREZ: All right, I've seen enough.

Yeah.

[music playing]

Coming from Mexico.

Yeah. It's all food and breads.

OFFICER TWAROWSKI: In here, you got peanuts. Tamales. Looks like a lot of shipments coming from Mexico. Mexico, a big source country. Cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, every--

Meth.

--you know, meth, everything. So what they like to do is they like to conceal it inside the food a lot of times. They think it's going to fool the x-rays. Or they think it's going to fool us, you know. We're not going to take a look at it. But we take a look at everything. You know, we have to. Those are Chilean apples. Those are bigger. So it's a different fruit.

OFFICER RAMIREZ: Nothing. Not as sticky.

ASSISTANT PORT DIRECTOR GALANTINO: It's funny that those were a different color.

[music playing]

There's another one. Now, we're separating the actual contraband itself from the fruit. I wish they'd chosen something that was less syrupy. They think we're not going to get our hands dirty. So what do you got there?

OFFICER TWAROWSKI: Five, seven.

ASSISTANT PORT DIRECTOR GALANTINO: This one has-- yep, seven. What we do now, we're going to use our Gemini machine to just confirm.

[music playing]

There you go. It's cocaine hydrochloride.

OFFICER RAMIREZ: Get a weight on this.

OFFICER TWAROWSKI: All right.

[music playing]

0.391 kilograms.

ASSISTANT PORT DIRECTOR GALANTINO: I mean, they were not greedy, not greedy at all.

OFFICER RAMIREZ: Not at all. And we have to dig through all this food to get a small load. And this, we've been seeing more and more, the smaller amounts. I think they're testing out different concealments and seeing what they can get through. They don't want to lose a big shipment.

Now, we're going to notify HSI. And they're ultimately going to take possession of the narcotics themselves. And they may do a controlled delivery to find out who this was going to.

OFFICER TWAROWSKI: Right. And then perhaps develop a case from this. At the end of the day, it's about disbanding these drug trafficking organizations. This shipment here, this is just one of those 300 or 400 that come in multiple times a day.

See what else they got.