yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

A Suspiciously Expensive Delivery | To Catch a Smuggler: South Pacific | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Auckland International Airport processes 21 million passengers every year and climbing. Customs and Immigration have just been alerted to a visiting Lithuanian woman with quite a history. Officer James is keen to take on the case. It looks like she had some trouble in the US on en route to New Zealand.

She's coming out of the UK, so I'm going to have a talk with her and see what interactions she had with the US authorities en route to New Zealand. I need to ask you your reasons for coming to New Zealand as well as what happened over in the USA. The woman tries to front foot her situation by producing correspondence with New Zealand authorities to avoid delay.

You see that you needed to have a visa for New Zealand and you have a very important family event here in New Zealand. Indeed, actually, I'm visiting my boyfriend who actually lives in New Zealand. Oh, great. But I just want to make sure that I can call you from an immigration perspective. Lithuanian nationals can travel to New Zealand as visitors without a visa. But James wants to know that she's not here to disappear.

"Can I ask how long you were living in the USA?"

"For like 17, 18 years."

"Seventeen years? Eighteen years? And what Visa did you hold? What Visa were you holding?"

"Um, I was, the Visa um, I was issued the Visa over 20 years ago I don’t exactly remember a truly specific Visa that was issued."

James knows she's lying. His American counterparts have already told him she's never had a U.S. visa.

"What about the USA? What about the USA? Yeah, what happened in the USA?"

At Auckland’s Air Cargo facility, Customs officer Hayden believes this parcel is worth checking out.

"So we've identified a consignment here that we believe is suspicious. It's come from West Africa, the country of Mali. It's been declared as motor parts worth 300,000 NZD, which is quite high considering the size of the consignment. There doesn't seem to be any padding or protection for it. It’s hard to imagine what car parts could be worth $300,000, let alone why the exporters were keen to get them here so quickly. They agreed to pay 60 grand in customs charges for the privilege. The items that are inside are very poorly packaged. You'd expect there to be some packaging material or some sort of order to the way that they package, but it just doesn't. It looks like they've just been thrown in there together, and for something worth so much.

Yeah, the alarm bells are definitely ringing here. There’s some organic material here of some kind, um, that doesn’t fit the description of motor vehicle parts; we just wouldn’t expect to find organic material in there. The Republic of Mali seems to feature highly optimistic car park dealers. The parts are worth a fraction of even the shipping cost. This is the sort of product you could pick up at your local parts store in New Zealand for a small amount of money. It's just not consistent with the valuation.

I'm not a mechanic, but I would expect this area here to be free moving. It looks like a bearing of some kind, but it's rock solid. So again, alarm bells are definitely ringing here. Hayden's no mechanic, but he knows how to swing a hammer. That's broken the metal straight off. So, again, not something you'd expect from a part so expensive.

While Hayden had his bearings right, the manufacturers didn’t.

"Hello, what do we have here?"

More Articles

View All
Ask me anything with Sal Khan: April 10 | Homeroom with Sal
Hello everyone! Welcome to Khan Academy’s daily homeroom. For those of you all who aren’t familiar with what this is, ever since we had the mass school closures because of the COVID-19, all of us at Khan Academy, which is a not-for-profit with a mission o…
Impedance vs frequency
In this video, we’re going to continue talking about AC analysis and the concept of impedance as the ratio of voltage to current in an AC situation. Just as a reminder of the assumptions we’ve made for AC analysis, we’ve assumed that all of our signals ar…
The First Amendment | The National Constitution Center | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy, and today I’m learning more about the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The First Amendment is one of the most important amendments to the Constitution, if not the most important. It reads, “Congress shall make no …
Assignment: Uplifted | National Geographic
National Geographic and Mazda started Assignment Inspiration, three quests to challenge photographers to test their ability to tell a compelling visual story and to capture inspiring imagery. Beth, Nina, Sam, congratulations to each of you. Truly a once-…
The kg is dead, long live the kg
On November 16th, representatives from nearly 60 nations will be meeting in Versailles, France, to vote to change the definition of a kilogram. Not only that, they will also be changing the fundamental unit of temperature, the kelvin, the unit for amount …
Arizona: Meet Khan Academy & Khanmigo
Hi everyone! Welcome to our webinar to discuss the good news. We officially have a partnership with Con Migo for this school year to fund Con Migo for students, um, and it’s broadly across the State of Arizona. So if you are a member of a public school di…