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
15 Ways Rich People AVOID Paying Taxes
Hello Aluxers and welcome back to what might be one of the most important Sunday Motivational Videos you’ve ever watched, because by the end of this piece, you’ll understand how to keep more of your money than ever before. If you search for this kind of …
Nonstandard free energy changes | Applications of thermodynamics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
[Instructor] Understanding the concept of nonstandard free energy changes is really important when it comes to a chemical reaction. For this generic chemical reaction, the reactants turn into the products. And nonstandard free energy change is symbolized …
Marcus Aurelius - Overcome Your Inner Coward
During his reign as the emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius faced immense uncertainties that would strike fear into the hearts of most people, such as times of war, plague, internal conspiracies, the death of some of his children, and the death of his wife, …
How to make TAX FREE MONEY in Real Estate
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So one of the questions I get asked a lot is how to make tax-free money in real estate. Now, because this is a subject that so many people get confused on, I wanted to make a video breaking it down exactly how to do i…
Epic Slow-Mo Drum Implosions!
[Music] So a while back, I did an imploding drum experiment. But at the time, I didn’t have a very good high-speed camera, and so I used something called optical flow to interpolate between the frames. It basically just tries to add in what must have happ…
The Problem With Romanticizing Mental Illness
If you’re watching this right now, chances are you spent many years of your life feeling misunderstood. Maybe you coped by spending hours online or listening to pop punk alone in your bedroom. You might have wished to run away or for a simple answer that …