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

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?"