5 Real Drug-Smuggling Schemes (That Went Hilariously Wrong)

When you're getting involved in illicit activity, you need airtight plans. Usually, those plans involve staying away from high-security areas, but one bold team of Los Angeles International Airport TSA screeners knew a golden opportunity when they saw one, and decided to start a trafficking ring. They would accept generous payments from smugglers to allow their drug mules to pass through airport security carrying pounds of product. After all, LAX is a trash palace in a garbage kingdom -- who's going to notice a bunch of people walking around with a shitload of drugs?

US Attorney's Office
Oh, right. Them.

One such mule was a guy named Duane Eleby, and he managed to ruin the whole thing for everyone in less time than it takes to buy a macchiato from the Starbucks in LAX. Eleby was carrying ten pounds of cocaine -- the equivalent of a large baby -- hidden in his luggage, and was supposed to meet one of his TSA hookups, Joy White, at Terminal 6. According to the plan, she would allow him through terminal security before spiriting him away through a secret tunnel leading to Terminal 5, where Eleby's plane would be set to depart. This is a seemingly idiot-proof set of instructions, but Duane Eleby proved to be somehow worse than an idiot and went directly to his departure terminal.

Granted, Eleby did what any normal human being would do and went to the terminal that was listed on his ticket, but it's as if he suddenly forgot he was smuggling a mountain of cocaine through an international airport and was really looking forward to his trip. Eleby was met by an actual, non-crooked TSA screener, who presumably reacted with a rich cocktail of professional alarm and hilarious disbelief when they saw that Eleby was casually holding all of the drugs in the universe in his luggage. Predictably, Eleby and his stash were reported to the authorities, who arrested the shit out of him.

Tim Bray / Wiki Commons
Duane Eleby is like all of us -- desperate to get the fuck out of the airport, no matter the consequences.

Recognizing that Eleby was badly exploiting a legitimate problem, federal agents staked out the airport and started watching the TSA screeners for a while. Over the course of six months, this intrepid Mile "High" Club helped smuggle cocaine and amphetamines through airport security five different times, ultimately leading to the arrest of seven people. All because one doofus went to the wrong gate.

Speaking of airport security ...

The problem was that, in most cases, the "surgery" fell somewhere between "disfigurement" and "ritual mutilation." Airport security in Madrid busted one woman after noticing that she had "certain irregularities and deformations in both breasts," which is another way of saying she had four freaking pounds of coke stuffed inside them. Officials were tipped off by her fellow passengers, who were complaining about her erratic behavior, a noted symptom of having four freaking pounds of coke inside your chest. Another woman strolled off a plane in Barcelona with her implants still bleeding, which, being not terribly inconspicuous, made border patrol officers suspicious (they could also kind of see the cocaine in patches through her skin).

Spanish National Police (NSFW)
This looks like a water balloon fight at Ed Gein's house.

In both cases, the smugglers were rushed to the hospital, where their implants were removed by a gently concerned doctor and handed over to the least enthusiastic evidence tagger in history.

Smuggling contraband on the ground is a little more straightforward (yet no less tricky) than via air travel. For example, people looking to sneak drugs and/or humans across the U.S./Mexico border are often able to go completely around border patrol agents either by using one of the more than 150 underground tunnels or by building crazy Inspector Gadget Drugmobiles that can drive right over the goddamned fence with built-in ramps. Of course, sometimes you don't have a map of the underground tunnels, or the money to afford an expensive ramp-laying car, so you do your best to build a makeshift bridge to carry you over the fence and wind up getting stuck on top of the freaking thing like a shipwrecked tugboat.

US Customs and Border Protection
"Dude, turn off the stereo. Maybe they won't notice."

Border patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona couldn't help but notice the Jeep as they made their rounds early one morning, and the two yahoos struggling to free it from its prison quickly ran back into Mexico before they could be detained to answer some seriously burning questions about their evening.

US Customs and Border Protection
The Dickheads Of Hazzard.

The two had used couple of half-assed metal ramps that couldn't properly support the weight of their Jeep Cherokee enough to get the back end over, resulting in them getting stuck embarrassingly in the air like a turd on a flagpole. They managed to unpack the car before being discovered, so we will never know the exact nature of their spectacular misadventure, but at least we have the photographs to pass on to future generations.

The bag held 35 pounds of cocaine, which was stuffed inside hollowed-out notebooks and then inexplicably dropped off at DHL without any instructions. According to a UN spokesperson, their best guess is that someone figured they could get the cocaine across the Mexican border by disguising it as official UN mail, but they either didn't properly execute Phase II of that plan or simply forgot to conceive of one. And the NYPD figures that DHL sort of sent the bag along without questioning its mysterious appearance or checking its contents to let the UN figure out who was supposed to get it. This is how anthrax gets mailed to public officials.

This isn't the first time poorly planned shipping resulted in mass quantities of illegal substances ending up at inappropriate places. One German supermarket chain keeps finding cocaine hidden in crates of bananas. The two incidents together resulted in the largest amount of illegal drugs ever seized in Berlin, although why the hell they were sent to over a dozen grocery stores is a mystery that has yet to be solved. The probable explanation is that they were meant to be intercepted somewhere in transit, and were either overlooked or sent along to Germany by oblivious dockworkers who had no idea they'd technically become international criminals. And recently, a whole batch of condoms inflated with liquid cocaine were sent to the goddamn Vatican. The packages were addressed to the Vatican post office, but for obvious reasons, no name was written anywhere on them. Police seized the condoms at the airport and then sent an undercover cop to the post office to try to catch whoever came to pick them up (because surely this was meant to be intercepted by a third party, and wasn't Amazon fulfilling one of the Pope's Wish List orders), but nobody ever showed.

German Finance Ministry
Good luck convincing the Pope to lift the condom ban after this debacle.

Also check out The 6 Most Insanely Reckless Smuggling Tactics and 6 Stories That Prove U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents Are Insane.

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Last Halloween, the Cracked Podcast creeped you out with tales of ghost ships, mysteriously dead people, and a man from one of the most famous paintings in U.S. history who years later went all Jack Nicholson in The Shining on his family. This October, Jack and the Cracked staff are back with special guest comedians Ryan Singer, Eric Lampaert, and Anna Seregina to share more unsettling and unexplained true tales of death, disappearance, and the great beyond. Get your tickets for this LIVE podcast here!