Honduras finds 2.5 tonnes cocaine in submarine

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Naval forces from the US and Honduras have recovered 2.5 tonnes of cocaine from a semi-submersible craft intercepted off the Honduran coast.

BBC News - Honduras finds 2.5 tonnes cocaine in submarine

 

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Fishermen haul in cartel drugs floating in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida...

Destin fishermen find $2.5M in cartel drugs floating in Gulf
June 13, 2013 | Some fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico off Destin, Fla., reeled in a major haul Wednesday - 25 kilograms of cocaine with a street value of $2.5 million, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office.

The five fishermen spotted a bale floating in the water about 2.5 miles south of East Pass and pulled it onto their boat, the sheriff's office reported. When they saw the package contained individually wrapped "bricks," they called the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Destin. After interviewing the fishermen, the Coast Guard turned the package over to the sheriff's office, said sheriff's spokeswoman Michele Nicholson.

The Okaloosa County Multi-Agency Drug Task Force determined that the 55-pound bale had a street value of $2.5 million. Investigators are trying to determine where the package originated. At least one of the bricks is marked with "OO," indicating that it may have come from Venezuela, Nicholson said. The cocaine likely belonged to a cartel, officials said. Located on Florida's Emerald Coast, Destin is about 150 miles southwest of Tallahassee.

Last Christmas Eve, the Coast Guard seized 85 pounds of cocaine from a ship off the Galveston coast. The crew of the 900-foot oil tanker Godavari Spirit notified Coast Guard Sector Houston-Galveston that they located a suspicious package hidden aboard their ship and suspected it to contain narcotics. A thorough search by the team uncovered 31 packages of cocaine with an estimated street value of $1.1 million, the Coast Guard reported.

Destin fishermen find $2.5M in cartel drugs floating in Gulf - Houston Chronicle

 

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Armed Coast Guard helicopter busts cocaine runners...

4 held in Caribbean coke bust carried out by armed Coast Guard helicopter
July 21, 2013 — The U.S. Coast Guard unloaded 2,300 pounds of cocaine seized this week in the central Caribbean, displaying the bales of drugs valued at $35 million during a press conference in Miami Beach, Fla., on Saturday.

Four people were arrested in the operation, in which a Coast Guard helicopter fired shots to disable the engine of a drug-smuggling fast boat. The four defendants are now in the custody of federal authorities in Tampa, Fla. Lt. Comm. Gabe Somma, a Coast Guard spokesman, said the seizure was part of Operation Unified Resolve, which started in October of last year and focuses attention on drug smuggling in the Caribbean, especially around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. “That’s where we’ve been seeing an increase in trafficking and in drug-related homicides,” Somma said.

The operation started shortly before midnight July 14, when the Coast Guard said it spotted a go-fast boat speeding away from land and carrying what appeared to be bales of narcotics, said Lt. Paul Stetler, commanding officer of a Coast Guard cutter involved in the seizure. Two Coast Guard cutters responded, one of which was equipped with an armed helicopter, which flew over the smuggling boat. “Once they announced their presence, the go-fast began to flee,” Stetler said. The people on the boat also started throwing the drug packages off the side of the boat into the ocean, officials said. “The helicopter then used disabling fire to shoot out the engines of the go-fast,” Stetler said.

Crew members from the Coast Guard Cutter Robert J. Yered offload and guard 2,300 pounds of cocaine at Coast Guard Base Miami Beach, Fla., on July 20, 2013. The seized cocaine, worth an estimated $35 million, was found aboard a go-fast vessel in the Caribbean Sea

Coast Guard helicopters typically use a 50-caliber rifle to disable the engines of fleeing boats, said Lt. Mario Gil of the Coast Guard’s Seventh district in Miami. “A lot of the time it doesn’t take that much — they’ll just stop because we’re there,” Gil said. “But if they don’t, this is a capability that we have, and we use it frequently.” After the go-fast boat was disabled, Stetler’s ship, the Coast Guard cutter Robert Yered, spent 10 hours scouring the water for the discarded drugs. They eventually discovered 42 bales of cocaine, Stetler said. According to Gil, that amount is the average load that can typically be transported by small go-fast boats.

Operation Unified Resolve, a multi-agency drug interdiction strategy launched by the Department of Homeland Security last October, has led to the seizure of some 40,000 pounds of cocaine — a street valued of around $600 million, Gil said. Unified Resolve was largely a reaction to the results of Operation Martillo, an earlier Homeland Security–coordinated endeavor that targeted smugglers in the southwestern Caribbean near the Central American coast. “We believe this operation has pushed smugglers to take a more central route through the Caribbean,” Gil said. Somma, the Coast Guard spokesman, said that “Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are a lot closer to the United States,” and traffickers “figure that if they can get there, they’ll have an easier time getting into the U.S.”

4 held in Caribbean coke bust carried out by armed Coast Guard helicopter - U.S. - Stripes

 

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France busts record cocaine haul...

Record cocaine haul discovered on Air France plane
Mon, Sep 23, 2013 - French police have seized a record haul of 1.3 tonnes of pure cocaine found on board an Air France passenger plane, French Minister on the Interior Manuel Valls said on Saturday.

The drugs, seized on Sept. 11, had been packed into 30 suitcases, Valls told a news conference in Nanterre, outside Paris, adding that this was the biggest-ever haul in metropolitan France. A source close to the investigation said the flight had originated in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, adding that the cocaine had a street value of about 200 million euros (US$270 million). The operation was carried out in collaboration with Spanish, British and Dutch police, and Valls said “several members of a criminal organization” had been arrested.

Valls said the seizure illustrated the “importance of strengthening international cooperation in the fight against traffickers,” as he displayed the 30 empty suitcases that had contained the cocaine and were not linked to any of the passengers on the flight. Valls said 4 tonnes of cocaine had been seized in France since the start of the year. “Such a seizure, in such circumstances, is quite simply exceptional,” French police commander Mohamed Douhane said. “Now an inquiry ... will have to determine if there were other accomplices, whether within the company or at the arrival or departure airports,” he added.

Authorities in Caracas said they had also launched an investigation to determine the origins of the haul. The office of Venezuela’s attorney general said in a brief statement that prosecutors and National Guard anti-drug police are investigating how the cocaine-laden suitcases got aboard the flight at the Simon Bolivar International Airport, and who was behind the smuggling operation.

Cocaine comes from coca leaves grown in countries like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Venezuela does not produce cocaine, according to UN monitors, but drug traffickers are increasingly using its territory to smuggle drugs into other nations. Last year, Venezuelan police seized about 45 tonnes of illegal drugs, according to government figures.

Record cocaine haul discovered on Air France plane - Taipei Times

 

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Another big ol' cocaine bust...

Almost 2 tons of cocaine seized off Puerto Rico coast
Wed Apr 2, 2014 - A 1.8 ton cocaine shipment worth an estimated $50 million that was thought to be destined for the U.S. market was seized off the coast of Puerto Rico, federal authorities said on Wednesday, in one of the largest drug busts there in recent years.

The shipment was intercepted on Monday evening on a 30-foot boat that was 12.5 miles off the resort town of Dorado on Puerto Rico's north coast. "We have seized more than three tons of cocaine over the last month," Angel Melendez, head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office in San Juan, said on Wednesday. The great majority of cocaine destined for the U.S. market is smuggled via Mexico, but U.S. officials have said that joint U.S.-Mexican counter-drug efforts have begun to push some of the traffic back into the Caribbean, an historically popular corridor during the heyday of Colombia's Medellin cartel in the 1980s and 1990s.

About 14 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine shipments, roughly 42 tons, was trafficked through the Caribbean in the first six months of 2013, and Puerto Rico and the neighboring Dominican Republic have emerged as hubs of the burgeoning trade, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. That was double the share of U.S.-bound cocaine that was shipped through the region during the first half of 2012, Vito Guarino, special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean division, said last October. The U.S. has seen a 30 percent overall drop in the amount of cocaine smuggled into the United States over the same time period, partly due to increased drug interdiction efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border, Guarino said at that time.

Melendez told a news conference on Wednesday that a drug bust netted 1.1 tons of cocaine on the south coast of Puerto Rico in March. Drug traffickers use the Caribbean corridor as one of the preferred routes to send drugs to the United States, he said. Last December a 33-foot long boat was seized off Puerto Rico containing 54 bales of cocaine weighing about 1,500 kilos.

Two suspected smugglers arrested on Monday were identified as Reny Alexander López Meneces and Andri Rivas Rojas Irving, both Venezuelan nationals. If convicted, they face from 10 years to life in prison and are being held at the federal detention center in San Juan on drug trafficking charges, authorities said. ICE spokesman Ivan L. Ortiz-Delgado said the go-fast boat is believed to have traveled directly from Venezuela to Puerto Rico. He said smugglers use either this direct approach, or "island hop" through small eastern Caribbean nations or attempt to smuggle into the United States through the Dominican Republic. The bust was made by the Caribbean Corridor Strike Force (CCSF), an initiative of the U.S. Attorney's Office created to combat major drug trafficking organizations operating in the Caribbean.

Almost 2 tons of cocaine seized off Puerto Rico coast | Reuters

 

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Brazil makes biggest ever drug seizure...

Biggest-ever drug seizure made
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 - WHITE CHRISTMAS: The haul, concealed inside lead containers made to look like car batteries, was enough to supply about 11 million people, according to officials

Investigators last week seized more than 200kg of cocaine packed inside car batteries imported from Brazil, the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau said yesterday. During the raid on cargo at Kaohsiung customs, investigators also found 51.3kg of amphetamine, the bureau said. It was the biggest drug haul in the nation’s history, the bureau said, estimating the cocaine’s market value at NT$2 billion (US$62.5 million). The raid was carried out by Taipei district prosecutors, bureau agents and also coast guard and customs officers following an investigation into a Taipei-based import/export company, the bureau said.

It was found that the company was selling batteries for large cars to Australia at a price of less than NT$10,000 per unit, but that shipping costs were NT$30,000 per unit, the bureau said. An initial inspection of a batch of batteries at Kaohsiung customs on Thursday last week revealed the 51.3kg of amphetamine concealed in fake batteries, the bureau said. One suspect was arrested and a raid on his home turned up NT$2.45 million and several rounds of ammunition, which were seized by investigators, along with a Mercedes sedan, the bureau said.

The following day, a shipment of car batteries from Brazil to the suspect company was searched at Kaohsiung customs, with the aid of sniffer dogs, and 218.45kg of cocaine was found, the bureau said. It said about 200 cocaine bricks were packed into lead containers made to look like car batteries, which meant that scanners were unable to identify the illicit cargo. The amount of cocaine was enough to supply about 11 million people, the bureau said.

Biggest-ever drug seizure made - Taipei Times

 

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Coast Guard seizes $15 million dollars worth of cocaine...

$15 Million Worth of Seized Coke Offloaded at Port, Coast Guard Says
28 Sep 2017 | More than 1,000 pounds of cocaine that will never be part of the illicit drug trade sailed into Port Everglades Wednesday aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.

Crew members from the Coast Guard Cutter Valiant offloaded approximately 490 kilograms, or about 1,080 pounds, of cocaine that the agency says has a wholesale value of $15 million. The drugs were seized during three separate interdiction cases that took place this month in the Eastern Pacific, the Coast Guard said.

Crew members on an interceptor boat from the Coast Guard Cutter Valiant approach bales of cocaine jettisoned in the Eastern Pacific Ocean by suspected smugglers​

Details of the operations were not disclosed. "Our whole of government efforts are targeting the financial lifeline of organized crime to ultimately cause the collapse of these illegal networks," Capt. Mark Vlaun, staff judge advocate for the Coast Guard Seventh District said in a statement. The Cutter Valiant is a 210-foot Coast Guard vessel based at Mayport Naval Station in Jacksonville.

$15 Million Worth of Seized Coke Offloaded at Port, Coast Guard Says | Military.com