Smuggler transports £1.3m of cocaine using scuba gear
A man has pleaded guilty to one of the most extraordinary smuggling operations ever, involving specially-adapted scuba gear and a tunnel between Mexico and the US.
US Border Patrol officers caught 28-year-old Honduran national Evelio Padilla in a wetsuit by a canal near Calexico, California. Nearby were a breathing tank with a rebreather to stop bubbles rising to the surface - and vacuum-sealed packages containing a total of 55 pounds of cocaine.
The cocaine in question had a street value of £1.3 million.
Further investigation revealed the existence of a 150-foot tunnel under the surface of the canal, which led to a house in Mexicali, Mexico.
It appeared that drugs were placed on a trolley system at the Mexican end, pulled along the dry part of the tunnel and pushed into the canal, from where they were retrieved by scuba divers.
Padilla was then expected to swim a mile and a half up the canal, drop off the packages and return to Mexico the same way.
"Drug smugglers will try anything to move their product — even scuba diving in an underwater tunnel," says US attorney Laura Duffy. "The ingenuity of the smugglers is matched only by our determination to thwart it."
Padilla claimed he'd been told that the plan was to smuggle people, and that when the truth was revealed he'd had no option but to go along. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
Smugglers are finding ever-cleverer ways of sneaking cocaine through borders. It's been turned into a paste and used as a plaster cast on a 'broken' arm or to model a figurine; it's been hidden in wigs and prosthetic limbs.
In one of the weirdest cases, it was smuggled into Spain in a woman's breast implants; and two years ago into the US in a pair of prosthetic buttocks.
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