Though it’s not uncommon to hear that someone shoved an ungodly amount of cocaine nose-ward, it’s an entirely different story when it’s 31 pounds of the stuff that’s been hidden in the nose gear of a commercial airliner.
Workers servicing an American Airlines plane at a maintenance base in Tulsa on Sunday found seven bricks of cocaine in the very front of the aircraft, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office said.
The plane originated from Bogotá, Colombia, and was flagged for maintenance on Sunday night, authorities said, but because the maintenance base in Miami was too busy to service the plane, the Boeing 757 was sent to Tulsa.
“A technician went to check the electronics bay near the nose gear and some of the insulation looked new,” the sheriff’s office said. “He moved it and saw one of the bricks and called TCSO.”
TCSO says the minimum street value of the cocaine recovered from the plane is $200,000. With an estimated value of $14,000 per pound, the Associated Press estimates it’s actually likely to be closer to $434,000.
Since the plane was bound for Miami, the investigation is now in the hands of the Drug Enforcement Agency, TCSO notes.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of criminals stashing drugs inside commercial aircraft:
• Last July, maintenance workers found three kilos of cocaine hidden inside two JetBlue planes.
• Back in December 2015, workers at that same American Airlines base found 26.2 pounds of cocaine stashed on one of the carrier’s planes.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist