I was babbling about this at kjugs over the weekend.
Smugglers are, by nature, a crafty bunch. Slaves to the market forces of supply and demand, drug runners risk liberty and limb to pedal their life-ruining wares around the world. Doing so requires a healthy helping of creativity, so it should come as no surprise that an Ibiza-based drug ring tried to use a fake Paris-Dakar support truck to move vast sums of drugs from Argentina to the Spanish port of Bilbao.
The intrepid smugglers bought a truck, gave it a race livery and a crew, complete with matching uniforms, and shipped the whole thing to a farm that was situated close to the Paris-Dakar course. Here’s where it gets fun. They then proceeded to pack hidden compartments with 814 kilos of cocaine, 15,000 ecstasy tablets, 4.5 kilos of hashish and $64,000 in cold hard cash. Evidently that wasn’t enough to bribe the authorities when the whole thing returned to Bilbao, though, as the operation got pinched by the man.
A total of seven people have been detained in connection with the attempted smuggling plot, and if authorities can get any of the charges to stick, you can bet they won’t be seeing daylight for a long, long time.