Dats.L

The kidney beans were packing more than protein. Customs officials in Fort Lauderdale must have suspected as much Saturday when they noticed that a woman arriving from Colombia had three bags of kidney beans and two bags of pistachios in her carry-on bag. When an inspector cut open one of the kidney beans, according to a report by the Sun Sentinel, “a white powdery substance” spilled out. Officials found more than 13 pounds of cocaine had been put into the beans and pistachios. Rank that one up there among the more creative drug-smuggling schemes ever, a dishonorable list that gained a couple of new entries this week. On Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard captured a make-shift submarine in the western Caribbean carrying about $180 million worth of cocaine. It seems that drug smugglers have taken to building the vessels in the jungles of Colombia. They then use them to transport thousands of pounds of drugs along with a handful of men. They’re designed to sink immediately upon detection, making it almost impossible for authorities to capture the cargo. This week’s cases are part of a trend in which authorities are noticing increasingly ingenious methods of transporting drugs. Heightened detection capabilities are forcing smugglers to conceive of new way to transport their wares. Not all the methods, however, involve sophisticated contraptions such as submersible vessels. Earlier this year, officials found a “pot catapult” designed to hurl marijuana across the border from Mexico into Arizona. Such ingenuity is wasted on a shameless crew of criminals who surely could put their talents to better use. Still, you can’t help but take notice of some of the more imaginative drug-smuggling attempts uncovered by law enforcement in recent years. Of course, we may never know about the truly creative attempts, since those are likely the ones that get past officials. Creativity aside, some of the schemes come with an extra dose of audacity. For example, smugglers in Colombia gave the term “drug mule” new meaning when they taped marijuana and cocaine to a carrier pigeon and then put it on a flight pattern toward a local jail. Police intercepted the pigeon before it had a chance to deliver its, uh, message. Food themes seem to be a favorite of the scoundrels. Consider the surprise of police in Austin, Texas, a few years ago when they flipped open a can of Pringles potato chips to find crisps of cocaine — sliced into thin sheets to look like the popular chips. Then there’s the giant frozen squid, doused in pepper in order to fool sniffing dogs, that was stuffed with more than 1,500 pounds of cocaine. Peruvian police, nonetheless, stopped the mammoth mollusk before it made its way to Mexico and the United States. Sometimes, however, smugglers negate their imagination with trite banality. A couple years ago a Chilean man flew into Barcelona, his fractured left leg wrapped in a cast. The cast was made of cocaine; officials might never have noticed had they not first found a stash of the drug in his luggage.