How much cocaine can you fit in the nose of a commercial aircraft?
It’s one of the age-old questions of life, right along with “Why are we here?” (see “Legislative Darwinism") and “How many licks does it take to get the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” (Purdue University researchers say 364.)
The first question was answered by an American Airlines employee in Tulsa when they stumbled on what appeared to be a brick of cocaine, Tulsa World reported.
The employee, along with other American Airlines maintenance crewmembers, found seven bricks of cocaine in the nose of a Boeing 747 at Tulsa International Airport. Each was covered with wheel grease, which the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office believed was used to mask the drug’s scent from dogs. Law enforcement estimated the cocaine had a minimum street value of $200,000, and some sources estimated its value at more than twice that.
Now that we know how much coke fits in the nose of a plane, we have to ask, “Where do babies come from?”
Whoops! Nope. Sorry; wrong question. What we meant to ask was, “Where did the drugs come from?”
That’s what agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in Miami were assigned to find out. The airliner recently flew from Bogotá, Colombia to Miami, Florida, where the aircraft was flagged for maintenance and sent to a maintenance hub in Tulsa, where workers discovered the blanca.
Considering Colombia is known for DIY cocaine-making classes and the country has surpassed Peru as the world’s top exporter of the drug (an 8.5-ton bust in May was the largest in Colombian history), us hard-nosed investigative journalists at Chicken-Fried News think Miami might not need a weatherman (or DEA agent) to know which way the snow blows.
