Two airline passengers on a Delta Airlines flight from the Dominican Republic to New York on April 19 got charged with the same crime when they were caught smuggling cocaine in the JFK, but according to reports, they weren't together.
According to Travel Pulse, these two men were caught smuggling cocaine by wearing and taping them in their bodies. But despite being on the same flight, they denied working together.
One of the passengers is U.S. citizen Ariel Garcia, who taped 11 pounds of cocaine to his legs that amounted to over $180,000. The other culprit is a native of Dominican Republic Elvin Montilla-Sosa, who has over $200,000 worth of cocaine powder wrapped around his body. Due to the suspicious bulges in these men's clothing, the US Customs immediately took them to a private search room in the JFK where they discovered the cause of these men's unease.
Washington Post reported that Garcia tried to pass off the crime by wearing overly baggy clothes, but the unusual bulging of his calves gave him away. Montilla-Sosa, on the other hand, initially acted on a pretense that he was a lawyer to traveling to the US for an immigration law conference but suspicion on his person immediately aroused during patting inspection. Both men confessed that they were serving as drug mules from an unnamed entity back in the Dominican Republic to bring the drug to the U.S.
Official charges have been filed against Garcia and Montilla-Sosa, and Leon Hayward, acting director of CBP's New York Field Operations, commended the officers who caught the drug smugglers in JFK. "This latest seizure demonstrates our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of these illicit drugs," he said.
JFK has long been a rendezvous point to smuggle drugs inside the US, and it's certainly not the first time the US Customs encountered "cocaine pants." The pioneer of this drug smuggling technique is Mayo-Banex Ruiz Gomez, who was also arrested on the same charges just last month.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
