Carriers Plagued by Ingenious Smugglers : U.S. Fines Eastern Airlines $1.37 Million in Drug Case

In recent months, cocaine has been seized at Miami’s airport stashed in a watermelon, sprinkled over carnations, mixed amid 40,000 pounds of sesame seeds. Small boxes of it were concealed under frozen shrimp. Clear, liquid cocaine was discovered sloshing inside a shipment of tropical fish.

But a more common method of smuggling the drug from South America is simply to secrete it aboard a commercial airplane, in the wheel wells or the luggage compartment or behind the fiberglass walls of the lavatories.

Thursday, U.S. Customs officials announced that they were fining Eastern Airlines $1.37 million because cocaine was found earlier this month aboard two of its Boeing 727 jetliners arriving from Colombia.

More than 1,700 pounds of the drug were stuffed into soft-sided suitcases and then hidden in the air conditioning compartments of the forward cargo hold. The street value of the cocaine was placed at $430 million.

“The law is rather clear, that the government can collect $50 an ounce for cocaine found aboard,” said Customs spokesman Edward Kittredge, explaining the civil penalties levied under a 1930 tariff law recently revised to include specific fines for narcotics.

Eastern Airlines has 60 days to appeal. To escape the fine, it must show that the airline exercised the “highest degree of care and diligence” in trying to keep the plane free of the contraband. That will be difficult.

“A human being can design all kinds of safeguards, but other human beings can find ways to circumvent them,” said Eastern spokesman Glenn Parsons.

Eastern has 39 flights to and from Colombia each week. On Aug. 11, 894 pounds of cocaine was found aboard Flight 972 from Barranquilla. On Aug. 24, 828 pounds was discovered on Flight 982 from Cali.

“We’re still trying to get at the perpetrators,” Parsons said, acknowledging that this kind of smuggling usually requires the complicity of someone in the ground crew. “The extent we know who it is can’t be discussed.”

The airline issued an official statement saying that it “deplores this drug traffic and fully supports the efforts of the government to reduce the traffic.”

Some Flights Suspended

In the meantime, it will voluntarily suspend its flights to and from Barranquilla.

For Eastern--and other airlines that serve South America--the problem is nothing new.

Last February, Customs agents in Miami seized a 747 jet belonging to Colombia-based Avianca Airlines. Aboard were 2,478 pounds of cocaine, hidden in a shipment of Valentine’s Day roses and carnations. It was the 34th such incident aboard an Avianca plane, Customs officials said at the time.

Eastern, too, has had a history of troubles.

22 Seizures Recalled

In the six months prior to April 24, 1984, Customs agents seized drugs 22 times aboard Eastern jets, all in areas not normally accessible to passengers. Finally, when three pounds of cocaine was found in a compartment beneath the cockpit of an Eastern L-1011, Customs seized the wide-body jet.

“We were trying to stir those people up,” Kittredge of Customs recalled.

The airplane was returned only after Eastern promised to beef up security in its foreign terminals, Kittredge said. Since then, there have been only two minor drug seizures aboard Eastern planes, until these latest ones.

“South America is our territory,” explained Parsons, the airline’s spokesman. “Unfortunately, this comes with that territory.”

Ingenious Schemes

Eastern is based in Miami, and South Florida is the place through which an estimated 70% of the nation’s cocaine supply is smuggled. The money involved is staggering, the schemes attempted often ingenious.

“There are thousands of ways to do it, and we can’t check everywhere,” said Vann Capps, chief of Custom’s contraband enforcement team in Miami.

For years, the most exotic technique of smugglers was wrapping cocaine in condoms or balloons, then swallowing them. But, sometimes, such packets break; sometimes bodily fluids permeate the rubber. Several smugglers have died of the massive doses of cocaine within them.

Other Concealments

But while Customs officials still discover “swallowers,” the trend now is toward other concealments.

Recently, agents at the airport found cocaine inside hollowed-out furniture, in aircraft engines, in a load of electrical capacitors. Cocaine paste was discovered in a crated shipment of large industrial pulleys.

“And that’s just the cocaine,” Capps said. “Let me tell you about the marijuana.”

It was stuffed inside pumpkins, he said.