Express Air Freight Called Conduit for Drugs, Arms, Porn

It’s fast, it’s efficient and it travels the world--it’s express air freight, and some of its biggest fans are drug dealers who increasingly use it to conduct multimillion-dollar deals, security officials say.

“Why do criminals use express freight systems? As well as being fast, efficient and reliable, it reduces the danger of being caught with the goods,” said Detective Inspector Chris Humphrey of Interpol.

“That’s why freight and mail systems are so vulnerable to criminals,” he said at the sixth World Express and Mail Conference last week.

Humphrey said a wide range of criminals use both conventional mail and freight and express air freight to send drugs, counterfeit money and documents, pornography and arms.

“World trade in counterfeit goods alone is worth $100 billion per year--that’s 5% of all world trade. We’re talking about very big business which moves around the world. Maybe your industry could unwittingly become a part of it,” Humphrey told delegates.

“The illegal drugs market in the U.K. is worth 3.6 billion sterling ($5.3 billion) per year,” Humphrey said.

He added that last year 31% of all drug seizures and 21% of heroin seizures by customs officials were made by intercepting mail.

Ian Watson, an official with the Customs & Excise Intelligence Division at London’s Heathrow Airport, said in an interview that shipment of illegal goods by express freight carriers is a growing problem.

“The express industry is carrying bigger parcels, so we’re getting an explosion in the number of shipments and the weight of consignments. You can get up to one kilo of a Class A drug like heroin in one shipment,” Watson said.

“Sometimes they are well-hidden, sometimes not. Recently we found statues made entirely of cocaine paste and dipped in plastic coating . . . other times we’ve found drugs in the false bottoms of boxes or in computer discs,” he added.

Watson said airlines generally train staff well to spot suspicious-looking passengers. Customs officials are training airlines and freight agents to become just as effective at identifying suspicious freight.

“When you look at passengers there are clues which add up to a risk profile for a drugs carrier or a terrorist. The clues for identifying suspect freight are different but they are there,” he said.

Key factors include the origin and destination of a shipment, whether the shipper is a regular importer or exporter and whether he has used a costly delivery service for a consignment of low-value goods.

Sophisticated electronic data interchange (EDI) systems in air freight provide detailed information about shipments that allows customs to check and even clear a shipment before a plane has landed.

Watson said EDI helps to counter crime, but the toughest crime to crack is committed by criminals working inside the freight industry.

“You can never be certain how much of this is going on because the shipments may never come near customs at all,” he said.