Aussie police find over 230 kilos of cocaine inside aluminium ingots, can you imagine the problems with the swarf from machining these ingots .
Amazing! So, how did the casters manage to cast aluminum around the coke “cores” without destroying the cocaine? Denis
I was wondering that myself, some of the ingots in the video look too clean as if they were welded and the welds ground smooth to hide them.
Didn’t think of that. Yes, cast aluminum welds very easily. In one segment (2:26 approx)of the video it did appear that a cover of 1/8” aluminum sheet was pried loose. Pretty clever idea.
Digging into this a little deeper, it appears that the ingots were hidden among 18 pallets so weight wouldn’t have tipped off the authorities. They had intel. Pretty ingenious.
It would be weird to ship aluminium from Mexico to a country that has aluminium smelters locally, it would be more expensive. I notice that a lot of these drug shipments don't make sense financially, they'd be better off putting it in bulk tequila shipments or something. That upper ingot at the 21 second mark is the hollow original and it looks noticeably different to a real ingot below it. I believe an unrelated guy in a drug sting had charges dismissed in a court recently as he hadn't actually received any real drugs, just the substitute fake drugs when he collected a parcel.
I’m acquainted with an aluminum foundry local to me that imports all of their 356 ingot from Russia. They’ve been importing it for decades, so I guess the Mexico import isn’t too much of a stretch.. Evidently it’s a purity issue for them.
Some of the ingots were hollow with a plate screwed on the bottom...hardly the "heavy industrial process" the officer states in the briefing. Not that hard to machine out the center of an aluminum ingot, you can do it with cordless tools! The scans probably caught those ingots, and subsequently they had to cut open each and every one to make sure. I suspect only the hollow, plated ingots contained contraband. If they were indeed cast around the payloads I imagine they might have gotten away with it.
There must be less recycled material in the Russian aluminium, they probably have lower costs in making the stuff too. I've heard of some foundry people claiming that recycled metal casts better than "virgin" aluminium although I've never seen any difference. There would be entire shipping containers X-rayed with fairly sophisticated Xray machines able to show different levels of signal as colours on the display and I bet the cocaine attenuates the signal far less than aluminium and shows up as a hot spot. So if you get a container full of off-brand cat food from Colombia you'd pay attention to it. That reminds me of a co-worker in the 1980's who lamented the local bottling plant moving from steel Coca-Cola cans with a tin-lead soldered seam to aluminium cans exclusively: he said the Coke from steel cans tasted better.
Apparently we pay a premium for illegal drugs in Australia. Just last week I was buying milk at the local service station and I see a small black wireless earphone case on the ground near my car's passenger door. Inside were two small resealable baggies with what looked like coarse grains of epsom salts: I handed it to the shopkeeper as he has a security camera aimed at that exact spot and is involved with the neighbourhood watch.
What was it? Crack cocaine? Crystal Meth? I guess it does not matter. Gads, when I was a kid, the worst thing you could "do" was Budweiser or Pabst. Never heard of "weed" or heroin. Small midwestern town. Pretty innocent place at the time. Denis
Apparently it's popular on building sites for tradesmen to use, it was about 8 am, so someone on their way to work probably dropped it while getting some diesel. I'm guessing crystal meth or "Ice" as it's been rebranded here, I bought more milk yesterday, the shopkeeper didn't mention it and I didn't either. I no longer have it as a problem and didn't have to play 20 questions with the cops either or get arrested by some ambitious cop. Crystal meth has made inroads into the farming industry where fruit pickers get wired on the stuff and work hard all day only to crash and burn after a few months of such abuse. Apparently the nearby sugar cane farmer was using the stuff not long before he lost his farm and died with the farm broken up and sold to developers.
Lots of people use meth around these parts. Rots your teeth out and makes people go totally schizo. I've seen people screaming at inanimate objects while high on it. Rather do cocaine than that crap.
YUP! You cannot miss the many faces of meth. The sores and teeth are the first thing I usually notice.
About ten years ago this guy in nothing but "budgie smuggler" underpants and covered in sores, walks up to the front yard of the foundry where I help out at. He was about 60Kgs weight, he pauses and then dead lifts a half full drum of hot sump oil in the sun to chest height and falls over backwards onto the ground with the drum on top of him, all the while muttering under his breath. He then gets out from under the drum, staggers to his feet and wobbles off down the road the same way Johnny Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow, and follows the dotted white line painted in the middle of the street until he crossed a busy four lane intersection with cars locking up brakes to avoid running him over. He was my first ever "Tweaker" .
Yeah that's a pretty spooky experience! These bastards are subject to do anything, never take your eyes off a tweaker! Cops in my town just busted this fine looking individual.
