Crime

Creative Smuggling Techniques and Training Exercises Gone Bad Highlight a Strange Month

By Scott Briscoe

28 April 2023

Hard to believe April is ending and May is near, which means it’s time to take a look at the strange, unusual, or just plan offbeat security news that we’ve noticed recently. Our usual disclaimer: While we take a decidedly less serious look at these news stories, security is still a very serious business, and we do not mean to devalue those harmed by the stories below. With that, let’s get into it, starting with some of the most unusual smuggling stories you will encounter:

Number 5 Authorities Find 26 Pounds of Gold Hidden in Man’s Leg Cast—A man was stopped at customs at an Indian airport and claimed he did not know about the gold bars hidden in the plaster of the cast wrapped around his right leg. Guess he just thought it was a really heavy cast. Must-see TV: the short video of authorities cutting the cast off with gold bars spilling out.

Number 4 Paging Walter White—Authorities seized 11,520 bottles of tequila in Manzanillo, Mexico. But be careful which shots you toast with: In a smuggling scheme worthy of the Breaking Bad character, the bottles were filled with liquid methamphetamine. Less Walter White-like was a separate incident in which 3.5 million fentanyl pills were hidden in a shipment of green beans.

Number 3 Dangerous Public Art—The sculpture on the side of a recreational trail in Edmonton, Alberta, is made of 1,000 stainless steel spheres piled into a pyramidic structure. Turns out, if you decide to climb to the top, there’s an opening, and if you fall into the middle of a structure made of 1,000 stainless steel spheres, it’s really hard to get out. Like emergency-responders-needing-to-use-the-jaws-of-life-tool hard. In polite Canadian fashion, the man was charged with one count of mischief.

Number 2 Torturing Inmates in This Way Is Not Cool—In general, torture stories are not fodder for Strange Security. We make an exception this month with the story of two correctional facility officers given two years probation for three counts of prisoner cruelty. The torture: inmates were put in empty rooms where the officers played the children’s song “Baby Shark” at a high volume for hours and hours. And our top strange security news of April…

Number 1 Training Exercise Gone Bad—A man slept quietly in a room at the Revere Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. He was then jolted awake when FBI raided the room, pushed him into the shower, and interrogated him for nearly an hour. The main claimed to be a “commercial airline pilot.” The problem: The raid was an FBI exercise. The man was actually a commercial airline pilot. The mark who was part of the exercise lay in a different room and went completely unmolested.