Sometimes flashes of wit or irony can be costly. When a drug cartel in Medellín, Colombia decided to ship cocaine inside the shell of coffee beans, someone decided it would be funny to label the sender “Santino D’Antonio.” Apparently, Italian police also like the John Wick series and recognized the name of the mafia boss from “John Wick: Chapter 2.” The cost of the joke was the cocaine shipment and methinks there is a some avid movie lover in hot water with Medellín. To paraphrase the mafia character Santino D’Antonio, now “you have no [coke], no [beans], no [sale]. You have nothing. Vengeance is all you have left.”
What struck me as equally notable about this story is the labor intense effort of putting little amounts of cocaine in every bean. At first I thought I must be missing something in the scheme but the pictures show individual beans with tiny amounts of cocaine. That must result in a significant loss in just inserting and removing the cocaine.
I expect that there is a hope that the beans might disguise the scent of the cocaine from dogs. However, while coffee can make the scent more difficult, it does not apparently mask the scent. Dogs are even trained to sniff out electronics and data storage devices.
That leave the D’Antonio cocaine coffee in the same place as Wick himself: “I Can Assure You, That The Stories You Hear About This Man, If Nothing Else, Has Been Watered Down.”
John Wick is awesome. It’s a fantastic role for a great actor, Keanu Reaves. He’s under-rated by the critics, which is typical, because critics come out of the same ersatz reality “matrix” the characterizes the mass media fog machine. but the audiences love him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQZkkeA75KA
Folks, get in touch with your inner “baba yaga”
How bout a nice cup of joe…. Blow!
Waste of space.
That coffee would wake me up!
It would be like the original Coke.
Good to the last drop.
Professor Turley, cocaine’s been mixed with all kinds of things prior to shipment through Customs. My guess is that very finely ground cocaine (I’m talking micron-sized particles – a very fine dust) is shaken inside a container with coffee beans which still have their shells. If the shipment clears customs, the coffee goes to a cooperative coffee grinder which shells the coffee beans and immerses the shells and the beans into a solvent which doesn’t affect the cocaine – then recovering the cocaine from solution. None of those is a serious technical challenge to the cartels.
I wonder how some coffee brewed from those beans would taste. Probably give you a real boost! lol
Roasted coffee doesn’t have a “shell.” That incredibly thin skin comes off as chaff during the roasting process. I have to assume by shell, he means bean. Maybe they pressed the substance into that central crevice of the dicot.
Or perhaps the cartels immersed the bean into a strong cocaine solution, then baked the coated beans just enough to leave a thin coating.permeable to the essential oils of coffee (masking any odor of cocaine). Assuming the beans pass Customs inspection (which is probably more a matter of folding money to the inspector than technical factors) the beans would be redissolved in a suitable solvent and the cocaine recovered from the solvent.