“This Man, If Nothing Else, Has Been Watered Down”: John Wick Reference Leads To Loss Of Cocaine

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.”