“Cocaine, New York’s nemesis of the 90’s, is back.”
An operation including officers from Customs and Border Protection, the D.E.A. and the New York Police Department have intercepted a container that detectives say stunned even the most experienced customs agents.
Detectives investigating the crime said that Carlotta, a container ship, had just arrived in Newark from Buenaventura, Colombia.
As authorities were conducting a routine inspection aboard the M.S.C. Carlotta, they noticed a worn, teal shipping container.
The pins that held the containers’ doors in place appeared to have been doctored.
The teal container was supposed to contain dried fruit. Instead, officers opened the doors to find something unusual.
Inside were 60 tightly wrapped bundles of white powder, each the size of a small trunk.
The bundles turned out to be 3,200 pounds of cocaine, the largest drug shipment to be intercepted at Port Newark in a quarter-century, a bounty worth $77 million on the street, the authorities said on Monday.
“This is a significant seizure, in fact it is the largest cocaine seizure at the Port of New York/Newark since May 1994,” Troy Miller, director of New York field operations for the agency, said. “This interception prevents a massive quantity of drugs from getting to the streets and in the hands of our children.”
Officers turned the drugs over to federal Homeland Security officials for investigation.