Criminals are always looking for a unique or clever way to get the best of everybody. Yes, criminals have done some pretty “creative” things and now they’ve even tried to commit crimes using the guise of good old fashioned roofing materials. The story seems like something out of Hollywood but it’s all true. Let’s look more into how these criminals tried to smuggle drugs in the U.S. using a pallet of shingles.
Smugglers attempted to transport 954 pounds of marijuana into the United States by stashing it within two pallets of innocent roofing shingles. The smugglers were caught after a K9 unit of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “hit on” the truck. The truck was moved to a secondary inspection area where officers managed to locate nearly 1,000 pounds of marijuana.
“Smugglers will often try to conceal their contraband within a legitimate product, good work by vigilant CBP officers stopped the shipment cold,” said Beverly Good, CBP Director of the El Paso Port. When officers opened one pallet, they discovered that the center portion had been replaced by bags of marijuana. Additional searching found an additional pallet that was loaded up with the contraband, resulting in a seizure of 288 bundles of marijuana. This seizure comes less than a month after CBP officers found a similar operation of marijuana being smuggled in a load of carrots, upon further search many of the carrots were simply orange packages of tape loaded with marijuana.
Unfortunately there have been no arrests so far in the roofing shingle marijuana seizure, but CBP officers continue their investigation.
Fortunately, those who are having their home reroofed or repaired likely don’t need to be worry about any drugs in their roofing materials as this was an extremely isolated incident and the shingles were more than likely not going to end up in a reputable roofing supplier’s warehouse.
It just goes to show that criminals can be very resourceful when it comes to meeting their ends. This of course an isolated incident but here’s hoping they don’t try to keep the using the roofing world to take care of criminal activity.
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