54 year old American Robert Todd W. attempted to smuggle more than 4 Kilos of cocaine through Madrid Barajas Airport today but was detained by police. The American arrived at Madrid Barajas from a flight originating from Sao Paolo, Brazil. Apparently he had several packs of cocaine wrapped under his belt as well as attached to his legs and thighs under several layers of woman’s girdles.
The economic crisis will make smart people do stupid things – or maybe they are simply stupid. Who knows, maybe this guy had lost much of his retirement savings in the last year, lost his job and had a mortgage to pay, was a drug addict himself, or was simply tricked into thinking it would be easy to get past those dope-sniffing dogs at a major airport like Barajas. I suppose a percentage of drugs do get through security, possibly a high enough percentage to urge drug dealers to continue. But what do they care? It’s not (usually) the drug dealers who get caught wearing woman’s girdles and forced to a full-body (and cavity) strip search by overzealous, latex-glove wearing sadist.
I’m not forgiving stupidity, that’s for sure, but really. These guys should know better. I could almost understand if they were young, late teens, or even 20-somethings. But past that, well, come on.
There’s a very interesting program on the National Geographic Channel that I love to catch called “Locked Up Abroad“. It’s all about this topic – and one episode was just about this. Two 20-something American girls were offered a free trip to exotic Latin America. There, they were promised a week near the beach, fun, dancing, and would later be contacted by the drug dealers. Well, the house was actually in the jungle somewhere, cut off from everyone. They were basically held prisoner, had no car, no phone, and were left alone the entire week until their contacts arrived. The dealers/kidnappers forced the girls to put on two sets of girdles into which they stuffed full of drugs, causing them to walk funny. To make a long story short, the girls were about to board a plane to Bangladesh (or somewhere) when they were indeed caught and sent to a local prison for a number of years, barely surviving some very raw conditions in the overcrowded prison, everyone sleeping on the floor, nothing but rice to eat, and on and on. I don’t usually care for re-enactment-type programs but this one is very well done and you almost believe you’re watching a television movie-of-the-week. Throughout the re-enactment the actual (and naive) smuggler recounts his/her emotional experiences.
Anyway, very little of this Madrid blog posting has anything to do with Madrid, Spain but the boldness of this presumably mature American man caught my attention. I don’t think the prisons in Madrid are particularly known for their roughness. It’s my impression that their conditions are much better & safer than at most American prisons, in fact. And food HAS to be better. Who couldn’t eat tortilla de patatas everyday? Okay, maybe not EVERY day.
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