A police union executive has been arrested for running a massive drug smuggling operation out of her home for the past 8 years, sending drugs all over the country by disguising them as wedding gifts and candy. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A police union executive has been arrested for running a massive drug smuggling operation out of her home for the past eight years, sending drugs all over the country by disguising them as wedding gifts and candy. Wow. Okay. Pick the story up, please.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a bit of a shock here. We’ve got this San Jose Police Union executive, you know, basically kind of at the top overseeing the entire police union for San Jose, California. Well, it turns out that for, you know, almost a decade at this point, she had been bringing drugs into the country and then acted as the distribution point sending them all over the country. So she was getting drugs from China according to the allegations, from China, from India, from all of these foreign countries, just having them shipped to her in the mail.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. While, she’s using WhatsApp.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, she’s coordinating with WhatsApp and coordinating with the police, with the police’s own equipment.
Farron Cousins: Right. She’s using their computers.
Mike Papantonio: Eight years.
Farron Cousins: To set up her drug ring. And it all is happening under the nose of these police officers, like you said, for eight straight years. And then she finally gets popped and she says, oh, clearly it was my housekeeper that’s smuggling all these drugs and sending them from my home. But her methods are becoming more and more prevalent that we’re seeing with these drugs smugglers.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the story. That’s the story, isn’t it? I mean, the reason we’re doing this story is not because of that event that took place in California. There’s this real pervasive use of a lot of creative things that are being done. Talk about a few that we’ve already discussed.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So she was disguising it as makeup. And what you do is you take, you know, a pack of makeup that has different powders and colors in it. You empty that out, you replace one or two of ’em with a powdered drug. That way somebody opens it up, it looks normal. She can, you know, well, not she, but you can bake it to look like candy. That is something that we see. You could.
Mike Papantonio: That’s, that was the wedding gift. It was candy.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I’ve got you all of these lovely chocolates, but it’s actually just drugs. We’re seeing them put it in shampoo bottles. In lotion bottles. They’re liquefying drugs to be able to send them, get them in and out of the country. It truly is massive. The ingenuity of these drug smugglers. I mean, not to give them credit, but you kind of have to because the creativity is off the charts and we’re falling behind on being able to detect them.
Mike Papantonio: DEA doesn’t have a chance here. I mean, that’s the real story. They, they’re not funding the DEA. They’re not training the DEA. They’re not keeping up with times. We talked about one where they’re putting on, where tourists are bringing the drugs back in, the magnet story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Yeah. What the cartels down in Mexico have started doing is they’ll put a package of drugs with a giant magnet on top, cover it in mud on a road. The tourist will drive over it, the magnet sticks to the bottom of the car and most of the time, you know, it’s just your average everyday tourist, they’re able to get through with no problem on the border because the bottom of the package will also be caked in mud so that it looks like, oh, your undercarriage is dirty. You ran through mud. No problem. Keep going. So they’re using anyone as a mule that they can find, even people who don’t know they’re being used. And of course, that creates massive problems for these people when they get caught because they had no idea that they were bringing drugs into the country.
Mike Papantonio: This story tells me that the DEA is fighting a losing battle and somehow, if they’re serious about it, need to adjust.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
