This is not the kind of crocodile bag you want to see on a plane…
Christopher Mitchell has shot to internet notoriety over the past few days after the obese 42-year-old American was caught by police trying to smuggle drugs in his rolls of fat.
The man, otherwise known as ‘Biggie’ or ‘Fatboy’, was concealing cocaine and 23 grams of marijuana under his stomach fat and while this was not the criminal highpoint of the century, it did get us thinking about the best smuggling attempts ever reported. Here are five of the finest:
5. Fully aware of the irony of his actions, a man in New York was once arrested while transporting a date rape liquid drug inside a bottle of ‘Holy Water’.
4. Inevitably this technique was always going to surface… Ukrainian Svetlana Ivanyshka was rumbled on the border after customs officers caught her trying to smuggle a bag of hashish inside a vibrator. She had hidden the drug in the sex toy’s battery compartment, which was hidden inside her own compartment, for want of a better term.
3. A truly bizarre story: a man in the Democratic Republic of Congo once tried to get a crocodile on an airplane in his hand luggage. Worryingly, he was successful and was only found out when the reptile crawled free near the end of the flight. At the sight of the croc, passengers and crew rushed to the front of the plane, causing a redistribution of weight which caused the aircraft to nosedive, resulting in 21 people dying. The crocodile survived the crash.
2. Less sinister than some of the stories above but disturbing all the same, a woman and her daughter were found in Liverpool airport trying to get a dead corpse on a plane. The pair put the recently deceased body of the woman’s husband in a hat and sunglasses and pushed the ‘sleeping’ man through customs in a wheelchair before officers cottoned on to what was happening.
1. A few years ago a Chilean man decided to capitalise on the misfortune of breaking his shin by finding an ingenious way of turning things back in his favour. He opted to make his leg cast out of the slightly more expensive material of cocaine and then attempt to travel into Barcelona. Officials caught the man and it eventually transpired that he had broken his leg intentionally so he could get the solidified white powder into the country.
