Crack-Pots

Where there’s a will there’s a way, so the old saying goes. Such determination was given a new twist when drug smugglers, intent on achieving their aim, constructed a 42-piece crockery set, complete with plates, bowls, cups and saucers, fit to grace any table, made out of compressed cocaine. Spanish police seized 20kg of the pots, which had been sent from Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city, to Barcelona via London. The cocaine was intercepted following a tip-off about the suspicious looking package that had been sent by recorded delivery. The consignment was intended to be reprocessed and sold in Catalonia in northeast Spain. A man is being questioned. If the pots in question had been used for making tea, what a high old time the tea party would have been.

The ‘pottery’ was not the only ingenious ruse invented by devious smugglers. Spanish police detained a Chilean man aged 66 with a broken leg whose ‘plaster cast’ was made out of cocaine. The man, arrested at Barcelona airport, was also found to possess six beer cans and two hollowed out stools that contained the drug. The broken leg proved to be genuine and the police think it may have been specially broken to legitimise the cast. In all 4.8kg of cocaine was found – quite a haul.