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Last Friday, Miami International Airport officers inspecting the bags of a 17-year-old British girl headed back to London took a look at a couple dozen boxes of cake mix stuffed amid her clothes. They weren’t full of red velvet batter. The cops found 30 pounds of cocaine inside, and the teen — Ayesha Olivia Niles — will likely be charged as an adult.
Give Niles credit, though. Cake-mix boxes are a completely original (if surprisingly ineffective) coke-delivery system.
Niles, a 5’4″ student three days shy of her 18th birthday, was en route from Jamaica when she drew the short straw at MIA for an automatic screening, the Miami Herald reports.
When police dug into the boxes and found 29.3 pounds of coke, Niles claimed she didn’t know she was carrying cocaine — “though she suspected the activity she was involved in was suspicious.”
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Niles’s baking bust immediately joins the pantheon of the strangest cocaine-smuggling attempts in recent years, including:
- A World Cup statue: Police in Bogota last July intercepted a life-size replica of the World Cup trophy, made entirely from yeyo, headed for Europe during the soccer contest in South Africa.
- Submarine: Why mess with airport screeners when you can ship the cocaine under the deep blue sea in your very own narco-sub? Of course, when the sub sinks, you’ll be left scrambling in a lifeboat amid hundreds of floating bales of coke.
- Candy Easter eggs: Miami resident Esteban Galtes was popped at LAX last December trying to sneak $100,000 in coke through security inside pastel-colored easter eggs:
Of course, these are just the bizarre methods that have failed — who knows what else is stuffed with cocaine at the airport and successfully navigating through the x-ray machines?
Update: The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has released Niles’s police report and a photo of the cocaine.
The coke is packed into 24 blue J.F. Mills Rich ‘n Moist-brand cake-mix boxes.
Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the office, says Niles will be charged as an adult because she was just a few days short of her 18th birthday and “given the nature of this serious drug-trafficking charge and given the amount of powder cocaine involved.”
Here’s a picture of the drug haul:
Here’s a full copy of Niles’s arrest report:
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