How drug runners use ‘narco submarines’ to traffic cocaine, money & more

Drug traffickers don’t have any bother enjoying harmless even once they’re caught red-handed — or wet-handed.

Take those who smuggle unlawful items by way of submarine.

“These guys do not give resistance when they are captured,” Colombia Navy’s commander of the Pacific naval drive Francisco Cubides instructed The Post. “They know there is no sense in resisting. So they use speed to try evading the Navy. Sometimes they sink the submersible and float in the water, claiming to be innocent fishermen whose small boats had been wrecked.”

Then, Cubides added wryly, “they tell us how grateful they are to have been saved.”

Last month the Colombian Navy busted a semi-submersible vessel carrying some 4 tons of cocaine with a road worth of $145 million.

“We did it with information from naval intelligence,” Cubides mentioned. “We surrounded the submarine with our boats. When it had nowhere to go, we boarded from up top. Once in the submarine, we found 200 sacks that contained 4,000 rectangular packages of cocaine.”

Drug subs are stealth vessels favored by smugglers to discreetly transfer tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and ill-gotten money. Loaded up with tens of millions of {dollars} in contraband, these cobbled-together vessels, with their sky-colored tops and noise mufflers, cruise just under the water’s floor, hoping to remain past sight traces of the Coast Guard, naval forces and worldwide drug enforcement brokers. As reported in Time, they don’t get noticed by radar and their fiberglass our bodies assist the subs to evade sonar.

According to Robert J. Bunker, senior fellow with Small Wars Journal El Centro, “Hundreds of these vessels have been built over the last three decades with likely dozens of narco subs operating at any one time. Hundreds of tons of cocaine is transported from Latin America up to Central America and Mexico each year using this method.”

Though the bust final month represents a critical haul for the authorities — the confiscated medicine plus the arrest of 4 smugglers contained in the sub — it put solely a small dent within the underwater drug commerce.

Cubides acknowledges that his battle is uphill: “Traffickers [in submarines] move four times the amount of drugs we capture every year.” Vice puts the sum of confiscated underwater-blow at 14 p.c.

A supply near the Colombian navy instructed The Post that traffickers’ “profits are so large that, after a trip, they destroy the submarine” quite than risking it being discovered and traced again to them.

Bunker defined {that a} state-of-the-art narco sub prices within the low tens of millions and is able to touring from cocaine capital Colombia to the Western Coast of Africa and presumably Australia.

But that pales alongside what the so-called “Facatativa” sub may have been. Thought to have been budgeted at $10 million, 120-feet-long, able to hauling 150 tons of cocaine and practically accomplished earlier than being seized from a Colombian mechanic store by authorities in 2000, as per Bunker, “the Factativa sub is the closest design we have seen to military grade.”

On the upside, he added, “No narco subs have ever been seized with any form of offensive weaponry or defensive protective systems.”

It’s even occurring in home waters.

Glen Mousseau, 51, is a strapping Canadian who — earlier than he was arrested in 2020 — made a good-looking residing by navigating marijuana from Canada to the States, by way of the Detroit River, which runs between Windsor, Ontario, and the Motor City.

“You can find lots of marijuana in small quantities in America. But for large quantities, 500 pounds of more, of high quality marijuana? For that you have to go to Canada,” he instructed The Post from Federal Correctional Institution, Milan, in York Township, Mich. “Western Canada has mastered the growing of the best marijuana in the world and can do it in bulk.”

Asked what he’s snuck over borders apart from weed, Mousseau — who’s serving 71 months after pleading responsible to costs that included possession of marijuana with intent to distribute — would solely cop to shifting foreign money and marijuana. Never thoughts {that a} US lawyer ticked off a litany of further illicit substances that Mousseau shipped into the States.

“If you do not smuggle cash, you can’t get proceeds to your home country,” he mentioned. “Plus we smuggled some cash for third parties.”

Until a number of years in the past, Mousseau “was basically smuggling marijuana on boats and running a [furniture] moving service”

He thought of varied methods of working medicine throughout the one-mile-wide Detroit River.

“The first concept was for me to put on a drysuit, weigh myself down and walk across the bottom of the river [with contraband attached],” Mousseau recalled. “But what kinds of terrible obstacles would you come across? Unknowns included the softness of the bottom and how many junked vehicles had been dumped into the river. There would be zero visibility. I did not try that technique. It was actually a terrifying idea.”

More manageable was a variation on the Colombian submarine, which, sadly for Mousseau, proved to be his undoing.

Acknowledging that the underwater drug-runs went on for greater than six months however fewer than two years, Mousseau stood charged with strapping a whole bunch of kilos of marijuana to his physique.

Loaded up with weed, Mousseau would cruise by boat to some extent close to the American border. There, he climbed onto a Seabob — a submersible water scooter — and breathed by means of a snorkel tube as he made forays to the States. Going under floor supplied sufficient invisibility to elude the Feds.

It was a terrific setup, till the evening of June 5, 2020. He was getting ready to launch from his smuggling group’s boat. But it was noticed by Border Patrol Agents who gave chase and tried to stop the vessel. In pursuit, brokers noticed one thing being dropped into the water. That proved to be Mosseau, on the Seabob, carrying 175 kilos in packs of marijuana.

“But a package got tangled up with the boat, the Seabob took off on its own and I got pulled underwater,” he mentioned.

“Next thing I knew, I was found unconscious by Homeland Security,” Mousseua mentioned. The weed remained strapped to his physique.

As haphazard as this unraveling might have been, the US authorities insisted that Mosseau was no newcomer to his commerce. “Mousseau was a sophisticated drug smuggler who smuggled large quantities of drugs, to include methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana, along with bulk cash, across the international waterway between the United States and Canada,” appearing United States lawyer Saima Mohsin mentioned on the time. “He smuggled these items during early morning hours using submersible vessels and diving equipment and a high speed boat, showing just how dangerous drug trafficking can be.”

Local reporters cheekily dubbed Mousseau “Scuba Steve” — seemingly a reference to a personality within the Adam Sandler film “Big Daddy” — and gave him the sheen of a folks hero.

But, in response to his lawyer, Victor Mansour, “The judge we had would not have found this amusing; he would have found it disrespectful. Glen took it on the chin and is now writing a book about being a failed drug smuggler. He shared with me that he was very good at what he did, he had a unique skill set and, I assume, he was valuable to the group he worked with.”

The strategy, Mansour added, “was very creative. The opportunity presented itself and he did what he had to do.”