MONKEY BUSINESS AND LAST WRITHES

Sep 24, 2012 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

---

 

 

I have heard about having a monkey on your back but having one in your pants is ridiculous.  However weird it might sound, however funny (“This ain’t no ordinary monkey darling, this is King Kong”), Customs authorities in India arrested a man last week who was attempting to board a flight at New Delhi’s international airport with a monkey in his underwear.
The man had arrived from Bangkok.  Personnel at the airport suspecting he was up to some monkey business searched him and found the seven-inch “loris”, a type of monkey native to India and southeast Asia, in his underwear.  Authorities were trying to determine the exact origin of the monkeys but had they asked me I would have told them it was a chim-pants-zee.
If you thought the idea of a monkey being in a man’s pants instead of a man being in a monkey pants is a howler, what about turtles?  Customs officials recently caught an Indian man at Mumbai’s main airport with 10 turtles in his underwear, which he was trying to smuggle into the city from Bangkok.  It has to be more than coincidental that two men from the aptly named Bangkok have animals in their underwear.  Given the proximity and tight squeeze, that is probably what the animals will do.
Anyhow the turtle man had to shell out some big bucks for smuggling.  Given all that you hear about jail, the turtle man would probably need a leather back to survive.
A Guyanese-born man in Antigua had a King Kong in his pants or so he boasted to Customs officers when they noticed the huge bulge and asked him about it.  Eustace Bamfield, a 54-year-old naturalized American citizen, was pulled from his flight and thrown into jail after the unusually large bulge in his pants turned out to be more than a pound of cocaine.
Bamfield was all set to leave Antigua for the United States but as he was walking through the security section at the VC Bird International Airport, he was subjected to a full body search.  According to a media report, “While Bamfield reportedly boasted his bulge was ‘all manhood’ authorities didn’t buy it and he was immediately handed over to the cops stationed at the airport.”
The cocaine in his crotch might have given him an enormous high but it soon became what Guyanese call a “goadee” (severely swollen testicles) and the jail term will be an even heavier load to carry.
Bamfield was not the first man to get caught on this particular front.  The Antiguan media reported that four months ago a 48-year-old Italian man was caught at the airport with 97 grams of cocaine stashed in his crotch.  The stunned Marcello Puggioni did not claim it was his salami or cannelloni. The Magistrate knew any excuse was pure boloney. Puggioni realized too late that jail could make him a fagioli.  So it ended up with the Magistrate making him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Some male smugglers do not only load up the front end but sometimes try a rearguard action.  According to local authorities, 19-year-old Clarell Jamar Colbert was arrested in Florida for possession of crack cocaine. The man had allegedly hidden a vial of the drug in his buttocks.  A drug-sniffing dog discovered the hidden contraband after noting a “narcotic odor” coming from the man’s posterior.
The record for using the male or female private parts and orifices for drug smuggling is probably held by 27-year-old Karin Mackaliunas who was taken into custody by police after a car accident in March.  According to reports, investigators in Pennsylvania suspected she may have been involved in a recent robbery.
After a routine search turned up three bags of heroin in her coat, she later admitted that she had “hidden more heroin in her vagina.”  A cavity search later located “up to 54 bags of heroin, 31 empty bags used to package heroin, 8.5 prescription pills and $51.22.”  The story that the drugs were not heroin but “crack” cocaine was entirely false. It is just malicious people trying to put in, not their two cents worth, but 22 cents.
If you want to hear a really fishy story about smuggling this is it. It is a hilariously told tale, “So you’re a customs officer at Melbourne International Airport, grinding through just another shift of routine security checks and the occasional bomb threat caused by a vibrator. You’ve seen (and cavity searched) pretty much everything humanity has to offer, and therefore think nothing much of the nervous-looking woman approaching your checkpoint.  That is, until you notice her skirt moving in ways no garment should.
It bulges and flexes in strange places, giving you the impression that either the woman has several extra knees or, more likely, that you should totally pull her aside.”  It turns out that the woman, Sharon Naismith, went into the washroom, put on a specially made apron with 15 bags of water in it containing 51 tropical fish, and headed for Customs.  The officers became suspicious when her pelvic area started making flipping noises.  One could call it small scale smuggling but the fishy business cost her $30,000.
The dumbest smugglers are those who are into drugs both as merchandise and as fuel for their stupidity.  Even the high flyers eventually outwit themselves.  A report from Los Angeles stated, “It’s generally a bad idea to fly a plane too close to Air Force One.  It’s especially dumb if you’re carrying drugs. The Atlantic Wire is reporting that as Obama was flying from Orange County to Los Angeles on Thursday, a small Cessna plane—which seems to be a favourite among drug smugglers—came too close to the President’s aircraft and failed to respond to warnings to back off.
F-16s were deployed and the pilot was forced to land. Officials were surprised to find 40 pounds of marijuana on the plane. The pilot, of course, was arrested.”
Another report stated, “In 2008, a pilot of an ‘ultralight’ plane crashed southwest of Tucson. Federal officials suspect that the plane’s cargo, over 350 pounds of marijuana, caused the pilot to clip some electrical lines, causing the crash. Ironically, it seems the pilot, who survived the crash, had all that marijuana, yet still was unable to get high enough to avoid his fate.”
One wonders how high a LIAT pilot was when he got caught with 65 pounds of marijuana in his suitcase.  The man was fined EC$337,000 (about US$125,000) which he paid in cash.  If he had not been caught, that kind of money could have bought him LIAT or even Air Force One.
*Tony Deyal was last seen commenting on the man who was caught trying to smuggle snakes in his pants.  He appeared rattled.  The arresting officer read him his writhes.

---

---