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Women caught smuggling drugs in hair weaves
(The Smoking Gun) The suspiciously towering hairdos of two women who had just flown into New York City from Guyana prompted federal agents to conduct searches that revealed each traveler was carrying more than two pounds of cocaine sewn into her weave, according to court records.
Makeeba Graham
After arriving early Sunday morning at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Caribbean Airlines Flight 526 from Guyana, the women appeared fidgety and extremely nervous during routine questioning by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.
In a U.S. District Court affidavit, a federal agent noted that Kiana Howell “appeared as if she was going to faint” and “her carotid artery was pumping.” During a pat-down, an investigator felt “an unusual bulge beneath the defendant’s hair weave.” When asked about the bulge, Howell claimed that it was “part of her hair weave.”
When asked to remove the weave, Howell said that she could not “because she had a package that was sewn into it.” Howell stated that her boyfriend in Guyana “told her to bring that package under her hair weave to the United States for him.”
While claiming that she did not know the package’s contents, Howell admitted, “It was not a good thing.”
Howell’s weave was subsequently dismantled at a medical facility at JFK, where agents removed a rounded package wrapped with clear plastic. Inside was nearly a kilo of cocaine – 996 grams. After Howell’s arrest, she told investigators she had been promised US$7500 to “smuggle the package under her hair weave.”
The second traveler, Makeeba Graham, “had an unusually high and bulky hair style,” according to an affidavit sworn by Department of Homeland Security Agent Jeffrey Fidler. After a CBP agent “felt a hard object on the defendant’s head,” Graham, a 33-year-old Harlem resident, was “asked to remove her hair weave.”
After Graham claimed that she could not remove the weave because it “was sewn to her natural hair,” she was transported to the same medical facility at JFK, where the weave was partially dismantled. Inside, agents discovered a rounded package containing more than a kilo of cocaine – 1,046 grams.
Kiana Howell
Howell and Graham were named Monday in separate felony criminal complaints charging them with narcotics smuggling. Graham was freed on US$100,000 bond, while Howell remains in custody in advance of a detention hearing scheduled for this afternoon.
And in Guyana the police arrested Michelle Thomas, called Lovely, yesterday afternoon, in connection with the same drug bust. Her relatives claimed that one of the women arrested may have had Thomas’s passport which they believed was stolen by another relative.
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