Stuff You Should Know - How Customs Works

Episode Date: September 9, 2010

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Opposite me is one Charles W. Chuck Tran Bryant. Nice callback? Yeah. Chuck Tran? Callback, yeah. The thing auditioned and won the role. You've never acted like auditioned for anything, have you?

Sure, no. I used to be in children's theater. Really? Yeah. Interesting. I've never done that, except my audition with you, of course, for this spot. That went really well. That was so good. So you're so kind. You're too kind. You're generous. Gruffs, Chuck. That's what actors all would say about each other. You're so generous. So, Chuck. Yes. Move on. Sure. Okay. If you've ever had a hankering for African monkey meat, I can tell you where in Europe to go. Get it. Really? Yeah. You can go to Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport. And they have monkey meat? They have bush meat of all kinds, apparently. Bush meat? Bush meat is what it's called. Bush meat is another term for any kind of wild game, or unregulated game. You can make the case of

that livestock that doesn't pass through any kind of regulatory body. Sure. It's considered bush meat, but typically bush meat is a bush man goes out into the wild, shoots a monkey through the head with an arrow, and chops it up, and there's your meat. You can also do that with crocodile. Sure. You can do that with river hog, porcupine, whatever. Gross. It is a little gross, but there was a study. I guess somebody noticed that there was a lot of bush meat coming through Paris. And so these wildlife officials got together with the customs agency there. And over 17 days, they searched 134 passengers randomly, I guess, but they were probably like, oh, you're coming out of Africa, right? Right. And they found that half of them were carrying

bush meat in their luggage. Wow. Unrefrigerated luggage. Like you opened up their duffel bag, and there was a lot of monkey right there. As opposed to the refrigerated luggage that you like. Right. Well, I mean, you would like to think that they would at least rig a some dry ice, something. Exactly. Yeah. No. That's nasty. It is a little nasty, but that, my friend, is part and parcel for a day's work for a customs official. Is it not? It can be. For sure. Let's talk specifically about US customs for a second. Where did it come from, Chuck? Where did this idea originate? Where, Chuck? Well, you know, dude, I know everyone likes to think that our founding fathers were just all about like everybody having freedom

and the government, no one owing government money for anything. But that's not true at all. George Washington and the founding fathers in the first Congress actually said, you know what? But we are a struggling nation and we need to raise some dough by way of tariffs on, how about imported goods? Right. And so they said, sure. So that was the birth of customs. Right. Actually, we can point to the very day that it was born. The Tariff Act of July 4th, 1789, was passed on July 31st, 1789. And it did exactly what you just said, right? Like we said, if you're carrying stuff into the country, we get the tax you on it just because it's originating outside of the country, right? And then you have ports of entry were set up.

Right. Yeah. Like Savannah. Yeah. Yeah. And so people come in, they're funneled in through these ports and they're charged dough, right? Yeah. Big time. They actually, I was staggered by this. The US customs for like 100 years supported the entire government infrastructure. Yeah. By 1835, we had zero debt thanks to customs revenue. Yeah. And even today, as far as I know, the customs agency is second only to the IRS in generating revenue for the United States, right? Yeah. I think I didn't get a hard number, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of about $30 billion a year that they bring in $1 billion a year. That's like almost what we bring in for discovery. Yeah. Close. Yeah. Originally Chuck, the customs service did a whole lot of stuff,

including census, veterans affairs. Yeah. And the National Institute of Standards and Technology was actually born out of the customs service. They're the ones who came up with our system of weights and standards. Yeah. Because they had to come up with a way to describe stuff that they were seizing or taxing or that kind of thing. And actually, I wrote a really cool post on the metric system. I don't know if you ever read it, but that's where I learned that. It was really cool. It's a cool post. And the Coast Guard, too, was birthed from the customs office. That's right. Jerry thinks you were hilarious. Anytime I'm mispronouncing some perfect titters. Yeah. So Chuck, the customs service did all this stuff, spawned all these extra agencies,

and then pretty much stayed the same for a while until 2003 when George W. was in office. The customs service became U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Yeah. Part of the Homeland Security Office Department. Yeah. Which makes sense, I guess, in a way. It does. Unless you have like a comprehensive immigration agency. Right. Good point. And so pretty much their main job is to control or oversee the flow of goods from outside the borders and inside the borders out. Right. Right. They are this thin blue line between free trade and total anarchy. That's a good point. Thanks, man. So they seize contraband. They process people. They process cargo. They enforce stuff as laws as disparate as bush meat importation. Yeah. To intellectual

property. Right. Like, if you get caught with some, you know, burn DVDs that are clearly pirated, you're going to get in trouble. And you would have gotten caught by the customs department, right? Yeah. All in all, they're enforcing about 400 different provisions of law. Right. Yeah. And they like to refer to themselves as the oldest law enforcement agency in the United States. And I think the duty that scares me, and we're going to say duty a lot in this podcast, we should probably just get it over with. Yeah. Not D-O-O-D-Y. Duty. D-U-T-Y. Duty. Right. Right. Right. Just want to clear that up. Yeah. And Chuck, they oversee what's called exodus cases. Yeah, what's that? Exodus cases are, I guess, that's kind of like broken arrow or something

like that. It's if you have weapons, weapons technology, weapons intelligence, anything you can destroy the US with or attack the US with, customs is on that. And they deem those exodus cases. And those are big time. Yeah. I just saw a guy. I didn't look into it too heavily, but like in the news this week, there's some custom sting operation where this big businessman was selling like some sort of batteries that help a missile launch to Iran or something. I don't know. I need to look it up, but big sting going down. Wow. Exodus type. Wow. That is exodus. It is. I guess if the urban legend about Saddam Hussein importing playstations to use the very sophisticated chips in his guided missile system. I never heard of that one. Yeah. Really? Yeah. When I think the

first PlayStation came out, that was an urban legend around it. Yeah. That's a silly one. So, Chuckers, like we said at the basis of all this, it's the customs service in any country is charged with keeping an eye on the flow of goods across the borders, right? And one of the reasons why is because as we saw George Washington and the founding fathers were hip to the idea that being government and all, you can push around guys who are importers, exporters, right? Yeah. And say, Hey, give us a cut. Well, yeah, the idea is kind of twofold. It's one is because, you know, America wants you to buy American goods. But a lot of times, most times goods from other countries, you can buy cheaper. Yeah. So they say, All right, well, if you're going to buy

something from over there, we want it wants you to support America. But if you're going to do that, then we want to get our piece of the pie. Right. Or they will a charge duty on, say, sombreros in Mexico, right? That's a good one. So there, so you can get a sombrero here, but you're going to pay like $17 for it. Right. The same sombrero, virtually the same except it was manufactured in Mexico. Mexico is a bad example after NAFTA was passed. But let's stick with it, shall we? Okay. You can get that one for two bucks. Well, the government's going to impose a duty on it. So maybe ultimately, once you pay the duty and how much you're being charged for the sombrero, right, you're actually paying $19 for the Mexican one, where you can get the $17 one here in the

U.S. So you might as well just get that. Well, yeah, but that's if you're shipping like large, like there's duty free exemptions. We should go over that real quick. Yeah, duty free, explain it. Duty free is in the United States, you get a $400 exemption if you come back into the country from anywhere except a Caribbean basin country or the Virgin Islands, Guam or American Samoa. So if you come in from Europe, let's say, you're allowed to bring $400 worth of stuff in, and you declare it and... $400 worth of bush meat? A bush meat. And then after that, you have to start paying your tariff on that. Okay. And they have specific outlines for like tobacco. You can bring 200 cigarettes or 100 cigars as part of that under $400. Okay. And alcohol,

of course, you can bring in one liter of booze duty free. Nice. And so you can bring in a carton of cigarettes and a liter of booze. Yeah. That's a party right there. You got it. And you know, a few cigars as long as you're not Cubans, which we'll get to. But I did find this interesting. Fine art and antiques that are at least 100 years old are not subject to tax. Really? No matter. I mean, it could be like a $10,000 painting and no duty. What about a $12,000 painting? No duty. Huh. Ask me about folk art. What about folk art, Chuck? Duty. Really? Yep. Just fine art. Folk art and handicrafts. The Custom Service has an opinion on art and they've deemed folk art as crappy. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe not. Or maybe they think it's so great it should be taxed. No. I don't think that's...

No. No. Have you seen folk art before? Yeah. I had a... I should say this real quick. When I was living in LA, I went to a show with Emily, one of those shows where they have folk art and I thought that, wow, what a scam. Yeah. It's like, I could... I should do this. And I came up with an idea to drum up buzz by calling over the course of like a year or different places and saying, hey, do you have any art by Chuck Bryant, this artist? And to the point where they'd heard this name and then at one point I would enter these places and say, hey, I'm Chuck Bryant. I didn't know if you want to cover some of my... carry some of my art. Nice. They'd be like, well, we've heard of you. Let me see that piece of tin that you slung paint on. That's actually a brilliant idea, Chuck. Somebody

should go do that. Why didn't you ever do it? Because it's fraud and it's not nice or ethical. I don't know that that's fraud in the art world. No. No. Okay. I think that's just normal business. You know I didn't do it? Why? I was lazy. Yeah. I got you. So that's duty-free. That is very odd. Did you find out why folk art is? No. Just that it is. No. We could probably call and get an answer of that. You want to call right now? No. Okay. So we covered duty-free, right? Yeah. And I guess we should talk about big business because there's two different kinds. There's people, there's businesses that ship in and import tons of stuff at ports of call and then there's UNI getting off an airplane. Well, we should say also that with duty-free, the exemption applies to the importer,

not the customer, right? Right. So if we come back into the States or yeah, if we come back into the States and we say, I could use a leader of Scotch and a carton of Dunn Hills. Right. So we pick them up and then we continue on into the United States. We don't pay any duty. But if we do the same thing at Charles de Gaulle Airport and then come into the United States, we pay a duty because we're still importing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you are actually an importer that you're classified as an importer. Yeah. So big business, Josh, millions of dollars worth of goods each year is imported and are imported and they kind of keep track of it the same way as they do with individuals. They like, they can't inspect every single thing or every single person. No, no way.

So they'll just kind of pick and choose. I'll open up a cargo container and say, I'm going to look at these seven boxes in container eight. Right. And then the guy crosses his fingers that the cocaine is not in those, you know, cargo holds. Right. Exactly. And that's, that's a deterrent in and of itself, the randomness of it all. Right. Yes. But at the same time, that method means that tons and tons and tons of illicit substances seep through our rather porous border. And it's not, it's not just with big business too. It's individual travelers as well. Like some countries use actual, you know, chance. They leave it to chance who gets searched. So they have people passing through their borders at their airports, press a random number generator and

a certain number will trigger a green light, which means you keep going. Another will trigger a red light. That means you're going to be, your rectum is about to be probed. Yeah. Or instinct, which is my favorite when the, they count on the border agent to be the customs agent to be so skilled that they can like eyeball you and say, that guy has something stuffed in a place that we should check. Either that or the GDP of that country is so low that they don't have enough money for a random number generator. Yeah. They rely on instinct, which comes with the salary. Yeah. That's a good point. Chuck, we talked about illicit substances. Sure. Cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. Marijuana.

Edwin. Sure. So like we were just saying, this stuff is coming through all the time and customs is aware of this. I don't know if you knew this or not, but they know that there are drugs coming across the border. And they have equipment at their disposal, right? At the ports, we talked about the random number generator. The U.S. is fairly flush with cash as far as customs go. So we actually have a truck size X-rays that you can literally, they're big enough to drive a truck through at the U.S. Mexican border. I've done that. Have you really? Yeah. You've driven through the X-ray before. Wow. What's it like? Were you inside? What do you mean? Yeah. Dangerous. Well, I mean, it's the same as walking through an X-ray. Which is pretty dangerous, but this is

like a truck size X-ray. Yeah. Good point. And really think about that. Sure. Yeah. I've been over and across the border quite a few times. I got you. Never carried anything illicit. That's very smart. Don't you worry. Yeah. We also have Black Hawk helicopters, citation jets at our disposal. Cigarette boats. Yes. For kitchen cigarette smugglers. Yes, no. Those are the super fast boats like Miami Vice. Oh, yeah. Because apparently the drug smugglers, they come in like undercover of the night really fast. Yeah. And so the Coast Guard works in concert with the DEA. It's a joint effort and customs agents. It's not a joint effort. No, it is. I just thought that was a funny pun. Yeah. So they're looking for, you know, bad things. And I looked up,

you know, they mentioned in here that people actually smuggle things in on their person. They'll go through customs instead of trying to smuggle it around customs. And I thought they should have a TV show called Smugglers Do The Darnest Things. Because have you ever seen, I mean, I know you hear about these stories from time to time, but the way that these people try and get drugs in the country, it's crazy. In their bodies, they remember the guy that made a cast, a foot cast out of cocaine? No, I hadn't heard of that one. I think we talked about them on the webcast. It was either that or we talked about they made a dinette set like the plates in the bowls were all made of cocaine.

It's crazy. There was the, that was 20 kilos of coke, by the way, for the dinnerware. Wow. One thing they'll do is they'll put it in a condom and feed it to their snake, their pet snake. Yeah. And then smuggle the snake in, which I guess is easier than smuggling drugs in. I don't know, that seems a lot. I wonder if people, I wonder if the average customs agent is afraid of snakes like any other person. Yeah, maybe so. And they figured that out. Frozen sharks. I saw where some, I think it was Cambodia. They had like 40 frozen sharks and they were stuff full of drugs. Wow. And then the sad ones, like the, when they smuggle them inside the dogs, liquid heroin inside those puppies. Remember that was a few years ago. And then this yellow lab had

like $30,000 worth of cocaine in its belly one time when they were smuggling this dog in. It's a bad dog. He's a good dog, bad people. Jerry's laughing again. So how would you stop that, though, in an airport, let's say? Well, again, there's the randomness of the whole thing serves as a deterrent into intuition, as you said. And dogs, good dogs, not ones that are drug smuggling bad dogs, but the kind that tattle on drug smuggling bad dogs. Good dogs, Beagle specifically, are good, apparently not just for illicit drugs, but especially for agricultural products. Apparently they're fine tuned to sniff those out. Really? Yeah. And bombs, of course. Right. Which has nothing to do with the customs. I was actually in, I guess, Atlanta.

I don't know where I was coming back from, but there was this cute little Beagle who walked up to this woman and just sat down and looked up at her, and this customs guy was like, man, will you please come with me? Really? And turned out she had fruit on her. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you should go ahead and mention that, then. Well, it's more of a threat than you would think, right? Absolutely. There's apparently a guy in the late 80s who brought a piece of fruit, one piece of fruit, back from the Mediterranean, and it was infested with Mediterranean fruit flies. Yeah. And it contaminated and destroyed millions of dollars worth of crops in California that year. That's crazy. One piece of fruit. Have you ever driven into California?

Yeah, I've always flown in. Yeah, you got to stop. They check your car. It's a real bummer, too, because when you make the Vegas to California trip, you're coming back from Vegas and all you want to do is get back to your house and sleep. I'm sure. And you got to stop at this. It's always backed up for miles, and it's the fruits of agriculture stop. Really? Yeah. No. And they asked, they either ask you to, do you have any fruits or vegetables or seeds, or they just eyeball you in your car and will wave you through or say stop. They were lying in a wish and see if you like a pear smuggler? Yeah, I was getting nervous. I don't know why. It's just fruit. The drug dogs, everything. They always make me nervous. And I never, of course, I don't have like

cocaine strapped in my belly, but it just makes me nervous. No, I think that's pretty typical. I think they make everybody nervous. It's like white shirt. Because you know you're being scrutinized, you know? Right. And nobody feels comfortable being scrutinized, right? Or maybe it's the t-shirt that don't scrutinize me t-shirt. I have one. Right. I don't have drugs on me. Dogs also get taken on to planes, Chuck. I thought this was kind of cool. It's very round about, but it makes sense. They'll take a dog on to a plane to sniff around after everyone's disembarked. And if somebody had drugs on him or her, he or she would have left some sort of trace on that seat. Right. So the dog will like say, this seat right here, they'll look up on the flight

manifest, who is sitting there, find them, and then take them to be thrown in prison. It was Josh Clark. The black ghost of the sky. Right. The other cool thing, too, that we didn't mention, was the electro vacuum device. It's like a handheld dust buster, super dust buster sort of, but it analyzes particles in the air. So if you have cocaine packed in your suitcase, in theory, there's probably some like residue floating in the air. And these things will sniff that out. Well, it's like poop when you smell poop. It's an odorant. It's an actual poop molecule that you're interacting with. Same thing. Yeah. That's very good. You just winked at me. What else we got here? Oh, money. That's a big deal. That is a big one. Cash. You're not allowed

to take more than $10,000 in cash out of the country. But I would suspect that if you had $9,999, then you're probably a little suspicious. I don't know that for sure. Or maybe that happens a lot and you're not suspicious. What do you think? I think if you're a penny over $10,000, they know it. Okay. I think if you get anywhere near it, or if you declare $10,000, they check you. Okay. I never, I mean, I never have more than like eight bucks on me anywhere I go. So yeah, I've never had $10,000 in cash on me ever. No. Probably never will. Of course not. Chuck, you mentioned art. Customs agents are also on high alert for antiquities. Yeah. Including once you remember when we invaded Iraq, there was a huge cultural ransacking. Their museums were getting

looted. Yeah. I mean, you know, ancient stuff was just being moved out of Iraq. Yeah. Right. Once it's in, I guess, US borders, there's that doesn't necessarily mean you're out of the woods. There was the example of customs finding a thousand year old Chinese sculpture that had been stolen from a tomb in 1994, turning up on a Christie's auction catalog. I guess they monitor these and then cross-reference them. And they found that it was going to be auction contacted. Christie said, hey, we're going to be taking that and give it back to China. Right. So that's that's something. Yeah. And this new story I pulled from just a couple of days ago in Bulgaria. Yeah. They had a border check between Kalatina and Serbia. They discovered four artifacts

from third and second century BC and first century AC that were wrapped in napkins at the bottom of the suitcase. And the cows like, oh, those are just trinket gifts for my family that are thousands of years old. So busted. Yeah. Is he busted, busted? They didn't believe him. No, they didn't believe him. And they did some checking and they haven't like nothing has turned up missing for museums or anything yet, but I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of it. Gotcha. Lastly, Chuck, we were talking about bush meat. You were. You also, you can't bring dog meat into the US. That's a good thing, especially after 2000 when the US passed the Dog and Cat Protection Act, which is the most adorable act we've ever passed. I think it is, but sad that we needed that. Yeah.

Well, not every country's, you know, they don't look at dogs necessarily the way we do. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, some countries look at dogs the way we look at monkeys is like meat. You know, we prize them for their fur. Yeah, true. Kind of stuff. I didn't think about that. Oh, another thing too, it's not always illegal stuff per se like Cuban cigars. Sometimes it's just, there's like an embargo, a trade embargo. That's a really good example. But I mean, don't you regard Cuban cigars in much the same way you would drugs too, just because it has that stamp of forbiddenness on it. It's, it is, it seems like highly illegal. Yeah. You know, I'm on the internet. I've heard that you can and like they send you the cigars and then like a week later in

a different package, they send you the bands, the bands. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard of that. I wouldn't know. I know you wouldn't. After that, like Switzerland or Sweden, you can buy them from something like that. Well, if you want to know more about customs, we have a lot of articles on the side about it. I think if you just type in customs in the search bar at howstuffworks.com, it's going to bring up probably all sorts of stuff. Things for Christmas, illegal border crossings, that kind of stuff. Yeah, there's one on US customs in particular. And I said search bar, right? Which as everyone knows is the automatic trigger for listener mail, right? Yes. Okay. Josh, this one struck us both pretty, pretty well here from Sergeant Walker in Afghanistan. Yeah,

this is cool. This was awesome. We love hearing from our men and women, service men and women over there putting their lives at risk. And this is a good one. Hello guys, my name is Sergeant John Walker. I'm with the 103rd Special Ops Division in Afghanistan. I cannot give you a more descriptive location, he says. My platoon and I protect the surrounding areas near schools so that children may achieve a well-rounded education. My life is not easy, but one thing makes it all the better. Your podcast is the thing that keeps me going strong out here. Every podcast keeps me wanting more and the next one comes out and so forth. I always have my iPod on listening to you guys and some of my platoon asked what I was listening to all the time. So I turned them onto it and now

there are at least 100 guys who use my computer to download your podcast. How cool is that? It's cool, but it doesn't stop there. No, it doesn't. Like I said, with the children in the school, although some speak poor English, most speak the local dialect of Farsi. My friend and I have learned a little bit of Farsi and actually translate your podcast for the older children to be able to understand it. We don't do some like the Large Hadron Collider, but more simple ones that they can understand and that we can translate. We are expecting care packages soon and I asked my family for a camera so I could share all of our happiness with you. I wish I had something I could give back to you guys and clearly, Sergeant Walker, what you give us is mind and cool emails and cool

emails. Yes. So we wrote him back and he's a very cool guy and he's still over there and he's still safe. This came in a little bit ago. Yeah, pretty cool. So good luck to you, sir. Good luck, Sergeant Walker. Right? Yes. And if you have a cool email about translating our podcast into some other language to help other people, we want to know about it. Bet we don't get any more. If you have one though, or if you just want to say hi or something like that, you can email Chuck and me at StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is

the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's Fortnite weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and Fortnite into a winter wonderland with new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle course, ice skating, hidden holiday gifts and more. Look out for upcoming special events from

your favorite artists and podcasters all month along with scavenger hunts and new how fan are huge challenges. So embrace the holidays at iHeartland in Fortnite. Head to iHeartRadio.com