The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - How To Smuggle Drugs Without Getting Caught | Ep. 19

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Johnny Mitchell explains how drugs are smuggled throughout the world, how he smuggled them, and the best ways to smuggle in order to reduce your time spent in prison or get away with it altogether.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're a drug dealer worth assault at all, eventually you're going to get popped. The idea is to stay out of prison for as long as possible. Now, just as a disclaimer, I'm not encouraging illegal activity, and I'm certainly not saying that this is sound legal advice. This is just what I've seen in my years as a trafficker. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell.

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Let's get into it. Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You guys, life doesn't always come with a user manual. I went through a very tough breakup last year. And it was thanks to online therapy through BetterHelp that I was able to work through some of my pain that came from that experience. BetterHelp is the world's largest therapy service. BetterHelp has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online.

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We're talking all about drug smuggling, how it used to be done, how it's done today amongst the big cartels, and down to the little guy. I'm going to talk about my experience. Many of you know I made a lot of money shipping pot through the mail and through other mobile storage units. I want to dig in into that more and talk about the best methods to smuggle drugs, methods I wish I would have employed and the best ways to not get caught. So let's get right into it. So drug smuggling has kind of come full circle. Back in the 60s and 70s, most of the pot, the cocaine, the pills that was smuggled into the U.S. was flown in. Many of you that saw the Roger Reeves episode know that it was guys picking up loads of cocaine and marijuana in Mexico or

Colombia and just flying it into the U.S. and landing at small air strips. That's almost totally extinct as a method of international drug smuggling. There's just too many radars, too many DEA agents watching at all times. I mean, even planes that fly from Colombia to Mexico, let's say, are subject to being shot down by the American military. That's how crazy it is. The only people using plane smuggling nowadays are small South American countries, Olivia, Peru, Colombia, and mostly that's just to transport drugs in between those countries.

And that's because corruption is much more prevalent down there. Therefore, it's easier for countries to kind of make these small hops within their continents. But as far as an international method of shipping drugs, the plane model is basically extinct. Today, it's all about maritime activity. So it's big ships, cargo ships that are carrying loads of different goods, smuggle drugs within those shipping containers, right? That's how product gets moved all over the world. Fishing vessels.

Submarines is a big one. Every other day in the news, you see a Colombian semi-submersible or fully submersible submarine getting caught off the coast of Mexico or all the way as far as Spain. Even luxury yachts. A lot of drug trafficking organizations will charter these fancy boats and in the whole of those yachts, they will be smuggling a load of cocaine.

And in that way, the smuggling has almost come full circle. So smuggling today looks a lot like it did back in the prohibition era when booze that was getting smuggled into the U.S. was getting shipped over from Ireland, England, and Canada. But how does drug smuggling actually work logistically, I mean? How are the drugs loaded onto the ship? How are they unloaded once they make it to the country of consumption? How does drug trafficking within a country work? How do people move drugs across the United States?

How do people make it from Mexico and smuggle it all the way up into Canada? These are things that I experienced, participated in for many, many years. I gained a lot of experience. And these are just some of the ways not only that I chose to smuggle drugs, but I think the best ways of smuggling to avoid getting caught, or if you do get caught, ways that you can reduce the amount of time you're going to spend in prison. So here they go. Let's take a look at how it's done from the highest level all the way down to the individual trafficker like myself.

So at the highest level, in order for the largest cartels in the world to ship drugs internationally, corruption has to be involved. This is actually more important than the kind of vessel that's used to smuggle the drugs. It's paying off the right people. So say the Colombian cartel wants to move a load of cocaine from the coast of Venezuela across the Atlantic to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Most likely what's going to happen is that multiple people in the military in Venezuela are going to be paid off. They're going to be the ones who organize the shipment of Coke across the border from Colombia into Venezuela.

They're going to have the soldiers load the cocaine into probably a shipping vessel and have it set sail across the ocean. And the reasons for that are obvious. It's Venezuela. It's a third world country. It's basically a failed state. Inflation is out of control. the country's falling apart, so the highest levels of the government are up to their ears in corruption and in drug money. But in a very advanced country like the Netherlands, where corruption is not

institutional the way it is in South America, probably what that's going to look like is whatever clan or cartel is receiving the load, they are going to have somebody on the inside working for the port who's going to alert them to the container of cocaine once it arrives. So that could be the Albanians, could be the Irish, whoever. They're going to actually infiltrate somebody within the legitimate port authority of Rotterdam. And that's kind of how corruption works in more advanced first world countries. It's very subtle. For example, when we were down filming in Mexico last month, we met a drug smuggler who said he pays off a U.S. border guard who works at the San Ysidro Crossing, which is the San Diego Tijuana border. He said he pays this border guard

$1,000 a day, $30,000 a month. And all this border guard has to do is once a month, tell this drug trafficker what checkpoint he'll be working at along the border. He'll then give this border guard the car description and the license plate of whatever car they're using to smuggle drugs. And as soon as those cars drive up to this guard's checkpoint, the guard will see it and just wave them on through. That's simple, right? And it's very subtle. And this guard makes almost a half a million bucks a year just by waving through a handful of cars every month. So think about that. $360,000 a year, and that's one guy.

Imagine the total sum of the bribes paid by all of the cartels to American border security. I mean, it's tens of millions of dollars a year. And that doesn't count all the Mexican police and military and politicians that are paid off. The corruption is astronomical. So that's how it looks, basically. It's third world countries. Corruption is institutional, and politicians, military, are all in on the drug trafficking. And in the more advanced countries, it's individuals that get infiltrated by the cartels that are paid out.

That's how large-scale drug trafficking works in a nutshell. But what if you don't have those resources? I mean, I was making a million dollars a year, and I didn't have 360,000 of it to spend on a border guard. how do ordinary drug traffickers smuggle drugs? These are some of the methods I used, and these are the best ways I think now for traffickers, middle class, mom-and-pop drug traffickers to move their product without getting caught

or at least if they do get jammed up, getting the least amount of prison time possible. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. We've said that on this show before. And what that means basically is that in a court of law, if you go before a jury or a judge as a defendant in a drug trafficking case, if you're caught with the shit on you, it's pretty hard to convince them that it don't belong to you. So as a drug smuggler, the most important thing is to create separation between you and your product.

And the idea is if you do get caught or a load gets intercepted and you get arrested, what you want to have is doubt. You want to have enough layers between you and the drugs to create doubt in the minds of the jury, the prosecutor, et cetera. Because in Western societies, that's how the legal system works. You don't have to prove your innocence as a defendant. It is the burden is on the state to prove you guilty. And of course, what reasonable doubt is, is basically just that. If there's any doubt at all that a defendant is guilty,

of something, the jury, by law, must acquit that person. So these are some tips, and I learned a lot through failing, right? And that's why I feel like I'm qualified to share these ideas and these tips with you guys, is because this is the way you do that. Number one is the mail. You guys know from the earliest episodes, that's how I got rich was by shipping pot all over the country using the U.S. mail system and UPS and FedEx. And the mail satisfies the first rule of drug trafficking. Separate yourself from your product. So when I stuff a package filled with pounds of weed or cocaine and I ship it off,

it's separated from me. It's like that joke by comedian Mitch Hedberg. The UPS guy is a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it. And that's exactly right. When I shipped my product to New Jersey or New York, pounds and pounds at a time. I wasn't the guy who delivered it. It was the mailman.

Now, obviously, you can still get caught doing this, right? And people do every day. But the probability, if you're careful, is much lower. So say I'm a drug trafficking organization in New York City, in the Bronx, and I receive heroin and cocaine shipments through the mail from Arizona. This is maybe what I would do. I would actually open up a mail shipment place. I would put it in an LLC under somebody else's name,

and it would be a legitimate business, and we would receive packages that people would come and sign for and walk out with, right? So I would receive my packages of drugs from Arizona to my business, but have it put under a phony name attached to a phony account under that business, and then I would have somebody come in and sign for that package and leave. So therefore, not only are the drugs not shipped to an address that's connected to me, but it's not even under my name.

It's under nobody that's involved in my organization's name. So there's a lot of different ways to hide and conceal what's going on. So therefore, if something goes wrong and I do get busted or jammed up, my lawyer in court is going to have a lot of action. He's going to have a lot of ways to try to point doubt at my culpability. You want to create doubt and separation. And of course, the mail is just great for speed of transport, too. So if I pay UPS an extra $100 to have a package delivered by 10 a.m. the next day,

express next day air, as we used to call it, that means that package has got to be at its destination by 10 a.m. And there's a guarantee on it. And you could track that package all the way from its point of origin to its destination. I was actually talking to some weed traffickers here in Los Angeles. have legitimate grow operations, but obviously they are looking for wholesale markets for their pounds. And what they told me was the new pot route, get this, is Los Angeles weed mailed to Thailand. So weed dispensaries are starting to pop up all over cities in Thailand, and they're murky.

They're still technically illegal, but nobody stops it. And they like good weed over there. So pounds of Los Angeles indoor weed are going for about $2,500 bucks over there. The downsides of shipping through the mail are obviously you can send limited quantity, even five or 10 pounds at a time. It's hard to really build up an empire by shipping drugs through the mail. Now the authorities are cracking down on it too. There's x-ray machines. You have to give your ID now if you ship out a box from FedEx or UPS. So you know, you got to work around that. You have to get fake IDs or you have to pay people willing to put it under their name. So it's getting a little tougher.

There's more drug-sniffing dogs in the sorting facilities where the packages get shipped off to their final destinations. But overall, it's for a low-level trafficker. The mail is by far the best way to do things on a low level. People often ask me, like, how would you sell drugs now in 2022 if you ever got back in the game? What I would do is I would go down to Medellegene. I would link up with my old connects down there in Envigado

from the officeina, and I would buy two kilos of pure cocaine, $4,000, $2,000 a piece. I would box them up. I would pay some girl $100 from the barrio to go deliver it to the DHS office in Medellin with an address bound for Los Angeles, and that package makes it. I would then sell off grams of 100% pure cocaine

for $100 and $120 a shot, and my profit would be like $200,000,000. $1,000 off two kilos, right? And if the box gets picked up, if it gets intercepted at, you know, the FedEx facility in Bogota or wherever, I could see that. I could see it online and I would know, okay, that's a dead package. Don't touch that. The feds are on it. When I was in college at the U of O and Eugene, I dated a young lady and she was half Swedish, half Mexican. And her Mexican side was a little wild. And she told me one day, because she knew what I did. You know, she knew I was a hustler, a drug dealer. She told me that she has some uncles from Mexico who successfully moved a load of cocaine, a large shipment of blow across the border

using long-haul car carriers. That's another great way that drug trafficking organizations move product across land borders. And obviously what her uncle and his crew did was stuff these cars full of cocaine and, you know, pay the driver, whatever he was paid. Probably if they were smart, they used a company that wasn't even associated with theirs. This driver wouldn't have even known what he was carrying. And that's why this method of smuggling

is so great. Because again, what do we talk about? It creates separation. If a driver doesn't even know what he's carrying, if he doesn't even know who owns the cars that are filled with the drugs that he's smuggling across the border, if that truck gets stopped and those drugs get seized, that driver, he doesn't have any information that he could give to authorities. And this works for international smuggling. You can also use this method if you just need to smuggle drugs across state lines within the U.S. So say you've got 50 pounds of pot you need to move from Los Angeles to Missouri. You can go buy a car at auction if you want, a cheap beater car.

You can stuff it to the gills with your pot. You can then go down to a long-haul truck carrier. I've looked it up. Most of these places don't even require you to put down an ID. You can pay them. They'll haul your car over to Missouri. And now you've just moved 50 pounds of weed across the country, basically, without your car ever touching the freeway.

Kind of like shipping product through the mail. Smuggling drugs using long-haul car carriers. It's a game of numbers. There's so many different long-haul car carriers moving at all times in the United States. There's just too much that the authorities could ever track down all of it, right? The idea is to get your product lost in the sauce of commerce. And again, separation. There's many layers that you can create around you and your product by using this method.

Another great smuggling technique is rental car companies. So say I'm a drug smuggler and I live in Seattle, Washington, and I am tasked with moving drugs across the border into Vancouver, B.C. That's a great market for dope, especially for cocaine. If a kilo costs 30 or 35 grand in Seattle, you're going to be able to get 60 or 65 in Vancouver. So what I would do is I would actually open up a small car rental business. Again, just like a trafficker receiving drugs through the mail, he opens up a postal annex or a post office shop. I would go buy a bunch of cheap cars, fix them up, start renting them out legitimately. And I'd probably hide a couple of kilos in the engine or line the panel of their cars with it.

And I wouldn't tell them what they were carrying. I would just say, hey, here's your money. This is where I want you to leave the car. Better yet, what I would do is I would find a mule who didn't even know they were a mule. Let's say a legitimate person looked up my car rental place online, and they saw something they liked, and I see that they want to take the car to Vancouver for the weekend. Well, I would happily rent them one of my vehicles. And inside that vehicle, we would have all of the drugs hidden away.

I would then take a spotter car. I would follow them across the border to wherever they ended up in Vancouver. I would steal the car, and then I would strip the car down and take the drugs out. I know that sounds like a big pain in the ass, but trust me, drug traffickers will go to these lengths. So you see what we just did right there. We got somebody to smuggle the drugs without even knowing they were smuggling them. And the beauty of that is the border guards, the people who work at customs, TSA, they're trained to look for human behavior. They're looking at people crossing the border, profiling them, but also looking out for signs of nervousness, right?

But if I don't even know I'm smuggling the drugs, I'm going to be as calm as ever. That's why in my greatest drug trafficking fantasies, I would do something like this. I would have a small rental car company, and I would trick people into mulling drugs, And of course for drug trafficking organizations and big cartels, one of the more common ways to move dope across land borders is by using commercial trucks. So Choppo was a guy who kind of revolutionized that. Back in the 90s, he took advantage of the new NAFTA laws, which allowed for really easy cross-border cargo transport to happen from Mexico to the US.

And he started taking Colombian cocaine bricks and hiding them en masse inside of jars of jalapinos and loading them inside of commercial trucks. And this is what allowed Sina Loa to start moving Colombian dope faster than any other cartel, and it kind of built them up into the organization that they are today. So they're taking Colombian cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, whatever it is, and smuggling it inside of avocado containers. And the drivers who drive these shipments across the border and have to pass through customs, I would bet a lot of the times don't even know that they're carrying dope. A lot of these long-haul commercial trucking companies take multiple different products from different distributors and pack them into one truck. So I would be really

astonished if the cartel would give up this kind of sensitive information to just a regular Mexican truck drive. So you see that in the news all the time. Large commercial trucks get popped at the border carrying all sorts of drugs up from Mexico. The drivers of those trucks, of course, always get arrested. Sometimes they get prosecuted, sometimes they don't. But what's for certain is that the kingpins and the traffickers who put those drugs onto the trucks are virtually untouchable. And we'll go back to it again. Separation. Separating yourself from the drugs you're moving. It's kind of like on a grander scale what I was doing by putting drugs in the mail and shipping them out. I was creating a barrier between me and my product and having a third party

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Let me tell you a quick little story. So last summer I was down in Mexico with a buddy, and we went to a pharmacy as we do when we're in Mexico, and we bought a shitload of Viagra pills. I mean, way over the amount that could be used for personal consumption. And the next day, as we were in line to cross the border back into San Diego, It dawned on me that they were probably going to ask us if we had any contraband or if we were bringing back anything. And I didn't want any entanglements, even if, you know, Viagra's not illegal.

I didn't want any taxes. I didn't want to have to fill out any paperwork. I didn't want to get the car stripped and taken to a secondary search. And it just would have been a pain of the ass. So in my mind, as we're getting closer to the window where we were going to talk to the border guard, I convinced myself that we were doing nothing wrong, that we were carrying nothing back, and that we had absolutely no reason to worry. I believed my own lie.

So as we pulled up to the window, I'm in the driver's seat, and it's a female border guard, and I am just as relaxed as ever. I'm almost bored, right? This felt like being at the DMV. That's the energy I was giving off. Not somebody who's got anything to hide, certainly. And she looked at me and she looked at my friend, two men in their 30s coming back from Mexico. And she was rude, as most border guards are.

She asked for our passports. We gave them over to her. Her next question was, are you guys bringing anything back with you? And I just went, nope. And it was so casual. It was so blasé. It was almost like I gave off an air like she was inconveniencing me with these stupid questions. Of course we're not carrying anything over the border.

We're too legitimate men. we don't have time for these fucking games, right? That was that kind of response that I gave to her. And she just gave us back our passports. Didn't even run anything. She didn't type anything into the computer. And she goes, okay, we'll have a nice day. And after we pulled away, my friend looked at me and he was like,

that was some of the most incredible bullshit I have ever seen. And it's true. I stunned even myself. And I'm a good liar. But that was some next level psychological warfare that I had just given to this federal agent. And obviously, I would have felt differently if we had had a trunk full of heroin, not Viagra, right? I would have been a lot more nervous. But my point is, if you're smuggling something, you have to forget about that. You have to be totally convinced that you are

a civilian just trying to get where you're going. And the police, the authorities, whatever, they're just there to keep you safe. You're not hiding anything. And that's why creating a backstory, having plausible deniability, I'm just renting a car. I'm renting a car and I'm going to Vancouver, BC from Seattle, Washington. I have no idea what this kilo of Coke is doing in the engine. I didn't put it there. I'm just renting the car. So if you were an individual smuggler, you could do this, you could go pull that car rental trick yourself and drive it up into Canada. Right? Now, just as a disclaimer, I'm not encouraging illegal activity. and I'm certainly not saying that this is sound legal advice.

This is just what I've seen in my years as a trafficker, people who beat their cases by creating doubt around their guilt. Remember, we're thinking worst case scenario here. We're thinking like lawyers. If I am smuggling drugs and I get caught, worst case scenario, how can I beat the case in court or create enough doubt to where the prosecution is going to want to give me a good plea deal? Because remember, prosecutors are scared to lose, and if they think they have a chance of losing,

they're going to try to offer you much less time than they normally would. I remember when I was a kid, my father served jury duty on a drug case, kind of like what we've been describing. There was a dude who was driving a car up from California into Oregon, and he got pulled over by the state troopers. They brought out a dog, and they found a couple of kilos of dope hidden in the wheel well. So they arrested this guy. They charged him with drug trafficking in state court, I believe. And this guy took the case all the way to the box. The car wasn't registered to his name.

He had a backstory. He swore that he borrowed it from a friend. And, you know, the Sadori sounds sketchy, right? Like, the guy was probably, in all reality, guilty. But he had a good lawyer, and the lawyer said, you know what? I think we can go to bat on this. So they took it all the way to the box. And the trial stretched like two weeks, I think.

think. And this guy stuck to his story so much that by the end, my dad said the jury was so tired of deliberating that they just said, fuck it, let's call this one a day. And they gave this guy a verdict of not guilty. That's what reasonable doubt can do for you. That's the brilliance and also the downfall of the Western judicial system, right? It's very imperfect. It's basically saying we need to find without a shred of doubt that this person is guilty. If there's any doubt they're guilty, they ain't guilty. And remember, if you're in this game long enough, if you're a drug dealer worth assault at all, eventually you're going to get popped. The idea is to stay out of prison for as long as possible. And once you do take your fall, to get the best

deal possible. The way you do that is by creating doubt and creating separation between you and your illegal product. And with the proper planning and organization, and by using barriers, these fake businesses, fake rental car company, fake postal shipping business, long haul trucking business, these are the ways to ship your product en masse without actually touching it. And thus giving you the best chance of surviving the game and minimizing the amount of time that you might spend in prison. All right you guys, that's been today's episode. Thank you so much for the support.

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