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MARCHING POWDER

body expels them, but they have to be pretty certain for it to get to that point. Aside from the physical discomfort, the main disadvantage of swallowing is that you can only transport a small amount; six or seven hundred grams each run, or a kilogram at the very most.

At the same time, you shouldn’t get too greedy in this business; the more stuff you carry, the more space it takes up and the harder it is to hide. I learned that lesson the hard way when I lost forty-five kilos of cocaine in Brazil. But for this run I had exactly five kilos, which was the perfect amount; it was enough to make good money, but I had compressed it so that it was very small and almost impossible to find.

I had done this by dividing the five kilos into four equally sized lots and wrapping them in a layer of cling plastic – the type people use for keeping sandwiches fresh. I then placed each of these bundles in a friend’s machine press, which had a handle that you turned in order to screw the top down against the base. I tightened it with all my strength, and then re-tightened it at five-minute intervals. The press completely flattened everything in between, so that the cocaine was as thin as cardboard. After half an hour, I unscrewed the press and folded these sheets over a few times and trimmed them with a knife so that the dimensions were exactly right for the compartments they would go into. Then I pressed them for another half an hour. There were about seventy grams left over at the end. I decided to make them into balls for swallowing. It wasn’t much of an insurance policy – that amount would hardly cover the expenses of my trip, let alone the cost of the five kilos – but if I got caught and was sent to prison, I figured I could use it to bribe my way out.

The next thing to consider is the smell. Sniffer dogs have a sense of smell a hundred thousand times stronger than humans do. And not only are they taught how to find the merchandise, they actually want to find it. The way they train those dogs in South America is by getting them addicted to cocaine. Dogs aren’t used in every airport, and there aren’t enough of them to check every single bag on every single flight in every single hour, but if there is a coke-addicted hound with a big, sensitive nose anywhere near your merchandise, you can be sure it will smell even a tiny molecule of the stuff. So, you have to do absolutely everything you can to stop the smell getting out, just in case.