Tampa Bay Criminal Defense Lawyer - Cocaine Seizure

By Nicholas Dorsten, Esq.

From the St. Petersburg times site, a short blurb about a rather large cocaine seizure...

U.S. authorities intercepted a submarinelike craft carrying roughly $180 million of cocaine off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, the Coast Guard said Monday.

Semisubmersible vessels are regularly used to smuggle drugs along Central America's Pacific Coast. U.S. and Honduran authorities said last week's cocaine seizure was the first time they had intercepted one of the vessels in Caribbean waters.

With help from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection airplane on patrol, a Coast Guard cutter found the self-propelled sub on July 13 off Honduras' sparsely populated province of Gracias a Dios, near the Nicaraguan border.

The fiberglass craft sank during the interdiction, though U.S. authorities were able to detain its five-member crew and recover some of the drugs on board, Coast Guard officials in Miami were quoted as saying.

The Coast Guard, FBI dive teams and the Honduran navy made multiple searches for the sunken sub, until the crew of a Coast Guard cutter found it July 26, the Coast Guard reported.

An FBI dive team recovered nearly 22,000 pounds of cocaine worth roughly $180 million from the sub, the Coast Guard said.

The drugs and the sub's crew will be turned over to U.S. law enforcement. The case remains under investigation.

Semisubmersible crafts, which partly remain above the surface of the water, are typically built in Colombia and are less than 100 feet in length, U.S. officials said. The vessels can carry four or five crew members and travel distances up to 5,000 miles. They are designed to rapidly sink when detected to make it difficult for law enforcement to recover the illegal drugs aboard.

Have you been arrested on trafficking in cocaine charges? Then the Pinellas, Florida based Blake & Dorsten, P.A. Pinellas criminal defense lawyers are at your service.

For more information, or to speak directly with experienced Pinellas County criminal defense attorneys, please contact the law firm of BLAKE AND DORSTEN, P.A. at 727.286.6141 or email the defense lawyers at: info@blakedorstenlaw.com