Al Pacino’s washed face emerges from the foam of the waves. Some shells hang there. The image of the American actor, in his role as a trafficker in Scarfacebathed for several weeks in the waters of the Atlantic, printed on twenty-five bales of cocaine, before washing up on a beach on the island of Oléron (Charente-Maritime), on November 15, 2023.
Such an arrival, whose market value is estimated at 1.3 million euros, is no longer unusual: it testifies to a strategy of criminal groups that has become common on the French coasts. Called “drop-off”, this technique consists of dropping cocaine from South America at sea so that a second boat can come and collect it before considering its marketing on dry land.
In total, thirty-six discoveries of bales of cocaine brought by the sea were recorded by the Anti-Narcotics Office during the year 2023. This is the first time that this census has been carried out, as these strandings have followed one another at an unprecedented pace, essentially from the tip of Brittany to Pas-de-Calais: one stuck on the ladder of a wind turbine off the coast of Fécamp (Seine-Maritime) in November 2023; another requiring the closure of the Saint-Jouin-Bruneval beach (Seine-Maritime) to summer visitors at the beginning of July; or these twenty-nine sports bags, attached to life jackets, found along the Cotentin coast (Channel), for a total of more than 1.2 tonnes of product, between February and March 2023.
In recent days, the surf has revealed other surprise packages, such as in Soulac-sur-Mer (Gironde), on January 13 – a residue too altered by its odyssey to be marketable.
“These episodes demonstrate an adaptation strategy of criminal groups consisting of ensuring the transmission of cocaine cargoes on the high seas by avoiding the most heavily monitored large ports, where criminal organizations had until now favored transit via container shipunderlines Jérôme Sentenac, head of the strategy department of the Anti-Narcotics Office. This effect of communicating vessels extends to the European scale. »
Wide range of techniques
Thus, blocks of cocaine from “drop-offs” were recently fished out in the Irish Sea, on the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of Sicily… Even the Australian police spotted this ploy, off the coast of a country offering one of the most expensive grams of coke in the world.
But the transfer operation on the open sea must have turned into a fiasco for this type of seizure to be carried out on the coasts. They are the consequences of bad weather, poor coordination of troops, or even a panicked reaction by traffickers faced with the risk of being spotted.
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