Kevin.
They found an air hostess who is up for carrying drugs.
This does happen.
When I was in prison in Ecuador,
they arrested the captain of an airline.
My name's Pieter Tritton, aka Posh Pete.
I am a former drug trafficker, namely cocaine,
from beginning of 2003 till the end of 2005.
I served just over 10 years' imprisonment in Ecuador.
Today, we will be watching clips from movies
and TVs about drug trafficking,
judge how realistic they are.
The one thing I see repeated in film
is that there's this scene of, you know,
loads of women naked
so that they supposedly can't steal the drugs
in a lab somewhere with loads of chemicals
and loads of drugs.
It's just unrealistic, in my opinion.
The women in this scene are wearing masks and gloves.
It's likely in a lab that you would have
that sort of protective equipment on,
'cause I mean, I've been in makeshift labs
when we were doing our thing,
and the amount of dust and fumes
and everything that gets up into the air and onto hands,
the chemicals are really toxic.
Álvarez: Let me show you distribution.
Jax: How many dealers?
Álvarez: 28. Looking to triple that.
They've got about 48 people in this scene,
let alone the dealers.
Having that amount of drugs in one place at one time
with that amount of people, it's just such,
it would be such high risk.
All the different parts of the operation
are all in one place. Never.
Each individual mechanism or part
would be separate to the other,
so the people that had the safe house,
they wouldn't know people that were in the lab.
The people in the lab wouldn't know the drivers.
So if any one part got hit by the police,
they couldn't be linked to the others.
I would give this a 5 just because
it's all just too much in one place.
Steve: Before long, we were seizing 60 kilos of coke a day.
That could happen.
I mean, there was an instance a few years ago
in Spain where boxes of bananas
were literally getting delivered to shops,
and they were taking out the top layer of bananas
and the rest was full of cocaine.
The flower industry in South America,
particularly Colombia, is huge.
So any cover good, as we call it.
But generally cartels don't send large amounts like this
unless they've got customs that are either paid off
or they know they've got a guaranteed in.
For the authorities to get big hits like this,
it means something's probably gone wrong somewhere
along the line, obviously,
for the cartel, that is.
Steve: We felt we were making a huge difference.
If you look at the name on the boat, it's Guayaquil,
and that's the city that I was in prison in in Ecuador.
That's the main drug-trafficking route
out of Ecuador, up to Central America,
and then on into America.
I was in prison with several people
who were working on the boats.
They were captains of boats.
Steve: Truth is, we weren't even making a dent.
In that tube, I mean, they tended to fit cocaine
to the shape of whatever it was packed in
in order to maximize the amount you can get in there.
Kilos are normally wrapped with a rubber skin.
There's normally about six or seven layers.
Steve: They let us have 60 so they could bring in 600.
Whether or not that's true, I don't know.
The cartel's giving up drugs so that they can bring in more.
Maybe they do. I've been in prison with people
from the Sinaloa Cartel,
and I've never heard them say that they did that.
The progression of the process
of the making of the cocaine here is very realistic.
That's the base product
from when the leaves are crushed down
and soaked in kerosene.
They then go through a few more stages.
They're put into trays to dry it, basically.
I mean, they have missed out a couple of stages.
I mean, as they would.
They don't tell everybody exactly how to make it.
This scene is very realistic,
where they've got the sort of temporary camp setup
out in the jungle somewhere, processing the leaves.
I mean, the volumes of chemicals that they're using,
in South America, they have the chemicals
highly controlled now. So it's very difficult
for them to buy the volumes that they need.
For 1 kilo of cocaine with ether,
you need at least 6 or 7 liters per kilo.
So you imagine, if they're making, you know,
300, 400 kilos a day,
you're talking about tank loads of chemicals.
I doubt you would be given access
to a laboratory like that.
If you've given away its location of where it was,
you'd be revealing the whole makeup just for a kilo,
when they're producing 300 kilos a day.
If you're talking to a guy that's running a lab like this,
you're going to be buying,
I mean, as a minimum 50 or 100.
The way that they're dressed in these scenes is typical
because these guys working in the labs,
they're out in the middle of a jungle.
You're not going to be showing off to anybody in there.
The actual workers are very poorly paid.
You know, it's bad conditions. It's dangerous.
You've got the Colombian military
looking for you all the time.
I mean, you can see that guy there
is sort of dressed half in military fatigues.
That's quite common.
And often they'll be dressed in rubber boots
like Wellingtons, just 'cause of the conditions underfoot.
Yeah, around 8.
They've done their research.
I was in prison, again,
with a guy from the Sinaloa Cartel, a pilot.
He used to fly Cessnas just like this.
And he told me stories about literally
coming down jungle airstrips like this, dirt,
in a Cessna with a ton and a half,
2 tons of cocaine in the back.
Barry: You get another load of powder,
take it back to the States
with a quick stop to refuel in Panama
under the protection of my old friend Col. Noriega.
They were paying off Noriega.
It's been proven that he was involved in drug trafficking.
I mean, you imagine the amount of money involved
in all this trafficking that's washing around.
There's so much corruption.
They would try and pay people like Noriega.
Barry: I had to get some help.
I called these boys my snowbirds.
They were using multiple planes.
So, they would probably limit the amount of times
they used a certain plane in a month,
or however frequently,
in order to try and avoid detection.
I mean, certainly in America they would have records,
you know, flight plans and stuff like that.
We did things like that.
When we were using passengers, for example,
we wouldn't use them any more than one
or two times in a month.
I know people that have done this into Britain
using light aircraft coming from Holland,
predestined drop zone.
You just drop it, and then you have people waiting
in that area to collect,
or you have, like, a private runway,
and if you unload it quick enough,
you make sure that you've got the place secure,
there's no police, just fire it out the plane
as quick as you can and get out of there.
It is quite high risk.
I mean, that's still happening, for sure.
Particularly in Central America and South America.
Maybe not into America these days
because the security's that good.
7.
So, this is making the capsules in order to swallow.
I've seen them made like this.
So, this is a press to just compress the cocaine
in order to make the capsule.
In this instance, they're wrapping them in condoms,
which is quite often how they're made.
I would say very high-risk way of trafficking cocaine.
And depending on the person's stomach,
generally, you are talking about 800 grams to 1,200 grams,
so around a kilo that they'll swallow.
Yuck.
I never sent people this way.
A, I didn't want somebody ending up dead on my account,
and B, it was quite risky. Well, highly risky.
They all tell you that the capsules are 100% safe,
there's no way they can split,
all sorts of stuff to get you to swallow them.
Whereas in reality, you know,
you stand a high chance of them bursting.
When I was in Ecuador, it was in the news.
A couple of people had swallowed capsules that had burst,
and they'd been found dead.
Drug trafficking can be portrayed
as being glamorous a lot,
but it is not very glamorous at all.
It's a pretty gruesome trade.
I mean, these are typical questions.
They would ask to see, for example,
"Have you bought your own ticket?" because if you haven't,
if somebody else has bought it for you, then why?
That's a big red flag.
So she's just trying to catch her out here
and see how much it costs and if she knows.
If she doesn't, then obviously
there's something wrong, probably.
Which is quite unlikely in Colombia,
as, you know, $800 is lot of money.
The ways of proving it, obviously, is
law enforcement will stop the passenger and X-ray them,
or nowadays use the scanner as well,
which is a much more detailed picture
of what's going on inside.
It's definitely a lot harder to use this method these days.
Another thing they'll do is they'll put you in a room
if they really think you've definitely got drugs in you
until you go to the toilet. And there's a collection pan,
so anything that goes through there gets collected.
This is the sort of thing that happens.
I got stopped on the first job that we did.
I brought the tent back myself,
which contained 5 kilos of cocaine impregnated in rubber.
I was over the luggage allowance,
so I had to give loads of stuff away in the airport
but kept ahold of this great big 10-man tent.
Got stopped in Amsterdam at Schiphol Airport,
questioned, and released
and let through carrying 5 kilos of cocaine.
I'd give that 7 or 8.
How much she was swallowing,
the kind of questioning they undertook.
I've gone into schools and just spoken about
what happened to me and how I became involved in it
and how bad it was in order to try and prevent them
from becoming involved themselves.
Tunnels have been documented.
It's a known method that they've used in the past.
They just want to get it out and get it dispersed.
I mean, that's the most dangerous point,
when it's coming into the country.
So they just want to get it out of that area
and somewhere safe, to the safe house,
as quick as possible, really.
Chapo Guzmán was the head of the Sinaloa Cartel.
He's a real person.
He's in prison in America somewhere for life.
And these guys do oversee things.
The amount of trust in people that you need
to be shipping tons of cocaine around the world.
That's one thing in films that's not quite true,
is this idea of the supercriminal,
they're just on a phone
and a laptop and everything happens,
and they have all these people working for them,
and they never go near anything, ever.
Yeah, I'd give this 7 out of 10.
Derek: Seems really risky.
Derek, she's a stewardess. They don't check her bags.
Kevin.
They've found a weakness in a system.
They've found an air hostess who is up for carrying drugs.
This does happen.
When I was in prison in Ecuador,
they arrested the captain of an airline
on several occasions.
There were people involved
with the airlines that had been arrested.
This is back in the day, isn't it?
I've met old-school drug traffickers
where it was literally, put drugs in a suitcase
and get on a plane and traffic them,
because the border controls was so lax back then.
But these days, and particularly after 9/11,
the border controls and the security
around airlines is so high.
Getting drugs through passenger aircraft is very difficult.
Pure coke, it melts away
at about 185, 190 degrees.
Cutting agents, they melt away at about 100.
They're looking to see if the drugs have been cut
or adulterated at this stage.
This is 100% a realistic method of testing cocaine.
We used to use a piece of cast iron
with a thermometer set into it,
and you put the cocaine on top of it, on the iron,
put that on top of a cooker,
and different chemicals in the cocaine
burn off at different temperatures.
And as you hear in the film,
cocaine in its purest form starts to burn
or evaporate at about 180, I think it is.
I know a lot of cocaine is getting adulterated these days
with things like boric acid,
levamisole, which I think is a pig wormer.
There's a multitude of things
that they use to cut the drugs with.
These cutting agents are all pretty toxic, I suppose.
So, I mean, I wouldn't say taking any drug is safe,
but the more it's cut, the worse it gets.
Fairly realistic. I'd say 7 or 8.
The quantities involved in this clip are huge.
How realistic that is, I don't know,
because I wasn't involved with methamphetamine.
But to me, the amount of people that are there
and the scale,
in America, I doubt it very much.
Normally, there's nearly always a hiccup.
Things get delayed, there's a problem,
someone's f---ed up.
There's just always, nearly always some sort of problem.
That's just to identify which containers have the drugs in.
So they're using the UV stamp,
which is obviously not visible to the naked eye,
but as soon as you put a UV light on it
they're going to know which containers have the drugs in.
Putting UV stamps on containers is one way
of identifying where the drugs are.
Normally, in any serious drug-trafficking operation,
you're going to have front businesses
to facilitate the movement of the drugs
or the inflow of the drugs or the outflow
or the laundering of money as well.
Companies are quite often vital
to drug-trafficking networks for numerous reasons.
I'd give that probably a 5.
Just the amount of people involved and the scale.
Hey, you're going to drive to San Diego.
So, yeah, this is quite a common method
of moving drugs around.
Putting drugs into a caleta,
or a hiding place, in the vehicle,
which they will have manufactured or made.
Certain vehicles have particularly good hiding places,
voids and spaces that can be utilized as hiding spots.
I mean, the British police have got these.
It's a mirror on a handle,
so they're looking underneath the car
to see if there's any new welding spots,
anything obvious, or anything that's out of place
that might show a hiding spot.
Obviously, they've got a sniffer dog there.
I mean, if you're that far in the queue,
I mean, you can't really run away from it, then, can you?
As soon as you get out of the vehicle,
they're going to spot you, apprehend you.
This is the first one she's done,
but, I mean, they would probably be using people
that they'd already used before anyway
that they knew were trustworthy and solid.
When we were sending people, we, you know,
the reason I did that first one myself
was because I didn't want to send people
to do something that I hadn't.
So I would be able to know what to tell them to expect.
Quite often I would go,
I'd be in the background somewhere,
just to make sure they were all right.
This is quite realistic.
Give that probably 6,
because it's fairly realistic.
I myself have become kind of a little bit bored
of watching films about drug trafficking,
having lived it.
I mean, I've witnessed so many people getting killed
in the most horrific means and ways that you can imagine,
all because of the money that's involved.
So, I mean, if you do think it's glamorous,
then I don't know what life you're living,
but it's not the one that I lived, that's for sure.
So, thanks for watching the clips today.
If you want to see more of the same,
click to the link above.