The Weird World of Cocaine Smuggling

In November 1988, surfer Ivan Kellerman stumbled upon a strange object floating off the coast of Boca Raton, Florida. A torpedo-shaped metal canister around 6 metres in length, the object was initially dismissed as a discarded pontoon. But when Kellerman’s brother David, a commercial salvage diver, dragged the canister ashore, it soon became clear that this was something else entirely. The canister had hinged fins like a submarine but no portholes or other accommodations for passengers, while its hatch could only be opened from the outside. And when Kellerman peered inside the hull, he found only 1,800 kilos of lead bars used as ballast. The Kellermans had, in fact, discovered the world’s first known narco submarine, a type of vehicle widely used by drug cartels to smuggle cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs from Central and South America to markets further north. Surprisingly sophisticated and difficult to intercept, narco-submarines represent the ultimate escalation of the decades-long War on Drugs and reveal much about the strange economics of drug smuggling. ... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout