Twenty tonnes of cocaine was guarded by a six dollar padlock in one of biggest ever seizures
Anish Vij
Featured Image Credit: Pavel Chernobrivets / Mihajlo Maricic / Alamy
In one of the biggest drugs seizures in history, cops found 20 tonnes of cocaine guarded by a six dollar padlock in a San Fernando Valley warehouse.
Known as 'The Sylmar California Cocaine Bust of 1989', an eye-watering $2 billion (£1.68bn) worth of cocaine was seized, which would be worth over $4.7 billion (£3.35bn) in today's money.
A whopping 20 tonnes of coke was found, along with $10 million (£8.38m) in cash, as police were made aware of the finding by an anonymous tipster.
Cops were informed by a 'concerned citizen' that several very large tractors were making regular trips to the storage unit in LA.
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Police followed up on the tip and tracked a car that made its way out of the storage unit the next day.
After pulling the car over, they found 20kgs of coke in the trunk.
That was enough to get them a search warrant for the storage unit.
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made sure that they were suited and booted with squads of back-up on arrival to the warehouse on September 28, 1989.
When they got there, however, agents reportedly used a simple bolt cutter to break a $6 padlock on the unguarded storage unit.
The sheer amount of cocaine found in one bust was apparently the same amount of drugs that were seized in the whole year before in Los Angeles.
At the time, Ralph B. Lochridge, a spokesman for the drug agency, claims that the initial amount estimated fell way short of the 'street value' of the drug.
He claimed that by using a police estimate of $170,250 (£142,725) per pound for diluted cocaine, the street price of the seizure would be close to $7 billion (£5.87bn) - which would be just short of $16.7 billion (£14bn).
John M. Zienter, the Federal agency's special agent in charge of the operation, said: "After 25 years in this business I never thought anything would impact on me.
"But it really gave me cold chills when I walked in and saw how much there was.''
At the time it was the largest drugs haul in a single location ever.
The area was said to have been controlled by Rafael Muñoz Talavera, who was one of the DEA's most targeted people back in the day.
Dubbed as one of the fasted growing drug lords at the time, the 46-year-old was shot dead in Ciudad Juarez, the drug capital of the Texas border area, in 1998.
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