- A beachgoer in Boca Raton last month discovered a 70-pound package of cocaine bricks that washed ashore from the Atlantic Ocean.
- It’s one of those special things about living here in South Florida: We’re surrounded by more skullduggery than we ever imagine.
A Palm Beach Post news source by Frank Cerabino states that visits by falling or floating drugs, rubber, seaweed and sausage part of Florida landscape.
An illicit million-dollar bale in the surf
Once in a while, that hidden world pierces our ordinary one, and manifests itself in the form of an illicit million-dollar bale in the surf. A similar-sized bale of cocaine washed ashore in Palm Beach County in April.
They’re hardly isolated cases. Wayward bales of drugs show up with regularity on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Twenty-four plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine washed up on a beach at Cape Canaveral in June.
And in the Florida Keys, 23 bricks of cocaine washed ashore one day in May, and more cocaine packages washed up last month in Key West in separate incidents.
They are hardly isolated cases
They’re hardly isolated cases. Wayward bales of drugs show up with regularity on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Twenty-four plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine washed up on a beach at Cape Canaveral in June.
And in the Florida Keys, 23 bricks of cocaine washed ashore one day in May, and more cocaine packages washed up last month in Key West in separate incidents.
Then there was the time when drugs literally fell from the sky
This used to happen more frequently during the wild cocaine cowboy/Miami Vice days of the late 20th century. Not only would the drugs wash ashore, but sometimes they would fall from the sky.
It’s hard to top the 1992 drop of a 75-pound bale of cocaine from a low-flying plane in Homestead.
The city’s police chief watched the low-flying plane drop the bale as he was speaking to a group of city residents on the back patio of a home, The Miami Herald reported.
“So I look up,” Chief Curt Ivy told the newspaper, “and this plane is coming, and it’s low. It’s very low. Then I see a package come sailing down.”
The backyard meeting happened to be a crime-watch gathering — a rare crime-watch meeting in which the participants actually got to watch crime.
Drugs falling from the sky in South Florida causes damage
Bales of drugs falling from the sky in South Florida have caused some damage. They have crashed through houses, and in one case, damaged a church in Miami-Dade County.
On the beaches, the packages of drugs that wash ashore were most likely the cargo of boats from Central or South America. The plastic-wrapped bundles either broke away from the rest of the loads by accident or were jettisoned to avoid law enforcement.
Police recovered 25 bales of marijuana
On one day in 1989, police recovered 25 bales of marijuana, 80 pounds each, from the beaches in Palm Beach, Ocean Ridge, and Delray Beach. A day earlier, U.S. Customs reported finding 45 bales of marijuana in Fort Lauderdale, while the U.S. Coast Guard said it found 35 more bales in the ocean off Miami.
Sometimes, they even come with the boat attached.
In April of 2012, a 22-foot fishing boat with as many as 100 bales of marijuana packed inside washed ashore near the Palm Beach County Club. And passing hurricanes usually bring bales of drugs along with their winds.
Frozen Italian sausage falls from the sky
In 2017, a family in Deerfield Beach was awakened at 4 a.m. by loud thuds on their roof. It turned out to be 15 pounds of frozen Italian sausage falling from the sky.
“It was louder than thunder, like a satellite had hit our roof, or a meteorite,” Jenny Adair told a national audience on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show.
“It was a meat-eor, alright,” Kimmel quipped.
“I thought maybe it was a coverup for a drug deal,” Adair said. “Because the packages looked similar.”
It’s not only drugs that wash in or drop down.
Marine Environmental Research
A study published in April by the journal Marine Environmental Research linked the rubber bales to the cargo of the SS Rio Grande, a German blockade-running ship that was sunk by the U.S. Navy in January of 1944 in the waters off the coast of Brazil.
The World War II-vintage rubber cargo remained submerged for more than 70 years, but now may be breaking free due to corrosion of the shipwreck or unauthorized salvaging of the ship’s cargo, which also included tin, copper and cobalt.
The bales began washing up on Brazil’s shores a few years ago, and now may be showing up on Florida’s beaches due to the natural migration caused by the northward flowing Gulf Stream currents.
Steady arrival of bale of cocaine or marijuana
If so, the rubber bales aren’t the only thing reaching Florida’s beaches from the waters off Brazil.
Far more common than the occasional beaching of a bale of cocaine or marijuana has been the steady arrival of mats of sargassum reaching Florida’s beaches.
Sargassum, the only kind of seaweed that doesn’t begin as a plant on the ocean floor, forms floating carpets of golden-brown plants that are beneficial to some sea life in the open ocean, but harmful to reefs and mangroves, and annoying to beachgoers.
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Source: Palm Beach Post
