Happy heroin! Philly customs agents seize drug-stuffed greeting card
The envelope being sent on a cargo plane from the Netherlands to Washington said it contained important documents.
The greeting card, using a Dutch spelling, read: "Succes."
In any language, the effort can be considered a failure.
Customs agents in Philadelphia discovered a greeting card last month en route from the Netherlands to Washington, allegedly with eight grams of heroin poorly hidden inside.
"It's unusual for us to find things like this," Stephen Sapp, public affairs officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Tuesday.
The envelope felt heavy, according to Sapp, as if it did not hold documents. When agents opened it, they found an air-sealed package with the greeting card inside. The card contained a sheaf of corrugated cardboard, Sapp said, with the heroin stuffed inside.
The card was intended for a specific address, but Sapp said the would-be recipient had not been charged. He declined to say whether the sender had been identified, although authorities said no arrests had been made.
In Philadelphia, Sapp said, the agency most frequently seizes counterfeit products such as sports memorabilia, cellphone accessories, and pharmaceuticals.
Nationwide, it seizes nearly 8,000 pounds of drugs per day, but Sapp said this was the first local drug seizure in several months.
In 2012, agents in Pennsauken found 175 kilograms of cocaine packed inside the body of a pickup truck shipped from Puerto Rico — a discovery that Sapp said was even more unusual for the region.
Bizarre seizures around the country are not unheard of: Agents in Santa Teresa, N.M., allegedly seized $1 million in cocaine in March from a pickup truck's fuel tank, and a man from the Dominican Republic was arrested that month in New York for allegedly attempting to smuggle five pounds of cocaine through John F. Kennedy International Airport by taping packages to his legs beneath his pants.
"It just looked odd," he said.