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Police in Italy find shipment of coffee beans stuffed with cocaine

CNN

July 20, 2020, 8:44 AM

Police in Italy discovered cocaine stuffed inside individually hollowed-out coffee beans, after opening a parcel addressed to a fictional Mafia boss from a Hollywood movie.

Investigators found 130 grams of cocaine in a 2 kilogram shipment of coffee beans that arrived at Milan’s Malpensa Airport from Colombia, according to a statement from the Guardia di Finanza financial police.

Customs officers decided to check the package after noticing that its intended recipient shared the name of a fictional character: Santino D’Antonio, a Mafia boss in the movie John Wick: Chapter 2, Italian police told CNN.

Once they opened the parcel they found more than 500 coffee beans that had been hollowed out, filled with cocaine and resealed using dark brown tape, the statement said.

Police tracked the package to Florence, and arrested a 50-year-old Italian man when he came to try and collect it from a tobacconist’s shop in the city.

The man was registered as living in the Colombian city of Medellin, according to the statement. He was already known to police and had previously been arrested on drugs charges.

Earlier this month, Italy’s Guardia di Finanza confiscated a huge shipment of 14 metric tonnes (15.4 US tons) of amphetamines, which they said had been produced by ISIS in Syria.

Officers tracked three suspect containers to the port of Salerno in southwest Italy and found 84 million pills with a market value of €1 billion ($1.12 billion) inside paper cylinders for industrial use, police said in a statement.

Investigators said the bust was the largest drug haul in the world, in terms of both value and quantity.

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