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Every major airport has a sizeable team of people tasked with catching travelers who attempt to use them to facilitate the illicit transport of illegal drugs. That includes Atlanta’s Hartsfield–Jackson, and agents at the busiest hub in the world recently detected a sizeable haul that led to an influencer being charged with trying to transport $3 million worth of marijuana to Brazil.
The Wright brothers conducted the first successful sustained flight in North Carolina in 1903, and it took less than a decade for someone to harness an airplane to try to smuggle something across international borders; an Italian man named Antonio Smeroglio was arrested in 1911 when he was caught attempting to bring unspecified “dutiable goods” into France following a crash that left him with a fractured collarbone and two broken legs.
Aviation has continued to play a central role in smuggling operations for over a century. A number of bootleggers harnessed planes during Prohibition, and Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel relied on that particular form of transportation to ferry cocaine from Colombia to the United States during the drug’s heyday.
Those operations largely revolved around the use of private planes landing at covert airstrips to avoid attracting the attention of authorities, but there are also plenty of drug smugglers who’ve opted to gamble by taking advantage of commercial flights despite the significantly higher risks that come with going that route—including one man who probably regrets that decision.
An influencer landed in hot water after allegedly attempting to smuggle $3 million worth of marijuana from Atlanta to Brazil
Nearly half of the states in America have legalized the recreational use of marijuana over the past couple of decades, and while it’s become increasingly normalized, it’s still illegal at the federal level as a Schedule I substance.
As a result, you usually want to avoid boarding an airplane with any form of weed in your possession—especially if you’re heading to another country where the drug is outlawed.
That includes Brazil, which decriminalized the possession of marijuana for personal use in 2006. However, it’s still firmly illegal to sell and traffic the drug within its borders, and you’re just asking for trouble if you’re going to fly there with some in your luggage.
According to Fox5, a man named Vance Ray Randolph allegedly attempted to do exactly that when he made his way to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a flight to Sao Paolo on June 28th only to attract the attention of Customs and Border Protection agents who flagged his luggage and executed a search before discovering a haul that included:
- 34.39 pounds of hashish,
- 12.35 pounds of THC wax
- 4.6 pounds of marijuana
- 1.21 pounds of pasty marijuana
According to the Atlanta Police Department, the drugs in question have an estimated street value of $2.97 million, and public records show Randolph was hit with marijuana trafficking charges after being booked at Clayton County Jail.
Who is Vance Ray Randolph, the influencer who was arrested and charged with trying to smuggle marijuana?
If you spend enough time online, there’s a chance this isn’t the first time you’ve encountered Randolph, as the 22-year-old has amassed over 150,000 followers on TikTok—and it doesn’t appear his arrest has put a cramp in his posting when you consider he’s uploaded multiple videos since the incident in question (although he hasn’t acknolwedged that development in them).
A page on a casting agency’s website where he’s described as an influencer with a focus on “Modeling, TV & Video” says he originally hails from South Carolina, and he ended up on the receiving end of a knockout in a boxing match against a fellow Content Creator earlier this year.
It would appear he’s been released on bail, but it’s currently unclear when he’s scheduled to appear back in court.