Drug smugglers will try to hide their illegal products inside literally anything. They have been caught concealing them in food, furniture, gas tanks, but recently a new item was added to the list: underwear. Specifically, a huge shipment of cocaine was discovered by authorities hidden in a truck carrying a large shipment of Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS brand underwear.
The truck driver, Jakub Jan Konkel, was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison for his unique drug smuggling attempt following an investigation by the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA).
The NCA reports that Border Force officers stopped Konkel when he arrived at the Port of Harwich in Essex on a ferry from the Netherlands on September 5 of last year.
The truck contained a huge shipment of SKIMS products, and cocaine
28 pallets of SKIMS underwear and apparel were being transported in his truck when it was x-rayed. Someone had specially modified the truck and built a compartment into the skin of the rear trailer doors. Inside were 90 packages, each containing 1kg of cocaine, with a street value of around $9.6 million.
The investigation revealed that Konkel and the criminal group loaded the drugs onto the truck during a 16-minute stop, according to his tachograph – a stop which he neglected to disclose to the NCA during an interview.
Konkel, a resident of Kartuzy in northern Poland, first denied having any knowledge of the drugs. However, he later entered a guilty plea to drug smuggling, admitting that he had agreed to smuggle the drugs in exchange for 4,500 euros (around $5,200).
“Organized crime groups use corrupt drivers like Konkel to move class A drugs often hidden on entirely legitimate loads such as this,” said NCA operations manager Paul Orchard.
“The detection and investigation have removed a significant amount of cocaine whose profits are lost to the crime group behind the smuggling attempt, and with Konkel they’ve lost an important enabler.”
According to officials, the legitimate SKIMS shipment and its exporter had no link to the smuggling operation, and neither SKIMS nor Kim Kardashian face any criminal charges.