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Tampa mayor Kelly Castor was on a family fishing trip in the Florida Keys recently when she caught a 70 pound whopper.
Unfortunately, that extraordinary catch turned out to be 70 pounds of cocaine worth around $1.1 million.
Castor, her brother, her son and his girlfriend were mahi-mahi fishing off the Middle Keys City of Marathon when they spotted something floating in the water.
“Hey, look at that,” the Tampa Bay Times reports Kelly Castor said.
“Cocaine,” replied his older sister, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor.
How was she so sure it was cocaine?
Perhaps it had something to do with her being a member of the Tampa Police Department for around 30 years, including about eight years working in narcotics and six as the police chief.
After hauling the package onto their boat, they headed back to their vacation rental and called the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
Over the weekend, Border Patrol agents in the Miami Sector seized 70 lbs. of cocaine that was discovered by a recreational boater in the #FloridaKeys. The drugs have an estimated street value of approx. $1.1 million dollars. #miami #florida #drugbust #Mondaymorning pic.twitter.com/etaiuwXrcK
— Samuel Briggs II (@USBPChiefMIP) July 24, 2023
U.S. Border Patrol would later determine the street value of the cocaine to be around $1.1 million.
This was the fifth time in the month of July that a large shipment of drugs was found floating in the ocean off the Florida Keys, the Miami Herald reported.
A bale of marijuana weighing around 3 pounds, a package containing 87 pounds of hashish, a package containing 62 pounds of cocaine, and a bale of marijuana weighing about 8 pounds were all also found floating in the Keys earlier in the month.
The sheer amount of drugs that are found floating in and washing ashore on the Florida Coast is the reason why researchers have recently been investigating so called “Cocaine Sharks.”
After rigging up some fake bales of cocaine to test how sharks react and simulating dropping bales of cocaine from an airplane into the water, sharks ended up taking bites out of the bales in both cases. One of them dragged the bale off with him.