On Saturday, July 2, New Zealand authorities confiscated 35 bricks of high-grade cocaine, worth roughly $11 million, from two men at Auckland International Airport. As it happens, they discovered this illicit cache in an 881- pound, diamante-encrusted horse head.
According to NBC News, this cocaine bust ranks as the largest New Zealand has ever seen — and by quite a wide margin. Detective Sgt. Colin Parmenter tells NBC that, on average, they expropriate half a pound (250 grams) of cocaine per year. My sense is that they generally do not find it tucked inside horse sculptures either, but that’s just a guess.
The men found in possession of the drug have been arrested. As of now, they remain unidentified, although one is a 56-year-old American citizen and the other is a 44-year-old from Mexico. Officials suspect that others were involved in this operation, and so a search continues in Christchurch.
As Parmenter surmises, such a prodigious find indicates that New Zealand’s demand for cocaine is greater than previously thought. It also indicates that someone has extraordinarily garish, almost gruesome, taste in art.
