[♪ suspenseful music playing]
[Agent Connor] All right.
[Agent Connor] Yeah, I can take that.
We just got a request from one of our other teams,
which specializes in, uh, commercial trucking.
They believe they've identified a vehicle that's
already made it through
and is, uh, loaded in the cargo section with narcotics.
So we're gonna get out on the road and give them a hand.
I'm set.
[Agent Connor] Our primary concern is that we, you know,
we can't let these drugs hit the street.
[Agent Connor] I just happen to be coming down,
I may cross him at the intersection.
[Agent Connor] I got him.
[♪ theme music playing]
Okay, I've got him.
[Agent Connor] Truck ramped on to 805 North,
which runs the entire west coast.
[Agent Connor] I think this is him right here.
-Damnit.
-That was a hard last-minute change.
-I'm trying to think what's up next.
This is not a normal route.
We don't have a destination for it yet.
It just, uh, makes it problematic.
-So he made a last-minute exit onto another feeder highway
that, that should have split off from the 5.
But in actuality, it comes right back on to the 5.
Uh, my guess is that that was some form of
counter-surveillance.
That just heightens our suspicions that, you know,
the information that we've developed is correct.
That this vehicle is, in fact, loaded.
We have the busiest land border in North America
here in San Diego.
Thousands of trucks are coming through an hour.
We know that a lot of these cargo loads go to the
Los Angeles area, which is a major distribution area.
But the truth is it could stay here in San Diego
or go somewhere in between.
It could hop on the 8 and head into Arizona.
It's very much a guessing game.
But the likelihood is, we're headed for Los Angeles.
-This is the port of Brownsville,
the southernmost point of Texas.
We are in the border from, uh, Matamoros, Mexico
under the state of Tamaulipas.
And you have a lot of people here that regularly cross from
Mexico, some that live in Mexico and come and work here
in the United States.
-All right, sir, thank you.
[Supervisor Fuentes] For the most part, as far as narcotics,
we get marijuana, cocaine, meth, smuggled in the vehicles.
And our job here is pretty much just to do what we can
to find and intercept the narcotics.
-Okay.
[speaking English] Yeah, I haven't had a good target yet.
It's been, uh, a little slow
the last couple months here in Brownsville.
[Officer Villarreal] She's gonna be excited.
Come on, Sophie.
So this is Sophie.
And let's go baby girl. Come on.
I've been a handler for nine years now.
We have four new K-9s and we actually have one that's about
to go to the academy.
Good girl. Come on.
The K-9 program is growing.
So we're hoping that we're gonna get more positions available.
Because they're an amazing asset, as far as trying to
find the narcotics that are going through.
Pre-primary, we try to search all the vehicles
that are coming in.
Let's go, baby.
Good girl.
She goes either wherever she thinks the narcotic is at
and she will not leave it.
Yup, found something.
Let's go.
Can you send the red Suburban in, please?
Single male, please.
-Okay.
-Okay, I, I just need to check under the hood, because she went
under the hood in pre-primary.
[Officer Cavazos] So it's a pre-primary target?
-Yes.
Checking to see if there's any tampering.
-Terminals don't look messed with.
[Officer Villarreal] There's these natural voids,
and they can easily hide stuff in there.
There could be a lot of factors that the dog can
be alerting to.
The dogs are trained to find odors that are not supposed
to be there.
[Officer Villarreal] Me neither.
-Ah, this is frustrating.
I don't see, I don't see anything.
-I'm good with it.
It could be somebody that might have been touching
the vehicle underneath.
It might have been contact with some type of narcotic.
-All right, sir.
-We're trying, Rhys, we're trying.
-We've all been trying. Nobody has gotten anything.
[Officer Villarreal] Nothing, dude.
-Yeah. -It's coming in.
We just haven't figured out where it's coming in from.
It's a competition between the good and the bad.
Cat and mouse.
Come on. Good girl.
[jet engine noise]
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-We're currently at the port of New York, Newark.
Newark Liberty International Airport.
We are on the cargo arrival side.
All these aircrafts that you see right here are cargo carriers.
We also have express consignment cargo here.
Express consignment arrives on DHL, United Parcel Service,
and Federal Express, as well.
Today, we'll be going to an express consignment facility.
It's a, a common method or a preferred method of
narcotics smugglers to use express consignment.
What the bad guy has on his side is the ability to track
every movement of that package.
If there's a delay for any, uh, length of time,
they'll be wary about collecting the package.
They'll assume, if they're savvy smugglers, which most are,
that, uh, somewhere along the process that, uh,
it was intercepted by law enforcement.
This morning, we have a flight from Cologne, Germany.
We have a specialty group, uh, known as, "the targeters."
And they've identified at about 85 to 90 packages for
an enforcement, a more thorough examination.
-What is that?
-It's, uh, books.
Educational books.
Good to go.
-On average, we probably get 20,000 shipments a day,
Monday through Friday.
[Officer Canadilla] In here, we have some IPR sneakers.
We actually get a lot of counterfeit items that
go out for resale.
We get sneakers, we get handbags.
We get basically everything.
[Officer Swanson] They've been known to put contraband drugs
inside cardboard, inside the actual packaging itself.
So we always check, in addition to the commodity,
we check the packaging.
[Officer Rodriguez] This is actually coming from Amsterdam.
And it's going to a private individual.
I'm not sure if what is it that they're trying to bring,
but, uh, this is manifested as, uh, a insulation block.
Could be used for medical purposes perhaps,
we don't know yet.
So we're gonna find out to see what this is.
All righty. So there's apparently two packages here.
It's well-protected, for sure.
Let's bring these two guys out of here.
Um, very interesting.
Well, that's definitely not an insulation block for sure.
This looks organic. It looks biological.
Um, this looks like shrooms.
-What is it? -Shrooms.
-Bingo.
[Deputy Chief Canzano] We've seen these before.
This is a shroom grow kit.
What they'll do is, they'll put this in soil and this will
grow the mushrooms.
It's a Schedule One narcotic.
It's definitely prohibited for importation.
-To the naked eye, most regular people
would just probably think this is some sort of food.
-We see legit mushrooms come in.
They say they're manifested as mushrooms and they go right to
AQI to be refrigerated.
But it's manifested, uh, incorrectly.
It's going from a person to a person, to an apartment right,
a couple miles from here.
Uh, fragile.
This side up.
I think I can pretty much drop this from a 30-story building,
and it's really not gonna break.
So what's fragile about it?
So it gives the appearance of being something that it's not.
Strictly for hallucinogenic, euphoric high.
Um, how do I know that?
Because prior experience of seizing these things.
You want to seal it up?
[Officer Rodriguez] Yeah.
-You'll see a warehouse full of things being seized.
Seizing's nice, but ultimately, it's the arrest we want.
This will definitely get referred to
Homeland Security Investigations.
Because my job is to find it,
their job is to possibly make a case.
But the bottom line is, look, this is not gonna
get admitted into the country.
Thank you so much.
Moving on, moving on, moving on, moving on.
[Officer Vargas] Hello, miss.
[Officer Vargas] Okay.
[Officer Cavazos] Uh, Mission.
Every officer kind of does things a little differently.
I kind of look at the vehicle and look to see who's driving.
Seeing if it's clean or dirty.
I kind of put all that together.
By the time they get here, I've already kind of established
whether or not I'm gonna look into a little more
or if I'm gonna release it.
[speaking English] Hey, secondary.
You got a '17 Honda Civic, '17 Honda Civic.
-Um, he's claiming, uh, he left the vehicle to, for a car wash.
They took out all the carpets.
So we're going to check it out thoroughly,
contact the K-9 officer.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-Good girl, mama.
Good girl.
Good girl, mama.
Good girl.
I'm very confident that the vehicle is going to have some,
um, some sort of concealed narcotic somewhere.
-Basically now, we're going to put the car on a lift
so we can take a better look underneath the vehicle.
[tapping]
[Officer Villarreal] All this has been tampered with.
Because there's something in here.
Like they smeared something.
-It could have been a decoy. -A decoy.
-What smugglers tend to do is they use decoys.
Because of what they smeared here, it could be anything
mixed with any kind of drug.
And of course, the dog is gonna alert as fast as my dog alerted.
That could be a big possibility.
They threw something in here.
Our dog was on point down here.
The way my dog alerted, that was like, like it was the
actual brick was just sitting there.
-Clear, clear, clear.
-That's why, like, I was so sure.
But we didn't find anything.
We're hunting.
We're hunting every day.
That's non-stop.
We learn their trends, they learn our trends and it's just
back and forth.
We're gonna get them.
It's gonna happen.
[tapping]
[Agent Connor] 10-4.
The sun's going down.
We have left San Diego County and we are now in Los Angeles.
So right now our, uh, team up in LA is assuming the
primary role in this investigation from here.
Our truck has exited the freeway and we're in a
predominantly industrial warehouse area.
[Agent Connor] Copy.
[Agent Connor] 10-4.
We were able to run some checks.
And, um, it's manifested for produce,
likely avocados or something to that effect.
And we're in a produce section of Los Angeles.
Uh, if it is loaded, it's gonna be somehow mixed in
with the, um, with the produce.
[Agent Connor] With these cargo loads, we've seen them
sit for a long time.
Hours, sometimes even days,
before someone tries to unload them.
Everybody here is tired and the lights on the truck
just shut down.
So there's a possibility that it's gonna sit there for
a while before they attempt to unload it.
It's a challenging waiting game because we don't know
how long it's gonna be.
It could be in ten minutes, it could be in six hours.
But if our information's correct and this cargo load
is loaded that is a lot of drugs to not hit the streets.
And so, it's, it's worth fighting for.
And we're gonna stay on this to see it through to
some kind of, uh, conclusion.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
[Agent Connor] It's morning. Uh, we've been here all night.
Um, most of the businesses were closed until about
an hour and a half ago.
And now we're starting to see forklifts running around
and cargo trucks.
So we're hoping to see some more activity soon.
We're, um, submitting for a search warrant for the location.
And, um, we're gonna take some action against the truck
so we can inspect it and, and confirm the dope and seize it.
[Agent Connor] We got activity.
-Somebody just showed up and opened up our vehicle.
And it looks like they're getting prepared to unload.
[Agent Connor] So we're trying to hustle over there.
[sirens]
[Agent Connor] We've got him.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-Wedding favors. It's good to go.
[Officer Rodriguez] A lot of times our targeting team, they
look into the manifest and they look at anything that
could be IPR related, FDA, or drugs.
Here, they're actually list it as just documents.
We're gonna open it to see what it contains.
Very weird, because this is, uh,
coming from one shipping company,
and as we open the package,
we see a different shipping company.
So they have a lot of different cards.
They all have different addresses.
California. We have Texas.
We have Philadelphia.
So this is going all over the place.
So the interesting thing is, what could be so special that
it's going everywhere.
Yeah, they're Christmas cards.
It's the summertime right here in New York City,
so I'm not sure whether if this is appropriate to begin with.
Not only are we shipping, uh, Christmas cards,
but they also contain shipping labels.
It also has, uh, let me see, on this one, it has...
voilà, look at that.
A VIN number.
This is even more interesting now.
So, this is the vehicle identification number.
Every vehicle has, like, its own unique, uh, identity,
for lack of a better word.
So that's what's gonna differentiate it from
the other vehicles.
So all of these are containing VIN numbers.
This definitely smells like illegal, uh, situation.
-Yeah, yeah.
-We deal with VIN numbers all the time.
In New York City and New Jersey area,
it's predominantly notorious
for a lot of vehicles getting stolen.
This one, in particular, has a lot of different VIN numbers
in comparison to the other ones.
And it also has another shipping label.
My guess is that most likely as they make it to this, uh,
person's address and I'm assuming this person is then
gonna distribute them across the States.
When you put two and two together, it's safe to say
that there's definitely something going, uh,
on as, as far as vehicle theft goes.
[Deputy Chief Canzano] This one's for a Mercedes Benz AG.
So if you look, these vehicles are all high-profile cars.
Tape them up and put them in a pallet, and then we'll start
with the next, uh, find.
[Officer Rodriguez] Okay.
[Deputy Chief Canzano] We're going to link up with our
Customs and Border Protection counterparts.
Their unit deals with specifically
stolen outbound cars.
They are, by far, the busiest in the country, so once we put
these VIN numbers in our system, then we should be
able to tie it to the car that they belong to.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-All right. Thank you. Have a good one.
Hello.
-Oh.
-The crossings of the vehicle, nervous behavior.
[speaking English] Escort lane two.
So I just decided to run the inspection into secondary
for enforcement.
-Right now we're just trying to see if we see, uh,
any, anything out of the ordinary.
Any tampering on any kind of bolts.
Something that, that doesn't look right.
-I don't see anything.
-K-9's gonna run it.
It's time to put the K-9 to work.
Watch out, guys.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-That's a good girl!
That's a good girl!
-Yeah, it's in the center console.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-We are reviewing the image.
In the center console, we see a dark spot,
which looks like an anomaly.
Secondary, can you go ahead and check the
center console for an anomaly?
-10-4. -Uh-hmm.
-Let's do it. -All right.
-Yeah, it's been, this has been, uh, played with a bit.
I think it's tampered, no?
-Yeah. These screws have been taken off.
You see how, like, they're all damaged, scratched?
-It's missing screws.
-Oh, yeah. -Right here.
-Oh, yeah.
-Yeah?
-Yeah. Let's see.
I can see something in here. Oh, yeah.
-Yeah, there's packages.
There's packages in there.
Yeah.
[siren]
[Agent Connor] Nice.
That's our original?
-That's driver.
-Yeah, okay. Everyone else came from inside?
-Yeah, everybody else is inside.
[Agent Connor] But they were in the process of beginning
the unload, so it's just kind of figuring out who's who and
what their involvement is.
-So what's next?
-And all this is gonna take a minute?
[Agent Connor] So we can at least see at least five pallets.
Uh, they're probably about five, six feet high.
Those are the ones that we're gonna have some interest in
and we're gonna inspect those a lot better.
Hey, our tow's here, I think.
I don't even know how they're gonna get that.
Okay.
We're gonna let this warehouse get back to business.
We're gonna take it off-site to a place that's safer for us
to pull out the narcotics.
All right, thank you.
We think we have a pretty good idea of what's in there.
Everything else, that through our investigative efforts and
our checks, kind of lines up.
Some of us have been up for 30-some hours, but we're in
the last hour, or so, of this.
And we're gonna push through and see it to the end.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
[Officer Panzarino] Port Newark, New York, New Jersey
is the busiest port on the East Coast,
if not in the country.
Tens of thousands of vehicles are exported every month.
BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, all day long.
I'm focused on finding stolen cars.
Tens of millions of dollars just from this port yearly
in stolen cars get recovered.
That money's used to fuel terrorism, the narcotics trade.
We're going to a warehouse where we have containers
staged for examination.
I look for discrepancies in the filings, things that
just don't fit what's being shipped.
Once it goes in the container and it's brought to the
seaport, well that's the last stop.
If we don't get it there, it's homefree to where it's going
and they got away with it.
It's like finding a needle in a haystack when you're looking
for the stolen cars.
But targeting is a very important part of
finding the cars.
These containers were targeted by myself.
And it is supposed to contain two vehicles
and household effects.
This one looks good.
It just has two cars.
But until I get in there and get the VIN numbers and
match 'em up to what they have, we don't know.
Make things easy.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
Right now, we're gonna take a picture to ID these cars
by the public VIN.
Okay.
I'm gonna go up to the Tundra, take a picture of that one.
Let's see if we get the VIN on this one.
And then we're gonna run them in the system and see if they
come back as stolen.
Let's see what we have.
Bingo. Yes.
Both of these cars are stolen.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-Bring it in.
[whirring]
You're good.
Okay.
Yeah, put it over here for now, and let's grab the other one.
It's brand new.
The bottom is shiny.
No dirt.
It's actually easier to steal a car today than what it was
20 years ago.
All these cars now, they have the key fobs where there's
no ignition switch, you don't need a key.
And then with internet, they make it look easy.
They're not even going to dealerships.
Right over the phone, right over the computer.
They could be in New York buying a car from a dealership
out in Missouri with somebody else's ID.
It still has the stuff from the dealer.
This one here, we have a key.
So it'll make things a little easier from here on out.
Let's see if it starts.
[engine turns over]
55 miles, so it never saw the road.
I'm gonna try to start the Infinity.
Usually, if one has a key, the other one does.
In this case here...
[engine turns over]
...the car starts up.
So the key has to be in here somewhere.
So, we're all good.
Two stolen cars today, at least.
After reviewing the printouts of the thefts of these vehicles,
it appears that both of them were steals from
two separate dealerships by a fraudulent purchase.
Identity theft on the internet.
We're all actually a victim when it comes to stolen vehicles.
Our insurance rates are higher.
And, uh, you have the consumer who owned the car.
They take their IDs, credit cards, and all that,
and that ends up fueling more steals.
These cars are gonna be going in the warehouse.
They'll be looked through real good to make sure there's
nothing else concealed inside them.
And then they'll be scheduled for recovery back to the owner.
In this case, it's either the dealership or
their insurance company.
Two cars and it's not making it somewhere.
I guess we, uh, ruined their plans.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
[Officer Ramirez] It's positive.
-Okay. Yeah, there's packages in there.
I see one gray.
-Let's take it apart. -Yeah.
[Officer Ramirez] So the trap door was here, underneath the,
the shifter.
-Oh, hold on.
-One package.
-So far, two packages.
-They really jammed them in there.
-Yeah, they're stuck in there.
-Want me to try and hit it down?
-Yeah.
[tapping]
Bang it this way. Yeah.
[tapping]
-What the heck?
-Here. Give me that.
-They're not budging.
We're afraid to tear the packages.
-There you go. There you go.
-There's still more?
-Yeah. Oh, yeah.
-Eight, nine, ten.
-11, 12, 13, 14.
-14 packages. Total 14 packages?
-Yeah.
We're gonna have to go test them.
[Officer Ramirez] From the looks of it, from my
experience, it's wrapped differently so it's gonna be
more of a mixed load.
We'll go ahead and test them, make sure we're confirming
what kind of drug it is.
Whether it's cocaine, heroin.
So, we'll go ahead and see.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
-The biggest difference with the cargo loads versus
the passenger cars that we are typically investigating
is the sheer volume.
-You put a rope on those, put it on a forklift,
and you back the forklift up.
[Agent Connor] Yeah?
All right.
The size of the containers that they ship in can hold
so much more.
-One of these vehicles can hold hundreds of kilos.
Uh, which is several, several cars worth full, uh,
that would be normally coming through our ports of entry.
Want to try in here?
It's not uncommon for the loaded packages to not
be easily accessible for inspection.
Try this one. It's dead center.
Oop. Oop. Got a winner.
That's different.
Just heavier, denser.
It's thicker.
Right there.
Bingo.
That looks like a dope package to me.
-It felt heavier and, like, it was wider when I grabbed it.
So not every one of these boxes is gonna be loaded and
not every package is gonna be loaded.
That being said, we have to do our due diligence and
we have to check every single package to make sure
that no contraband hits the streets.
There you go. That's one, yup.
So cut it in fours and then they break better.
Sweet.
Whenever you're dealing with drugs hidden in
food commodities, it's always messy extracting it.
There it is.
-There you go. You got one.
[tapping]
-That's one, right? -Yeah.
[tapping]
[Agent Connor] We still have to test it, but we believe it
to be cocaine.
We seized it here in Los Angeles, which is a major
distribution hub that spreads far and wide into the interior.
So these could've been headed anywhere from
Buffalo, New York to Blaine, Washington.
Thank you, man. Take care.
Our HSI Los Angeles office took primary along with
their state and local partners.
They've pretty much got it well in hand and are starting
to process, uh, the narcotics.
So we're gonna start heading back down to San Diego again.
We spent a lot of hours on this and it would appear that
this is the end.
This is only the beginning of this investigation.
We're gonna continue to work these investigative leads and
try to dismantle this network as far, as wide as we can take it.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
[Officer Ramirez] We have a total of 14 packages.
We're gonna unwrap them to get better access.
And as we're unwrapping the packages, we're finding,
uh, different signs.
The smugglers, they put these markings on the bricks
themselves to show to who they're going to.
And also we're finding, like, these dryer sheets.
They believe that dryer sheets and all these other scents are
gonna throw our K9s off, but, I mean, as you can see,
it obviously doesn't work.
They still pick it up.
So the Gemini is a tool that we use to test the
properties of the narcotics.
It has a library of different chemicals to give us
the exact match.
I'm just gonna open up the package.
[♪ suspenseful music playing]
Okay. So we got a positive for cocaine.
The packages, they're all wrapped in different forms.
From our experience, it's a mixed load.
So we're gonna go ahead and test just to confirm that.
Also positive for cocaine.
So, so far it looks like all the packages are cocaine.
So we're gonna go ahead and weigh them now.
-Two more.
-We estimated about
12.46 kilograms of cocaine.
[Officer Ramirez] Right now, we have the driver detained.
And we're also gonna seize the narcotics and turn them over
to HSI for further investigation and processing.
-They get smart but then we get smarter.
-Hello.
[Officer Villarreal] Good girl.
We're hunting every day, so you will be seeing us on the
bridges and checking cars left and right.
We're just starting, so we're excited.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.