An Ohio man ordered a gun safe online, but somehow got a bonus when it showed up: 300 pounds of marijuana in tightly wrapped bricks.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for 47 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Sheriff John L. Lenhart . “It’s quite effective if you think about it: wrapped airtight to withstand high temperatures. Drug-sniffing dogs probably couldn’t smell it.”
The gun safes are manufactured by Champion Safe Co. in Nogales, Mexico, and packaged by local inmates, according to authorities. They say that there must have been a mix up with the drug trade, which is why $425,000-worth of marijuana wound up in an Ohio man’s safe.
“Someplace between Mexico and the warehouse in Northern Ohio, the drugs got mixed up and put in the wrong safe and got delivered to the wrong person,” Lenhart said.
As far as how the marijuana got in the safe, police are hoping to question a driver for Conway Inc. , the truck company hired by Champion to move the gun safes to a warehouse in Ohio. So far, they haven’t been able to find the driver. Lenhart implied that the loss of 300 pounds of marijuana means that police aren’t the only ones interested in finding him.
“Not only are we looking for him,” Lenhart said, “but the bad guys are, too.”
Safe smuggling has become a topic of interest in the DEA , because this isn’t the first time such a method has been used to move large shipments of drugs.