More than $1.6 million worth of cocaine washed up on Florida beaches during Hurricane Debby, authorities say

By Ashley R. Williams and Denise Royal, CNN

(CNN) — Hurricane Debby left behind not only a trail of deadly destruction in the Southeast last week but also more than 100 pounds of narcotics, discovered along Florida’s shores, authorities said.

On August 4, 25 packages of cocaine were found on a beach in Islamorada, a village in the Florida Keys about 80 miles from Key West, according to a social media post from the US Customs and Border Patrol in Miami.

A good Samaritan alerted authorities after coming across the packages, which weighed about 70 pounds and contained cocaine with an estimated street value of more than $1 million, the agency said.

Samuel Briggs, the acting chief patrol agent of the US Border Patrol’s Miami sector, shared a photo on X, showing the large quantity of seized drugs.

A week later on Monday, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office said another batch of cocaine – more than half a million dollars’ worth – was found floating near Everglades City, in the Gulf of Mexico.

Collier County Sheriff Kevin Rambosk credited good Samaritan boaters for reporting the narcotics they discovered floating in the mangroves off Panther Key, the agency said in a Facebook post Monday.

The boaters found what was later determined to be 56 pounds of cocaine wrapped in a package about the size of a microwave oven. It contained 25 individually wrapped kilograms of cocaine, according to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. The drugs had an estimated street value of $625,000, authorities said.

“We appreciate the help of Good Samaritans in our community who saw something unusual and contacted law enforcement,” Rambosk said in the post.

The barnacles covering the package suggested it had been in the water for some time, authorities said.

“The find was reminiscent of the ‘square grouper’ marijuana smuggling days in Collier County during the 1970s and 1980s but uncommon for today,” the Facebook post said.

The term “square grouper” is slang used to describe bales of marijuana wrapped in plastic because they looked like square fish, Brian Townsend, a retired supervisory special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, told CNN.

“During the 1970s and 1980s, drug smugglers commonly wrapped marijuana this way to transport it from the Caribbean and South America into Florida and other coastal areas,” Townsend said.

Collier County Sheriff’s Office detectives and its vice and narcotics bureau are working to determine where the drugs came from, according to authorities.

“Detectives said the cocaine most likely washed in with the tides from the east coast due to recent storms,” the post read. “Large packages of drugs ranging from marijuana to hashish to cocaine have been discovered floating in the waters off Miami and the Florida Keys.”

Drug smugglers often use boats, submarines and other vessels to transport drugs into the US by sea and may ditch the drugs in the water to avoid seizure if their vessels encounter issues such as mechanical failures, severe weather or law enforcement interdiction, according to Townsend.

He says he frequently witnessed drugs washing up along the South Texas shoreline along the Gulf Coast during one of his past DEA assignments.

“Some smugglers intentionally drop bales of drugs wrapped in plastic or watertight containers into the sea at predetermined locations for later retrieval by other smugglers,” Townsend said.

Once in the water, ocean currents and tides – especially during storms such as Debby – can carry the drugs to shore far away from their original drop points, he said.

In June, authorities in Alabama said 55 pounds of cocaine with an estimated value of $450,000 washed up on Dauphin Island in Mobile County, The Associated Press reported.

Weeks later, a beach goer on Amelia Island in northeastern Florida came across 70 pounds of cocaine with an estimated street value of around $4 million, according to CNN affiliate WJXT.

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