Seatrade Maritime: Drug smuggling and organised crime in the supply chain

Osama Bin Laden’s freight forwarder led the way in terms of shipping illegal goods, according to a former Federal Maritime Commissioner who himself admits to smuggling wine from Italy to his home in Washington.

When regulators break the law with ease you know there is a security problem. Carl Bentzel, once of the Federal Maritime Commission, but more recently the President of the National Association of Waterfront Employers (NAWE), recounted his limited criminal past, smuggling wine into the US, to prove to congress the how open the freight system is.

Bentzel had all the shipment information on wine shipped, legally, from his honeymoon in Italy, after telling Congress that he could beat the maritime security system easily. He used that historical information to ship two cases of wine, but this time labelled it as olive oil, “which is a quarter of the price of wine in tariff terms”.

The shipped ‘olive oil’ was delivered to his house, four blocks from the US Capitol, “Perhaps the most protected terrain in the United States,” and it arrived intact, not a bottle was broken, he said.

According to Bentzel: “If I can’t [as a drug smuggler] come up with a credible way of lying my way through the system, I’m a total idiot… It wouldn’t take that much to buy your own little freight forwarding operation.” He said, “That’s what Osama bin Laden did.”

Bin Laden operated a honey trading business with around 18 vessels, it was a legitimate business, that also carried illicit cargoes.

Congress had wanted to inspect all cargo containers after the twin towers attacks, while industry was trying to get inspections up to 5%, even though “We inspect probably less than 1%,” said Bentzel, with customs still targeting boxes through manifest information, as it did with Bentzel’s fake olive oil.

The failure of the maritime industry and regulators to develop a more effective system of inspecting cargo containers means that the drug smugglers, realistically, have an open goal.

A fact that has not been lost on the authorities in New Zealand, with Maritime New Zealand signalling earlier this month that it would carry out a review of maritime transport legislation with a view to modernising the laws, including the Maritime Security Act 2004.

One of the reasons for this move was the World Customs Organization study (WCO), released in June, in which it was found that 70% of maritime drug seizures had a trusted insider link.

“The modern, globalised cocaine trade is backed by a highly mature industry and well-established supply chain, capable of mass production and maintaining steady flows of cocaine to illicit consumer markets globally.”

According to the WCO study, there were 2,600 drug seizures, totalling 1,347 tonnes of cocaine, 97% of the total that was confiscated in 2023-2024, and 70% of these incidents had a “trusted insider” helping the smugglers.

Some 1,519, amounting to more than 1,900 tonnes were either concealed in a container or were container “rip-offs”. A further 184 seizures, of 83.7 tonnes, were from drugs dropped at sea or hidden on a vessel hull.

US law firm Holland & Knight said the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA) is the primary law that prohibits the illegal transportation of drugs on a vessel.

“In tandem with USCG [US Coast Guard] law enforcement efforts under the MDLEA, the recently imposed Trump Administration counter-narcoterrorism policies have resulted in a shift by traffickers from using traditional small ‘go-fast’ drug-running vessels to a critical part of the global supply chain: commercial vessels plying their trade on the high seas,” said a Holland & Knight paper on drug running on commercial vessels.

The challenge for the maritime industry and for regulators now is how to monitor the movement of more than 200 million containers a year, when, as Bentzel points out, they are packed in places where the drugs originate and not in the destination jurisdictions. 

Moreover, the only information on the contents of a box is what the people that packed it tell you is in it. Just as Bentzel demonstrated with his cargo of wine designated as olive oil.

The maritime industry has an incentive to co-operate with authorities on this issue, because as Holland & Knight point out, “Discovery of drugs onboard a commercial vessel introduces significant legal risk to vessel owners, operators, crew, shippers and insurers. It can trigger immediate vessel and crew detention, which can be lengthy and extremely costly for vessel owners.”