Guyanese man busted at JFK with cocaine rum cakes

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection images of a rum and cocaine cake.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection images of a rum and cocaine cake.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection images of a rum and cocaine cake.

[NY Daily News] – You can’t have your cake and snort it too. The feds arrested the reputed drug courier caught smuggling two rum and coke cakes into the U.S. through Kennedy Airport — cocaine, that is.

Romel Samuels was selected for examination Tuesday, December 08 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers after he stepped off a JetBlue flight from originating in Guyana, according to a complaint filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Samuels, 30, was carrying a duty-free bag containing two rum cakes which apparently aroused the officers’ suspicion.

“When one of the cakes was cut, CPB officers discovered a white pasty substance,” Homeland Security special agent Dan Donahue stated in the complaint.

A field test of the substance determined the filling wasn’t whipped cream, but tested positive for cocaine. A total of 1.5 kilos of cocaine was recovered in the two cakes with a street value of about US$70,000.

Samuels crumbled like a cheap sponge cake at that point, and admitted that someone had given him the two rum cakes during a stopover in Trinidad and Tobago and asked him to bring the bag to New York. He told the officers that he assumed there was something illegal inside the cakes but did not think it was drugs, according to the complaint.

Samuels was ordered held without bail Wednesday by a magistrate judge. Defense lawyer James Darrow declined to comment.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. I desperately want to know; when an accuse is found guilty of an illicit drug offence and then prosecute and sentence, what then happens to the intelligence report. I know vital information are divulge about the many cohorts during interrogation, do the CID trow the intelligence away, or are they only after the superficial offenders?

  2. It’s difficult to fight drugs crime, simply because, the persons who are task to implement and execute the laws are colluding with the smugglers.

  3. This on-going crime makes it more difficult for Law-Abiding travelers. Meanwhile the drug lords continue to line rather ‘comfortable’ lives here in Guyana – and the new government seems to be doing nothing to put them behind bars. It is very frustrating.

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