Word: cargos
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Borne into the U.S. on private jets, inside the scuzzy trunks of old cars or even on flimsy rubber rafts equipped with cellular phones, the shipments of human cargo are surging. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was supposed to stem this tide, mostly by beefing up enforcement and nabbing employers who hire these aliens. But the number of illegals apprehended by federal agents, 954,000 in 1989, is suddenly rising sharply. In a perverse way, IRCA has enhanced the smuggling trade by motivating undocumented aliens to plan their trips more carefully. Result: up to half the estimated...
Atomic weapons were on the mind of a buyer for Iraq when he contacted a California manufacturer of capacitors in September 1988. One year later, he struck a deal for 40 capacitors powerful enough to detonate a nuclear blast. Last week U.S. and British customs investigators seized the cargo in a freight shed at London's Heathrow Airport and arrested four people in connection with the attempt to smuggle arms into Iraq...
...March 19 the capacitors were flown from Los Angeles to London aboard a TWA aircraft and stored in a warehouse. (By some accounts, British officials substituted fake devices for the actual capacitors.) Nine days later, as the large wooden crate containing the cargo was about to be loaded onto an Iraqi Airways flight bound for Baghdad, U.S. and British customs officials seized the goods...
...Cubans shipped in a small arsenal. On March 9 a Cuban transport plane landed in Brasilia carrying 100 passengers and crew members. According to the Rio daily Jornal do Brasil, there were also ten tons of weaponry aboard. At first the Cubans tried to convince the hosts that the cargo consisted of medical supplies. When the Brazilians insisted on an inspection, they discovered machine guns, grenades, an antiaircraft gun, even missiles...
After more than a day of heated negotiations, the transport plane headed back for Cuba, its cargo intact; Castro's security detail was left with only handguns...