Word: contrabanding
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...Buenos Aires last week, customs officials were auctioning off a $100 million hoard of contraband-1,500 cars, mountains of nylons, radios and TV sets -confiscated over the last few years. It was only the merest drop in a very deep bucket. By conservative estimate, Argentine smugglers will do a $300 million business this year, while their counterparts in Brazil will gross an even handsomer $400 million. Total sales for all Latin America are well over $1 billion annually...
...bring a 300% markup on the legal market in Argentina, and there is a thriving undercover import business in crates marked "agricultural equipment." An even more sophisticated wrinkle is smuggling airplanes: near the seaside resort of Mar del Plata, Argentine police are currently investigating a shipment of planes-53 contraband Cessnas and Pipers-smuggled in piece by piece. At a rough estimate, the haul would have been worth $1,000,000 to the smugglers...
Prosperity's wand seems to have touched almost every kind of business man in the Common Market - even the smugglers. Europeans have always been adept at slipping all sorts of contraband across their tangle of national boundaries, but the smugglers were usually small-time dealers in such items as coffee and cigarettes. Today's smugglers are sophisticated businessmen who shun 50 lbs. of coffee in favor of 50 tons of steel, or deal in complex electronic calculators rather than cigarettes. Nowhere in Europe do these "white-collar smugglers" thrive more than in West Germany, where harassed customs officials...
...also nixed proposals for 1) a corps of pretty hostesses to aid incoming passengers, 2) a Customs Academy, which would eventually turn out inspectors so expert in snap judgment that they could simply glance at a woman's face and know whether her spiked heels were full of contraband. As it is, the simplified "oral declarations" remain a pie-in-the-sky practice except for air arrivals at Miami and Idlewild. As for New York's outmoded docks, Nichols concludes, "I can't see anything happening in the next five years that will be better than...
Climaxing a two-year investigation, a commission of inquiry in Colombo accused 22 Ceylonese navy officers-the cream of the top naval leadership-of conspiring to smuggle a treasure-trove of contraband into the country. Chief among them is the former naval chief of staff, Rear Admiral Royce de Mel, 47. When he sailed grandly home from a 1960 goodwill cruise in Asian waters, the commission charged, the magazines of De Mel's flagship and an escorting frigate had been loaded with some $10,000 worth of bounty bought in duty-free ports. Main source was Singapore, where...