When it comes to drug running, I generally tend to think that people are smuggling drugs on tiny planes or boats across the sea, but it turns out that there’s more than one way to get that stuff from South America into the European populace.

Images VIA

Case in point is the weird story of OAPs Susan and Roger Clarke who were recently arrested on a cruise ship in Lisbon with 10kg of cocaine hidden inside their suitcases. The pair had been travelling over from the Caribbean but what’s more shocking than their age in pulling a stunt like this was that they first tried to set up a couple of their friends to take the fall.

Paul and Pauline Craven (lol would you really marry someone with almost the exact same name as you? They’re pictured below) met the Clarkes when Pauline was employed as a cleaner by them in Spain – the four are all expats. Anyway, the Clarkes invited the Cravens on a free cruise with them on the proviso that they needed to carry some designer suitcases back from the Caribbean for them to sell at a profit once they were back in Europe. Luckily though, the Cravens thought something was up with it and declined the invitation:

Assuming they knew they were hiding those drugs, I feel like we’re two very lucky people.

That could so easily have been us.

Roger told us he imported pineapples from the Caribbean to the UK in containers and said he wanted me on the ship to keep his wife company.

Then they started saying we should buy some designer suitcases in the Caribbean because they could pick them up them cheap and we could sell them for two or three times more once we got to the UK.

I didn’t think anything of it initially but then they said we’d need to put our clothes inside the suitcases we were supposed to buy.

I couldn’t understand how we’d be able to sell the cases for a profit when they were essentially second-hand because they would have been used.

No flies on Pauline there are there? Pretty smart she figured it out but I’ve also gotta question just how the Clarkes managed to get involved with drug running insane amounts of cocaine from the Caribbean over to Europe when they’re in their 70s. I guess there are some dodgy characters on the Costa Del Sol and the lure of one last huge payday is pretty tempting, but even so it seems kind of a dumb thing to get mixed up in at that age, right? Guess we’ll find out the details when they go to trial.

For more of the same, check out this story about bricks of cocaine washing up on the beach on Fiji. Naughty.