Customs agents inspecting a shipment of plantains thought some of the green bananas seemed unusually hard and cut them open, finding more than 750 pounds of cocaine stuffed inside what turned out to be phony fruit.
Smugglers molded the plantains out of glass fiber, filled them with cocaine and painted them to look like the real fruit, a large, green member of the banana family popular in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The culprits painstakingly scattered the fakes throughout 1,080 boxes of genuine plantains shipped from Ecuador to the Port of Miami, agency spokesman Zach Mann said.
Federal agents were still sorting through the shipment, laboriously cutting each plantain open to separate the contraband from the edible ones.
The smugglers probably had a simpler sorting plan in mind: "Turn off the air conditioning and let them rot, then pull out the fake ones," Mann said. Agents were trying to track the shippers and the intended recipients, he said.
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