A network of Kennedy Airport baggage handlers smuggled tens of millions of dollars worth of cocaine and marijuana into the United States by exploiting its access to airplanes and cargo, federal officials charged Tuesday.
Twenty-five people, nearly all current or former employees at Kennedy, were arrested and faced arraignment at federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday afternoon on charges of conspiring to import controlled substances, prosecutors said.
The defendants helped import hundreds of kilograms worth of cocaine and hundreds of pounds worth of marijuana in a scheme that one top investigator called "a potential threat to homeland security."
"A network of corrupt airport employees, motivated by greed, might just as well have been collaborating with terrorists," the investigator, Michael J. Garcia, acting assistant secretary of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement.
Nearly all of those charged in the case are current or former baggage handlers or other ground crew members for American Airlines and at least three other smaller companies operating at Kennedy. One was described as a current employee at Miami International Airport.
Federal agents who began conducting surveillance on flights from Guyana 14 months ago watched suspects unload drugs stashed in luggage, cargo and, in one case, under ice in a plane's galley, officials said.
The drugs were then diverted around border inspection areas and handed off for distribution inside the U.S., officials said.
In September, federal agents seized a pallet loaded with three boxes of cocaine weighing about 185 kilos and worth about $23 million, officials said.