Many Italians might enjoy a strong cup of coffee, but authorities in the country say they recently found some Colombian beans with a little too much kick to them.
Police intercepted a package at Milan airport this week that contained roughly 500 cocaine-laced coffee beans, which amounted to about 150 grams of the white stuff. Each bean had been carefully sliced open, hollowed out, packed with coke and then sealed with brown tape, the Financial Police said on Facebook.
The beans were addressed to Santino D’Antonio, the fictional Italian mob boss in the second John Wick film, Euro News reports.
Video posted on the Financial Police Facebook page shows officers slicing the beans open with a utility knife to reveal the drugs inside.
Authorities followed the package to its delivery address at a tobacco shop in Florence, where they arrested a 50-year-old man after he received it.
It’s not the first time smugglers have tried to slip cocaine beans through customs. A Berlin coffee roaster found 33 kilograms of cocaine inside a bag of beans in 2014, which police said came from Brazil.
Italian police also made a massive drug bust in January 2019, when they seized about 644 kg of cocaine hidden inside bags of Honduran coffee. The coke was packaged and hidden inside the bags, rather than inside the beans themselves.