This week: News broke that, back in June, a man was arrested at Barcelona El Prat airport for smuggling cocaine under his wig.
I think, first of all, it is important that you see the wig:
Videos by VICE
Yeah, mate – just at the airport being totally normal. You’ve got your normal bag and your normal little moisturiser for the plane because your hands get all dry. You’ve got your normal “tall wig” on, under which is a massive packet of cocaine that you have glued to your head. Everything is normal. You look good. You are easily the most relaxed person in this airport security queue.
Of course this man was stopped and arrested. The wig is, let’s face it, the sort of visual gag you’d expect to see on Mrs Brown’s Boys. So why did he choose this method, exactly?
Some guesses: maybe he was going for a sort of “hidden in plain sight” thing? Or perhaps he hoped that social awkwardness around pointing out a man’s toupée would make airport security refrain from pointing out his toupée? Unfortunately, if his strategy was based on the latter, he seems to have forgotten that airport security people are famously some of the rudest in the world. It is literally their job to not smile.
Either way, staff noticed that something was afoot, and, per the Guardian, in a pair of sentences so sublime I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never reach their heights even if I continue writing for the next 40 years: “Officers noted that the passenger, who had arrived on a flight from Bogotá, seemed extremely nervous. However, what most attracted their attention was the size, and in particular, the height of his wig.”
The height of his wig indeed. The higher the hair, the closer to God, they say. A lesser known but just as true phrase is: “The higher the hair, the more likely to raise alarm at airport security.” It’s reported that the drugs were worth a total of £27,000 and weighed just over half a kilo; in a statement, Spanish officers noted, “There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls.”
This level of piss-taking is basically unmatched. It’s transcendent piss-taking; piss-taking that most of us could only hope to achieve over the course of our lifetimes. It also truly gets to the essence of piss-taking, of doing something so absolutely fucking cheeky that – regardless of your stance on the activity – you do have to go, “Fair play to him for giving it a try.”
I think, fundamentally, the part of this story that makes it so special is that we will probably never know why this man decided that a wig was the best thing to conceal 503 grams of cocaine. We will simply be left with the fact that he did it, and in doing so left us with some of the greatest before and after images of all time.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS:
– The person who managed to do 27 London bus trips in an hour on one £1.50 FareHopper payment (h/t @adambecket).
– Fairly obviously, Tom Hooper, director of the upcoming Cats film, who has given cats tits and added the phrase “advanced fur technology” to the collective lexicon, for which I will never forgive him.
