This is what 5 kilos of cocaine looks like when it’s packaged for shipment. Henderson and Vance County law officers found this cocaine in a car on Interstate 85 on Wednesday.
Henderson police seized 11 pounds of cocaine from a car on Interstate 85 on Wednesday, the second major cocaine bust during a traffic stop on the highway in about three weeks.
Two Alamance County men, Arles Euceda-Valle, 41, of Burlington and Nelson Gallo-Barahona, 32, of Graham, are being held in the Vance County Jail in lieu of a secured $500,0000 bond each on five charges: conspiracy to commit trafficking of cocaine; manufacture of cocaine; trafficking cocaine by possession; trafficking cocaine by transport; and maintaining a vehicle to transport controlled substances.
A police officer stopped them in a 1996 Nissan Maxima for an undisclosed traffic violation on northbound I-85 near mile marker 215, in the area of Parham Road, around midday, Police Chief Glen Allen said in a news release Thursday.
After further investigation, the officer, assisted by a Vance County sheriff’s deputy and a K-9, found the 5 kilos of cocaine hidden in the car.
Based on a rough price for cocaine in this pure powdered form of $20,000 to $25,000 per kilo, the value of the seized drug would be $100,000 to $125,000. That is a wholesale price because the cocaine would be cut and resold and possibly processed into crack before reaching the streets, Allen said.
The chief said he doesn’t think the cocaine was headed for anywhere in Vance County in its current form, but if it had been processed into crack, it would have come to Henderson “and a thousand other communities.”
Police impounded the vehicle and called in the State Bureau of Investigation and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to join the investigation.
The SBI and DEA also are leading the continuing investigation into an even bigger cocaine seizure 22 days earlier, March 29.
In that case, the largest cocaine seizure ever in Vance County, a city police officer stopped a van for speeding on northbound I-85. With the help of county deputies, the officer uncovered about 8 kilos, or 17.6 pounds, of cocaine in a hidden compartment. Police estimated the value of the cocaine at $200,000.
Both cases involved an Alamance connection, and both intercepted a cocaine shipment headed farther north.
A Burlington man, Pedro Lita-Quiroz, 27, was among the three men arrested March 29 on the same five drug-trafficking charges as in Wednesday’s bust. The other two men were from Mexico. The initial bond for the trio was $1 million apiece.
Allen said he has not heard any updates from the SBI and the DEA on the investigation of the March 29 cocaine shipment.
But the similarities in the cases are “remarkably coincidental,” Allen said when asked whether the two shipments could be connected. “We expect further investigation will examine that possibility.”
The chief said both luck and stepped-up enforcement played roles in producing two major cocaine seizures so close together.
The Police Department’s highway traffic safety unit has worked the interstate since the fall, he said, and “they key onto certain factors when they make a traffic stop.”
Allen can’t judge whether drug trafficking has increased on I-85, but he said he has no reason to suspect that the recent activity has been unusual. “As much crack cocaine as there is on the streets, several somebodies have to be moving it all around.”