Trending Topics

What kinds of secret compartments have cops found?

A question posted recently on Quora asked, “What kinds of secret compartments have police found?” Two law enforcement professionals shared their stories on the topic, below. Check them out and add your thoughts in the comments.

Bob Cooke:
Some years ago my agency investigated a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang who lived in a home in unincorporated area of south Santa Clara County. His compound was on a few acres, and he had built a tall wall around the entire property and an actual moat inside the walls and around the primary building which was his residence. We had to use a large military-type vehicle to breach the steel gates. Once we secured all of the people and vehicles on the property, we spent an entire day searching the property.

The primary suspect must have friends in the cabinet construction business. He had several hidden compartments constructed within areas that almost went undiscovered. However, we noticed discrepancies in the width of hallways and rooms that led us to find a small interior storage or hiding room on the main floor. We also found a much larger sub-level room that you had to access from a bathroom sink cabinet. That room was under the garage.

Police have discovered much less elaborate hiding areas in homes that most commonly are used to hide contraband like drugs and firearms. These have included large pipes buried in yards and other pipes concealed with the building’s sewer pipes.

Vehicles
Vehicles are another challenge. For a time, Mexican drug smugglers favored Ford F-100 and F-150 pickup trucks with large V8 engines. Operating with information from an informant, we learned of heroin being smuggled in these trucks from Mexico. We had task force officers working with us who were experts in locating the sophisticated methods of hiding contraband in passenger cars, trucks and commercial vehicles. But these trucks proved troublesome for quite a while. We were missing heroin deliveries even when the trucks were legally detained by U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement. Even the use of experienced K9 drug detection dogs were unable locate these loads.

Finally, we got a break. One of the vehicle experts studied the vehicle diagrams and engine specifications. It was then we found about 18 pounds of black tar heroin, with a street value of about $580,000.00, hidden in a space between the intake manifold and the actual top of the engine. That led to many seizures from other vehicles until the smugglers and transporters changed their methods of concealment.

There are a lot of people who install false hidden compartments in vehicles that are definitely difficult to locate — even when using an X-ray machine. Some of the compartments are equipped with a trap door that is opened by triggering an electronic switch. I’m not talking about a simple on-and-off type toggle switch. The switches are sometimes released by a magnet moved over a remote switch hidden under the hood, under or behind the dash board. I have seen ones that required the vehicle to be placed in a particular gear such as park or reverse — then the air conditioning had to be set to maximum — which finally pushed one of the radio control buttons to release the compartment door. In California is it illegal to outfit cars with these hidden compartments used for drugs, guns or cash.

Tim O’Pry:
The only creative / unique hiding location I saw in six years of working in vice/narcotics was from a couple that sold Dilaudid. Their house was in a nice middle class neighborhood, very neat and well-kept. A confidential informant made a controlled buy that was the basis for our search warrant — purchasing a few pills — but the CI did not see a larger stash, nor where the pills were stored.

The front half/living room of the house had built-in shelves with over two hundred dolls. Nice dolls. Expensive dolls. The house itself was immaculate and very clean. We searched the usual places (where we found drugs 90 percent of the time), but came up empty. The couple had been kept separated the entire time and neither one was talking, and they were quite convincing that they did not know what Dilaudid was or anything about the CI and the controlled buy. These were not your normal dealers — nor the normal stash house — and we were starting to get a little concerned.

While we thought the pills may be stored inside a doll — an examination of several revealed no obvious tampering. Cutting open potentially hundreds of expensive dolls and coming up dry was not something we wanted to do — and it was possible that they had sold all of the pills prior to our arrival or simply did not keep them in the house.

Bring Out the K-9
Fortunately, we had a trump card — Judge, our police narcotics dog (I was his handler). The concern was that simply handling a doll with residue on the hands could trigger an alert, so we would need to do multiple passes to try and limit the false positives (or dolls that had residue but no actual drugs inside), and keep the dolls from touching each other while using gloves to handle them. We changed the gloves regularly and documented the entire process.

We positioned the suspects handcuffed and sitting on their porch, where they could watch the process and we could watch their reaction.

Taking one shelf of approximately 20 dolls at a time, we set them three feet apart outside on the sidewalk and I ran Judge by them. Since he was only trained in narcotics detection, his alerts were aggressive, not passive (like a bomb dog), and would range from nosing a doll over to get a better sniff to full-on, squeeze-toy grabbing it with his mouth and shaking it.

Any dolls Judge grabbed with his mouth were set to one side, those that received a light alert to another, and the balance (majority) placed in boxes. We examined the mouthed ones very closely, but found nothing. All stitches in place, nothing odd or out of place — they all looked brand new. We repeated this process again, and any dolls that Judge gave a strong alert to a second time (almost all of the original group) were considered suspect and to be opened.

Breakthrough
Throughout this process we continued to watch the couple and their expression went from nonchalant and confident to the traditional ‘oh shit,’ so we were reasonably confident we were onto something. We asked them again if they wanted to tell us which doll(s) contained drugs in order to save us from damaging more than we had to (not knowing that finding drugs in one, meant were going to likely open all of them). We simply wanted to find at least one sooner rather than later — for obvious reasons.

Despite their change in demeanor, they opted at this point to exercise their rights and asked for a lawyer. We then laid the suspect dolls on the ground in a row and someone noticed that most of them had something in common — a different eye color. We then looked at the dolls that did not trigger an alert and sure enough, none of those had this same eye color.

We then opened one of the dolls that had a strong alert and odd eye-color and (fortunately) found Dilaudid. At that point, all of the dolls were boxed up and taken to the police department. Later, we would open all of the dolls which triggered a strong alert (around 10 total, as I recall) and found Dilaudid in all but two — and those two were they only ones that did not have the odd eye color. The color was apparently how they could tell the stash dolls from the others.

Much later, after they plea bargained, we were told by the DA that the wife used to work at the company that made the dolls. They were actually produced in Mexico with the pills inside — that is why they looked perfect. The remainder (the vast majority) was her collection that also served as the perfect camouflage.

Good job, Judge!

“The Question” section brings together user-generated articles from the Police1 Facebook page based on questions we pose to our followers, as well as some of the best content we find on Quora, a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users who are often experts in their field. The site aggregates questions and answers for a range of topics, including public safety.

The views and opinions expressed in the questions and answers posted directly from Quora do not necessarily reflect those of P1.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU