Smugglers modify cars ‘on industrial scale’ to hide drugs

ORGANISED crime gangs are customising cars and lorries on an ‘industrial’ scale to smuggle millions of pounds worth of drugs into Britain, police revealed yesterday.

Secret compartments have been installed in vehicles to hide wads of cash and class A drugs in garages ‘like factories’ around Europe, Scotland Yard said.

It comes as a trafficker faces jail for smuggling 66lbs of cocaine with a street value of £3.6million into London in a custom-made cache in the roof of his Bentley Flying Spur.

Drug dealer Florentino Gonzales, 48, regularly smuggled cocaine in his £140,000 Bentley, which he drove from Belgium to Britain through the Eurotunnel.

The Belgian, of Spanish origin, was arrested after being seen selling the drugs to London deal- ers in an underground carpark. A specialist Border Force team discovered the hidden compartment and seven packages of cash totalling £250,000.

Gonzales’ Bentley travelled to the UK 13 times in 2016. Investigators believe it could have held up to 130lbs of the drug at once.

Gonzales was found guilty of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs at Blackfriars Crown Court in south London this week. He is to be sentenced in April.

Yesterday a senior Met officer said criminals were using increasingly complex hiding places. Detective Chief Inspector Spencer Barnett of the Organised Crime Partnership revealed drugs were found in false footwells and dashboards.

He said garages ‘like factories’ are an industry in itself and ‘a lot of knowledge and expertise is required to alter vehicles without damaging them’. He added: ‘ These [ compartments] are more and more sophisticated, so in a routine stop they are unlikely to be detected.’

‘More and more sophisticated’