Man finds $850K worth of cocaine in car he bought at auction

Buying a used car is a fraught business. You can’t be sure what you’re getting, especially when it’s unlikely that all those advertised vehicles really have had just one elderly churchgoing female owner.

But if a potentially spicy surprise is what you’re after in an automobile, you could do worse than head to an auction in the Rio Grande Valley, South Texas, on the US-Mexico border.

A car buyer there certainly got a lot more than he bargained for when he recently put in a successful bid on a motor he’d had his eye on.

The man from the border city of Laredo, Texas, was checking out his new mean machine back at home when he happened upon a unique extra not mentioned in the original listing – 74 pounds of cocaine.

Not fancying himself as the next Scarface, the bona fide bidder called the cops Saturday to report what he had discovered in a secret compartment of the vehicle.

He showed arriving deputies from the Webb County Sheriff’s Office 17 bundles of the potent powder that he had already found, according to the Houston Chronicle. Police dogs then sniffed out a further 17 bundles stashed in a second hidden compartment inside the car.

In total, the 34 bundles contained 74.96 pounds of cocaine with an estimated street value of $850,000.

“I thank and congratulate the person who alerted us to the drugs. Had he not been an honest individual, the drugs could have ended up in the wrong hands,” Sheriff Martin Cuellar said in a statement.

The area’s car auctions may now need to brace themselves for an influx of out-of-town bidders.