March 12--More than a ton of marijuana worth $10 million was found in a shipment of frozen avocado pulp sent to a Lyons cold storage facility, police said Wednesday.
The discovery was made March 4 when workers at the facility in the 8400 block of East 47th Street in the unincorporated section of the west suburb began opening the boxes of pulp that had been shipped there, Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart said in a news release.
The shipment included 1,512 boxes that contained several packages of frozen avocado pulp, Dart said.
But in some boxes flat bricks of marijuana were found under the pulp. In total, 2,100 pounds of pot were found with a street value of $10 million, Dart said.
The workers notified the sheriff's Street Crime Suppression Unit of the suspicious shipment, Dart said in the statement. The shipment had instructions for an urgent pickup.
A narcotics-detecting police dog was brought to the scene and found the drugs inside the pallets. The Drug Enforcement Agency and the McCook Police Department were contacted.
The DEA and sheriff's police are investigating.
