On her first day at work at Dulles, Latrice Hill opened up a suitcase and found a charred monkey.
It’s been pretty much like that every day since then.
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The people who work in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Dulles International Airport — seizing joints, ivory, dirt, live crabs, caches of Iranian jewelry, leopard skins, all manner of sausages and anything anyone could ever think to smuggle in — see the world tucked into this luggage arriving from overseas.
The favorite flavors people miss from home, the pets people can’t bear to leave behind, the scams they run, the souvenirs they can’t pass up, the drugs they hide in children’s juice boxes, the religious items they cherish. It’s all right there.
“Every day is like opening presents. Every day you find something really unusual,” said Kristi Currier, an agriculture specialist who leads a small, cheerful beagle around the luggage carousel to sniff out apples, pork and other threats.
These are jobs that mix the sheer futility of trying to screen for the tiniest traces of illegal substances as thousands of people and bags come gushing in and its ridiculous opposite: contraband that literally reaches out and bites them.
It has its dangers.
It has its banalities — the umpteenth time explaining why you have to throw out that orange, sir.
And it has lots and lots of weird stuff: ocelot belts, needles full of collagen, cocaine hidden in religious statues, and a suitcase with bloody sheets, chicken feathers and a dried hedgehog.
CBP officers are trying to enforce federal, state and local laws, said supervisor Christopher Downing.
They’re trying to keep bad guys out of the United States and screening for more nebulous dangers, such as diseases and threats to agriculture.
That’s why on Thursday agriculture specialist Hill took a large ostrich egg, emptied, polished and painted with songbirds, from a passenger arriving from South Africa. It could pose a risk of spreading avian flu. That’s why Currier said she is on guard against ruminants — a roast beef sandwich to you, perhaps, but, if it came from certain countries, it could be tainted with mad cow disease.
And that’s why passengers might have to undergo X-rays if they are suspected of smuggling drugs. In June, officers arrested a man from Nigeria who had three pounds of heroin in his belly, which would probably have killed him if the balloons had burst inside him.
The search begins
The screening begins as soon as the suitcases start coming off the planes. On Thursday afternoon, a large German shepherd named Rex ran on the conveyor belt sniffing frantically at first-class passengers’ bags from an Air France flight, slaloming between or jumping on top of them in the search for drugs.
At a baggage carousel upstairs, a beagle named Thomas was snuffling at a large Louis Vuitton shopping bag. He had already found some fruit and five songbirds that a passenger had bought in Europe to remind him of home.
CBP officers and officers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wander through as people wait for their bags. That’s where wildlife inspector Kelly French once noticed someone carrying an unusual leather purse. The front flap was the head and tiny front paws of an African dwarf crocodile, which is endangered.
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