From: WJLA.com ABC-7
By Kris Van Cleave
Only on 7, we have an exclusive look at a crackdown on a huge kind of smuggling you’ve probably never even thought of.
Cigarette smuggling costs states billions of dollars and our region is the hotspot because taxes on cigarettes are substantially lower in Virginia than in Maryland and the Northeast.
ABC7’s Kris Van Cleave is with undercover Maryland investigators as they close in on a suspected smuggler.
And he has more on the staggering amount of money people are making by breaking the law.
The cops are after untaxed cigarettes, bought in Virginia or North Carolina and taken through Maryland to the Northeast.
ATF agents stopped a Lincoln Town car in Richmond, loaded down with 1,800 cartons of smuggled cigarettes. The difference in taxes between Virginia and New York City, where these were going, is $55.50 a carton, which means about $6,500 in profit for a potential smuggler on this one trip.
ATF agent Ashan Benedict has handled several major cigarette smuggling cases in our region.
“Cigarette smuggling is as lucrative or more lucrative than smuggling drugs or smuggling guns,” Benedict says.
The Department of Justice puts the scope of the problem into the billions of dollars, with big organized crime, and even groups with links to terrorists cashing in.
“You are looking at millions of dollars and the more organized they get we are seeing links to human smuggling, links to narcotics, weapons and violence,” Benedict says.
