The scene is Kennedy International Airport. The principals are some drug-enforcement agents and a 36-year-old Nigerian named Ojiabo Onumonu. The key exhibits are 83 condoms---all stuffed with heroin and all carried in Mr. Onumonu's stomach as he entered the United States.
Consider a world in which officials spend their days scrutinizing disembarking passengers, looking for a tell-tale tic. Consider how they then yank such persons aside, chain them to a bed and wait, for however long it takes for them to defecate. Consider a suspect under the watchful eyes of three Federal agents, extricating nugget after nugget after nugget of contraband from his own feces.
To lay people, it is a vision out of Dante or the Marquis de Sade. But to judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers who spend their days around the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, it is routine. Mention "balloon swallowings" to them and they sound blasi almost bored. While educators debate whether to hand them out in public schools, condoms have become the container of choice for some so-called drug mules arriving at Kennedy, particularly for those on twice-weekly flights from Lagos to New York.
Mark Wasserman, the prosecutor who tried Mr. Onumonu, called such matters "second nature." Mr. Onumonu's lawyer, Leonard J. Levenson of Manhattan, estimates this was his 12th swallower case. Asked how many such cases he had heard, Judge Raymond J. Dearie , who sat on the trial replied: "Oh, heavens! Hundreds."
Caught as they are with the goods, balloon swallowers almost always plead guilty rather than go to trial. Under Federal sentencing guidelines they receive prison terms as long as five years without parole.
If few cases go to trial, fewer still are appealed. Mr. Onumonu's case reached the appellate state only because it involved gemology as well as scatology.
Before leaving Nigeria, Mr. Onumonu, who had lived legally in the United States for 16 years, swallowed 83 condoms, each containing a small, hard package of heroin. Like bizarre wontons or kreplach, the condoms were placed in soup---a thick slippery Nigerian variety called "foo-foo"---which helped them glide down Mr. Onumonu's throat. He was given $5,000 for his troubles. The money would enable him to see his two children in Detroit, he said.
In the wee hours of Aug. 8, 1990, Mr. Onumonu arrived in New York on Nigeria Airways Flight 850. A member of the United States Customs Service's contraband enforcement team saw him shaking and sweating profusely. When stopped for questioning, Mr. Onumonu was vague and evasive, agents said. It was, the official said, the prototypical behavior of an "internal drug smuggler."
After Mr. Onumonu refused to have an X-ray, he was led to a van, where he was shackled to a bed by one hand and one leg. After four days there, he finally voided. In his stool were the 83 condoms, containing 576 grams of heroin valued at more than $100,000.
Mr. Onumonu said his Nigerian confederates had told him that the condoms contained diamonds, not drugs. While smuggling diamonds out of Nigeria is illegal, bringing them into the United States is not, at least if they are uncut. One here, however, those diamonds would be worth millions. Or so Mr. Onumonu's expert, Samuel Beizer of the Fashion Institute of Technology, had planned to testify, to corroborate Mr. Onumonu's defense that his intention was to make money in a legal way. But Mr. Wasserman asserted that such testimony was irrelevant, and Judge Dearie agreed. A jury promptly convicted Mr. Onumonu, and Judge Dearie sentenced him to 66 months in Federal prison.
Maintaining that Mr. Onumonu had not been allowed to present a full defense, Mr. Levenson took the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which ordered a new trial. "The average New York juror knows little about diamond smuggling out of Nigeria,and even less abut the feasibility of internally smuggling diamonds by swallowing condoms." Judge George C. Pratt wrote for himself and Judge Roger Miner.
Mr. Levenson said such drug smuggling prosecutions are wasteful unbecoming of the courts and ultimately, futile. Judge Dearie, for six years the United States Attorney in Brooklyn, added another adjective: tragic. Most of the defendants, he noted, were actually very decent people who became human suitcases only out of desperation. Nor, Judge Dearie said, was there any evidence that prosecuting them did any good.
Tomorrow morning at 6"05, Nigeria Airlines Flight 850 is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Airport, carrying its latest planeload of passengers, and perhaps, of pathos.