Feral Hogs Steal $22,000 Worth of Cocaine From Drug-Trafficking Ring

Feral hogs, man. When they’re not running into your yard within 3-5 minutes while your small kids play, they’re digging up and destroying huge stashes of cocaine buried deep in the woods of Tuscany.

In a story first reported stateside in Newsweek, a gang of suspected drug dealers—one Italian and three Albanians—were arrested on charges of trafficking after police tapped their phones and overheard them talking about, uh, dealing drugs. More specifically: they were complaining about how rampaging wild boar had dug up their massive stash hidden in Italy’s Valdichiana valley. (“Mamma mia! Those-a terrible-a hogs-a!”) According to The Independent, “with their powerful snouts, the boar managed to rip open the waterproof packages in which the cocaine was kept” scattering it all over the bucolic forest floor.

Feral Hogs Steal $22,000 Worth of Cocaine From Drug-Trafficking Ring
Feral Hogs Steal $22,000 Worth of Cocaine From Drug-Trafficking Ring

The gang are accused of getting the cocaine from nearby Perugia and selling two kilos per month in local clubs and bars at a price of $88 to $110 per gram from September 2018 to March 2019. They replenished their supply regularly from their secret forest bounty until, of course, the hogs got to it first. As of now, nobody knows what happened to the hogs or how much cocaine they actually ingested.

Much like feral hogs have become an unmanageable invasive species in the United States, so too have they been plaguing Italian farmers. Earlier this month, hundreds of those farmers staged a protest in Rome demanding that the government give them adequate measures to control the hog invasion. Alberto Vincenzo Pagani, a mayor of a small town in the Lombardy region, said, “They are free to move around as they wish. Boar don’t go into offices or factories [Ed. Note: It would be pretty cool if they did though], so the only ones penalized by this freedom are farmers.”

And, as it turns out, drug dealers.

Originally Appeared on GQ