TAMPA, Fla. — To hear Tampa mayor and former chief of police Jane Castor tell it, her discovery of 70 pounds of cocaine during a recent fishing trip with her family in the Florida Keys was mildly surprising and even somewhat amusing.
"It was interesting," Castor said in a conversation with media Tuesday afternoon. "I thought I'd found shade, not something shady."
Castor said she and her family go down to the Keys every year for Florida's mini lobster season. This year, they had rented a house in Marathon at the end of July and had gone out mahi-mahi fishing on the Atlantic. They had caught some fish and were on their way back to shore. Castor's younger brother spotted some debris floating in the water.
"We went over there because quite often, if you fish, the smaller fish will go under any kind of shade that they can get, and then that attracts larger fish like tripletail," Castor said. "So we went over there to see if we could fish around it. The closer we got, I was like, 'Oh, that would be a bale of cocaine!'"
Castor also said it took multiple family members to pull the bale out of the water and onto the boat, as it weighed 70 pounds. Castor noticed the plastic had split open and she could see the tightly wrapped kilos, which she said she easily recognized, having served as Tampa's chief of police and spent 31 years in local law enforcement.
"My family was a little worried, like 'What if there's a tracker, or something like that?' I said, 'Well, the battery's dead if that happened,'" Castor said.
As soon as they reached the shore, Castor says she contacted the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, which ultimately contacted Customs and Border Protection. A customs agent then came and took the cocaine. Castor said she supplied the GPS coordinates of the spot on the ocean where they had found the bale.
The following Monday, Agent Walter N. Slosnar announced the seizure of the cocaine in a post on X, formerly Twitter, which estimated that the drugs had a street value of $1.1 million, though he credited its discovery to "a recreational boater on the #FloridaKeys".