Cocaine Jesus statue seized by agents in Laredo Drug dealer's wait for Jesus denied by federal agents

This statue of Jesus Christ is made from cocaine. The small statue was seized in Laredo last week after an attempt to smuggle it into the United States. This statue of Jesus Christ is made from cocaine. The small statue was seized in Laredo last week after an attempt to smuggle it into the United States. Photo: ICE Photo: ICE Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Cocaine Jesus statue seized by agents in Laredo 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A drug dealer named The Spider is wondering why his Jesus Christ still hasn't appeared in Dallas.

Thanks to an unusual bust by federal agents in Laredo, they're not going to connect.

Drug traffickers mixed as much as six pounds of the illicit white powder into a paste and used it to make a regal statue of the Christian savior, complete with painted-on flowing hair and a gold cape.

Smugglers were likely hoping the statue, which could be worth as much as $30,000 on the streets, would be dismissed by border guards as just another of the hundreds of plaster representations hawked to borderland tourists.

But a dog trained to sniff out drugs confirmed it was anything but another religious memento.

"This seizure shows what extreme measures people will go through to smuggle drugs," Janice Ayala, second-in-command of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's investigative office in Laredo, said Wednesday.

Earlier this week in the Rio Grande Valley, border inspectors found $10,000 stuffed into a child's bulging diaper.

"These people will use anything, including religious icons to smuggle their drugs," said Steven Robertson, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in Washington. "It is sacrilegious."

Robertson said if the statue had been successfully smuggled, it would likely have been broken apart with water, sifted through a strainer and dried before being bagged and sold to users.

Investigators will likely now run chemical tests to determine what percentage of the statue is cocaine as well as the drug's purity.

There's no way to know if smugglers routinely use the Jesus statue technique, though Robertson said big-time drug dealers would likely consider it too much work for too little profit.

The plot quietly began to unfold last week when the woman who was a passenger in a car driving into the United States said a man told her he had too many things to carry, and would pay her $80 if she'd drop the statue at the Laredo bus station, according to a court document filed Wednesday.

While trying to enter the United States, Customs and Border Patrol inspectors grew suspicious and checked her out.

The woman later said she was unaware the statue was cocaine and took federal agents along for her rendezvous.

After being arrested, the man, 61-year-old Bernardino Garcia-Cordova, admitted the statue was his property, authorities said. Garcia-Cordova, who now faces cocaine importation and possession charges, told investigators a man he knows only by a Spanish nickname, La Araña, or The Spider, told him to take it to Dallas.

dane.schiller@chron.com