When you combine contraband, poverty, desperation and lots of spare time, you get the bizarre world of the smuggler. Everything from cocaine to human beings is waiting to cross tight borders into lands where they're not welcome. And wherever you find them, you find an army of smugglers using every ounce of their creativity to get them through. Also, it appears quite a few of them are insane. Advertisement

7 Mini Subs Continue Reading Below Advertisement Smuggling drugs in completely safe and structurally sound factory-made vehicles is for cowards. Real smugglers climb into leaky, rusty homemade submarines to bootleg their cocaine. These things aren't just a couple of steel drums welded together, though. They've found subs in Colombia and Mexico big enough to carry up to 11 tons of drugs. The cops seized a partially-built sub that had hydraulic tubing, a protected propeller, a double hull and the ability to dive below 300 feet. It makes mom's attempts to smuggle opium in her wooden leg look sad by comparison. Costing from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars, the subs are usually crewed by small teams, have ranges of around 5,000 nautical miles and generally carry several hundred million dollars worth of drugs per trip. If you're wondering how you convince a drug mule to get inside one of those things, we're guessing they figure that with 11 tons of drugs in there nobody will notice if, at the end of the trip, a little comes up missing. Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"Missing cocaine? No, I'm as shocked as you are."

6 The Lady in the Dashboard Of course smuggling human beings across borders is a whole different ballgame. After all, it's not like you can just stuff a whole person in the glovebox. We stand corrected. A few years ago, customs officials at the US-Mexico border stopped a car and requested to see the registration. Being trained in the fine arts of observations, officials noticed something suspicious: a fully grown, 135lb woman jammed in the dashboard, looking out through the glove box. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Arguably more stupid, there's also photographic evidence of a man who inserted himself into a car's upholstery in an attempt to disguise himself as a captain's chair. Another passenger was sitting in the seat and the entire car was hoping today was the day customs officials were holding their annual "Bring A Retard To Work Day." Elsewhere in the universe, some people have attempted to smuggle humans--specifically a woman and her 3 year old daughter--in the gas tank of a Dodge Caravan. If you've never been in a gas tank of a Dodge Caravan you may be surprised to learn it's exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds, which is to say: still better than public transit. Continue Reading Below Advertisement