An American Airlines mechanic who was found guilty of trying to smuggle more than $320,000 worth of cocaine into the United States by hiding it in a special compartment under the cockpit of a commercial airplane has been sentenced to nine years behind bars.
Paul Belloisi, who was fired by American Airlines in the wake of his conviction last year, has only just now been sentenced at a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, where District Judge Dora L. Irizarry ordered Belloisi to be banged up for 108 months on Friday for his part in the audacious drug smuggling plot.
Belloisi was an aircraft mechanic at New York JFK, where he had privileged access to American Airlines jets – a privilege that jurors were told that he abused when he took part in a scheme to smuggle hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine into the US.
The smuggling operation was, however, only discovered by chance when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers carried out a random enforcement exam of an American Airlines plane that had just landed in JFK from a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica, on February 4, 2020.
The search of the plane included looking inside the main avionics bay, which is underneath the cockpit and accessible from the ground. Inside this compartment, officers found ten bricks of cocaine said to have a street value of more than $320,000.
The CBP officers quickly set up a sting operation, replacing the real bricks of cocaine with dummy bricks so that they could see who would try to remove the narcotics from the plane.
Surprisingly, the plane remained on the ground for hours without anyone suspicious approaching the avionics bay to remove the cocaine. But just 20 minutes before the plane was due to depart JFK and with passengers already boarding the aircraft, CBP spotted Belloisi approaching the plane and removing the blocks of dummy drugs.
Law enforcement rushed in to apprehend Belloisi, and during a preliminary search, they discovered that he had cut special holes in the inside of his work jacket to hide the blocks of drugs without anyone noticing what he was carrying.
“The defendant abused his insider position at JFK Airport to help smuggle more than 25 pounds of cocaine into the United States in a highly sensitive electronics compartment of an international aircraft,” commented United States Attorney Breon Peace, following Belloisi’s sentencing.
“This conduct not only furthers the trafficking of drugs that harms our communities but also poses a serious threat to the security of a vital border crossing in our district and our transportation infrastructure,” Peace continued.
This isn’t the first time that an American Airlines mechanic has been caught trying to abuse their position to smuggle drugs into the United States. In December 2020, long-serving mechanic Adil Munir Yusuf, who was based at Los Angeles International Airport, was accused of helping to smuggle over 80,000 pounds of Khat into the United States between 2015 and 2020.
Khat is a leafy green plant containing two main stimulant drugs that can speed up the mind and body, with effects said to be similar but less powerful than amphetamine.
In that case, however, Yyusuf was accused of abusing his buddy pass privileges to help his coconspirators travel to countries where khat is legal and then transport it back to the United States.
