These Guys Tried to Smuggle a Load of Heroin in a Crushing Machine

It's one of those situations where it doesn't take long for you to be left mesmerised. As devotees of the world of YouTube hydraulic press videos will already know, there's something soothing about watching a whirring nub of metal appear to lightly descend over an object – a golf ball, say, or the entire blonde Barbie doll above – and almost cheerily get to work crushing it under an unimaginable weight.

It's all sort of predictable at first. When the piston nudges towards the ball or doll's "head", you know they're going to make contact. You know when they do, the object is going to lose the shape you've always recognised and turn into something … something else. But for the love of whatever god, those final few seconds quickly turn from interesting to horrifying to a flinching moment of total destruction that ends up looking rather lovely in the end.

All of which is to say that, sure, if I were a drug smuggler I'd also probably never think that anyone working for the border authorities would expect a hydraulic ram to contain packages of heroin. Sadly, for a group sentenced to a collective 121 years of prison time on Friday, their clever plan didn't quite play out.

Andrew Lillis, a 47-year-old from Coventry – pinpointed as the lead organiser, by the National Crime Agency – Mark Regan, 44 and 37-year-old Skinder Ali were among seven men sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court for trying to smuggle 44 kilograms of high-grade heroin, worth £4.8 million, from Pakistan to the UK. They were only busted after what the relevant authorities described as a concerted and drawn-out law enforcement effort.

"The drugs had been hidden inside specially adapted pieces of hydraulic equipment," said Charlotte Mann, of Border Force, as quoted in an NCA press release. "So elaborate was the concealment that it took Border Force officers several days to dismantle the machines and reach the drugs."

Four days, in fact. All of this happened back in August 2014, when the shipment was first intercepted at the Port of Felixstowe. Once the Border Force and NCA lot found the drugs in ten of the hydraulic press rams, they then followed the shipment onto Leicestershire and Birmingham, where fingerprints on related paperwork, mobile phone evidence and surveillance snippets tied together all seven men convicted in the operation. Within a few months, they were all brought in.

As you'd expect, the officers were chuffed. "Border Force and the NCA faced a difficult job in intercepting this equipment," said Paul Risby, of the NCA, "opening it up and re-sealing it at speed while preparing an investigation, but were able to complete it all without the criminals suspecting. After that, traditional investigative techniques and the criminals' own hands-on approach combined to bring them down. Their fingerprints were all over the documents."

Turns out the smuggling team had executed a "dry run" – because practise generally does make perfect – sending two shipments from Pakistan to the UK before trying to pull off the £4.8 million heroin move. They each now have a minimum of ten years' time. If nothing else, it was an innovative use of one of YouTube's prized weird obsessions.