An Arizona man who owned an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant one block from the U.S.-Mexico border is in custody after law enforcement discovered he had been trafficking drugs from a home in Mexico through a 600-foot-long underground tunnel to the kitchen of the fast food joint.
In the KFC’s kitchen was an eight-inch hole in the floor that then went 22 feet down to a wood beam-lined walkway that was five feet tall and three feet wide, according to photos U.S. Customs and Border Protection shared with the Washington Examiner on Friday.
Ivan Lopez, a resident of San Luis, was first arrested Aug. 13 on different charges that then led local police and federal agents to the KFC tunnel.
Lopez was pulled over by police that day while driving a pickup truck and towing a trailer. During the traffic stop, a K-9 police officer alerted officers to two toolboxes in the trailer.
Police found 370 pounds of hard narcotics, including seven pounds of fentanyl, enough for 3 million doses.
“This discovery has no doubt dealt a heavy blow to that transnational criminal organization that built this tunnel,” Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot said at a press conference. “That amount of fentanyl — that’s that many lives that were saved through this investigation.”
Law enforcement had previously observed the two toolboxes being moved to the trailer from the KFC, located at 552 San Luis Plaza Dr.
“At the U.S. entry point, there was no mechanism to physically come up to the small opening,” HSI Special Agent in Charge Scott Brown said in a press conference. “The narcotics we believe were raised up by a rope then loaded into the toolbox and taken out of the abandoned restaurant.”
Local police notified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit and they obtained a search warrant for the restaurant and searched it Aug. 14.
On Aug. 15, Mexican authorities got a search warrant for a residential property where the tunnel led to. They discovered a trap down under a bed inside a house that led into the tunnel.
Yuma Sector Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Anthony Porvaznik said the tunnel will be filled with cement to prevent others from using it.
This is not the first such discovery — two years ago a 2,600-foot tunnel was found by authorities in San Diego, Calif. Authorities said it was one of the longest drug tunnels ever discovered, used to transport an “unprecedented cache” of cocaine and marijuana.
In July, Border Patrol seized 35 pounds of heroin, 55 pounds of cocaine, 723 pounds of methamphetamine, but no fentanyl, at border checkpoints nationwide.
