The world’s most valuable (but illegal) air compressors?

What would be the best way of smuggling $2.2 million dollars’ worth of banknotes across the border from North America into Mexico? A Mexican drug cartel with operations in Dalton, Georgia thought that it would be a good idea to stuff the cash proceeds of its narcotics trading inside the air receivers of two twenty-gallon air compressors and an inflatable mattress before boxing them up and sending them over the border in a privately-owned bus. The bad guys reckoned without the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office which had been tipped off about their activities in summer 2011. Staking out the scene of the crime in Sandy Springs, Georgia, Whitfield police officers saw two storage boxes being loaded onto the bus, and called for backup from Sandy Springs’ own police force. The bus and its contents were seized and transported back to Dalton where a fire crew used specialist tools to cut open the air compressors, revealing that the receivers had been stuffed solid with dollars. Between the two air compressors and the air mattress a total of $ 2,223,294.00 (that’s about £1.4 million) was recovered. Happily for the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office, air compressor crime really does pay – in August 2012 they received a reward for their involvement in the bust: a share of the drugs money worth $821,000.