Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

A Polish lorry driver will spend the next 13½ years in a British prison after Border Force found 200lbs of cocaine riding, with no visible sense of irony, alongside a shipment of Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear, a product whose entire purpose is to make sure no one notices your bulges.

Kim ensures that nobody notices your bulges. (PopularImages/depositphotos)

Jakub Jan Konkel, 40, of Kartuzy in northern Poland, was stopped on 5 September at the Port of Harwich after arriving by ferry from the Hook of Holland. His truck carried 28 pallets of legitimate Skims clothing. The exporter was real, the importer was real, and the only item on board with no paperwork was the cocaine, which usually has no paperwork. The lack of paperwork wasn’t the immediate problem. 

Border Force x-rayed the truck and learned that the trailer’s rear doors had been hollowed out and stuffed with 90 one-kilogram packages of Class A drugs. A compartment had been built into the skin of the doors themselves. Kim Kardashian’s Skims would call this ‘contouring’.

Investigators were pointed there by the truck’s tachograph, a small device that records exactly where a driver stops and for how long. It logged a 16-minute halt that Konkel declined to mention in his interview with border control. The NCA believes those 16 minutes are when $9.7 million of cocaine boarded the vehicle. The Skims appear to have been on board the whole time.

Konkel first denied knowing anything about the drugs, then pleaded guilty and admitted he had agreed to carry them for €4,500 ($5,230). Thirteen and a half years for €4,500 comes to roughly €333 a year, a wage structure that compares unfavorably to nearly all forms of legal employment, including commercial truck driving.

Skims has denied any connection to the shipment, the most predictable sentence a concealment brand has ever issued. The NCA called Konkel a “corrupt driver” and an “important enabler,” titles that are not acceptable to put on a CV or are impressive to anyone in prison who asks what he’s in for.