Tampa mayor reels in $1.1M cocaine catch while fishing in Florida Keys with family

TAMPA, Fla. (WFTS) — Tampa Mayor Jane Castor made a big catch while fishing the Florida Keys with family late last month, spotting and hauling in a package containing 70 pounds of cocaine with an estimated street value of approximately $1.1 million, according to the mayor’s office.

The package was discovered south of Marathon on July 23, according to US Border Patrol.

Mayor Castor spends the end of every July with her family vacationing in the Florida Keys.

"My family, we've been going down there for years. It's actually one of my son's birthdays. And so we go down yearly," she said. "But this year we caught a square grouper."

Mayor Castor says her younger brother spotted the large mass in the water as they were coming in from a success trip fishing for Mahi-Mahi.

"We went over there because quite often, if you fish, the smaller fish will go under any kind of shade that they can get and then that attracts a larger fish like tripletail. So we went over there to see if we could fish around it, the closer we got. I was like 'Oh, that would be a bale of cocaine.' So we got the gaff and pulled it in and pulled it up on the boat," she recalled.

Before her current role as mayor, Castor “spent 31 years with the Tampa Police Department, serving in nearly every capacity and in nearly every neighborhood of the city. In October of 2009, Castor became Tampa’s first female Chief of Police, serving for six years in that role,” according to her bio on the city of Tampa website. She also spent years working as a narcotics detectives. That training kicked in when they found the cocaine.

"It had been in the water for a while because the plastic had split open. And I could see down in the tightly wrap kilos which I've worked a lot of years in narcotics. So as we went back to shore, my family was a little worried. Like, 'what if there's a tracker or something like that?' I thought, well, the battery's dead if that happened," she said.

They Mayor logged the latitude and longitude of the find. She explained she knew reeling it in would be better than leaving it be.

"It is interesting, because so many people have been like, 'I wouldn't touch that, you know, I would have just called'. But then if you would, you know, if I had tried to notify where we were at, by our GPS, it probably would have floated someplace else," she added.

Once back to in cell phone range, Mayor Castor phone the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, telling them to meet them at their rental to pick up the unusual catch.

"I called Monroe County Sheriff's Office and they sent with a local police officers. So he came in. And then he goes, 'Well, I'm gonna have to call somebody else. So he went out, notified Customs, they came up," she said.

Border Patrol tweeted about the incident days later. In the tweet, there's no mention of who found the cocaine.

"I had told the police officer that I was a former officer in Tampa, but I didn't say anything about the whole Mayor gig," she said.

The packaging contained 25 bricks of cocaine, according to Border Patrol.

“We appreciate the ongoing support from our boating community. Thanks to the efforts of this Good Samaritan, 70 pounds of cocaine are in federal custody and off our streets. We encourage the community to immediately report suspicious activity to local authorities,” Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Adam Hoffner said.

Mayor Castor says they've found interesting things in the water, but never anything like this.

"We've actually found before, never any narcotics, but found like the large Styrofoam things that people may have come over from Cuba and, you know, trying to come into the country. So we found those kinds of things before, but never found floating bales of cocaine, that's for sure," she said.