Wild boar sniffing through the Tuscan countryside ploughed through £17,000 of cocaine stashed by bumbling gangsters in the forest.
The mobsters were heard furiously complaining about their haul of precious powder, some of it devoured the rest scattered amongst the leaves, by police who had been wiretapping their phones.
The crooks - an Italian and three Albanians - had buried the cocaine in jars but it wasn't enough to protect it from the prying snouts of the swine.
The men were allegedly trafficking roughly two kilos of cocaine every month from the valley of Valdichiana into bars and clubs in the cities of Arezzo and Siena.
The dealers used a code to refer to the drugs which was easily deciphered by the police, it included words such as: 'aperitivo, prosecco, vino and caffè.'
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The four were said to have been operating from September 2018 to March 2019 and traded in high purity cocaine, charged at £85 per gram, Il Tirreno reported.
Two were sent to prison, while two others were placed under house arrest, according to Toscana Media News.
The probe began after a 21-year-old Albanian was murdered in May last year.
It was not reported what became of the boar which had dug up the drugs.
Millions of boar are estimated to live in Italy, so many that the national farmers' union has petitioned the government in Rome to cull them.
They are blamed for thousands of road accidents each year and destroying crops, especially lucrative vineyards.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
