Why the piano became the drug dealer’s instrument of choice
Let’s be real here, the piano isn’t cool.
Tim Minchin made this point better than I ever could. His wonderful song ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd’ is about how the moment you take up the piano and not the guitar, you are condemned to a life just that little bit squarer than other musicians.
That’s not to say that you’ll make bad music, though, quite the opposite in fact. Watching a true master of the piano at work is truly mesmerising stuff. Let’s be real here, most people don’t pick up an instrument to make great music.
They pick up an instrument to be cool. So, unless you perfect that Jerry Lee Lewis style old school rock piano thrash that involves sweeping your stool out from under you and hammering away at the keys, you’ll never be quite as cool as someone ripping a solo on their Les Paul. And even if you do perfect all that, you’ll still be directly Jerry Lee Lewis, and no one wants that.
No, if you want to make your piano genuinely cool, you’ll have to take it away from music and down a much darker and more dangerous path. One that gives you an altogether different kind of cool that music gives you, going from faux-danger to actual, real-life danger with the law. Some bright sparks have realised in the past that pianos are, at their core, large, cumbersome boxes that no one wants to spend that much time with if someone isn’t playing them. Trust me, I’ve moved a few in my time, and they’re bastards.
So, if you wanted to get something through customs without anyone noticing, a piano would be a perfect vehicle for that, right?
Wait, people have used pianos for smuggling?
They have indeed. Quite a few of them as well. Back in November 2023, Francesco Role was flagged by UK Border Force officials while shipping a van full of household goods from Normandy to the UK. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for Role, a man with a van by trade, except that something had caught the eye of customs officials. The van was a little heavier than its cargo would suggest. Thus, his van was cleared and his cargo investigated.
The source of the excess weight was identified as an unusually heavy upright piano. Despite Role’s protests, the piano was opened up, and an astonishing 89 bags of high-purity cocaine were found within it, valued at £4.2 million.
Role pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply class A drugs and was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison as a result. He was far from the only one as well, over the past two decades, everyone from teenagers in New Zealand smuggling class B drugs to powerhouse cartel kingpins in Colombia smuggling over 500 pounds of cocaine has housed them in pianos.
Those are just the ones we know about, too. Who knows how many smuggling efforts have gone off without a hitch due to no one being arsed to look that hard at a piano? After all, people have historically used their pianos to store valuables for as long as pianos have been objects that an average household can afford. It stands to reason that many people have gotten away with literal crimes due to their old Joannas.
Which makes sense, nothing less than a literal crime could make such a nerdy instrument cool.