A woman who became the unintended victim of an elaborate plot to smuggle narcotics into the United States is suing American Airlines, claiming one of the carrier’s employees set her up, leading to her detention in a squalid jail where she was threatened with rape and had to sleep on a concrete floor covered in faeces and urine.
Alison Dominguez from Miami, Florida, traveled to the Bahamas on April 10 and stayed in the island paradise for just two days before heading to Nassau Airport for her return flight with American Airlines to Miami.
She did not, however, board her return flight as she was stopped at the gate by law enforcement and accused of trying to illegally smuggle 100 bottles of Codeine out of the Bahamas and onto US soil inside a checked bag.
Alison would spend almost a week in a Bahamian jail, surviving in “horrific conditions,” sleeping on the floor, and without access to toilet facilities. At one point, the guards even told Alison she may have been exposed to AIDS, leaving her even more distraught.
Investigators initially didn’t believe Alison’s desperate pleas of innocence, and it took her friends to start their own investigation before she was eventually exonerated.
After convincing an American Airlines staffer at Miami Airport to do some digging for them, Alison’s friends discovered that the checked bags containing the illicit Codeine had been tagged and checked before Alison had even arrived at Nassau Airport for her return flight home.
With this key piece of information, Alison was able to build a case that convinced investigators of her innocence.
In a new lawsuit filed in a Florida district court, Alison says that she believes that some American Airlines employees are part of an international drug smuggling ring that exploits vulnerabilities in the special US pre-clearance facility at Nassau Airport.
Unlike most other international flights to the United States, passengers arriving from Nassau are able to pre-clear US customs and immigration in the Bahamas. Flights then arrive at domestic gates, and passengers do not have to clear customs for a second time.
The lawsuit claims that American Airlines employees are able to access the passenger manifest for flights departing Nassau and then falsely check bags containing narcotics in the name of a legitimate customer.
On arrival in the United States, the bag appears on the carousel in a publicly accessible area of the airport, where an accomplice collects the bag. The passenger is, however, none the wiser because they never knew a bag had ever been checked in their name.
The scheme is, of course, reliant on the bag getting through the pre-clearance in the Bahamas, but if it fails, then the only person on the line is the innocent passenger whose name has been used to check the bag under.
The complaint explains:
This scheme poses a substantial risk to passengers. If the contraband is discovered in the luggage falsely labeled, the targeted passengers are likely to face investigation, imprisonment, and prosecution in the Bahamas, if not also in the United States, which will cause foreseeable reputational, emotional, and physical harm.
With respect to the former, arrest or imprisonment in the Bahamas is widely known to present foreseeable risk of serious physical harm.”
Alison says that American Airlines should, at the very least, have known about the risk posed to passengers by vulnerabilities in the US pre-clearance facility in Nassau, especially considering that narcotics smuggling from the Bahamas is a well-known and persistent threat.
American Airlines even employs a Transnational Threats Manager at Miami International Airport to identify so-called ‘insider threats,’ including narcotics smuggling.
Given the history of American Airlines employees being involved in narcotics smuggling, Alison believes the carrier was negligent in not understanding the potential threats at Nassau and taking steps to stop them.
For example, as recently as May 2023, an American Airlines mechanic was found guilty of trying to smuggle more than $320,000 worth of cocaine into the United States by hiding it in a special compartment under the cockpit of a commercial airplane.
And in 2022, an American Airlines contract cleaner removed five life vests from a passenger plane and replaced them with bricks of cocaine weighing at least five kilograms ahead of a flight from St Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands to Miami, Florida.
Just months later, a Mesa Air flight attendant who operated regional flights on behalf of American Airlines pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle fentanyl through a special TSA checkpoint at San Diego International Airport.
The flight attendant had strapped the packages of fentanyl to her chest, but was caught when she was pulled aside for a random check.
Alison has demanded a jury trial and is seeking undeclared compensation for the injuries she suffered as a result of her arrest. The case has been filed as: 1:25-cv-24366
