In a way, you have to admire drug dealers. Or, at the very least, it’s likely agreeable to everyone that we can admire their tenacity and cunning, the same way we can respect the savagery of a great white shark or hungry coyote.
And, throughout pop culture, we’ve celebrated some of this ingenuity; incorporating such concepts as “blind drops” in an almost cutesy, cat and mouse sort of way. We scoff at speed dealers packing dope into the tires of cars being towed over state lines, but with the scoff of, “how have I never thought of that?”.
But perhaps we have tonight reached the pinnacle of drug dealer gags: The large bucket of popcorn with a little baggie of coke in the bottom.
The manager of a Minnesota movie theater sold cocaine hidden in a bag of popcorn to a police informant, according to court records.
Jamie Lynn Hiniker, 39, was named yesterday in a criminal complaint charging her with narcotics sales. Hiniker is the general manager of the four-screen Spotlight Theatres in Mankato, a city 80 miles from Minneapolis.
If convicted of the felony drug count, Hiniker faces a maximum 20-year prison term and a fine of up to $250,000.
Hiniker was a target of a Minnesota River Valley Drug Task Force probe, according to a probable cause affidavit. An investigator reported that he knew “through previous investigations” that Hiniker worked at a movie theater and “the sale of cocaine typically took place behind the theater in an alley or at the theater in a popcorn container with popcorn.”
Hiniker had quite the track record, however, having been arrested for everything from DWI to “malicious punishment of a child”.
