Stephanie Soo

The guy in the bright red tomato Hawaiian shirt and a 20 foot long shipping container filled with cocaine are probably headed to the same exact place.

It's a place called Port Miami.

Welcome to this tiny floating piece of land in Miami, Florida, where half of it is like a giant international airport, but instead of airplanes, you have mega liners, cruise ships,

ushering passengers on and off their cruises, making sure that they go through security, immigrations, customs.

And then on the other side, you've got massive ships filled with shipping containers.

Sometimes, a lot of times, millions of dollars of illicit drugs being smuggled into South Florida to the point where the vice admiral of the Coast Guard based in Miami has stated in public messages to the cartels,

We own the sea, not you.

We will find you.

We will hunt you before you harm anyone on our shores.

That coupled with the fact that it is one of the many busiest shipping ports in the United States, it's not going to be the most shocking thing when you see FBI agents, federal agents in Port Miami.

I mean, they've also nicknamed Port Miami the cruise capital of the world.

In 2025, the Port Miami saw, I believe, close to 8.6 million cruise passengers coming in and out of the port.

It is one of the few cruise terminals that can handle multiple mega ships at once.

I think they can accommodate 12 vessels at once.

which sounds not like a lot, right?

But then you realize that these mega cruise ships are essentially skyscrapers, lay them down on their side, and there's just 12 skyscrapers from New York City lined up in the water, taking you out to an all-you-can-eat buffet out on the deep sea.

And it's really cutthroat.

They have something called the turnaround day.

It's when a cruise ship disembarks one set of passengers, restocks and embarks a new set of passengers within the span of eight to 12 hours.

And then sometimes out of the 12 mega liner spots that they have open, there could be like half of them that are doing a disembark day.