This subject also came up in another thread, and may interest somebody.
Early in my career in newspapers, I found myself condemned to work at small dailies in Texas border towns. So I found ways to make the best of it, even though having lived in the big city so long I thought I had died and been sent to Hell. But living in Laredo, Tex., as well as Brownsville, at the tip of the U.S. where it meets Mexico, I learned to find all the local airports, large and small, and hang around. If you ever vacation down there, or anywhere along the vast border from Brownsville to Tijuana, you will see the most interesting a/c you can find anywhere. Across the street from the paper in Laredo was the local city airport, a former AFB. Two C-119s lived there, along with a C-46 and countless goonies. And even stranger things came and went. As I became a more savvy reporter, covering Customs and the FBI, I came to learn that there are brokers out there who do nothing but locate former military transports and buy them for drug smugglers. The smugglers will literally buy, say, a Flying Boxcar, bring in tons of cocaine in it, and abandon a perfectly good airplane. So these airports are littered with birds of this kind. The Brownsville Airport had a rare, perfectly flyable Viscount sitting on the ramp for more than a year (it may still be there 20 years after for all I know) because drug smugglers had bought it, unloaded the dope, and left it. So Customs or the DEA eventually might get the plane and auction it back to a broker cheap, and it will be used to smuggle again. Or, if we’re lucky, it might get bought by a warbird enthusiast.
Tom
There were a couple of C-46s at NAS Barrigada, Guam back in 1979-1981 that were apparently abandoned in place. Rumor had it at the time that the CIA had used them for some clandestine endeavor and left them there after it was over. I went back there twenty years later and they were gone. My old contacts there didn’t know what had happened to them. I would like to find out their fates but have resigned myself to never knowing.