Cops: $450K in drugs found on man passed out in taxi

Frustrated cabdriver delivered passenger to police station

A frustrated cabdriver unwittingly delivered a man carrying a bag that was allegedly filled with nearly a half-million dollars in drugs to officers at the Rogers Park District police station over the weekend.

The driver, who asked not to be named, said he picked up a fare in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on Saturday afternoon and took the man to an address in Rogers Park.

The passenger, later identified by police as Joseph Andrew Hoffman, 25, chatted on his phone for about half the trip but was unconscious by the time they arrived at the destination, the cabdriver said.

The cabdriver said he tried to rouse the man for about 10 minutes before driving to the police station. Police searched the man's bag and found bottles of a "clear, crystalline substance" connected by wires to a "power source," which together apparently amounted to a miniature methamphetamine lab, according to a police report.

The street value of the drugs in the man's bag was nearly $450,000, the police report said.

Hoffman, of Vancouver, Wash., was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. Police said he consented to a search of a residence in the 800 block of West Dakin Street, where officers found a gallon jug filled with suspected GHB, the so-called date rape drug; small bags of marijuana; $1,401 in cash; and other drug paraphernalia, the report said.

Hoffman was charged with six felony counts and on Sunday was ordered held on $100,000 bail by a Cook County judge.

The cab that brought Hoffman to police was searched by a Chicago Fire Department hazardous materials team. Police didn't tell him what they had found on the passenger when they returned the car, the cabbie said.

"They said they found a lot of bad stuff. My only concern was to collect my fare," the cabdriver said Sunday. "It was going on and on, and I didn't even get my full fare."

8:01 p.m. CST, December 26, 2010