'Cocaine Cargo': Pivot Airlines flight attendant on how she uncovered key evidence

W5 speaks with Pivot Airlines flight attendant Christina Carello, who reveals new details about how she uncovered key evidence that had been tampered with in a nightmare ordeal in the Dominican Republic. Watch 'Cocaine Cargo' Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.

Christina Carello knows she is a good flight attendant. She’s been shepherding vacationers and executives around the world for 14 years. What she didn’t know, until a sensational series of events, is that she is a pretty good detective as well.

The 33-year-old Ontario woman’s painstaking digging uncovered the fact that key evidence had been tampered with, in a legal ordeal that kept her and her airline crew trapped in the Dominican Republic for more than seven months.

The nightmare began on April 5, 2022, when the Pivot Airlines crew was making final preparations to return seven Canadian passengers on a chartered flight from Punta Cana to Toronto. Carello was on board the plane when pilot Rob Divananzo made an announcement.

"The pilot actually came out of the flight deck and did a PA, letting the passengers know that they had to deplane because they found something on the plane," Carello told W5.

The passengers disembarked and headed to a VIP lounge while Christina and the rest of the crew stayed on the tarmac. They watched in horror as a big black duffle bag, tied up in yellow rope, was removed from the plane’s avionics bay -- a compartment under the plane that houses the computer systems.

"We didn’t know what it was. It could have been a bomb," Carello said.

But there wasn’t just one bag. There were eight. And it wasn’t a bomb. It was 210 kilograms of cocaine.