Seattle-Tacoma International Airport officials are calling it their largest drug bust ever, and all the cocaine was headed to Anchorage.

Three men, including two Anchorage residents, were indicted Thursday on federal drug conspiracy charges after police found nearly a dozen packages of cocaine -- with a street value police said would easily exceed half a million dollars in Alaska -- wrapped and stuffed in boxes of Nerf and Hot Wheels toys in their baggage.

"All together we came up with 11 kilos," Port Police Chief Colleen Wilson said Thursday. "Two or three kilos is what my narcotics detective is remembering" as the previous record bust.

Isaiah Manuel Campbell, of Tacoma, Wash., Miguel Antonio Pineiro Jr. and Thomas Lamont Steed, both of Anchorage, are facing felony charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine after they were caught preparing to depart for Anchorage, according to court documents. At the time of his arrest, Campbell was wanted by Anchorage police on 20 felony charges.

According to an affidavit filed in federal court by Detective Matthew Bruch of the Port of Seattle Police Department, the Transportation Security Administration on Sept. 30 found five kilograms of cocaine stuffed in a toy box wrapped with children's wrapping paper in Pineiro's checked baggage.

Each kilo brick of cocaine, about the size of a hardcover book, was tightly wrapped in cellophane and masked in oil or grease. They tripped off an alert during a routine X-ray, which indicated the bag contained explosives, the affidavit says.

Police went to the gate to arrest Pineiro, who was already in his seat aboard the plane. An airlines employee then told officers Pineiro was with two others on the same flight: Steed and Campbell. All had bought one-way tickets to Anchorage with cash about an hour before the flight. According to police, that is a common practice for smugglers wanting to avoid detection.

The men were taken to police headquarters, where a search of Steed's bag uncovered four more kilos of cocaine also stashed in a box wrapped with children's wrapping paper, the affidavit says. A police dog sniffed out two kilograms of cocaine from Campbell's bag after he refused to consent to a search.

The seizure of 11 kilos of cocaine was the largest ever at the airport and one of the largest of its kind in the region, police said.

"It was a pretty big shock to have that much," Bruch said Thursday.

A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine has a street value of about $22,000 in Washington. In Anchorage, it can wholesale for $40,000 or more, police said. Broken down into smaller units, the cost goes up: An ounce of cocaine goes for up to $1,700 here.

The men aren't strangers to the law. Pineiro has a criminal history in Alaska including arrests on drug and weapons charges, according to court records.

Campbell was charged in Anchorage just last month with 20 felony counts of scheming to defraud, forgery and theft, according to court records. His capture came as bittersweet to APD financial crimes Detective Michele Logan, who had been investigating him since the spring and said it's now unlikely she'll meet him anytime soon.

"That's definitely a bigger case than ours," she said.

Campbell came up here back in December or January and began passing counterfeit checks -- and really good ones, by Logan's estimation. They didn't have the blunders police often find on poor imitations, she said.

"To this point, I have not been able to track down where he was going to get them," Logan said. "Whether he was making them himself or whether someone locally was making them or whether he had a computer and printer set up somewhere, I will never know because by the time we put this all together he had left the state."

Campbell would allegedly make out a counterfeit check purportedly from a business -- the Great Alaska Bush Co. and Red Robin were among those forged -- to an unsuspecting individual, each time using a different name like "Manny Fresh" or "J Dub." He would then withdraw on their accounts, either by stealing their information or coaxing them to give it, and disappear with the cash before the fraud was discovered, according to court records.

By the time he left, probably sometime in May, he had duped Anchorage residents of more than $40,000.

Down in Tacoma, Campbell is a confirmed member of the street gang "Hilltop Crips from 16 clique" and was implicated as a peripheral player in a homicide at a Tacoma motel back in 2006, Logan said.

Logan said she planned to check on Campbell's associates in the alleged drug conspiracy; he was operating here with a yet-unidentified accomplice. This could help identify him, she said.

"Counterfeit checks is totally different from the drugs, but they're all linked," Logan said. "All our financial crimes have a nexus in the drug world, it seems like."

Sea-Tac police say the three men are facing a mandatory maximum penalty of 10 years to life in prison and up to a $4 million fine if convicted. They have been ordered detained until trial.