But surely if you want to just look and sound like an ordinary boat, you don’t need to run partially submerged with waves over your deck and a low profile hull - you could just... use an ordinary boat?
As an engineer I think this would be a dream jobs to design and built low-tech yet effective solutions for smuggling.
If you think engineers are expendable to "regular" companies, wait until you learn how the cartels deal with them...
I don't know anything about organized crime other than what I see on TV, but not long ago there was a local story here about a couple of chemistry students who were put to work in an MDMA lab and got themselves killed because of bad ventilation. From what I can tell (again, this is from following media, I may be wrong), engineering in criminal enterprises is low status and quite dangerous, and not even paid particularly well. Cooks in drug labs get into accidents because of how rickety those labs are, there was an encrypted phone dealer around here who got himself killed when his network was dismantled by the police, the telecoms engineers in Mexico in the story above.
I'm also sure the increase in ordinary boats (which you'd need for carrying capacity) would be noticed.