Be thankful they were DEAD! I opened up a Cobra 29 LTD Classic about 20 years ago that was FULL of LIVE roaches. It was just like a scene from a horror movie. Roaches scurrying across the bench, across my lap, up the cabling, down my legs, and in all directions across the floor. Needless to say, after I dispatched as many of the crunchy insects as I could find, I put the radio back together and handed it back to the customer without doing any work to it. It belonged to a friend of his (so he said), and he apologized profusely about the incident. To this day I still get flashbacks when I open up a Cobra 29 Classic. Oddly enough, I don't recall any kind of smell from that radio....
Now-a-days of course all the roaches you find in radios are surface-mount, so you can't really see them.
