It sounds like a storyline straight out of Hollywood: two semitrucks carrying more than $1 million worth of Santo Tequila, a brand co-founded by Food Network star Guy Fieri and former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar, vanish on their way to the warehouse. But in this highway heist, there was no hijacking, and the drivers weren’t in on it. So what happened to those 24,000 bottles of tequila?
It turns out international crime groups have found new ways to infiltrate the global supply chain online to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of goods. Last November, Fieri got a crash course in the sophisticated high-tech crime that’s roiling the trucking industry and the U.S. businesses that rely on it.
“My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila,” Fieri said.
How Santo Tequila found out something went wrong
The tequila started out like every other Santo batch: in Western Mexico, where it was distilled and bottled. From there, it was trucked to the U.S.-Mexico border, went through customs and was unloaded in Laredo, Texas.
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Santo doesn’t have its own delivery trucks, and instead relies on a logistics company to hire trucking companies to ship its tequila, according to Santo Spirits CEO Dan Butkus.
The day after the tequila arrived in Texas, it was moved into two semitrucks that were supposed to head to the Santo Tequila warehouse in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. The tequila was due at the Pennsylvania warehouse on a Wednesday, but didn’t arrive, Butkus said. The logistics company told Santo there was a slight delay due to a water pump cooler problem with the truck.
On Friday, two days after the shipment was supposed to arrive, Butkus was told there was more than just a water pump issue with the truck. The logistics company emailed him a video they said they’d received of a broken down semi with a note: “Looks like the issue is bigger than he thought. Mechanics advised the truck will be fixed Saturday…he says he can deliver Sunday but I know y’all are closed so he can be there first thing Monday.”
Still, Butkus wasn’t alarmed. Delays like this aren’t uncommon and GPS tracking monitored by the logistics company showed the truck near Washington, D.C., where it was supposed to be on its route to Pennsylvania.
“Then on Monday, we get an email that the truck is close, ‘GPS says it’s within a couple miles of our warehouse in Lansdale, can you let us know when it arrives?'” Butkus said.
The tequila never arrived in Pennsylvania.
That’s when Butkus called Fieri and told him two truckloads of his tequila were lost.
A tractor trailer shell game
Here’s what happened: The logistics company that worked for Santo hired a trucking company. But then that trucking company outsourced the job to two other trucking companies, who then hired drivers.
It’s a bit of a tractor trailer shell game called double brokering, and it happens more often than you might expect.
The problem is those second trucking companies were fakes – fronts for criminals – complete with phony letterheads, email addresses and phone numbers to appear legitimate. Those emails about the mechanical issues, the video of a broken down semi and the GPS tracking were all fake, too. It was all part of an elaborate ruse, set up to buy time and steal the cargo.
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That’s when Keith Lewis was brought in. Lewis is a former cop who runs operations for CargoNet, a company that works with law enforcement to solve these types of crimes. According to Lewis, U.S. businesses lost more than $230 million in goods last year to cargo theft.
“It’s very common,” Lewis said. “It happens multiple times a day.”
Lewis began to piece together how the tequila heist was pulled off: criminals created fake online profiles of trucking companies, bid on jobs they suspected might be valuable and hired unsuspecting drivers online. Then, instead of sending the drivers to the Santo warehouse in Pennsylvania, the criminals remotely redirected them to take the shipment west – all the way to Los Angeles.
Though it might seem suspicious, Lewis said the drivers had no idea they were being directed by criminals. They believed they were taking a legitimate load to a legitimate location.
Lewis says the tequila heist was orchestrated entirely online, which made finding the mastermind behind the operation tough because there was no suspect description or fingerprints to follow. In fact, the masterminds don’t even need to be in the same country.
“We’ve tracked them to over 40 different countries around the world,” Lewis said.
Investigators say the tequila theft had all the characteristics of a criminal gang that operates out of Armenia, 7,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border where the tequila was last seen.
This kind of theft, where criminals remotely redirect cargo to steal it, has spiked 1,200% in four years, according to Lewis.
“If you think about online dating, for example, you can be anywhere in the world and set up a date with someone. It’s the same thing in the supply chain,” Lewis said. “We don’t do business face-to-face anymore. We don’t have the hand-to-hand transactions. We’re doing business by PDF file, by rate confirmations.”
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He considers it a global threat to supply chains.
Nowhere is that threat higher than in California whose ports and highways make it a favorite target and hiding place for cargo thieves. Last year, California had more goods stolen from trucks and trains and by cybercriminals than any other state.
In response, the Los Angeles Police Department created a special unit to tackle all kinds of cargo theft and last year recovered $42.8 million worth of stolen goods..
The LAPD says the stolen goods are usually sold online or in stores to unsuspecting customers. In August, they busted two hardware stores stocked with $4.5 million worth of stolen goods.
A shot at a happy ending
The tequila theft was especially challenging for Santo because Fieri and Hagar had been heavily promoting a special tequila ahead of the holiday season that took more than three years to make. All of it was on those two missing trucks.
“You know here we are, we’re coming right into the fourth quarter. We lose all the tequila. We can’t fill the shelves. We had to lay off players. You know, and that’s the hardest thing,” Fieri said.
The LAPD Cargo Theft Unit eventually cracked the case of the missing tequila. Detectives tracked down one of the drivers who’d picked up the tequila in Texas. He’d moved on to other jobs, but told investigators that he was directed by what he thought was a legitimate trucking company to leave the shipment at an industrial site in the San Fernando Valley.
His information ultimately led police to a warehouse in southeast Los Angeles, and 11,000 bottles of Santo Tequila, just a few weeks after the heist.
It’s a shot glass half full kind of situation: The thieves and the second truck of tequila were never found.
Fieri said he never thought any of the tequila would be recovered, and still thought the tequila they’d found would be unusable.
“Who knows what’s happened to it, who knows what condition it’s in and so forth. I’m just thinking, ‘This is all gonna go down the drain'” Fieri said.
But after an inspection of the recovered bottles, Santo was able to put it back in stores, and take a shot at a happy ending.
