42 - Delicious Robberies

Today's stories aren’t just about the small-time pilfering of food here and there from your local grocery stores. No, today we’ll be talking about people stealing truckloads of the stuff at a time, not it seems to quell their stomach's callings, as much as to refill those empty wallets.

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Thank you to Athletic Greens for being a sponsor for this episode.

To make it easy, Athletic Greens will give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit www.athleticgreens.com/EMERGING to take ownership of your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance!

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Episode Transcript

(00:03):
More and more people around the worldare getting to experience cuisines and food ingredients
that even just one hundred or soyears ago, they would never even have
heard of. And as this phenomenongrows, so does the foodie culture that
comes along with it. And it'severywhere millions of online blogs, food magazines,
TV shows, and would you believeit, even podcasts. But as

(00:26):
people begin to expand the culinary experiencesof their palettes, sometimes their wallets don't
have the requisite funds to match theirappetites. And so what is a person
to do? Well? For manypeople, they turn to the tried and
tested five fingered discount, shoving someor other ingredient inconspicuously into their clothing or
bags. But today's stories aren't justabout the small time pilfering of food here

(00:50):
and there from your local grocery stores. No, today we'll be talking about
people stealing truckloads of the stuff ata time, not it seems to quell
their six callings as much as torefill those empty wallets. But here's a
question for you to try and guessbefore we come back from the intro.
What food do you think is stolenmore than any other all around the world.

(01:14):
See if you can get it right, and I'll tell you the answer
when we come back. These arethe bizarre but true stories from history that
in some way involved food. I'mNick Charlie Key, and this is the

(01:34):
fantastic history of food. One oftoday's sponsors is Athletic Greens. So what
is Athletic Greens. Well, withone delicious scoop of Athletic Greens, you're
absorbing seventy five high quality vitamins,minerals, whole food sourced superfoods, robiotics

(02:00):
and adaptogens to help you start yourday right. This special blend of ingredients
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free, or gluten free diet,Athletic Greens fits into all of them.

(02:23):
It costs less than three dollars aday, and for every purchase, Athletic
Greens donates to organizations helping to getnutritious food to kids in need, including
No Kid Hungry in the US.In twenty twenty, a loan Athletic Greens
donated over one point two million mealsto kids. Right now, it's time
to reclaim your health and arm yourimmune system with a convelient daily nutrition.

(02:46):
It's just one scoop in a cupof water every day. That's it.
No need for a million different pearlsand supplements to look out for your health.
To make it easy, Athletic Greensis going to give you a free
one years supply of immune supporting VitaminD and five free travel packs with your
first purchase. All you have todo is visit Athletic Greens dot com slash

(03:08):
emerging again that's Athletic Greens dot comslash em r G I n G to
take ownership over your health and pickup the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Okay,
we're back and before the break,I asked you to guess what you

(03:30):
thought would be the world's most stolenfood and would you believe the correct answer
is cheese. Now, I wouldhave thought it would be candy or something
like that, but when you reallythink about it, it actually makes a
lot of sense. There are alot of very expensive cheeses, aren't there,
And they come in particularly compact packages, perfect for slipping into a pocket

(03:53):
or a bag. And it's notjust old mavers from down the road pilfering
a tasty Wensleydale for her afternoon tea. No, most cheese thefts end up
being resold to restaurants or independent grocers. And if you think about it,
how can you track a stolen cheeseOnce any identifying labels have been peeled off,
it really could have come from anywhere. Now, Even as recently as

(04:15):
the last decade or so, therehave been numerous high profile cheese heists around
the world. In New Zealand,a twenty three year old woman and a
twenty one year old man broke intoa train loaded with cheese that was bound
for Auckland. They grabbed as muchcheddar as they could and then loaded it
into their old car, dreaming ofthe world's biggest cheese fondue. But alas,

(04:36):
the police was soon notified and discoveredthe old car sputtering along as fast
as it could. Unfortunately, forthe dairy based equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde,
their cars fastest wasn't quite fast enough. The cops were racing along behind
them, trying to get them topull over, when all of a sudden,
the police car in front swerved violently. The cops in the secon and

(05:00):
car looked at each other as theyrealized what they had just seen. Multiple
one kilogram blocks of six month oldmature cheddar was being lobbed at the police
by the cheesy dairy devils ahead ofthem. Luckily for the police, none
of them were injured by the cheesegrenades, which is especially surprising considering that
aged cheddar is often known to berather sharp. Anyway, the miscreants were

(05:29):
apprehended and peace was once again restoredto New Zealand's dairy industry. There was
also the time when police pulled overa Russian man driving a truck just off
the New Jersey Turnpike, and uponcloser inspection of his vehicle, found that
he was carrying forty two thousand poundsof stolen Amish cheese. As it turns
out, the man had arrived atthe shipping factory, provided false paperwork,

(05:53):
loaded the cheese on board, andsimply driven away. The cheese had originally
been destined for Texas, but itwas thankfully found and apprehended before it reached
its final destination thousands of miles away. But both of these criminal escapades pale
in comparison to the mother of allcheese heists, when throughout the central and

(06:14):
northern regions of Italy, eleven clandestinethieves pilford more than two thousand wheels of
their country's greatest pride and joy,Partamisiano reggiano, or as we more commonly
know it outside of Italy, parmesan. Now, if you've ever done any
cooking with parmesan, you will knowit is not a cheap product. Hence
why the eleven highly equipped thieves,using specialized electronic equipment, radios, weapons,

(06:41):
and more, stood to make almostone million dollars just from those two
thousand wheels of cheesy goodness. Now, there are actually so many stories of
people's stealing cheese. I could probablystart a whole new podcast just telling those
stories. But for the sake ofmy time and your sanity, I'll put
that one on the back burn itfor now. I'll stay with us as

(07:01):
after the break we'll find out thatfood is not always the subject of heists,
but has also been used as atool with which to commit the crime
itself. The Sign Hustle Show isthe award winning business podcast you can actually

(07:23):
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(07:45):
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(08:11):
We're back, and as promised,let me tell you about a few enterprising
thieves who sought to fool their intendedvictims with the use of some ingenious food
based weaponry. Now, I thinkwe've all seen the movie trope where a
robber doesn't have a gun and souses a banana stuffed in his pocket to
create that sort of menacing gun shapedoutline with which to scare his victims.

(08:33):
But as the famous saying goes,life often imitates art, as in the
case of a man in Israel whosuccessfully robbed two different banks armed only with
an avocado. The forty seven yearold man, who had previously served three
years for aggravated robbery, was upto his old tricks again, but this

(08:54):
time he had a new and ingeniousplan. They couldn't charge him with the
use of a weapon while in thecommission of a crime if he didn't actually
have a weapon, right, sowhat he needed was something that simply looked
like a weapon and in hope thathis ruse fooled the unsuspecting bank tellers.
Before he left his house that morning, he grabbed an avocado from his fruit

(09:16):
bowl, found some black paint,and then applied it all over the outside
of the avoux. He found apiece of paper and enscrolled the words hand
over the money in the drawer,before donning his disguise of a big jaunty
hat and in a somewhat surprising choice, strapped an eyepatch to his face.
He set out on foot to thelocal shopping mall in southern Israel and calmly

(09:39):
walked inside the local branch of thePostal bank. After waiting patiently in line,
a confusing choice for a man whowas clearly trying not to be suspicious,
but who was also at the sametime wearing an eyepatch. He then
approached the first available teller. Hehanded her the note that he had written
earlier, but being that the eyepatchman was nearly not the greatest intellect,

(10:01):
he had misspelled the word drawer sobadly that the teller was confused as to
what he wanted and just looked athim. In that confusion, the man,
now frustrated that he hadn't paid moreattention at school, shouted at the
cashier to put all of the moneyin his bag or he would quote throw
this grenade at her while holding uphis black painted avocado. In what must

(10:33):
have been a frightening moment for allinvolved, the cashier didn't inspect the so
called grenade any closer, but ratherdid exactly as he asked, before watching
the man escape with a bag ofcash. In an incredible turn of events,
he would put off exactly the samestunt just five days later at another
bank, this time I'm sure,after consulting the d section of his dictionary,

(10:56):
and once again gone away with evenmore money in total. He stole
almost ten thousand dollars with his avocado, which, if politicians and sensationless newspapers
are to be believed, should havebeen just about enough money to buy one
or two more avocados the whole wayBack in twenty thirteen, the police got

(11:16):
a frantic phone call from an employeeof the confusingly named Fifth Third Bank in
Michigan. They had just been robbed, but that wasn't the most pressing issue
at that very moment, as thewoman who had held the bank up had
left behind a bag that she claimedcontained a bomb. Everyone was too frightened
to go near it or move it, and so they had evacuated the building

(11:39):
as soon as the robber had madeher escape. The police were taking no
chances and put in a call tothe local Michigan bomb squad, who raced
to the scene in their big,bulky bomb proof suits. One of the
bomb squad made his way cautiously towardsthe suspicious package, sweating as he went
as much from the humid temperature asfrom his nervousness about what lay in front

(12:01):
of him. Carefully, he tookhis final few footsteps towards the package,
and slowly but surely pulled the paperbag open to inspect the mechanics of the
bomb that was surely hidden inside.As he opened the bag more and more
he couldn't see any wires or plasticexplosives, no timers or fuses, and

(12:22):
eventually realized that he was looking attwo cans of spaghetti sauce. A few
days later, the spaghetti bomber,a woman named Ophelia Neil, was arrested
and charged with bank robbery, anddespite the bag containing nothing more than some
delicious passata, she was rather humorouslyalso charged with committing a crime with the

(12:43):
use of explosives. Now we'll finishtoday's episode with the story of possibly the
most lucrative food based heist in history, involving one of the planet's most delicious
breakfast condiments. In early twenty eleven, a few men in the Canadian province
of Quebec hatched a plan that wouldmake all of them very, very wealthy.

(13:09):
You see, a few of themworked at a particular facility that produced
one of Canada's most famous products.It's so Canadian, in fact, that
they produce eighty percent of the totalworld supply, and of that eighty percent
of the world supply. Ninety onepercent of it comes from this facility in
Quebec. Have you worked out whatit is yet? Yep? It's that

(13:31):
old Canadian classic maple syrup. Andmaple syrup is so important to the Canadian
economy that while other countries make surethey have enough of the important essentials like
fuel stockpiled against some terrible disaster,Canada has their very own strategic maple syrup
reserve. So it's no small thingto steal almost thirty million dollars worth of

(13:54):
this liquid gold. The men,knowing its value, broke into the industrial
compound storage facility and began siphoning offbarrel after barrel. Initially, they would
use trucks to transport the barrels toa remote shack where they would siphon them
off into unmarked white barrels before refillingthe now empty barrels with water and returning
them to the facility. Eventually,this became too much of a hassle for

(14:18):
them, and, with their brazennesshitting new heights, they simply began siphoning
the syrup into their barrels straight fromthe storage facility. Over the course of
a year, the thieves would filltheir barrels with more than ten million pounds
of syrup, enough to fill almosttwo full Olympic sized swimming pools and depriving
the market of almost seven point fivemillion bottles off the shelves. But their

(14:41):
brazenness was now accompanied by their laziness, and this would eventually be their downfall.
You see, as they got moreand more confident, the less and
less they paid attention to the smalldetails. Where once they had made sure
to refill the barrels with water,now they simply left them empty, to
having siphoned out what they needed.So it was in July twenty twelve,

(15:03):
when the yearly inspection was to takeplace, that their scheme literally and figuratively
came tumbling down. You see,Inspector Michel Gavreaux began climbing up the mountain
of stacked barrels in order to geta better sense of their quantity, when,
instead of the barrels bearing his weightand staying steady under his feet as
he pushed off to climb higher,the now empty barrels instead toppled under his

(15:28):
efforts. Police were immediately alerted andthe investigation began with only a fraction of
the barrels being able to be identifiedand recovered. Later that year, however,
seventeen men were arrested in connection withthe theft, with fines of around
a million dollars handed out to morethan one of them, along with some
hefty jail sentences. So if there'sone thing we've learned today, well,

(15:52):
in terms of actual potential for monetarygain, Prime very much does pay.
But it's also worth noting that ineach and every story today there would be
criminals were always caught and eventually sentto prison. Surprisingly, even I patched
Genius, whose disguise couldn't stop policefrom using his cell phone data to place

(16:14):
him at the scene both crimes.This show is made entirely by me,
Nick Charlie Key, with our thememusic having been made by the enigma that
is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Ifyou'd like to support the show, the

(16:37):
simplest way to do that is overon our Patreon account. There's just one
option, so for just two bucksa month, you'll help me keep producing
the show, and in return,you'll get your name forever etched onto our
supporters Wall of Fame over on ourwebsite. No, and then maybe listen
out for your name in an upcomingepisode, So until next time, bonappetite flow