What A Week It's Been For Heists

Yes, of course, the KitKat heist. We’ve all heard about this, yes? The thing where thieves intercepted a shipment headed from Italy to Poland and disappeared with “a truck transporting 413,793 units” of crunchy chocolate snacks? Some of the headlines I saw chose to quantify the amount as “12 tons of KitKats,” which was funny to me because I’m pretty sure no one outside of Nestle has any idea what 12 tons of KitKats even looks like. I don’t even think I would know what one ton of KitKats looks like. Just ballparking the math on it all — assuming 400,000 KitKats is 12 tons — puts us at a figure around 30,000 KitKats per ton. That is... it's so many KitKats, man, especially considering that, prior to this week, I would have considered, like, 40 KitKats to be “so many KitKats.“

The primary takeaways here, for me, were as follows:

• It’s kind of wild that some dudes pulled off a highly coordinated theft of three priceless paintings from a museum in Italy — potential laser dance situation imo — and it was only the second most notable heist of the week
• I bet the guy who just got busted stealing 2,400 Snickers bars felt like a real putz after seeing someone else stole 400,000 KitKats

I would be furious, honestly.

These types of cargo heists are becoming pretty common, actually, despite how wild each individual headline seems. Every week or two, you’ll see something like $40,000 worth of crab legs stolen, or 200,000 Cadbury Creme eggs stolen or, if you’re really lucky, $1 million dollars worth of tequila stolen from Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar. Philadelphia Magazine did a great story last year on a crime ring in the area with the incredible headline “The Beef Bandits of Nicetown,” which is worth revisiting every now and then. The important thing, as with most fun things you see online, is to never spend too much time down the rabbit hole because you might just go and research the joy right out of it by discovering a bummer twist you had not considered.

Unless, of course, the rabbit hole takes you to the very long article The Guardian published this week, which dug way way deep into the rise in cargo heists, complete with detailed breakdowns of how they’re pulled off and a lengthy chat with a former rugby referee named Mike Dawber who changed careers and is now “the UK’s leading detective in cargo crime” and also maybe my favorite law enforcement agent since Agent Doug from the McMillions documentary. What’s that? You don’t remember Agent Doug? Oh, don’t worry, I still have the screencaps.

What a prince. I hope he’s doing great. Anyway, back to Mike…

It was in 2012 that Dawber realised that solving vehicle crimes was his true calling. As a Cheshire police officer specialising in vehicle theft, he was tasked with looking into a notorious Manchester gang linked to more than 70 thefts of farm machinery. The cases had all been investigated in isolation, so Dawber did his own cold-case review, poring over the evidence for each, revealing their MO – the areas they most frequently hit, the times they did so. A sting was set up. A police digger with a tracker was planted in a suitably vulnerable spot. Dawber likes to tell the story that, at the sentencing, the ringleader, resigned to his fate, paid his respects to the cops who had caught him. “You’ve done a good job with this one,” he said.

Okay, three things:

• I love a polite thief
• I would like a movie about cargo theft that stars Clive Owen as Mike The Cargo Theft Cop
• I really do recommend reading that article

Most of the thefts involve slicing open the side of a truck while it’s parked in a loading or rest area, or sometimes using technological flimflams to re-route a legitimate shipment to a different location, but I feel like it’s important to bring this paragraph to your attention…

The latest, and most audacious, type of cargo theft is known, somewhat dubiously, as the “Romanian rollover”, in which criminals from eastern Europe target trucks while they’re on the move. The pursuers climb on to their own bonnets and break into the truck ahead while on the motorway; boxes are tossed back at speeds of more than 50mph. Dawber showed me a video of one such operation: I watched as two men climbed out of the sunroof of an SUV that was tailgating a truck, one holding on to the others’ legs as he broke into the truck’s rear door ahead. Such cases are relatively rare – about 20 or so a year according to Dawber – and reserved for high-value goods

Olay, three more things:

• “The Romanian Rollover” is an incredibly cool name for… anything, really
• That said, this feels… familiar, right?
• Like maybe we’ve seen this maneuver in a movie at some point…

Yes, we have. In 2001. In an attempt to steal DVD players.

What all of this means, as far as I can tell, and please do stop me if I’ve got my facts wrong on any of it, is that in about 15-20 years at least two members of this Romanian gang will be recruited by a secretive government agency and sent to outer space to as part of a mission to save the world.

I mean, it’s the only logical conclusion.

This is the thing where I pitch you on subscribing and especially upgrading. I really enjoy doing this newsletter. I hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, please consider smashing the button below and supporting me so I can keep doing it.

A paid subscription does get you some extras, too, not just the joy of giving me money. You’ll get access to the Friday newsletter and you’ll get to contribute to our periodic mailbags and reverse mailbags. Maybe there will be other benefits coming soon. All that for $5/month or $50/year. Basically a buck a week. A buck a week! Wow! What a deal!

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— excellent Defector blog about the UConn buzzer beater, which I still can’t believe happened

— stumbled across this piece from last year on the 30th anniversary of Tommy Boy (happy, uh, 31st anniversary to Tommy Boy)

— Matt Singer interviewed his 10-year-old about the Super Mario Galaxy movie and, while I do not suspect I will ever see the movie, I found it delightful

— this thing on the Greenland shark was bouncing around recently and the first paragraph is worth the click

— RIP to James Tolkan, one of the greats 

— hell yeah, Rosie Perez in The White Lotus

— Paul McCartney was accidentally and briefly banned from the Paul McCartney subreddit and The AV Club nailed the headline

— minor league baseball rules

— the Pope is fed up 

— pants-wearing kangaroo on the loose

— Celine Dion back

— RIP to Sugar the surfing dog

— baseball umpires are having a bad time

— “California chocolate spiked with Viagra ingredients recalled nationwide”

— “I didn’t want anybody shooting me,” said the CEO of Five Guys

— Andrew Lloyd Webber hated the Cats movie so much he went out and got a dog

Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and work way too hard to jam a Fast & Furious reference into your blogs.