Last November’s hijacking of two truckloads of Sammy Hagar and his celebrity chef partner Guy Fieri‘s Santo Tequila in Laredo, Texas was profiled Sunday night on 60 Minutes, which you can now watch on YouTube below.
The trucks were transporting from Mexico to Pennsylvania 4040 cases of tequila — 24,240 bottles — with a value of around $1 million. They had Blanco, Reposado and a specially made extra Añejo, which took 39 months to create.
Fieri compared the heist to the mafia robbing $5.9 million in money and jewels from the Lufthansa heist from the cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York on December 11th, 1978. You may be more familiar with the Lufthansa Heist as it was a plot point in the 1990 movie ‘Goodfellas‘.
Here’s a very basic breakdown of what happened.
The logistics company hired by Santo hired a trucking company for the delivery from Texas to Pennsylvania (standard procedure). But then that trucking company outsourced the shipment to two other trucking companies that hired two other drivers. It’s called ‘double brokering’ a shell game that happens a lot in the trucking OTR business. That second trucking company turned out to be fake – complete with false documentation and contact information. And the thieves even “spoofed” the GPS to make it look like the shipment was still on its way to its destination in Pennsylvania.
According to Keith Lewis from CargoNet (a company that assists law enforcement in solving these crimes) this kind of thing happens multiple times every day – calling it a global threat to our supply chain.
One of the trucks and it’s contents were recovered in Los Angeles three weeks later but the other is still missing somewhere in the wind.
[YouTube:60 Minutes] [
