More and more people around the world are getting to experience cuisines and food ingredients
that even just one hundred or so years ago, they would never even have
heard of. And as this phenomenon grows, so does the foodie culture that
comes along with it. And it's everywhere millions of online blogs, food magazines,
TV shows, and would you believe it, even podcasts. But as
people begin to expand the culinary experiences of their palettes, sometimes their wallets don't
have the requisite funds to match their appetites. And so what is a person
to do? Well? For many people, they turn to the tried and
tested five fingered discount, shoving some or other ingredient inconspicuously into their clothing or
bags. But 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 six callings as much as to refill those empty wallets. But here's a
question for you to try and guess before we come back from the intro.
What food do you think is stolen more than any other all around the world.
See if you can get it right, and I'll tell you the answer
when we come back. These are the bizarre but true stories from history that
in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this is the
fantastic history of food. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens. So what
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we're back and before the break, I asked you to guess what you
thought would be the world's most stolen food and would you believe the correct answer
is cheese. Now, I would have thought it would be candy or something
like that, but when you really think about it, it actually makes a
lot of sense. There are a lot of very expensive cheeses, aren't there,
And they come in particularly compact packages, perfect for slipping into a pocket
or a bag. And it's not just 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 cheese Once any identifying labels have been peeled off,
it really could have come from anywhere. Now, Even as recently as
the last decade or so, there have 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 into a train loaded with cheese that was bound
for Auckland. They grabbed as much cheddar as they could and then loaded it
into their old car, dreaming of the world's biggest cheese fondue. But alas,
the police was soon notified and discovered the old car sputtering along as fast
as it could. Unfortunately, for the 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 to pull over, when all of a sudden,
the police car in front swerved violently. The cops in the secon and
car looked at each other as they realized what they had just seen. Multiple
one kilogram blocks of six month old mature cheddar was being lobbed at the police
by the cheesy dairy devils ahead of them. Luckily for the police, none
of them were injured by the cheese grenades, which is especially surprising considering that
aged cheddar is often known to be rather sharp. Anyway, the miscreants were
apprehended and peace was once again restored to New Zealand's dairy industry. There was
also the time when police pulled over a Russian man driving a truck just off
the New Jersey Turnpike, and upon closer inspection of his vehicle, found that
he was carrying forty two thousand pounds of stolen Amish cheese. As it turns
out, the man had arrived at the shipping factory, provided false paperwork,
loaded the cheese on board, and simply driven away. The cheese had originally
been destined for Texas, but it was 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 all cheese heists, when throughout the central and
northern regions of Italy, eleven clandestine thieves 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 know it is not a cheap product. Hence
why the eleven highly equipped thieves, using specialized electronic equipment, radios, weapons,
and more, stood to make almost one 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 probably start a whole new podcast just telling those
stories. But for the sake of my time and your sanity, I'll put
that one on the back burn it for now. I'll stay with us as
after the break we'll find out that food is not always the subject of heists,
but has also been used as a tool with which to commit the crime
itself. The Sign Hustle Show is the award winning business podcast you can actually
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We're back, and as promised, let me tell you about a few enterprising
thieves who sought to fool their intended victims with the use of some ingenious food
based weaponry. Now, I think we've all seen the movie trope where a
robber doesn't have a gun and so uses a banana stuffed in his pocket to
create that sort of menacing gun shaped outline with which to scare his victims.
But as the famous saying goes, life often imitates art, as in the
case of a man in Israel who successfully robbed two different banks armed only with
an avocado. The forty seven year old man, who had previously served three
years for aggravated robbery, was up to his old tricks again, but this
time he had a new and ingenious plan. They couldn't charge him with the
use of a weapon while in the commission of a crime if he didn't actually
have a weapon, right, so what he needed was something that simply looked
like a weapon and in hope that his ruse fooled the unsuspecting bank tellers.
Before he left his house that morning, he grabbed an avocado from his fruit
bowl, found some black paint, and then applied it all over the outside
of the avoux. He found a piece 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 the local shopping mall in southern Israel and calmly
walked inside the local branch of the Postal bank. After waiting patiently in line,
a confusing choice for a man who was clearly trying not to be suspicious,
but who was also at the same time wearing an eyepatch. He then
approached the first available teller. He handed her the note that he had written
earlier, but being that the eyepatch man was nearly not the greatest intellect,
he had misspelled the word drawer so badly that the teller was confused as to
what he wanted and just looked at him. In that confusion, the man,
now frustrated that he hadn't paid more attention at school, shouted at the
cashier to put all of the money in his bag or he would quote throw
this grenade at her while holding up his black painted avocado. In what must
have been a frightening moment for all involved, the cashier didn't inspect the so
called grenade any closer, but rather did exactly as he asked, before watching
the man escape with a bag of cash. In an incredible turn of events,
he would put off exactly the same stunt just five days later at another
bank, this time I'm sure, after consulting the d section of his dictionary,
and once again gone away with even more money in total. He stole
almost ten thousand dollars with his avocado, which, if politicians and sensationless newspapers
are to be believed, should have been just about enough money to buy one
or two more avocados the whole way Back in twenty thirteen, the police got
a frantic phone call from an employee of 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 the woman who had held the bank up had
left behind a bag that she claimed contained a bomb. Everyone was too frightened
to go near it or move it, and so they had evacuated the building
as soon as the robber had made her escape. The police were taking no
chances and put in a call to the 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 towards the suspicious package, sweating as he went
as much from the humid temperature as from his nervousness about what lay in front
of him. Carefully, he took his final few footsteps towards the package,
and slowly but surely pulled the paper bag 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 plastic explosives, no timers or fuses, and
eventually realized that he was looking at two cans of spaghetti sauce. A few
days later, the spaghetti bomber, a woman named Ophelia Neil, was arrested
and charged with bank robbery, and despite the bag containing nothing more than some
delicious passata, she was rather humorously also charged with committing a crime with the
use of explosives. Now we'll finish today'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 would make all of them very, very wealthy.
You see, a few of them worked 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 total world supply, and of that eighty percent
of the world supply. Ninety one percent of it comes from this facility in
Quebec. Have you worked out what it is yet? Yep? It's that
old Canadian classic maple syrup. And maple syrup is so important to the Canadian
economy that while other countries make sure they 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 thing to steal almost thirty million dollars worth of
this liquid gold. The men, knowing its value, broke into the industrial
compound storage facility and began siphoning off barrel after barrel. Initially, they would
use trucks to transport the barrels to a remote shack where they would siphon them
off into unmarked white barrels before refilling the now empty barrels with water and returning
them to the facility. Eventually, this became too much of a hassle for
them, and, with their brazenness hitting new heights, they simply began siphoning
the syrup into their barrels straight from the storage facility. Over the course of
a year, the thieves would fill their barrels with more than ten million pounds
of syrup, enough to fill almost two full Olympic sized swimming pools and depriving
the market of almost seven point five million bottles off the shelves. But their
brazenness was now accompanied by their laziness, and this would eventually be their downfall.
You see, as they got more and more confident, the less and
less they paid attention to the small details. 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,
when the yearly inspection was to take place, 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 get a better sense of their quantity, when,
instead of the barrels bearing his weight and staying steady under his feet as
he pushed off to climb higher, the now empty barrels instead toppled under his
efforts. Police were immediately alerted and the investigation began with only a fraction of
the barrels being able to be identified and recovered. Later that year, however,
seventeen men were arrested in connection with the theft, with fines of around
a million dollars handed out to more than one of them, along with some
hefty jail sentences. So if there's one thing we've learned today, well,
in terms of actual potential for monetary gain, Prime very much does pay.
But it's also worth noting that in each and every story today there would be
criminals were always caught and eventually sent to prison. Surprisingly, even I patched
Genius, whose disguise couldn't stop police from using his cell phone data to place
him at the scene both crimes. This show is made entirely by me,
Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having been made by the enigma that
is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to support the show, the
simplest way to do that is over on our Patreon account. There's just one
option, so for just two bucks a 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 our website. No, and then maybe listen
out for your name in an upcoming episode, So until next time, bonappetite flow