A screenwriter could try pitching this one to a Hollywood executive: a heist movie starring a flamboyant television host and a veteran rock ’n’ roll frontman on the hunt for $1 million worth of stolen tequila.
The crime happened this month after two trucks carrying tequila made by Santo Spirits, a brand founded by Guy Fieri, the celebrity restaurateur and spiky-haired host of “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” and Sammy Hagar, the former lead singer for Van Halen, crossed from Mexico into Laredo, Texas.
Joe Baeza, an investigator with the Laredo Police Department, said that after the trucks arrived at a warehouse in the city, they were picked up by legitimate truck drivers who set out to take them to their intended destination, a warehouse in Pennsylvania.
But somewhere along the route, he said, the drivers received new orders from someone they assumed was in charge of the delivery, directing them to go to a warehouse in Los Angeles because of problems at the warehouse in Pennsylvania. The drivers brought the tequila to what appeared to be a legitimate warehouse in Los Angeles, where they left it.
“That was the last time anybody knew or saw where the tequila was,” Investigator Baeza said, adding that the theft was reported to the Laredo Police Department on Nov. 12.
“All indications are this is a theft,” he said. “I don’t think this is a case of a misplaced load of tequila. I’m pretty sure it’s probably gone.”
Dan Butkus, the chief executive of Santo Spirits, said that the company was robbed of 24,240 bottles of tequila, including 240 bottles of Extra Añejo Single Barrel, which had been aged for more than 36 months and typically sells for $119 per bottle.
It was the first batch of that aged tequila that the company, founded in 2017, had produced, he said. The total retail value of the purloined tequila was $1 million, according to Santo Spirits.
Mr. Fieri, who could not be immediately reached for comment, told People magazine that he was astounded that the theft involved two trucks of his tequila.
“I mean, one is one,” he said. “But now you’ve got to have double the amount of people to pull off the double heist. It just seems so much riskier to take two trucks.”
In an emailed statement, Mr. Hagar called the theft “a gigantic setback for any independently owned company in a hugely competitive market.”
“But Guy and I are not the type to sit back and whine over spilled tequila,” he said. “Our distillery is working day and night right now to replace as much stock as we can.”
Incidents of cargo theft are projected to increase by more than 25 percent this year compared to 2023, a record year, according to CargoNet, a subsidiary of Verisk, a business focused on theft prevention and recovery for the insurance industry.
While there are fewer instances of alcoholic beverage shipments being stolen this year compared to 2023, when much of the cargo theft involved hard seltzers, the theft in 2024 has been “almost exclusively hard liquor,” CargoNet said in a statement.
Mr. Butkus said that he had managed to piece together some troubling information about his company’s pilfered tequila. He said that a trucking broker had given the job to a trucking company that then transferred the job to another company — a practice called “double brokering.”
Mr. Butkus said that the trucking broker had received fictitious accounts of breakdowns and other reasons that the drivers could not bring the tequila to the warehouse in Pennsylvania. He said one of the trucks had used a GPS emulator to disguise its location.
Mr. Butkus said that he suspected that much of the tequila would be sold on the black market, to bars and restaurants or people on the street.
“It’s a big momentum killer and it’s definitely a gut punch,” he said. “It’s not going to break us and we all feel we’re going to come out stronger from it. But it’s really frustrating.”
The post Who Stole 24,240 Bottles of Guy Fieri’s Tequila? appeared first on New York Times.
