Grand Theft Food

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Ruthman Roofman was a burglar who was given that nickname by the authorities due to his preferred method of entry.

He would cut holes through the roofs of fast food restaurants and franchises, mostly McDonald's, and drop down and rob them.

What was so interesting for me about the story was that in that crime he had uncovered this kind of revelation, which is that these restaurants are so regimented and so templated that when you learn how to rob one, you effectively learn how to rob all of them.

The floor plans plans are the same, the kitchens are the same, even the managerial schedules have the same things happening at certain times of day.

So in a sense, Roofman was performing the same crime over and over and over again, but he was doing it all over the country.

You may recognize that voice from past episodes.

I do.

It's my husband, Jeff Mayno.

Not only is he your husband, reason enough to have him on the show, of course.

Buddy also has a new book out all about burglary and architecture.

And it turned out there's a surprising food connection, too.

This episode is all about food heists, how they happen, what gets stolen, and how detectives are trying to deter these crafty, hungry thieves.

And also what we can learn about our food system from the criminal masterminds who try to hack it.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber, and you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I actually...

decided to support you just because I realized how excited I get when the next episode shows up on my playlist.

We are two episodes into our three episode long fundraising campaign here, here, where we're asking you for your support.

Even before that started, though, we had received a generous donation from Andy in Arizona, and we called him to find out why he gave.

So, I usually listen to podcasts in the order they're released, but Gastropod was always cutting to the head of the line.

Every time a new one came out, I would listen to it as soon as I could, and I thought I wanted to say thanks for that.

This is the best compliment possible.

When he said this, I thought it couldn't get any better.

But then, there's also this amazing story about his daughter and her science project for school.

I'm Andy Allen.

I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and I have with me my daughter, Delaney.

How old are you, Delaney?

I'm seven years old.

Spoken with confidence.

Last year, Andy told us.

She colored foods different colors to see if it affected how people tasted them.

And this year, she decided to find out if what they were listening to could affect what they tasted.

In other words, Delaney's science project was inspired by Gastropod.

My science project was called Which Sound Makes Sweeter?

And I tested if listening to high notes, low notes, or no music at all make a drink taste sweeter.

What drink did you use?

Um, I used orange juice.

What did people say?

Out of six people, they said that, um, high notes made their drinks taste sweeter.

That's just what we learned when we interviewed Charles Spence on our Crunch, Crackle, and Pop episode last summer.

Nice job, Delaney.

And thank you, Andy, for your support of Gastropod.

Listeners, if you want to help us inspire the next generation of awesome food and science fans, please support us with a gift of whatever size you can.

You can donate directly on our website at gastropod.com.

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That helps us grow.

Let's get back to Roofman and his special relationship with McDonald's.

It was an executive at McDonald's who said that he just guessed that Roofman must have been very brand loyal.

It was the perfect crime, and then it went wrong.

He switched his allegiance from food to toys.

His actual final arrest came after building a fake apartment for himself in a Toys R Us.

So he actually cut through the wall behind a bike rack and he built himself a fake apartment.

And he actually cut so far through that he ended up in an abandoned circuit city next door.

He started doing really strange things.

Like he stole baby monitors and he turned them into a surveillance network so that he could watch the employees.

He started actually altering the employees' work schedules so that certain employees would be on the job and other ones would stay home.

And he was trying to engineer this kind of super heist so that he could then strike Toys R Us at the exact perfect moment.

The problem was Toys R Us just wasn't as regimented a template as McDonald's.

It must have been really frustrating.

Especially when he got caught.

But I love this idea that fast food, it's convenient for us.

We always know that we're getting the exact same thing each time.

And it was the same thing for the burglar.

I think that what's so great about that is that it reveals that, you know, if you take the same patterns, the same

conveniences, and you just look at them from a slightly different angle, which is the angle of the criminal or the angle of the burglar, you realize that, you know, you too could get something from the McDonald's franchises, and it just happens to, you know, not be on the menu, as it were.

It's all of the stuff that's hidden in the cash register.

And if you hit it at exactly the right moment, you can do the same crime over and over again.

You can find the rest of this story in Jeff's book, including details of Roofman's daring prison break.

It's called A Burglar's Guide to the City.

As an architecture writer, you know, it's been really easy to focus on how architects look at the built environments or how urban planners see cities.

But it just became really fascinating to me that whenever you read about a burglary or a bank heist, or you talk to a cop or, for that matter, an FBI agent investigating a bank robbery, they too have a really, really interesting take on how buildings operate and how buildings can be misused.

You know, we take for granted that we have to go through a door and then walk down a hallway and then go through another door into a room, but there is another way to move through the building, and it's this way that burglars reveal to us if we study their techniques, where you cut through walls instead of using doors at all.

You can go through floors from one floor to the next.

Or as Roofman reveals, you can go through the roof and enter the building from above.

And so I really wanted to look at this alternative use of the built environment that is summed up in the word burglary and write a burglar's guide to the city.

Jeff came across some weird details while he was working on the book, like this one about ancient Sparta.

If you don't remember from your studies in elementary school, Sparta was one of the city-states in ancient Greece.

Well, so yeah, one of the things that came up in my research was this notion that Spartan children, in particular boys being trained for the kind of heavily militant aspect of Spartan culture, were basically sent out on their own to learn self-reliance.

There were lots of things about the Spartan education system that would maybe not fly today.

Those poor kids had to go barefoot in all weathers and on all terrains.

They had to cut the reeds for their beds with their bare hands.

I mean, they endured this bizarre paramilitary style training, all designed to turn them into the ultimate warriors.

And the way that they were taught this was through sort of the hunger games of their time.

They were asked to steal all of their food.

And so food was specifically the target.

It was the thing that would hone their tactical thinking.

It would keep them on their feet.

It would teach them everything from stealth to cunning to using charisma to sort of get into markets and steal food.

That's the opposite of today's free lunches.

And look at the kids these days.

Those Spartans would have whipped their asses.

I'd still rather be in school now than in ancient Spartan times.

So stealing food has a distinguished and ancient pedigree.

But what about actually using food as a burglary tool?

Well, see, actually, one of the more interesting stories I heard was from a retired New Jersey state cop who later went into vaults and safe design.

So one of the stories that he told me actually was really fascinating.

He summed it up as, Scandinavians love potatoes.

You know, when I asked him what he meant by that, he pointed out that potatoes have been used in vault heists in Northern Europe, Scandinavia in particular.

And the reason why is that the potato, of course, is an awful lot of water in a potato.

So water can't compress, and in fact, it's actually used as a hydraulic amplifier for explosives.

So in fact, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms here in the United States even have a device that is basically water-filled IV bags and detonation cord.

So it doesn't actually use any explosives at all, where the detonation cord goes off, it sends the shockwave through the water, and then it bursts the door off of its hinges.

So what this kind of innovative realization was, was that potatoes can function as a hydraulic amplifier for small explosives.

It'll create an awful lot of mashed potatoes at the same time, but it will also blow the door off its hinges from the inside.

So that's in Scandinavia.

Has it ever been done in, say, Idaho?

Do you know?

I couldn't find any evidence of that, but after people listen to Gastropod in Idaho, who knows?

Maybe a potato-based bank crime will go through the roof.

We have to be careful what we're teaching ourselves.

There's a

spade of mashed potato vault raids.

Exactly.

But I feel like an American burglar at least would probably just eat the mashed potato, too.

I mean, that's one of the funny things about burglars is they

seem to be hungry.

That comes up a lot, and food can end up sort of being their Achilles' heel.

Yeah, it's actually astonishing, you know, if some of the things I'm saying imply that burglars are, you know, these closet geniuses who can figure out alternative ways of entry into even the most high-security building.

You know, the flip side is equally true, that burglars make a lot of really dubious decisions.

It's surprisingly common that you hear burglars undone by their stomachs, you know, where they will break into a house and open the refrigerator and start eating the leftover chicken wings, or they will ha take a bite of pizza or actually in some cases making themselves sandwiches, cooking entire dinners, and then in some cases even falling asleep in a kind of post-dinner bliss on the on the victim's couch and then being arrested.

God.

There was a great example of this actually where a burglar broke into the a restaurant and while leaving the kitchen knocked over a big bag of flour.

He walked through the flour and actually led police right to his front door because there was a trail of white footprints in flour that led directly back to his own apartment.

You know, to have not noticed that, I think, is a pretty astonishing indictment of his mental state at the time.

But those kinds of things happen surprisingly often where, yeah, burglars get distracted by the notion of a free meal, and that's their undoing.

These stories are about fairly small-time criminals, but food heists can lead to massive rewards.

Remember our maple episode?

Well, it turns out that one of the biggest food heists in the past decade involves that sweet, sweet syrup.

It was called the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist of 2012.

We haven't heard the last from Jeff, but we need to take a moment here.

This maple heist is an epic story in and of itself.

It all started when an accountant named Michel Gavreau was auditing a warehouse halfway between Montreal and Quebec.

Brendan Burrell is a journalist who covered the story for Bloomberg Business Week.

Yeah, well, he's a very specialized type of accountant.

He's, you know, his job was basically auditing the supply of maple syrup that's controlled by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers.

And so, you know, they basically get all this syrup in the syrup season and they've got it stored in a warehouse.

And he went in in July 2012, I think, you know, was just going around and checking and counting barrels.

And what he told me was he started climbing on the barrels.

Sometimes they're kind of arranged like little pyramids and so you can climb up on them.

And if they're full, it's totally steady.

But he sort of got to the top and he tried to pull himself up and one of them was just empty.

It almost tumbled and he almost completely fell 10 or 15 feet from the floor.

And at that point, he started to take a closer look because it's very strange that there'd be an empty barrel on top.

And he started opening up barrels and finding many of them were half empty.

Some of them had been replaced with water rather than syrup.

And that's when they realized something had gone terribly wrong.

You guys might remember this Federation of Quebec maple syrup producers from our recent episode all about the maple boom.

Basically, it's like an OPEC for maple syrup.

OPEC is

the organization that controls oil production that we're all really familiar with.

In Quebec, they do a similar thing with maple syrup.

And as we found out in our maple episode, that provides a lot of benefits for maple syrup producers.

It helped grow markets for maple syrup at big box stores like Walmart, as well as overseas in China and Japan.

And prices increased, and maple syrup producers knew they could sell their products for a good price so they could finally make some money.

The Federation even sponsored research into the health benefits of maple, like those studies we heard about from Nabindra Siram.

So the Federation made sense to maple farmers.

Though not all of them.

There were a contingent of rebels out there, a contingent of people who were not happy with the system.

Brendan said they were free market rebels.

Maybe they benefited from the federation, but they wanted to have the freedom to sort of do things their own way.

They had their own people they wanted to sell to.

They

wanted to be able to decide, I want to expand my maple grove this year.

I want to produce more maple.

This is the way I've always done it.

I don't need this new fangled federation to come in here and tell me how things should be done.

So they weren't happy about that.

They weren't happy about the control.

And then the second aspect is then there are people who don't have allocations.

They don't have the quota, but they have land and they want to be able to produce maple syrup.

And sometimes there's an enormous waiting list to get quota.

So they were unhappy about that.

And just to give a sense, I mean,

the Federation are not messing around, right?

They will come and check on you oh yeah it's it's an elaborate system I mean they have their own you know undercover agents who will go out to farms they are empowered to go and sort of ask for your your electric bill to see if you've been cooking maple syrup they will sometimes set up undercover operations where they'll try to buy syrup from people because you're you're not allowed to make private sales but I mean that's that's the only way it works is if there's there's enforcement of the laws.

The syrup that was stolen was the Federation syrup.

Just like OPEC has a strategic oil reserve, the Federation created a strategic stockpile of syrup in case there was a bad year.

That helps even out both prices and supply.

So when $18 million worth of the Federation stockpile disappeared, the first people to become suspects were those free market rebels.

Chief among them was a 69-year-old widower called Etienne Saint-Pierre, who's a maple buyer in New Brunswick.

He used to have his own sugar bush when he was younger and his family had sold maple syrup.

But I think he told me he went bankrupt a couple times and he decided from then on he was going to be an exporter and so he set up shop and and had these recipes developed like for maple chocolates and different maple products and so he started buying syrup and of course he's just a couple hours from the border of Quebec so it made sense for him to buy syrup from Quebec.

But he was definitely a renegade.

He didn't think that the Federation should have any control over the market and certainly not control over what's happening in New Brunswick because it's it's a different state it has different laws they don't have the same quotas that Quebec has so he very early on was just buying syrup under the table and the federation started to go after him so was Etienne the criminal mastermind behind the great maple syrup heist thumbtack presents uncertainty strikes I was surrounded the aisle and the options were closing in There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

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After Michelle, the accountant, accidentally discovered that the maple was gone, the Federation reported it to the state police and they started a massive investigation.

There were forensic analyses of syrup kettles and forklets and scales.

The police interviewed more than 300 people in the industry.

And before long, the Quebecois cops showed up on the New Brunswick doorstep of free market rebel and maple renegade Etienne Saint-Pierre with a search warrant.

What they weren't counting on was his assistant, Julienne Bosset.

She was a sassy lady, to say the least.

His second-in-command was kind of, you know, his all-around secretary and attack dog.

And she's this wonderful woman who would just scribble these screeds that she would fax to the Federation.

Like, you know, some of them were sort of strewn with expletives and threats.

And she knew that their search warrant was not good in New Brunswick.

And so she pretended to wipe her butt with it and then

locked the door and wouldn't let them in.

And they had to run off and find a judge.

And, you know, and St.

Pierre's place is like in the middle of nowhere.

So they had to

go several hours away and then come back the next day to get a new warrant that would be good in New Brunswick.

You know, and then they finally came and and they seized all of the syrup in his warehouse, and it was quite a bit, I think like a million pounds or something.

Etienne had a friend named Richard Valliere.

I arranged to meet Valliere at St.

Pierre's place.

You know, he denied any involvement with the theft, but he had had this reputation of being what's called a barrel roller, which is a guy who will just buy your over quota syrup.

And so he had violated the Federation's regulations before and was banned from working with maple syrup.

And a couple weeks after I met him, he ended up getting arrested and is considered one of the leaders in the theft.

Gradually, the cops started to figure out how these guys managed to steal all this syrup.

With the cooperation of a man who worked for the warehouse company, you know, Valier and his colleagues, I guess we could call them, would go in and they'd bring a trucker in, they would load up the barrels, they would take them over to one of the cooking facilities that Valiere's had out there across the St.

Lawrence River, and they would cook the syrup to the right level, and then they would ship it perhaps to Etienne St.

Pierre in New Brunswick or to some other buyers.

You know, it was a pretty elaborate operation and involved kind of this whole network of maple syrup renegades.

Like a lot of burglaries, this was something of an inside job.

The ringleaders knew what the security at the warehouse was, and they just siphoned off a little bit at a time over the course of an entire year.

If that accountant hadn't slipped, they would have emptied the entire warehouse.

In the end, 25 people were arrested.

Five have pled guilty.

The rest are still awaiting trial.

Etienne says he's innocent, so does Richard Valliere.

But this is just a crazy story.

Imagine it was 6 million pounds of maple syrup, $18 million worth.

It'd make a great movie.

Yeah, I've heard that there's a chance that Jason Siegel is producing a movie.

I don't know what the status is of that.

But yeah, we'll just have to see.

But you might be wondering, I know I was, what in the world happened to all that syrup?

Law enforcement's only recovered less than a million pounds of that.

So we know that five extra million pounds ended up on the market, and probably most of that's in the U.S.

If you buy maple syrup, you are probably one of the people who has eaten the stolen maple syrup.

I don't know how bad you should feel about it, but.

You know, the great maple syrup heist sounds like a comedy.

But it ends up showing how easy it is for black market foods to get into our stores and onto our plates.

And how absolutely impossible it is for us as consumers to know whether we're eating anything stolen.

But it is still kind of funny.

Even Jeff, our guest burglary expert this week, couldn't help but laugh when we told him Brendan's story.

Well, I think I had this sense of disbelief that I think a lot of people shared, which was what on earth are you going to do with that much maple syrup?

You know, unless it's the Guinness Book of World Records pancake contest coming up, it seems kind of difficult to know what purpose it would serve to possess all of that.

But I do think it just reveals that, you know, anything of value on a large enough scale becomes worth targeting.

But here's the thing, it is actually incredibly valuable.

Maple syrup at the time was worth more than crude oil.

And not just a little more, 13 times more.

Part of the beauty of stealing maple syrup is it's so valuable.

If you think about it, you know, pound for pound.

I think at the time, like maple syrup was trading at like $30 a gallon.

So you take one barrel of syrup and that's almost $2,000.

As a rule, unsurprisingly, the most common food crimes involve products that are really valuable.

Caviar, truffles, lobster, liquor, they're all pretty regular targets of food heists.

Cheese is the most stolen food on the planet.

Something like 4% of all the cheese produced in the world ends up being stolen.

Which is pretty amazing.

But smart thieves know exactly what they're going for and where to find it.

In his book, Jeff has lots of stories about how burglars can use freely available information to plan their next crime.

Things like a city's fire code or a realtor's website.

When it comes to food heists, though, something as simple as a restaurant putting their wine list online can make them a target.

And so, you know, you might not think of that as a vulnerability.

It's quite a plus to have a fine wine list online, but at the same time, you are inviting other people to take advantage of that information.

There was a heist out in California at the French Laundry where the thieves, it is assumed, used the wine list as a checklist for precisely what bottles to seek out because the heist was very, very specific and it targeted very particular bottles in the collection.

Fine wine is another target that makes intuitive sense to steal.

But certain foods can be worth a lot more than you think.

Right now, it's nuts, pistachios, almonds, walnuts.

Rocky Pipkin lives in California's Central Valley.

He's a detective.

He gets hired for all kinds of crime.

Every day, you never know who's going to be calling you.

It's like today I got a call on a missing person from the coast.

But when a truck full of nuts goes missing, Rocky gets a call about that too.

He told us how a lot of nut criminals like to work.

They troll the internet looking for truckloads.

What has happened now with technology?

A lot of the shippers will post on a website that, hey, I've got a load of pistachios to go to a receiving facility in Los Angeles, and I need it picked up on this date, and this is what we pay.

The crooks will identify that, and they're also looking for what the load has to be insured for.

And if it's a high insurance mark, then they know that it's an expensive load.

And so what the nut thieves do is they hack into the computers of the shippers and packers and they figure out which trucking company ended up getting that load.

And then they replace that information with their own.

So they hire a different driver, somebody who has no clue what's going on, and then they get all the documents they need to show that this driver is legit.

They go really far to set up this fake identity.

Rocky told us they'll hire someone specifically to answer the phone for the fake insurance company.

They forge the certificate of insurance and the license and all the stuff they need to pull it off.

And so when they duplicate or forge these documents, they wait for the most opportune time, which is usually on a holiday weekend or a Thursday or Friday.

Because the goal is to get the nuts out of town before anyone notices, get the product down to LA or up to the Bay Area and get it shipped to the buyer.

Rocky told us that in these sorts of ag heists, the produce is usually being sold by the criminals before it's even stolen.

We had one case where we were able to track down the vehicle that made the cargo theft up in in a small town in Central California and got it down to the Los Angeles area.

And we were there within three hours and poof, everything was gone and we exhausted every lead we had.

There was no evidence of who it was or how they pulled it off.

The truck driver in essence said, I met this guy at a truck stop.

He told me his truck broke down.

He had a load and all the paperwork and he'd pay me X amount of dollars in cash to go pick it up and deliver it to this location.

Interestingly enough, the location where he delivered it to was an empty field, but yet there was another truck there with sketchy-looking markings and a forklift.

And so they unloaded and loaded onto the crook's truck and gone.

Half a million dollars worth of almonds.

Half a million dollars for a truck full of almonds.

We told you that this stuff was valuable.

Rocky didn't get into the detective business to track down nuts or citrus or cows for that matter.

But that's what's big in the Central Valley.

It's huge.

It's in the billions.

And obviously, when the criminal element realized how much money was in say a truckload of of almonds which is worth half a million dollars or a truckload of pistachios which sometimes is worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars the crooks decided to get into that business we got involved in it when farmers and dairymen were ripped off and didn't have the resources and law enforcement to go after these folks and that's where we've kind of filled a void between law enforcement and private business.

The Central Valley is also close to two major ports, LA and the Bay Area.

That stolen food can be out of the country on its way, usually to Asia, in four or five hours.

We did a cherry theft, a skim job a few years ago, and all the cherries were being flown the next day to Japan.

When cherries are harvested, they're usually cooled down in a bath of water and then packed into bins and shipped right away to stay fresh.

No one weighs those bins on the farm, but everyone knows they hold between 200 and 250 pounds of cherries.

And that 50 pound gray zone, that's where our thief saw his opportunity.

Well, little did we know until we started following the trucks to where the fruit was supposed to be delivered that there was a detour.

And the detour was a gentleman with inside information who knew a lot of the trucking companies that hauled cherries.

And he contacted the drivers and said, hey, I just opened up a new facility on your way to so-and-so.

And if you pull in there, I'll fill your truck with diesel, which at that time diesel was like $4 or or $5 a gallon, I don't recall.

The diesel trucks will take anywhere from 500 gallons to 1,000 gallons, so that's a lot of money.

And I'll also wash your truck and trailer and put $500 cash in your pocket.

Meanwhile, the thief was skimming off those cherries, just taking the top off the micro bins, maybe a dozen pounds at a time.

It added up pretty quickly, though, to millions of dollars.

And yes, Rocky said the truck drivers did know something shady was going on.

They just ignored it and pocketed the extra money.

What agricultural thieves target varies, depending on commodity prices.

Nuts are so hot right now because the drought has pushed their prices sky high.

But there's another shortage that's pushing up prices with bees and honey and making them a target for criminals too.

You might have heard of this huge problem.

It's called colony collapse disorder.

The bees are dying.

There are more crops that need to be pollinated than there are bees.

And so the hives have jumped in value.

At one point, I believe honey was going for like $1,200 a barrel.

On top of that, the hives were worth a fortune.

And so you've got somebody with a quasi-knowledge of how to handle bees, and he gets a truck and he goes out in the middle of the night.

Our area is very, very rural.

You know, a sheriff's deputy has an awful lot of area to patrol, and it's just, you know, your odds of getting caught are almost nil.

All these enormous fields and ranches make it tough to patrol on foot or even by car.

So what I think is interesting is that certain kinds of landscapes require different kinds of policing.

In his book, A Burglar's Guide to the City, Jeff looks at the landscape of Los Angeles.

Just like Rocky, the LAPD has to cover a lot of ground.

You know, greater Los Angeles County is actually nearly the size of Rhode Island, and so if you're trying to patrol that kind of environment, then you need something more than just ground policing.

You need this aerial unit, which is the air support division.

And LA has exactly that.

They have a helicopter unit, and Jeff went flying around with them.

I actually went on one ride, too, and managed not to throw up.

It was really fascinating.

I totally would have puked.

Oh, my sick bag was out and ready, but I held it together.

So when we told Jeff about Rocky's dilemma, he had a suggestion.

But if you could have something like, you know, an air support division for the State Agricultural Commission, or if you yourself as a farmer could even just send up a couple drones now and then to patrol your orchards from above, I think that kind of thing would not only be tactically necessary, but would also just be a really interesting imagined feature for these agricultural developments.

And as it happens, it's not just imagined.

Rocky is already using drones, among other types of no high-tech systems.

We're patrolling a farm that's you know 100 miles square miles and in a drone or an airplane you can cover so much ground and with with FLIR you can actually determine what's a jackrabbit and what's a human body.

FLIR stands for forward-looking infrared.

It's basically a way of getting a heat map of the landscape.

It could be totally dark and you could be completely hidden and you would still glow like a candle on the helicopter or drone screen because of all the heat your body is giving off.

That's one of the things when we have a highly concentrated area where theft is occurring, a lot of the military technology that has come back

after the Middle East wars, we're utilizing some of that.

There are sensors that we can plant into the ground, and if somebody rides over that sensor with a bicycle, we'll be able to tell, it will alert our security officers who are out in the field via their radio that there's just been a security breach at this location at this latitude, longitude, and at this time.

Even with all this equipment, it's still really hard to patrol ag fields, and most ag crimes go unsolved.

These cargo theft cases drive us crazy.

I mean, we have solved, you know, probably less than 1% of them.

And it's just so frustrating that these folks can pull this off.

It's super frustrating.

And what's worse, says Rocky, is that he and the farmers are the only ones who seem to care.

What we see in experience in the field is that If you went into a bank and you robbed a bank of half a million dollars in cash, that would be all over the news, all over the police blotters.

There'd be be on the lookouts, FBI would be involved, everybody and their brother would be involved.

But in ag crime, I mean, that last load of almonds that we investigated, I don't even think it made the paper.

Consumers don't seem to care either, but we should.

These crimes jack up the prices of the food we buy.

And they lead to traceability issues.

If there's an outbreak of E.

coli in the produce, it's impossible to trace stolen goods back.

And Rocky said that frequently conventional produce that's been stolen will be labeled as organic to fetch more money.

So we're all being cheated by ag crime, but we don't seem to pay any attention.

And even if the crooks are caught, there's another problem that drives Rocky bonkers.

And then the thing that's frustrating from our end and from a law enforcement end is even if we do catch somebody, unless they have priors, it's a slap on the wrist.

It's restitution and probation.

It's absolutely nothing.

So the benefits certainly outweigh the risk.

Here's where Jeff's book may offer Rocky a solution because the thing is, it turns out that burglary and theft are two different things.

The definition of burglary is weird.

As a crime, it has to include some form of architecture.

And very specific kinds of structures can be burgled in different states.

So one example that might be interesting for Gastropod actually was that in New York state, for example, a ginseng garden specifically can be burglarized.

But now you can burgle telephone booths, you can burgle house boats, you can burgle any number of other structures.

And so those laws have to constantly be updated.

For burglary, you absolutely have to have a structure.

Otherwise, it's just theft.

And the important thing to know here is that burglary gets a higher prison sentence.

Yeah, you can put somebody away for another couple years.

You can add onto it purely by dint of the fact that they were standing within an architectural structure, and that's the magic of four walls.

So we wondered: could Rocky use the magic of four walls to put away his cherry thieves and beehive rustlers for longer?

Well, so yeah, breaking into a truck would be considered automotive burglary, so that would be a relatively straightforward example.

A truck is a complete structure, four walls and a roof for the purposes of the law.

But what about fences round a field?

It turns out that the law has thought about this and the law is a little confused.

Fences don't count because there's not an implied roof, but there is some wiggle room.

Obviously, you know, a greenhouse would be a much more straightforward example because it is in fact surfaced.

But I'd think that you could imagine something like a savvy farmer out there, maybe like a high-end vineyard who would surround his or her fields with, you know, what, pagoda-like structures or small tents so that in order to get into the field, you have to pass through something that is legally recognized as architecture, and therefore you could bust everybody for burglary.

Jeff told us that even if you just walk through an enclosed structure on your way to steal something, it can count as burglary.

Which means you can totally imagine a really angry farmer putting up tent poles and plastic sheeting, creating some crazy structure just to protect their fields full of nuts and cherries.

As you can see, thinking about burglary makes you see the world a little differently.

Well, I think in terms of my book at least, you know, burglary has the interesting effect of revealing that all along there had been another way to use this building.

You know, it indicates that someone else is looking at the same structures that we are using and finding other ways into them or ways around them or through them.

And I think that what that reveals is that, you know, we ourselves could be paying not only more attention, but a different kind of attention to the everyday environment.

And that same kind of logic, that burglary can help you see the built environment differently, that applies to food, too.

I mean, it took the maple syrup ice to make this entire OPEC-style Quebecois stockpile system visible to ordinary pancake eaters.

Looking at our food system through the eyes of thieves can also help us see what's valuable now, like nuts or beehives or maple syrup.

And it can also reveal some of the weaknesses in our food system, like all the middlemen that make the kind of cargo theft that drives Rocky crazy so much easier to pull off.

Not to mention the way that we as consumers can end up eating stolen food and not even knowing it because of the lack of traceability.

And there's one more thing that really stood out to me.

There are these aspects of our food system that are kind of built for efficiency.

McDonald's is always the same.

The Agfields are huge in monoculture, but the same efficiency makes them an easy target.

So maybe we owe these maple thieves and nut rustlers some thanks?

I mean, not a lot, of course, but they can teach us something.

And meanwhile, we do still recommend paying for all your food.

Oh, yes, please don't take away any bright ideas from this episode.

No potato explosives, please.

We do not want to have to visit you all in jail.

Thanks this episode to my in-house burglary expert, Jeff Mayno.

He's the author of A Burglar's Guide to the City, and I am biased, but it's a really fun read.

I just reread it on a flight from Dublin, cover to cover, and I still loved it.

I'm not married to him, but I heartily recommend it as well.

Thanks also to Brendan Borrell.

He's a science reporter based in Brooklyn.

You can read his article, The Great Maple Heist, at our website, gastropod.com.

And thanks also to Detective Rocky Pipkin.

We have links to his detective agency online, as well as to a story about a cow con he solved.

That story by Tessa Stewart, published in California Sunday magazine, was what initially introduced us to him.

Thanks again to supporter Andy Allen.

You too can support Gastropod at gastropod.com.

Just click donate.

Or go to our new Patreon page at patreon.com/slash gastropod.

And thanks to those of you who have already given, seeing those emails come in really makes our day.

And come back in two weeks for a tour of an amazing citrus grove, the one with the most different kinds of specimens in America.

So this is calamandin.

Do you know that one?

Yeah, what's this?

This is called calamansi.

It's what they grow in the Philippines and they use a noodle dishes and to make like a lemonade, lime aid.

Here you go.

Do you eat the peel or no?

No, just take a lick.

It's really acidic.

Oh.

It's like a super acidic orange.

Right.

Wow.

Oh, that's awesome.

But it's got a really great flavor behind it.

Yeah.

it's delicious.

Wow, puckery.

There's even some more crime with the unexpected connection between lemons and the mavdia.

Check back in two weeks for the whole story.

Till next time.

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