Niamh Spence
Losing one bottle of tequila would be annoying, but thousands of them? Well, that's baffling.
That's exactly what happened to Food Network host Guy Fieri, when 24,000 bottles of his Santo Tequila suddenly went AWOL.
Speaking to CBS' 60 Minutes, Fieri recalled: "My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila?"
The bottles disappeared while en route from Texas to a warehouse in Pennsylvania, the shipment worth a whopping $1 million - so not a small amount to lose, by any means.
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The tequila's journey began in Mexico, passed through customs at Laredo, Texas, before it was loaded onto trailers for delivery to Pennsylvania, where it was expected to be delivered. However, it ran into issues, with the logistics company initially blaming technical issues.
The logistics company emailed Fieri and his co-founder, Santo Spirits CEO Dan Butkus, explaining delays were due to a broken down pump truck. The email explained: "Looks like the issue is bigger than he thought. Mechanics advised the truck will be fixed Saturday… he says he can deliver Sunday but I know y'all are closed so he can be there first thing Monday."
Butkis told CBS: "Then on Monday, we get an email that the truck is close, 'GPS says it's within a couple miles of our warehouse in Lansdale, can you let us know when it arrives?'"
However, the logistics company had subcontracted and outsourced the transport to other trucking firms, and this is where it got dodgy, as those firms were actually fronts for criminals. The entire operation turned out to be a major scam, with fake companies, fake email and phone contacts as well as false tracking.
With no sign of the missing tequila, he pair turned to Keith Lewis, a former cop who runs operations for Verisk CargoNet, to help them get to the bottom of things. Lewis revealed businesses in the US had lost more than $230 million in goods last year to cargo theft.
He explained: "It's very common. It happens multiple times a day."
In this case, the theft was sophisticated and largely orchestrated online, with some of the criminals behind the scheme believed to operate internationally as investigators traced parts of the network to over 40 countries.
Investigators say the tequila theft had all the characteristics of a criminal gang that operates out of Armenia, 7,000 miles from the US-Mexico border where the tequila was last seen.
This kind of theft, where criminals remotely redirect cargo to steal it, has spiked 1,200% in four years, according to Lewis.
"If you think about online dating, for example, you can be anywhere in the world and set up a date with someone. It's the same thing in the supply chain," Lewis said.
"We don't do business face-to-face anymore. We don't have the hand-to-hand transactions. We're doing business by PDF file, by rate confirmations."
The loss of the 24,000 bottles was catastrophic as Fieri explained: "You know here we are, we're coming right into the fourth quarter. We lose all the tequila. We can't fill the shelves. We had to lay off players. You know, and that's the hardest thing."
Miraculously, though, this story does have a happy ending - something that came as a surprise to Fieri, who thought that, even if it was recovered, they wouldn't be able to sell it. He said: "Who knows what's happened to it, who knows what condition it's in and so forth. I'm just thinking, 'This is all gonna go down the drain'."
Yet when the bottles were recovered, they were in a saleable condition and able to be sold in stores.