'Organized' cheese bandits still on the loose
For one hard-luck semitrailer driver, the routine task of hauling 20,000 pounds of fresh Wisconsin cheese from Green Bay to the Milwaukee area led to a mysterious crime that remains unresolved a year later.
That night, the semitrailer pulled into the Hoffman Storage facility near Interstate 94. The Oak Creek business seemed a safe place to temporarily leave his trailer while he got his truck serviced. The property had video surveillance and a chain-link fence.
But by 2 a.m., when the driver returned, his trailer was gone. Someone made off with $46,000 worth of stolen cheese.
Where did the cheese go? Where did the semitrailer wind up? Just who was the cheese bandit? A year later, detectives in Wisconsin still don't know.
The Oak Creek case from June 30 was one of three cheese heists last year — strange, unusual crimes that gave Wisconsin plenty of national notoriety:
"Thieves make off with $46,000 worth cheese in Wisconsin heist" - New York Daily News
"People can't stop stealing thousands of pounds of cheese" - Gizmodo
"What went wrong in Wisconsin's biggest cheese heist?" - Munchies
A semitrailer filled with 41,000 pounds of Parmesan cheese was stolen in Marshfield and another trailer of assorted cheeses was taken in Germantown. That pair of crimes occurred in January 2016, about a week apart. Both of those loads were recovered. The Marshfield shipment of cheese turned up about two weeks later at a storage warehouse near Appleton. The trailer of cheese from Germantown turned up at a grocery store lot in Milwaukee.
"It's an organized type of crime," said Marshfield Police Lt. Darren Larson. "It's certainly very plausible because of the sophisticated nature of these crimes that you need knowledge of the (freight) shipping business."
Profiling a cheese thief
Why would someone steal a truck stocked with thousands of pounds of yellow cheddar? Police and industry experts say it's all about resale value. The cheese from Marshfield had an estimated retail value of $90,000. The other two stolen loads were worth $70,000 and $46,000 respectively.
But keep in mind, these are blocks of cheese. Not bags of money being hauled out of your local bank. Even in Wisconsin, you can't exactly go door to door with this stuff.
Unless your plan is to eat all the cheese, stealing a full cheese truck might be more trouble than it's worth.
"The harder part is figuring out what to do with it," agreed John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association.
One of the transportation industry's leading experts on cargo crimes said most thieves have already lined up a buyer before they steal a 53-foot semitrailer stocked with food or other merchandise.
"Food products are a bigger target than most people think; food gets stolen all the time," said J.J. Coughlin, author of the 2012 book, "Cargo Crime: Security and Theft Prevention."
"You are dealing with people who are organized and true criminals," Coughlin told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin last week. "It's not mafia like you think, but it's very organized. It can be a ring or it can be one person, but it's usually a ring of two or three people."
Someone stealing a truck of cheese usually intends to sell off the product to a small mom-and-pop grocer or restaurant, Coughlin said.
He recalled a crime he investigated years ago in Texas involving a stolen meat truck. It was a back-alley deal. The thieves sold off the stolen meat for a flat $10,000 to a man who owned a chain of seven restaurants. "The person buying meat off the street, he's just looking for the best deal," Coughlin said.
However, now more than ever, it's increasingly difficult for black market smugglers to unload thousands of pounds of fresh cheese because the food regulatory industry has become wiser. Coughlin said it's inconceivable that a grocery store chain would buy a truck of cheese from someone pulling into their loading dock, offering a discount deal.
Packaged cheese is bar-coded with a "traceable trail" to track the history of the food-processing origin, Umhoefer said.
That means it's practically impossible to sell a truck of stolen cheese to a reputable grocery chain.
Fortunately for Wisconsin, the state is not regarded as a hot-spot for cargo thefts, Coughlin said. Most cargo thieves operate in the South, where there are more mom-and-pop restaurants, convenient stores and grocers. Smaller stores that aren't part of a national or regional retail chain often struggle to remain profitable. As such, there's a greater temptation for some of these little businesses to buy stolen merchandise by the bulk at a deep discount.
Although large-volume cheese heists are rare, they have happened before in Wisconsin.
Crime ring unravels
In 2011, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on a gang of four thieves who were charged with stealing a slew of semitrailers over several months. Their stolen merchandise ranged from Nike sneakers to a tractor trailer in West Allis filled with mozzarella cheese.
The 14-page federal criminal complaint offers a window into the network of cargo thefts — a dark underworld that most in society rarely stop and notice. Most of their crimes happened late at night.
May 29, 2011: A blue minivan pulled up near the gate of Aim Transfer and Storage, a storage business on Milwaukee's South 13th Street. Several men piled out and their van drove off. The men snuck around the corner to avoid the security cameras. They cut a hole in the fence to gain access. Later, they cut the lock and chain securing the gate. Around midnight, a tractor trailer filled with $250,000 in stolen Nike shoes drove off the lot.
The theft wasn't discovered until the next day. "From the time it's stolen and by the time you know it's gone, that product can be two or three states away, at least a couple hundred miles away," Coughlin added.
June 4, 2011: A tractor and trailer stocked with $30,000 in fresh cheese was stolen in West Allis — the same city where the criminal ringleader lived. The tractor and trailer turned up three days later near Detroit, but the shipment of mozzarella cheese was gone. It had been loaded into another truck that moved it to a warehouse in Detroit for safekeeping. That warehouse had close ties to the Milwaukee crime ring.
June 15: The ringleader sold off his load of stolen mozzarella cheese. The transaction took place in a hotel parking lot in Dearborn, Mich.
June 21: The outfit sold off the 3,000 pairs of Nike shoes that ranged in retail price from $60 to $90 each.
June 26: A trailer with pallets of Chex-Mix and Shark Bites fruit snacks was reported stolen to Milwaukee police. The stolen cargo was worth $50,000, according to the criminal complaint.
Aug. 21: A trailer with $100,000 of anti-freeze and windshield wiper fluids was stolen in Wauwatosa. The thieves hooked up the stolen load to their own tractor and drove off the open lot.
Aug. 28: A truck and a trailer with $30,000 in salad dressing were stolen in West Allis.
Sept. 5: A trailer filled with rock salt and a forklift inside was taken from an industrial park in New Berlin.
Sept. 18: A blue Kenworth trailer was stolen in Milwaukee — days later, police discovered it parked near the residence of one of the bandits.
Oct. 3: The ring was foiled after police put a GPS tracker on the ringleader's Honda Odyssey van. When the van was stopped, the driver and three other men in his crime network were arrested.
No suspect in mind
It's now been 10 months since Wisconsin's last great cheese truck heist, in Oak Creek. That crime and the two earlier cheese heists from January 2016 have netted no arrests.
"There were leads available, and we followed up on a possible suspect," said Marshfield police's Larson. "Unfortunately, it did not turn out. Right now, we don't have a specific suspect in mind."
Even though the cheese was recovered by police from the two crimes in January 2016, the damage was done. "I believe that was all destroyed," Larson said. "They could not verify that any of the stolen cheese was properly stored."
Whether the three Wisconsin crimes were carried out by three different perpetrators "it's hard to say," Coughlin said.
"Food gets stolen all the time," he said. "They're probably not going to get caught, if they have not been busted by now."
Meanwhile, Wisconsin's cheese industry says it isn't in danger of being put out of business by these hooligans.
"I don't think it's a trend," Umhoefer said. "But it may have given the industry a warning to ramp up security. It will be a footnote in history because I think it will be a difficult crime" to replicate.
Marshfield police continue to monitor police bulletins around the country, figuring their bandit remains on the prowl for other vulnerable products within the freight industry, just like the 2011 ring of thieves near Milwaukee who bartered in stolen beer, cigars, cheese, snack foods, candy bars and even windshield wiper fluids before they met their end and went to federal prison.
The best hope for police in Wisconsin is that their cheese bandits were part of an elaborate ring.
"People talk," Coughlin said. "The more people involved, the more of an opportunity for information slipping out."
John Ferak of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin: 920-993-7115 or jferak@gannett.com; on Twitter @johnferak.