- Could these bizarrely similar crimes on the opposite sides of the globe be related?
To paraphrase one Dr. Doofenshmirtz, if I had a nickel for every giant beer theft in the past month, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
The hot weather this summer must’ve made some criminals very thirsty, because they’ve gone looking for refreshments. Both the U.S. and the U.K. have seen a large-scale and weirdly coincidentally timed heist of beer.
Here in America, enterprising thieves stole thousands of cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and non-alcoholic Old Milwaukee beer (the latter probably unintentionally). The strange part here is that the thefts happened in two separate heists targeting the same warehouse on one day.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, the crooks felt like having 70,000 pints worth of Guinness. The English police have found the trailer the thieves used, but the criminals themselves seem to have vanished into thin air.
Look, I understand perfectly that sometimes you want to crack open a big case of cold ones with the boys. But this isn’t the way to acquire that case.
Pints of PBR
The U.S. robberies took place on August 17. In this case, the robbers targeted an Anheuser-Busch distribution center near Los Angeles in two separate but likely connected heists.
In the first heist, a truck loaded with $45,000 worth of Pabst Blue Ribbon left the Los Angeles facility, headed for Tucson. The cargo never arrived in Arizona.
It’s not clear whether the person who drove the truck out of LA was in league with the criminals or whether the thieves pilfered the cargo along the way. But what matters is that the beer is gone and there’s no trace of it.
But the criminals weren’t done. An hour after the first truck drove away, a supposed “subcontracting company” submitted paperwork to pick up another load of beer from the LA distribution center.
The order was for $25,000 in beer. The management at the facility signed the order, and a truck came to pick up the load.
However, the documents were fake. It turned out that the subcontractor named in the papers doesn’t exist, and there’s no telling who took the beer.
Altogether, $70,000 worth of Pabst products are missing, totaling 34,000 cans of PBR and Old Milwaukee. In weight, that’s 40,000 pounds of beer cans.
The Pabst Brewing Company, though, didn’t waste time turning the theft into a marketing opportunity.
“To the thief: we don’t fault you for wanting to brag to your friends how much PBR you have, we just wish you obtained it the honorable way,” the company wrote in a statement.
However, to clarify that this isn’t a veiled publicity stunt, the statement underlined that the company is “deadly serious.” So serious, in fact, that Pabst has promised a $20,000 reward to anyone providing information that leads to the thieves’ capture.
Gallons of Guinness
Next, let’s hop over the Atlantic to Jolly Old England. Well, it’s less jolly at the moment, as hundreds of barrels of liquid jolliness are missing.
In the U.K., the beer disappeared on August 31. As in California, the thieves targeted a single distribution center in the Whitehouse Industrial Estate in Runcorn, just outside Liverpool.
At 7:45 p.m. on the day, somebody drove out of the storage facility with a semitrailer loaded with barrels of Guinness. About two hours later, at 9:30 p.m., another trailer left the warehouse.
Neither arrived where they were supposed to, if they were ever supposed to go anywhere. With them, the trucks took more than 800 barrels, or 70,000 pints of Guinness that had been earmarked for distribution to Britain’s pubs.
Altogether, the stolen Guinness is worth around 25,000 pounds sterling, or nearly $278,000.
Unlike in America, where there’s ample space to dump a trailer, England is more compact, and the cops have found the stolen trailers. They found one in the Hall Lane area of Liverpool, while the other was discovered in Skelmersdale, northeast of the city.
Eyewitness reports and surveillance footage have captured vague descriptions of the thieves. The first trailer’s driver is allegedly a white man with a short dark beard, while the second reportedly wore a cap.
That’ll surely help the police find the crooks.
Given that the cases are so similar and there wasn’t much time between them, the obvious question is whether they’re related to each other. While there has been no breakthrough in either one, it’s probably safe to say that these are isolated incidents.
Unless they happen to uncover an international beer smuggling ring, in which case I’ll admit I was wrong.