Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/25/truck-driver-attacked-30k-in-snow-crabs-stolen-in-heist.html
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Red Lobster won’t go down without a fight! /s
personal opinion of a seafood lover follows:
honestly, i don’t get the fervor for snow crab or (even worse) Alaskan king crab. for me, stone crab claws are far superior to either of those AND the stone crab lives another day, perhaps to have a claw or two taken next season. to this lover of shellfish, stoneys are sweeter, meatier and overall more tasty than those others. Chesapeake blue crabs or PNW dungeness are also quite good, but… i’ve already said it.
that stuff just ain’t worth stealing.
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wolf eel?
i remember those, fishing Puget Sound.
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I’m curious whether this was part of a larger operation, whether it was interrupted, or if I’m just really bad at estimating the costs of doing crime.
$30k worth of crabs is absolutely not nothing, especially if your crab launderers can actually get a decent percentage of the sticker price(which is presumably easier for goods that are expected to be sold hastily and aren’t serialized); but 12 people is a fair amount of labor for an escapade that must be kept quiet; and which means potential felony charges for all involved.
Just feels like it lands in a weird place: extremely big and sophisticated by the standards of ‘desperate addict does questionably sensible thing for a pittance’ type crime; but seems like it would be hard to keep the lights on for that kind of money if you are dealing with the overhead of big organized operations.
I don’t have a masters in burglary administration or anything, so I could just be wildly wrong about prevailing costs in the industry; but it feels like an awkward-sized score for that level of resources unless this is either just the part of the heist that people noticed; or something that was intended to be bigger but had to be aborted.
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Police suspect that the criminals behind this crustacean heist were the Cray Twins.
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No one yet caught red handed?
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I always assumed it was just a size thing, and that some people found more precise dissecting while dining difficult.
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“They look at the type of trailer. If you see a refrigerated trailer you know there’s something valuable in there. Whether it’s ice cream, pork, crab legs or beef,”
Organized gangs of 12 breaking into trucks to steal whatever cold food happens to be in there seems very bizarre to me. Is there a black market for crab and ice cream? How do they unload this stuff in time and make enough money for the risk to be worth it? I’m assuming they have some kind of walk-in freezer hideout somewhere full of stolen goods, but even so…
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mmmm…
crab ice cream!
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He made that up. He didn’t wan to admit that the crabs freed themselves and escaped.
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I used to get so excited when my family could afford a whole crab. We’d all sit around the coffee table sucking on crab meat and butter.
Ever since Deep Water Horizon and everything I learned, seafood has become very fraught for me. 
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Most organized crime operations have transitioned to online/telephone scams these days for that very reason. Low overhead, high margins. Bonus if you can kidnap people and force them to work for free until their family pays their ransom (and sometimes not even then). So yeah, for such a small pay day, this seems odd. The scammers in Mexico and SouthEast and Eastern Asia are operating at the multi-billion dollar level.
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That’s up in the far northeast. Suburbany. I wouldn’t think you’d have four cars with 12 robbers there at 5:00am.
But it was the loading dock area of a Walmart Superstore; so I guess there’s a good chance of finding cargo on the regular.
But hard to sell before it goes bad. Unless you’ve got a cold storage facility you can use.
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This should be a thing.
Feeling bad now that this career option was never suggested by the Vocational Guidance advisor at my school.
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“Or so I hear from a friend”.
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I wondered what an MBA entailed…
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