Tulare County police in California have arrested a 34-year-old man suspected of stealing 42,000 pounds (19,050.88 kilograms) of pistachios. The sheriff announced this on the district police's official Facebook page.
He said that a routine inspection at Touchstone in June found about 42,000 pounds of pistachios were missing. On June 17, representatives of the company contacted the Crime Department and asked to investigate the theft. Two days later, police found a truckload of pistachios in one of the parking lots, and the pistachios were packed from 2,000 pound (907 kilograms) sacks into smaller sacks for resale. Alberto Montemayor of the Montemayor trucking company was arrested on the spot on suspicion of stealing nuts.
This isn't the first time a pistachio truck has disappeared in Central California. In August 2020, another man in California was arrested and charged with stealing more than $ 294,000 worth of pistachios. Last July, two men were caught pretending to be drivers picking up a load at an almond and pistachio distribution center. The pistachio industry is one of the major contributors to the U.S. economy, with California pistachio farmers contributing more than $ 5 billion to the state economy and over 47,000 jobs, according to a March study, Business Insider reported.
“Nuts are the ideal high-value item to steal and resell because, unlike electronic devices, pistachios do not have serial numbers, making them virtually untraceable,” explains the popularity of nuts among robbers to The Washington Post.
Walnut robberies flourished especially between 2014 and 2017 after organized crime groups stole more than $ 7.6 million in nuts, according to CargoNet, a company that tracks cargo thefts. Thieves forged documents, hacked into databases to redirect and steal shipments of valuable nuts, BuzzFeed News reported in 2016. Theft has declined in recent years as companies adopt new methods of tracking and securing shipments, such as photographing and fingerprinting drivers, Capitol Press reports.
Earlier it became known that the police in the Indian village of Dhurena, Chhattisgarh state, recorded the theft of 800 kilograms of cow dung. On the night of June 9, an unknown person stole 800 kilograms of cow dung worth 1.6 thousand rupees (1.5 thousand rubles). Law enforcers started searching for the loss.
