On America’s interstates, brazen bands of thieves steal 18-wheelers filled with computers, cell phones, even toilet paper. And select law enforcement teams are tasked with tracking them down.
On May 11, 2013, a semi cab made its way up Interstate 555 from Memphis, Tennessee, northwest to Jonesboro, Arkansas. The man driving — a career trucker from Memphis — was accompanied by his nephew, and the pair was bobtailing, meaning their truck wasn’t pulling a trailer. Drivers often have to travel between warehouses and shipping facilities to pick up a new load, and these two men were indeed in search of new cargo to haul. Only in this case, they weren’t looking to do it legally. They were cruising the truck stops along I-555 for unattended trailers to pick up and steal.
Truckers sometimes leave their trailers at truck stops or even in parking lots in order to visit a mechanic or drive the cab home for the weekend. So the men knew it was only a matter of time before they came across an unattached trailer, overlooked in the bustle of a busy truck stop. The pair’s combined experience came in handy, as either one of them could hook up to a trailer, crank up the landing gear and connect a few hoses, then drive right off in a matter of minutes. Working as a team would make the process faster, allowing the thieves to blend in with the endless streams of highway traffic and be gone before the trailer’s rightful driver realized what had hit him.
At around 5:40 p.m., the men found what they were looking for. A 52-foot Wabash trailer, sitting in the parking lot of the Snappy Mart Truck Stop in West Plains, Missouri. The nephew dropped out of the cab and ran over to the trailer, directing as his uncle backed up. They maneuvered the large, U-shaped coupling on the back of the tractor, under the trailer’s enormous kingpin, which clanked into place and locked automatically. The nephew hopped up and walked through the space between the tractor and the trailer to connect a few hoses and cables. He took a quick look around the lot as he hopped back into the cab and slammed the door. It appeared that nobody had seen them. The two men drove off with the errant trailer, itself worth $7,500 even empty, and hightailed it with whatever cargo was inside, intensely vigilant but giddy like kids at a criminal Christmas.
They drove up through Chicago and into Indiana before cutting northward into Michigan in the early morning of May 12. The distance was substantial but not especially noteworthy for long-haul truckers who crisscross the U.S. highway system on a weekly basis. The pair already had buyers set up in obscure warehouse locales, people who knew how to efficiently get rid of bulk goods. The men would get a cut of the proceeds, with higher-value merchandise meaning a heftier payday. They grew more and more eager to see the fruits of their pull. They had no way of knowing what was inside the locked trailer — it truly could be anything — but this was all part of the excitement.
As they would later find out, their prize haul was $30,000 worth of Green Giant canned corn, headed from a food processing facility in Montgomery, Minnesota, to a food pantry in Little Rock, Arkansas. The 40,000 cans of corn weighed many thousands of pounds. Would they have gone through with the theft had they known what the trailer contained? Surprisingly enough, yes. A trailer full of canned corn isn’t a bust of a heist. Cheap food disappears easily into mom-and-pop shops, swap meets, and over the internet, and it is virtually untraceable once it’s gone.
“If you have enough of something and you can sell it for cheap enough, you can make it disappear very quickly, and your profit is 100 percent,” said Manteca Police Department Sgt. Joe Ahuna, who has worked on cargo theft cases in California’s Central Valley region.
In fact, some of the highest value and thus most targeted loads in recent years have been snack nuts. When a drought greatly diminished the supply of nuts, thereby raising the demand for them, seasoned truck thieves became more interested in going after nuts than they were big-ticket electronics or medicine. Nut theft reached a peak in early 2015, with 31 nut heists costing carriers more than $5 million.
“How are you to track individual nuts?” said Sgt. Shawna Pacheco, a supervisor in the California Highway Patrol’s Golden Gate Investigative Services unit and a member of its Cargo Theft Interdiction Program. “When those nuts get transported to a warehouse where they are processed — some are legal and some are stolen — but all are crushed and bagged, so good luck telling the difference.” (Similar networks of licit and illicit buyers are relied on to fence everything from lunch meat to designer clothes, and the same strategy is at play today in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Sheriffs in North Carolina recently tracked down a stolen semi carrying 18,000 pounds of toilet paper.)
And so, while $30,000 worth of canned corn wasn’t necessarily a dream haul, the steal was well worth their effort. The two thieves lumbered along the roads of Michigan, driving into the horizon like so many other anonymous truckers delivering the goods on which we all rely.
....MUCH MOREThe two truck thieves, Earl Stanley Nunn, and his nephew, Michael Lee Sherley, were no slouches when it came to ripping off trucks. The crew they were working with had previously conducted similar operations in more than a dozen states, spreading the felonies across countless jurisdictions. What they didn’t know was that they were already being carefully tracked by the FBI’s Memphis Cargo Theft Task Force, who knew exactly where the trailer full of canned corn was at all times. Memphis has some of the highest cargo theft rates in the nation, and the U.S. Marshals on the task force had placed a GPS tracking device on Nunn’s tractor.
The canned corn thieves made their way across Michigan on Interstate 94. Their route took them across Jackson County in the southeastern part of Michigan’s mitten. As they drove, the Marshals contacted the Michigan Department of State Police’s Southwest Commercial Auto Recovery (SCAR) Unit to let them know they had a stolen load coming their way. The SCAR team was already aware of Nunn, who authorities had been keeping an eye on since 2009. But they’d ramped up surveillance a year earlier, after his son Roderick Nunn had been arrested for stealing a trailer full of 39,000 pounds of Wrigley’s gum, valued at $175,000, from a shipping facility and attempting to drive it to Detroit, a heist that led to a 15-minute chase with a Michigan State Police officer, and culminated with Roderick Nunn running from the cab and his co-conspirator attempting to hide in a field. (The younger Nunn had also been convicted of bank robbery in 2002 and of stealing $92,000 worth of sugar and powdered lemonade mix in 2008.)
Nunn and Sherley had no idea that their progress was being closely monitored. It was a cooler than average morning, and the two men gazed out the window as the rising sun brought out the details of the dense foliage of Michigan’s verdant roadside ecosystems. The men didn’t hear the siren at first; it only intruded on their consciousnesses when they saw the emergency lights of a Michigan State Police vehicle in their rearview mirrors. Hoping he could talk his way out of the stop, Nunn slowed down and coasted onto the shoulder, stopping right between mile markers 141 and 142. It was 7 in the morning, and they were approximately 80 miles from their presumed destination in Detroit.
The officer took his time exiting his vehicle, taking notes but deliberately delaying contact to intimidate the drivers. He ambled up to the cab and asked the driver and passenger to get out.....
