How A Meat Bandit Made off With A $9 Million Truckload Of Beef And Pork
Three men were leading a meat bandit group that stole more than nine million dollars worth of beef and pork.
It’s not just jewels and cash thieves are targeting these days. It’s the food industry too. Following multiple thefts of tractors and trailers loaded with thousands of pounds of frozen meat, five Nebraskan law enforcement agencies started developing a strategy to catch the elusive meat bandit. In one instance, the unidentified thieves used fraudulent documents to haul away 40,000 pounds of beef from a JBS Beef plant. While on a separate occasion, multiple tractor-trailers containing $500,000 worth of meat and pork from a different JBS plant were taken.
Both times, the meat bandit removed the GPS trackers from the trailers, knew how to operate the truck, and where to find the stored trailers. “It’s somebody who has been involved in the meat and pork industry,” Grand Island Police Captain Jim Duering told agriculture news outlet The Fence Post in July. “I do have a theory these are not local criminals,” he added. His theory eventually turned out to be correct.
According to Homeland Security Investigations, the meat bandit was caught. But it wasn’t just one person. Three men from the Miami area were arrested earlier this month, and are now facing charges of transportation of stolen goods and money laundering. The identification and arrest of Ledier Machin Andino, Delvis L. Fuentes, and Yoslany Leyva Del Sol was a joint effort by HSI Omaha, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Highway Patrol, and HSI Miami – El Dorado Task Force South.
In addition to making the mean bandit arrests, officers recovered three tractor-trailers filled with stolen meat at an estimated value of $550,000. Later, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said that it had identified 45 related thefts that took place in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Together, those thefts involved a loss of $9 million worth of beef and pork, the law enforcement agency said in a press release.
Speaking about the meat bandit to The North Platte Telegraph, HSI Miami special agent Robert Palombo, Jr. said the suspects were caught by cross-referencing their mobile devices to “specific cellular communication towers” at the time and place of some of the robberies. They found Fuentes through those cell phone records, which led them to the other two suspects.
“On or around September 16th, law enforcement observed, through real-time GPS tracking, a semi-tractor registered to Del Sol traveling on Interstate 80 in Lincoln, Nebraska,” Palombo told the publication. “Within a few seconds, law enforcement observed two other semi-tractors with trailers following the semi-tractor registered to Del Sol.” Agents followed the meat bandits to Iowa, and put GPS devices on the stolen semi-trucks.
The meat bandits were then tracked to South Dakota where investigators linked them to the theft of a trailer with 19 pallets of ham, and a second theft of 22 pallets of pork in Minnesota the next day. All three tractor-trailers were seen days later on I-75 East and they were arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol, Food & Wine reports. The investigation remains ongoing, but anyone in charge of security at a Midwestern meat packing plant is probably a lot happier.
