Philly's Meat Heist Spree

The first car rolls in at 3:35 a.m. Then another. Then another. Within minutes, more than half a dozen cars are gathered around a parked tractor-trailer on a dark Northeast Philadelphia street, and men are carrying boxes of beef over their heads and on their shoulders, loading them into the cars one trip at a time. It goes on for nearly 25 minutes.

The driver is asleep in the cab the whole time. He had parked on the 5200 block of Devereaux Street in Wissinoming around 9 p.m. Wednesday, planning to nap until his 6 a.m. delivery. His alarm went off at 4. The truck was moving — not rolling, shaking, because men were unloading it. By the time officers arrived, the crew was scattering: one SUV nearly crashed into another fleeing, and drove over a dropped box of meat on the way out.

Watch: 25 minutes on camera

Thursday: five pallets of beef

According to NBC10 Philadelphia, officers responded at 4:12 a.m. Thursday to the 5200 block of Devereaux Street — The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the driver called the theft in at 4:12 a.m. The padlock on the trailer's rear doors had been cut. Gone: five pallets of beef, valued at about $10,000.

The driver — who had come in from Iowa, per CBS Philadelphia — stayed in the truck, tried to move it, and got his phone out in time to film the fleeing vehicles: a dark gray Nissan sedan and two dark-colored SUVs, FOX 29 reported. Police have released photos of three of the vehicles. It was the second cargo heist in the city in three days.

Tuesday: 3,000 pounds of crab

The first of this week's pair was bolder. Just before 5 a.m. Tuesday, on Island Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia near the airport, driver Marty Muriuki woke in his cab to his trailer shaking. Outside: six masked men pulling boxes of frozen snow crab out of the trailer and loading them into waiting vehicles. Muriuki — a Webster, Massachusetts driver with 30 years on the road, parked up waiting to deliver to a nearby seafood wholesaler — got out and told them to stop. He told 6abc one of the men offered to pay him. Then another charged at him, and he ran — all the way to a nearby hotel. "I had to rescue myself and forget the truck," he said.

The crew took two pallets of snow crab — 50 boxes a pallet, about 30 pounds a box, 3,000 pounds of seafood in all — and left the rest of the load untouched. They fled in several vehicles, including a gray Ford F-150 pickup and a gray Dodge Caravan. Police have released no dollar value for the crab. Capt. Joseph Busa, commander of the Southwest Detective Division, said it is too early to say whether the crab heist connects to the city's other cargo thefts. Muriuki, for his part, had never had a load touched in three decades of trucking.

The month behind it

Twice in a week is a spree only if the month agrees — and it does. On Tuesday, October 6, at about 3:40 a.m., three masked men broke the seal on a 2023 Freightliner parked on the 2800 block of Southampton Road in Northeast Philadelphia and started on its ground beef. The driver, in from Wisconsin, woke to the shaking, got his phone up and photographed the crew — and scared them off mid-heist. They still took four to five pallets of ground beef worth about $40,000, fleeing in a dark Ford Fusion, a white Ford Fusion and a black Ford SUV. "He interrupted the thefts, and they fled," Capt. Ryan said afterward.

And in late September — Tuesday the 22nd, per CDLLife and FreightWaves — four masked men cut the hinges clean off a refrigerated trailer's rear door on South Third Street outside Ritter Foods in South Philadelphia and took half a pallet of Black Angus beef ribs, splitting into a dark Ford F-150 and a Jeep. The driver wasn't in the truck. Same hour, same tools, same idea.

"Likely the same crew"

Add it up the way police do: four food cargo thefts in about a month, nearly $55,000 in stolen food, and a method that never changes — pre-dawn, a parked trailer, a driver asleep or away, a seal, padlock or hinge cut, and the cargo hand-carried into ordinary cars. Capt. John Ryan, commanding officer of Northeast Detectives, said the quiet part out loud Thursday: "It's likely the same crew. We haven't made the connection yet." Asked where five pallets of beef goes, he was blunter: "I'm sure it's not for personal consumption with the sheer volume of the five pallets. It's an enormous amount of meat." In the October case he put it in one line: "Clearly there's a market for this."

The official advice has not changed, because the countermeasure keeps losing: police are urging trucking companies to fit hardened-steel locks and drivers to park in bright, public places, and patrols around the usual overnight spots are being stepped up. Ryan has noted the arms race plainly — drivers who do fit real locks find the crews simply bring cutting tools and cut the locks off. Federal prosecutors have taken down Philadelphia cargo crews before — a separate conspiracy case, involving more than $1.5 million in merchandise, ended with a 10-year prison sentence in September — but authorities have established no connection between that operation and this month's thefts. Tips on the Northeast cases go to Northeast Detectives at 215-686-3153. As of Thursday's reporting, nobody has been arrested in any of the four.