Columnists
The great Trenton butter theft
The Quinte area is becoming a breeding ground for high stakes theft. The booty? Not diamonds. Not art. Not gold bullion. Instead, we’re talking about butter. And a large quantity of it. Some 20,000 kilos of the stuff—worth about $200,000—have gone missing.
Quinte West OPP report that on the evening of Christmas Day, two trucks and trailers full of butter were stolen from a trucking facility on Glen Miller Road. The perpetrators were dropped off at the truck stop by a black SUV. The trucks were later found, abandoned and emptied of their contents, in Toronto and Etobicoke. Police suspect that four people were involved in the operation.
Butter is an usual choice for a theft. It is perishable and is not normally accepted as currency of the realm. Unless you had a well-developed plan to unload it for cash, you could easily devalue your “investment” just by sitting on it.
So the interesting angle of me is: how did the thieves manage to offload so much butter so fast? It couldn’t have been everyday households who bought the butter. My rough and ready calculations tell me that you’d need about 4,000 purchasers forming an orderly lineup to buy enough butter to satisfy their needs for the three-month period the butter stays fresh.
Even if my calculation is way off the mark, it’s almost impossible to imagine a great number of people participating in a butter distribution scam without at least one person having loose lips. And 4,000 people couldn’t line up to receive their butter without attracting suspicion. And for every person who agreed to participate in the purhase of the stolen property, you’d find another who was a straight arrow, so you’d have to canvass 8,000 people to get to the number you needed.
So it’s reasonable to conclude the recipient of the stolen butter was a wholesaler, and to conclude that the offloading of the trucks in Toronto and Etobicoke was just as well planned as the purloining of the butter.
Just how would a crooked wholesaler get rid of 20,000 kilograms of hot butter? To restaurants? To hotels? To hospitals? Surely a food wholesaler with a sudden extra stock of butter to sell quickly would stand out like a sore thumb.
Commentators are already comparing the Trenton butter theft to the Great Maple Syrup Heist of 2012, wherein someone walked off with 3,000 tonnes of Quebec maple syrup worth $18.7 million. Maybe there is a pattern to the crimes. Maybe the next load to be lifted will be 20,000 kilograms of pancake mix to go with all that butter and syrup.
Without meaning to sound gloomy about the likelihood of catching the Trenton suspects, I note that it took Quebec police four years to find the ringleader of the maple syrup gang, and only after a $10,000 reward was offered. But find him they did, and so will the Trenton OPP.
Police are no doubt going to call on the general public to help identify suspects. For instance, if we see a neighbour at the supermarket buying a large amount of fresh corn on the cob out of season, we should contact the police tip line, because where there’s corn there’s usually butter. I can’t wait to go to the store to do some snooping.
They also made a movie about the Quebec maple syrup theft. Why not consider doing the same for the Great Trenton Butter Theft? Maybe George Clooney could be persuaded to make a crime caper movie (Oceans 2021?). Shooting on location in Trenton. Mr, Clooney could play a ringleader who gathers a cast of loveable rogues to play the ‘bad’ guys who think they have gotten away with their plan to steal some valuable diamond, only to be outsmarted by a sultry siren (Nicole Kidman?) they had foolishly trusted.
Mr. Clooney would be briefed on the proud history of Trenton moviemaking going back to World War 1 and Carry on Sergeant. Maybe he might fall in love with Trenton and purchase a pied-à-terre which he can use as a base for attending all the eastern film festivals—including, of course, the Trenton International Film Festival. Maybe Trenton will become a bigger attraction than the County.
We’ll have to butter him up.
Comments (0)