HDT: Six Steps to Thwart Cargo Theft
Late on a Saturday night in March 2010, as a powerful Nor’easter lashed the Northeast with high winds and heavy rain, a trailer was backed up to an out-of-the-way warehouse in the northern Connecticut town of Enfield.
Before dawn on Sunday, a crew of thieves entered the facility surreptitiously and loaded their trailer with a $60 million load of pharmaceuticals — driving off with the record for the biggest theft ever recorded in the Nutmeg State.
How did they do it? Well, for one thing, these crooks were, as the FBI put it in a recent press release, “experts at their trade, members of a criminal group known as the Cuban Mob,” who knew how to conduct surveillance, how to discover and disarm alarm systems, and how to load and move freight.
That dark and stormy night made it easy for the crew of thieves to case the joint unseen and check for security guards before backing into the dock. Then a ladder stashed earlier in the back parking lot was used by two of the burglars to get up on the roof, cut a hole, and lower themselves into the building. Once inside, they disabled the alarm — to anyone monitoring the system remotely, it seemed the storm had knocked the power out.