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By Malia Wollan
- Published Jan. 23, 2024Updated Jan. 24, 2024
Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made Victor Llamas memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. He was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless police-station room in the spring of 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, told me. “It was euphoric for him.”
According to detectives, Llamas divulged how he learned to decode the containers stacked on freight trains through his repeated break-ins and by Googling the placards, locking devices, logos and numbers on the containers, which often provided clues to the loot he might find inside. An upgraded lock was a sure sign of more valuable contents. Inside the containers — most of them were secured with metal locks about the size and shape of a corkscrew that easily succumbed to his bolt cutters or mechanized handsaw — the items were varied and plentiful: TVs, beer, clothing, makeup, shoes, electric bicycles, hard drives, tablets.
Llamas worked with Connie Arizmendi, his girlfriend at the time. After becoming aware of them, the detectives put a tracking device on the couple’s S.U.V. and followed them around Southern California. The couple would set up in a motel near the tracks somewhere out in the Inland Empire or farther south; they ranged as far as Barstow, more than 100 miles to the east. After nightfall, they would hit the trains and then often shuttle cargo back to their motel rooms for storage. By that point, Chavez, who is 58, had been at the L.A.P.D. for nearly 35 years, working homicides, drugs, gangs, auto thefts and robberies, and he had never heard anyone talk about his crimes as rapturously as Llamas. “He straight out told me, he goes, ‘Detective Chavez, I’m never going to stop doing it,’” Chavez says.
Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots. Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019, according to CargoNet, a theft-focused subsidiary of Verisk, a multinational company that analyzes business risks, primarily for the insurance sector. On CargoNet’s map of cargo-theft hot spots, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Memphis show up as distinct, high-incident red blobs. But the biggest blob, a red oblong smear, stretches out over the Los Angeles valley like molten lava.
Freight trains are massive mechanical constructions, but because they’ve been on the landscape for so long, they tend to be part of the background, like hills. In Los Angeles, however, trains roared back into the public imagination in late November 2021, when a local NBC affiliate ran footage from a section of Union Pacific tracks strewed with thousands of ransacked boxes. The video included a man with bolt cutters climbing up onto moving cars and a reporter’s calls to the packages’ intended recipients, as well as their reactions to seeing their emptied-out boxes. “I’m honestly just disgusted in human behavior,” said a woman in Seattle who was waiting for a car seat for her unborn baby. It was like an IMAX-scale version of those now-ubiquitous security camera videos of porch pirates sneaking off with deliveries.
Soon videos of the trains were circulating all over; by January, the story had become international news and the images a kind of culture-war Rorschach test. When a photojournalist and helicopter cameraman for CBS Los Angeles posted a thread to Twitter featuring similar footage, tens of thousands of people retweeted and commented. Some viewers saw the videos as evidence of the absurdity of global e-commerce run amok; some even reveled at the return of an iconic American crime. One respondent posted a clip of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Another quipped, “Who will cry for the Amazon packages?”
But other viewers saw the entire mess as illustrative of a kind of dystopian lawlessness they attributed to liberal cities gone rogue. “This breakdown of order is happening because the bedrock of civilized society, the rule of law, has been abandoned,” the editors of National Review wrote. “For Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón, a paradigm exemplar of today’s progressive prosecutors, this is literally the express-track redistribution of wealth.”
At the time, Union Pacific claimed that about 90 containers were being opened per day and that theft on their freight trains in the area was up some 160 percent from the previous year. About 80 guns were stolen from trains. In early 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom donned a pair of work gloves and picked up scattered boxes on the tracks himself. “What the hell is going on?” he asked the assembled television news crews.
The Los Angeles Police Department scrambled to respond; Chavez and his crew of detectives were put on the case. The boxes on the tracks were cleaned up. And for the most part the story went quiet.
But under the placid surface of digital commerce, even as consumers continued to get almost all of their online orders delivered to their doors so seamlessly and quickly it felt vaguely like magic, the supply chain roiled, plagued by thieves, and things continued to go missing — whole trucks’ and train cars’ worth of things.
“Give me a call re your land pirates story.”
The text that popped up on my phone last fall was from the communications guy at the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents more than 51,000 members. He connected me with Edward A. Hall, who in late 2022 won an upset election to become the union’s national president, after spending 28 years as an engineer for Union Pacific, first in El Paso, Texas, but mostly out of Tucson, Ariz. I wanted to know what it was like to be inside a train during a heist.
Up in the cab, Hall told me, he regularly passed stopped trains and saw people clambering up ladders or loading cargo into their trucks pulled up alongside the tracks. Sometimes he saw people breaking into moving trains too. He would call the rail police dispatcher and keep going. Those container doors, meanwhile, stayed open, he said, trailing boxes as the train rolled on. Hall saw all kinds of merchandise spread out across the tracks, including tires and televisions. Engineers don’t stop for this flotsam of global capitalism; they run over it. Once, near the Dragoon Mountains, in southeast Arizona, Hall drove a train through a desolate quarter-mile of track littered with hundreds of pairs of Nike sneakers. “Between L.A. and Tucson is where I know a lot of theft happens,” Hall said.
The most extreme type of modern train theft occurs when thieves cut the air-compression brake hoses that run between train cars, thereby triggering an emergency braking system. When that happens, the engineer stays in the cab and the conductor walks the length of the stopped train, trying to locate the source of the problem. (Thieves can also stop a train by decoupling some of its cars.) Of course, if a train is miles long, that walk takes a while. In the meantime, the pilferers unload.
Law-enforcement officials told me that it’s not uncommon for thieves to target specific cars full of electronics, say, or tires, in a way that suggests previous knowledge of their contents. Gary Rogers, a former Union Pacific law-enforcement agent, says that during his decades working throughout the West, he saw thieves coordinate their movements precisely; one of them would climb aboard a moving train and know just when and to what extent to cut into the air-compression hose. “The train would stop, and the guys would be there waiting to unload,” Rogers told me. It’s easy to imagine how frightening a heist might be for a train engineer and conductor, but in cases when the train has not been stopped, they often have no idea it’s even happening. Sometimes they won’t know for hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles, until they arrive at their destination and discover looted cars.
Piracy is an age-old occupation, particularly prevalent in places and times when large gaps have separated the rich and the poor. But this modern-day resurgence in cargo theft stems in no small part from the extreme ways the internet has altered the buying and selling of things. When the United States Census Bureau began collecting data on e-commerce, in 1998, online sales amounted to some $5 billion. Now that figure is upward of $958 billion; e-commerce revenue is forecast to exceed $2.5 trillion by 2027.
The need to get packages to consumers quickly has reshaped the infrastructural landscape, changing the way freight moves around the world, through more warehouses, distribution centers, modes of transport, trucks, trains, planes, delivery drivers. This ever-quickening tangle has opened new vulnerabilities to be exploited by supply-chain thieves.
Many in the industry would prefer not to talk about theft. Union Pacific and BNSF Railway declined my interview requests. (They each, along with the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group representing major freight rail, provided written statements emphasizing their commitment to combating theft.) None of the parties involved — the rail companies, the truckers, the shippers, the warehouses, the insurance companies — are required to publicly disclose stolen freight, either.
On the website of Operation Boiling Point, which the Department of Homeland Security recently created to go after organized theft groups, the agency states that cargo theft accounts for between $15 billion and $35 billion in annual losses. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a statement emailed to me, estimated that cargo-theft losses amounted to $1 billion nationally in 2021, but the agency acknowledged that that was an undercount. (An F.B.I. spokesperson also confirmed that the agency is working with the rail companies and deploying special agents from its Major Theft Program to address rail and cargo theft in known trouble spots.) One expert on supply-chain risks gave me an estimate of $50 billion in annual losses globally and noted that this kind of crime is a notorious problem in Mexico and Brazil. But essentially it’s impossible to get a clear picture of how much is purloined from the supply chain, who takes it or where it goes next.
We do know that often these hijacked goods are cycled back into the online ecosystem, turning up for sale on places like Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace (some e-bikes Chavez watched Llamas and others take from the trains later showed up on OfferUp). Sometimes products stolen out of Amazon containers are resold by third-party sellers back on Amazon in a kind of strange ouroboros, in which the snakehead of capitalism hungrily swallows its piracy tail.
Last June, California’s attorney general created what was touted as a first-of-its-kind agreement among online retailers that committed them to doing a better job tracking, reporting and preventing stolen items from being resold on their platforms. While declining to comment on specific cases, a spokesperson for Amazon told me that the company is working to improve the process of vetting sellers: The number of “bad actor attempts” to create new selling accounts on Amazon decreased to 800,000 in 2022 from six million in 2020.
But filched cargo can be hard to get a handle on; it shape-shifts, in effect. If you’re buying brand-new speakers from someone’s trunk in a parking lot, you can probably deduce that there’s a good chance they were ripped off. But the anonymity of the internet essentially launders stuff.
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