Nearly 11,000 bottles of bourbon are stolen from a Philadelphia warehouse

PHILADELPHIA – It was a sunny Friday afternoon in Philadelphia when the driver of a semitrailer pulled up to a five-storey, faded red brick warehouse and showed his identification.

The workers there made a copy of the ID, following procedure, and loaded up the 18 pallets of Noble Oak bourbon, containing 10,800 bottles, which were intended for commercial distribution.

But A21 Wine & Spirits, the company that owns Noble Oak, soon learnt that the bourbon had not reached its destinations.

It announced on June 5 that the bottles had fallen victim to “a coordinated cargo theft operation carried out in broad daylight”.

The haul from the warehouse was worth about US$500,000 (S$645,000), Rob Koch, chief executive of Apogee 21 Holdings, the parent company of A21 Wine & Spirits, said in an interview on June 7.

Koch said the driver did not have the purchase order, a missed step in the security protocol.

“So the warehouse called the shipping broker, and said, ‘Hey, do you have a truck coming?’ And, of course, the answer was yes,” Koch said. “And so they just loaded up the 18 pallets and let the guy go.”

He said that he did not believe that it was an inside job and instead blamed cybercrime.

“Sometimes computer systems get taken over by another company, and what will happen is that they will pose as that company and go and pick up loads and just steal the whole thing,” Koch said. “And you don’t really know until, well, it’s all gone, right? It doesn’t show up at the destination.”

Company officials said the large volume of product also pointed to a highly coordinated theft.

The stolen inventory might be offered for resale through unauthorised channels, secondary wholesalers, online marketplaces or other illicit distribution networks, Koch said.

“Unless you’ve got a container ship waiting for it, you’re not going to send it anywhere,” he said. “It’s going to stay in the tristate area.”

Company officials asked distributors, retailers, restaurants, bars and consumers to report any suspicious offers involving large quantities of Noble Oak bourbon.

“The stolen inventory represents one of the largest known bourbon thefts in the region this year,” a company spokesperson said in a news release.

The Philadelphia Police Department and the Philadelphia office of the FBI are investigating, the company said, but the agencies did not have updates on June 7. NYTIMES