Guy Fieri’s $1M tequila heist reveals how thieves prey on US trucks

No guns. No midnight ambush.

Just a phone call.

That’s all it took for thieves to hijack two truckloads carrying $1 million worth of Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar’s tequila.

In one of the most high-profile cargo heists in recent memory, criminals posing as company officials used cyber deception to reroute 24,000 bottles of the celebrity duo’s Santo Spirits tequila to a fake Los Angeles warehouse — instead of its intended destination in Pennsylvania.

After duping legitimate drivers in Laredo, Texas, they spoofed the trucks’ GPS, making the booze that took nearly four years to produce disappear without a trace.

“Oh, it hurt. It hurt bad,” TV chef Fieri told “60 Minutes” this week as he revealed details of the plunder.

“I mean, this is a semi-tractor truck,” said Fieri. “My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila.”

The heist underscores a much larger and more alarming truth: Cargo theft has metastasized into an organized, global enterprise that now costs the US trucking industry $7 billion per year.

That’s $19 million every single day.

Thieves may still smash locks in the middle of the night, but now they’re also using ever-evolving digital deception to hijack goods — even impersonating the websites of legitimate trucking companies to fool unsuspecting shippers.

Because of the remote nature of cyber tactics, cargo theft is a high-profit, low-risk proposition.

With fragmented jurisdictions and minimal penalties to prosecute and enforce cargo theft, thieves can steal millions of dollars in minutes with little fear of arrest.

And as Fieri and Hagar’s experience shows, no one is immune.

That’s why we need Congress to pass the bipartisan Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which would give law enforcement and industry a unified framework to fight back.

The law would create a long-overdue task force to pursue these criminal rings, and would also establish a badly needed national cargo-theft database to track this exploding crisis.

Currently cargo theft data is self-reported, so the extent of the damage is likely underestimated.

Still, the stats we do know are alarming.

Strategic theft — deception, fraud, and cybertheft that tricks shippers, brokers and carriers into handing loads over to thieves instead of legitimate receivers — skyrocketed 1,500% from 2022 to 2024.

Cargo-theft losses surged 27% in 2024 and are projected to climb another 22% in 2025, with logistics-service providers seeing nearly $2 million in cargo stolen from them on average every year.

And the true cost goes far beyond the stolen goods themselves.

These thefts are disrupting deliveries, raising insurance rates, eroding trust in the supply chain — and ultimately, imposing higher prices on consumers.

It’s encouraging to see this issue gain national attention, even if it took celebrity victims to spark it.

But the greater victims are the small business owners, truck drivers and carriers who quietly absorb devastating losses that rarely make headlines.

Fieri and Hagar’s stolen tequila is no anomaly, but a warning of how brazen these criminal networks have become.

They target anything that moves quickly and sells easily, from electronics and food to clothing and household goods — and they’re getting more sophisticated every year.

It’s proof of an emboldened, international criminal network exploiting America’s open roads and digital vulnerabilities.

But every day Congress delays, the networks grow stronger, the technology sharper and the economic toll higher.

“If it can happen to us with what I believe were pretty strong measures and security and awareness and, you know, communication . . . then everybody’s vulnerable,” Fieri said.

Let’s pass the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act to give law enforcement the authority, coordination and data they need to dismantle these rings before the next multimillion-dollar load disappears.

Truckers show up for America every single day. It’s time for Congress to show up for them.

Chris Spear is president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations.