Celebrity chef Guy Fieri has shared details of a large-scale theft that resulted in the loss of more than $1 million worth of his Santo Tequila during an elaborate shipping fraud.
The heist, which took place in November 2024, involved 24,000 bottles of tequila that vanished while being transported from Mexico to the United States.
Fieri, co-founder of Santo Tequila alongside Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar, recounted the incident during an interview on “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday.
He said the company’s president first alerted him to the disappearance of two full truckloads of product.
“He goes, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but we lost two truckloads of Santo Tequila.’ I said, ‘Elaborate on lost.’ He says, ‘Well, they disappeared,'” Fieri said. “Because all my mind goes to is ‘Goodfellas,’ you know? That’s what I think is happening.”
The tequila was bottled in western Mexico and moved across the border into Laredo, Texas. From there, two semitrailers were scheduled to deliver it to a warehouse in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. But the shipment never arrived.
Investigators found that the logistics company hired by Santo Tequila had subcontracted the delivery to another carrier, which then passed the job to two additional trucking firms.
Those final companies turned out to be fraudulent.
The fake operators used spoofed GPS tracking and forged email updates to convince Santo Tequila that the trucks were delayed due to “mechanical failure,” while the real cargo was redirected elsewhere.
Keith Lewis, a former law enforcement officer and president of CargoNet, a firm specializing in cargo theft investigations, told “60 Minutes” the scheme reflected a growing trend in logistics crime.
“If you think about online dating, for example, you can be anywhere in the world and set up a date with someone. It’s the same thing in the supply chain,” Lewis said. “We don’t do business face-to-face anymore. We don’t have the hand-to-hand transactions. We’re doing business by PDF file, by rate confirmations.”
Roughly three weeks later, authorities recovered about 11,000 bottles of the missing tequila in Los Angeles, California. The second truckload has not been located.
Fieri said the incident exposed vulnerabilities even among companies with tight security practices.
“If it could happen to us with what I believe were pretty strong measures of security and awareness and communication and the way we do business — and to get ripped off for two full semi-truckloads of tequila in today’s age — then everybody’s vulnerable,” he said.
Santo Tequila, founded in 2019 by Fieri and Hagar, produces its spirits through the El Viejito Distillery in Jalisco, Mexico, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.
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