New details emerge on how 24,000 bottles of Guy Fieri’s tequila were stolen on their way to Montco

It was a dark day in Flavortown in November, when about $1 million worth of Guy Fieri’s Santo Tequila went missing en route to a warehouse in Montgomery County. But now, it appears an international crime group was to blame for the booze never even making it to Pennsylvania.

Fieri discussed the caper alongside Santo Spirits CEO Dan Butkus in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, saying that roughly 24,000 bottles of the tequila were stolen — or two full truckloads of the stuff. By our count, that’s enough hooch to make about 360,000 margaritas, assuming all the stolen bottles came in at the standard 750ml size.

“My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila,” said Fieri, who created the Santo Tequila brand in partnership with famed rocker Sammy Hagar. The answer, it turned out, was through a sophisticated scheme orchestrated by fraudsters fronting as a freight firm.

As Butkus explained to CBS, the tequila in question was distilled and bottled in Mexico before being shipped to Texas, where it was loaded into two trucks slated to deliver it a Santo Spirits warehouse in Lansdale, Montgomery County. The company doesn’t have its own delivery trucks, and instead uses a logistics company to hire trucks to move its product. That ordinarily goes off without a hitch — but this time, there was a delay.

After the shipment didn’t arrive on time, Fieri and his crew were told that the trucks had mechanical problems that would delay delivery. A video sent to the Santo Spirits team, CBS reported, even showed a broken-down truck, and indicated the issue would be fixed within days.

Eventually, GPS signals from one of the trucks showed that the tequila was within a few miles of the Lansdale warehouse, and the Santo Spirits folks asked the company to contact them when the shipment arrived, Butkus told CBS.

But that arrival never came. And after looking into the incident, the company learned that its logistics partner had outsourced the delivery job to two trucking companies — both of which were fraudsters. They used fake letterheads, phony email addresses, and bogus phone numbers to appear legitimate, allowing them to pull off a ruse known as “double brokering,” CBS reported.

The GPS signal Butkus mentioned, it turned out, was spoofed, and the tequila was never really in Pennsylvania.

“It hurt bad,” Fieri said of the theft.

There is, however, something of a silver lining. According to CBS, in the weeks after the crime, police were able to track the scheme to a warehouse in Los Angeles, where they recovered about 11,000 bottles of the stolen tequila. After being inspected, those bottles were released for sale.

The rest of the missing tequila bottles — as well as the thieves who pilfered it — have not been found, Fieri said. Investigators told CBS that the caper appeared to have elements associated with similar thefts committed by a gang of fraudsters based out of Armenia — and that these kinds of cargo heists have increased by about 1,200% over the last four years.

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