Farm Chemicals an Unlikely Booty for Crime Ring

Placid black cows were the only witnesses on the foggy winter night when crooks zipped into this two-stoplight town and ripped off a most unusual booty: 108 sloshing containers of the tomato herbicide Devrinol.

A potent weedkiller stored in five-gallon plastic drums, Devrinol is toxic, unwieldy and useful only to specialized vegetable growers.

But a nervy gang of criminals working California’s farm belt knows how to convert poison into profit. Shunning more conventional theft targets such as fruit or tractors, this new breed of thieves specializes in pesticide plunder.

Attacking in slick nighttime raids, the bad guys have bedeviled detectives from Sonoma to Oxnard. They have hit here in Colusa County, a region of stubbly rice fields an hour north of Sacramento, at least seven times in the past four years--evading burglar alarms, motion sensors and police patrols.

“They’re not your 20-year-old burglars who break in to get $20 for a bag of dope,” said Sean Arlin, a detective in neighboring Glenn County. “They’re ripping off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property. And they’re good at it.”

Although no mastermind has been arrested, investigators suspect a Fresno-based ring is behind the rash of thefts. The gang is thought to be responsible for stealing about $1 million worth of agricultural chemicals each year, then smuggling them into Mexico or selling them on the black market.

Those losses, combined with frequent thefts of harvesting equipment and irrigation pipes, can be “devastating to these farmers up here--a major hit financially,” said a U.S. Customs agent based in Fresno. Even when they recoup some cash through insurance, growers reel from disrupted planting schedules. Ultimately, consumers pay.

“People say, ‘How come I have to pay so much for a head of lettuce?’ ” Monterey County sheriff’s Investigator Ron Qualls said. “If they only knew.”

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Determined to crack down on pesticide thefts, farm county detectives have enlisted help from the FBI, U.S. Customs Service and the California Department of Justice. Several trade groups teamed up last month to offer farmers tips on theft prevention.

So far, however, the crooks have always danced a few steps ahead of their pursuers.

“When it’s Vinnie and Joey sitting at a table in a restaurant in Manhattan talking about a body they just dumped into the river, well, there are ways to investigate that type of crime. But this type of thing . . . it’s real hard to pin down,” said Jim Beasley, the FBI supervisory special agent in Fresno.

After months of undercover investigation and extensive surveillance, detectives finally reported solid progress last year when they arrested a suspected chemical crook in Fresno County.

Ernesto Raymundo has been charged with selling $1.5 million worth of stolen herbicides and fungicides to chemical wholesaler Kelly D. Worton. Worton allegedly resold the chemicals, at a hefty profit, to retailers in California, Oregon and Indiana.

Raymundo and Worton have pleaded not guilty; their trial in federal court is set for late May.

Fresno County sheriff’s Detective Rick Ko, who led the investigation, said he hopes a conviction will deter chemical thefts. But he admits that it is unlikely. Although Ko thinks he has identified the gang’s masterminds--and traced their links to Raymundo--he has not found enough physical evidence to arrest anyone else.

Several low-level gofers believed to be associated with the ring have been convicted of burglary or trespassing in various counties, but most have received light sentences of probation or a few months in jail, authorities said.

“These guys have worked with impunity for years,” Ko said. “They’ve gotten lucky a lot of times.”

Colusa County Detective Bill Kellogg added, almost admiringly: “These guys have guts.”

They can rip apart a chain-link fence, blast holes in warehouse walls, hot-wire a flatbed truck and cart away cases of chemicals in less than 10 minutes. They leave few clues, perhaps a rough brown work glove, a pair of bolt cutters or footprints. Shrieking burglar alarms seem to be no deterrent.

The crooks enjoy plenty of time to escape--especially in remote outposts such as Maxwell, which Kellogg describes as a “blink and you’ll miss it” town. Surrounded by winter wheat and rice fields, Maxwell “really is the middle of nowhere,” Kellogg said, notable mainly for a red barn labeled EAT Cafe, a row of shiny silver silos and a faded sign proclaiming “Farmers Feed America.”

Maxwell’s main chemical warehouse, Simplot Soil Builders, has a burglar alarm, but the local phone company lacks the technology to wire it directly to the sheriff’s office. Instead, the alarm rings at a manager’s home.

That system clearly does not work. The warehouse has suffered three raids in the last four winters, Kellogg said.

In one, the crooks left a stopwatch as if to taunt police with their speed. In the most recent blitz, around Christmas, the thieves loaded about $30,000 worth of goods on a stolen Simplot flatbed truck. Apparently, they decided the purloined vehicle was too tough to maneuver. So they brazenly pulled into a rival warehouse a few miles away, ditched the Simplot truck and hot-wired a getaway vehicle more to their liking.

“These guys are so smooth,” Kellogg said with a sigh. “They don’t even leave us any fingerprints.”

At a Simplot warehouse in Colusa, the thieves cut a line of reconnaissance holes in the wall, apparently to scout out the most valuable chemicals and to pinpoint the location of motion-sensor beams. At Shawn Holbrook’s warehouse in Fresno, the crooks slashed through a metal door and used his forklifts to load their loot. When Holbrook, alerted by a burglar alarm, dashed to his warehouse, he found the bandits gone, but the forklift motors still warm.

After spending thousands of dollars on security systems, Simplot’s Colusa County manager, Mike Griffith, has concluded that the thieves are unstoppable. Relentless in pursuit of chemicals, the bad guys have chiseled through six-inch concrete walls and created cross-town diversions to lure security patrols.

“I don’t know the answer,” Griffith said glumly. “I really don’t know the answer.”

But he does understand the motive. Money.

One wildly popular burglary target, the common weed fighter Roundup, carries price tags as high as $52 a gallon. Agri-Mek, a fungicide used on strawberry fields, costs $279 for a four-sack case. Another fungicide, Beniate, can cost nearly $18 per pound.

Even though stolen goods sell for about half their face value on the black market, profits add up quickly.

A car trunk can easily hold tens of thousands of dollars in chemicals. Transferred into nondescript containers, the powders and liquids melt into the underground economy.

Even in their original packaging, agricultural chemicals are tough to trace. Manufacturers stamp lot numbers on each batch that rolls off the assembly line--but hundreds, even thousands, of cases share the same lot number.

“On the black market, (chemicals) are just flat-out liquid gold,” said Ventura County’s rural crime specialist, Rhett Searcy.

Despite plump profits, the suspected chemical theft ringleaders live in modest Fresno County homes, Detective Ko said. A few have loaded up on flashy jewelry and tough-guy clothes, and flaunt a “Mafioso-type image,” he added, boozing in local bars and blowing fat wads of bills on keno.

From their bases in the Fresno area, the thieves have developed a string of buyers in the Western United States and Mexico, investigators say.

That broad distribution network creates its own problem. Thieves rarely worry about the niceties of packing chemicals for safe transport. And their carelessness endangers both people and the environment.

“Stolen pesticides definitely cause a huge threat to the public health,” said Elin Miller, chief deputy director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Ko once discovered chemicals abandoned in a dry creek bed, where they could have contaminated underground drinking water. Chemical distributor Holbrook had to call in Fresno County’s hazardous-materials crew to clean up herbicides splattered in his warehouse yard during a successful heist in 1992.

In Monterey County, Investigator Qualls recalls nabbing two low-level thieves who had stashed the insecticide Lannate in a jump seat of their pickup truck. Used to kill strawberry, celery and lettuce pests, Lannate is considered so toxic that truckers must obtain a special license to transport it.

Even when stolen chemicals arrive at their destinations, black market buyers may misuse them.

“There are toxins being put into the dirt that no one’s keeping track of,” Fresno County sheriff’s Sgt. Marty Rivera said.

Fearing that they will be blamed for irresponsible use of stolen pesticides, some growers worry about environmental risks nearly as much as they fret about their own losses. As walnut grower Don Salfen said, “Our industry is under scrutiny as it is, and this is just more bad publicity.”