Last year, stolen pairs of the then-unreleased Air Jordan 11 “Legend Blue” worth more than $200,000 were recovered after allegedly being stolen from a train in California. That headline is just the tip of the iceberg of a heist syndicate targeting Nike sneakers, according to an eye-opening Los Angeles Times story connecting 10 thefts over the last year.
Ten train burglaries—not robberies because they haven’t involved confrontation—have yielded nine successful hauls of valuable Nike sneakers, including nearly 2,000 pairs of the Nigel Sylvester x Air Jordan 4 “Brick by Brick” worth more than $440,000 recovered in January in Arizona.
Police say thieves have targeted trains on the BNSF Railway, the largest freight railroad in the U.S. and one with roots that go back to 1849. Sometimes having been tipped off from collaborators at warehouses and trucking companies, and other times merely looking for containers with high-security locks, the alleged criminals slash the air brake hose to cause a train to stop. They’ll then open the containers with reciprocating saws or bolt cutters and then alert a “follow vehicle” to retrieve the stolen goods.
The aforementioned Air Jordan 11s were recovered later on from the back of a U-Haul truck. The sneakers from Sylvester’s forthcoming collaboration, which releases next month, were also discovered later in a truck after tracking devices in some of the trucks helped lead police to the product.
A purported ringleader was arrested last summer, but that hasn’t stopped the thefts from continuing. Police believe Felipe Arturo Avalos-Mejia had been involved in train thefts for more than 11 years. Prior to his arrest 74 cases of stolen Nikes, 108 packs of socks and 35 pairs of shoes worth about $94,659 were recovered from a location he allegedly fled.
Thefts have also occurred while trains have continued to move slowly during the changing over in tracks. Train staff are told by their employer not to confront thieves, but because trains can be so long and thefts can occur without raising any alerts that instruction often isn’t necessary. The remote location of the thefts increases the amount of time it takes authorities to respond should they be notified.
“It’s done fast. It’s fast as lightning,” Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at CargoNet, a private company that provides supply-chain theft intelligence to law enforcement, told the Arizona Republic in a story about the Air Jordan 4 heist. “A lot of those areas you can’t get to other than with a helicopter… You can’t even get to some of those rail tracks with off-road vehicles.”