The Nuttiest Crime
By Ellery Weil
Detective Tom Moebs adjusts his holster and steps out of an unmarked cruiser into the still air of a Sacramento industrial park. It’s early morning, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, 2006. The street smells faintly of diesel and dust, and there's not a soul to be seen. His boots hit the pavement with a quiet finality.
He doesn’t speak. No one does. The raid has been planned quickly — based on a tip that could be nothing or could be everything. The only sound is the soft rustle of vests and the low murmurs from radios as the team surrounds the warehouse where a big heist has just gone down.
Tom has been a detective in Stanislaus County long enough to know that most thefts in the area aren’t cinematic. They’re small-time, clumsy, short on drama. Kids steal from their neighbors as a prank, or someone robs the register in a retail store — it's ordinary stuff. But this doesn’t feel like his standard fare.
The warehouse door is metal, unmarked, ordinary. Tom raises a hand. The signal. They move.
Inside, it’s all industrial chill and fluorescent light. No guards. No resistance. Just boxes. More of them than anyone cares to count. Still labeled with the names of different processors, a mass of cardboard boxes that — they check — are full of the stolen goods.
Not gold bars. Not jewels. Not electronics, or cash, even.
No, what Tom finds are almonds. Row after row, crate after crate. Hundreds of thousands of almonds. And not just any almonds, but California-grown, California-processed almonds. Almonds, which, crucially, have been missing since the first half of July. Well, they're not missing anymore.
No one says it. Not Tom, not his partner, not a warehouse worker caught mid-stack. But if it weren't such a serious situation, really, it would have been irresistible. And inevitable. Someone would have said it:
Ah, nuts.
The week before Thanksgiving had been just another week at the office for Tom. He had been working for the Stanislaus County police department's rural crimes unit for some time now, and like with any job, there was a routine. His colleagues, from Roy Singh, who was helping him with the recent nut theft issue, to Aaron Costello, who was busy putting out different fires, felt like people he could trust. That was the thing about police work, or any workplace where you took the job seriously — folks you saw every day started to feel like family.
Tom had been working alongside Roy Singh for a while now, but the nut case was proving, well, tough to crack, and he was grateful to have his colleague alongside him through it all. Roy had been the one to answer questions when the New York Times had come to call about the spate of walnut thefts plaguing Stanislaus County, and Moebs had been glad to have a trusted teammate talking to the media.
In 2006, and even years later, that was always something he liked about his job—the people. It was tough work, but he was always proud of the folks who did it with him.
If all went well that day in November, the Times, and others, would be back with more questions about nut theft. This time, hopefully, if the tip was as good as it sounded, Moebs and the rest of the rural crime division would have something better to say to them.
Thefts aren't unheard of in the tree nut industry. California farmers have always been wary of trespassers.
In the 1980s, it was honeybees — rustlers would swoop into apiaries in Glenn County and vanish with entire hives before dawn. Before that, it was livestock. The very word “rustle” was born in the American West, and long before the Central Valley was irrigated into a global orchard, grain and hay disappeared off the backs of wagons. Even the ancient Babylonians understood how tempting crops could be; Hammurabi’s Code carried harsh penalties for stealing grain.
But the almond heist of 2006 isn’t about a few missing crates or a couple of extra hands skimming off the harvest. It’s a different creature altogether. First, the scale. Nearly 135,000 pounds of almonds, shrink-wrapped and staged for export. Nearly half a million dollars in product gone in a single, silent move. Second, the sophistication. The thieves haven’t cut locks or scaled fences. They’ve manipulated paperwork, built a network, and prearranged buyers overseas. This isn’t grab-and-go. It’s organized. It’s business.
And business, in California’s Central Valley, is nuts.
And so what Tom is staring at on that Thanksgiving weekend in 2006 is the second-largest food theft in history — and the largest ever in the United States. He doesn't know it, though. He just knows he’s found what he's been sent to find.
Drive Interstate 5 south out of Sacramento and the Central Valley stretches flat and endless, horizon to horizon. On a clear day, the air smells faintly sweet — a mix of soil, pollen, and the sharp tang of almond blossoms.
California produces more than 80% of the world’s almonds and three-quarters of its walnuts. Pistachios follow close behind. To outsiders, they’re snacks, garnish, or dessert fodder. To locals, they’re a multi-billion-dollar economy.
This is not boutique farming. These crops are high-value commodities loaded onto trucks, processed, brokered, and shipped to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. A single truckload could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And unlike stolen electronics or jewelry, once these products cross a port, they are invisible. Perfectly legal, indistinguishable from legitimately sourced crops, and profitable anywhere.
It also means the supply chain is sprawling — and vulnerable.
Growers often lease to processors. Processors hire hullers. Hullers contract truckers. By the time a shipment leaves a Stanislaus County orchard for the Port of Oakland, it may have passed through four or five different companies. Every link in that chain is a soft spot a clever thief could exploit.
And in 2006, one of those clever thieves is a man named Sukhwinder Grewal.
Sukhwinder owns Sona Spice Imports, a small but steady grocery wholesaler specializing in Indian spices and specialty foods. He also owns Bavan Foods, a grocery company operating out of a warehouse. He’s been flagged by investigators as a "person of interest" in nut theft specifically because his business provides him with valuable knowledge of the wholesale food industry. Besides, he has the storage space. He knows buyers and sellers. And most importantly, he knows the math. Almond prices are climbing, overseas demand is exploding, and logistics are — let’s say — messy.
If a buyer pays top dollar for a shipment of almonds, does it really matter if those almonds come from a legitimate processor or a warehouse rerouted through an inside man?
Sukhwinder is far from a thug or a gangster. He is a businessman who sees opportunity.
And like all businessmen, he needs partners.
The plan, prosecution would eventually argue, is simple on paper: identify a processor with minimal security, coordinate a fake pickup with forged dispatch orders, then move the nuts before anyone notices. It requires drivers who won’t ask questions, relatives who won’t talk, and a broker overseas willing to launder the goods through normal markets.
If this works, the profit will be close to half a million dollars. And for Sukhwinder, this isn't just about enriching himself. He has a family, a wife who works alongside him in his business, not that she would be involved with this particular operation. This money, applied right, could make that business something so much bigger than a small shop in West Sacramento.
That is, if it works.
And it almost does.
What Sukhwinder doesn’t anticipate is a tip. It’s anonymous, random, and inconvenient. And even then, it could so easily have gotten lost.
If not for a network of rural crime enforcement officers sharing information across counties, Tom included, the tip would have faded into the background noise that was Sacramento's sheriff's office. A passerby saw suspicious boxes, labeled with the names of nut processing companies, being moved into a warehouse early on Thanksgiving weekend, called it in, and by the time Sukhwinder realized the net was closing, Tom and his team were already surrounding the Sacramento warehouse.
Tom hits the road fast. And he is furious. Not at the thieves, who hadn't even been caught, but at the timing. There goes Thanksgiving weekend, based on a potential tip that might not be anything. That is the thing about this job — so many holidays ruined, so many cases that they started to blur together.
At least the view is worth looking at. As he drives on, the scenery shifts from country to town, and eventually, to a city. While Sacramento is his destination, this is, at its core, a true Central Valley crime, and he is the Central Valley cop who wanted to see it thwarted.
East of the Bay and West of Yosemite, California's Central Valley counties — Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Tulare, Yuba, and Merced — are quiet and relatively sparsely populated, with fewer than ten million residents spread across all five. Their county seats are small and sun-bleached, and they house none of the Golden State's major urban centers, but these three counties are home to some of America's highest-producing farmland. In Steinbeck's classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, it's this part of California that serves as a destination for the Joad family and others left impoverished by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
In the twenty-first century, though, the Central Valley is less Steinbeck and more like that old California Dairies ad — "happy cows come from California," specifically from the Central Valley. Happy almond growers also come from the Central Valley as a rule, although as Tom winds his way through fields and small towns, their moods have been mixed.
By the time Tom reaches Sacramento, the annoyance of working Thanksgiving weekend has faded into a sense of possibility. There are things to hope for. They are going to bust an international criminal operation, they are going to close a major case, they are going to absolutely get first dibs on any and all leftover pecan pie back home — but only if the tip is good.
They approach the warehouse as quietly as they can. There are no sirens, no screams, just the soft tread of feet as they surround the building they hope houses what they've been sent to recover. Breath drew in. They open the door.
The tip is good.
The officers move quickly once the warehouse is secure. Under the fluorescent glare, the crates look oddly ordinary for something worth nearly half a million dollars. It isn’t just the value of the nuts that have them on edge — it is what might have happened to them in the four and a half months since they’d vanished. These aren’t jewels or pricey appliances. Quality is currency. And if the almonds have been left in damp conditions, they could be moldy. If they were stored near anything with a strong odor — garlic, diesel fuel — the nuts would absorb it. And if the thieves had been careless, the product could have gone stale, overly oily, or worse … eaten.
So Tom and his team realize that they are getting to do something rare — actually recover the stolen almonds. Boxes are loaded into police vehicles to be taken back to Stanislaus County.
The nuts aren’t the only things going into custody. The warehouse hasn’t been empty; workers are cuffed and arrested, although it isn’t immediately clear if these are the masterminds of the heist or lower-level accomplices. That is a question that will have to wait for the investigation.
The suspects are en route for questioning. The almonds are headed back to their original owners.
Tom knows that once he gets back to Stanislaus County, he will have to begin a more thorough investigation into the thieves' methods and any accomplices they may have had.
As Roger Isom sees the punny headlines break into every news cycle, his first thought is right along those same lines: If thieves could take this much in one move, and keep it hidden for months without damaging it, what else were they capable of?
Roger will eventually become the public face of anti-nut-theft efforts. But back in 2006, he’s just a steady, plain-spoken presence in California agribusiness circles, specifically the cotton industry, where he's been serving as President of the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association since 1992. A sturdy man with a gentle twang in his voice, he’s enjoying the tail end of a quiet holiday weekend with his family when he starts seeing headline after headline, capitalizing on the nutty puns. He glances over them quickly enough — then turns to his television to watch the images roll across the local news.
He’s still new to the nut business, having recently started to consider branching out his work from the dwindling California cotton industry into processing associations that include almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. He isn’t law enforcement. He’s a man who has spent decades working with farmers and agricultural processors — and when they're stolen from, the hurt hits Isom as if the crop had been his own.
Roger has the vantage point of someone who knows the whole supply chain — from the orchards to the ports — and can see where the seams are the weakest.
When the call comes in that the stolen almonds have been recovered intact, Isom’s reaction is mixed. Relief, yes, but also concern. If the thieves had stored them well enough to keep them fresh, that meant they knew what they were doing. This wasn’t a grab-and-go job by opportunists; it was theft carried out with enough industry knowledge to preserve product value for eventual sale.
Roger begins asking quiet questions — about paperwork, about who had authorized shipments, about how drivers were verified. Even in those first conversations, before there was any talk of industry-wide reforms, Isom is already making mental notes. The system has been exploited once. It can be exploited again.
Standing in the doorway of his modest office in Fresno and reading the early reports, Isom knew this was more than a one-off theft. The scale, the precision, the months-long concealment. These were signs of a system being exploited. For now, his role is simply to understand what happened and how to keep it from happening again. His work begins with a simple, unsettling truth: the thieves had taken everything but the quality. And that, to Roger, was the most dangerous detail of all.
He begins to form a group called the Western Agricultural Processors Association. It’s the collective voice — and hired gun — of the processors who were victimized by these crimes.
Tom and his team find 41-year-old Sukhwinder standing near a stack of boxes.
His business, Sona Spice Imports, typically dealt in Indian groceries — not illicit almonds. Alongside him is Amrik Singh, 27, both now surrounded by detectives.
Both men were handcuffed and formally arrested on the spot, charged with receiving and possessing stolen property.
But by the time they pair appeared in court, their faces — Amrik baby-faced and clean-shaven, Sukhwinder stern with his thick mustache — had become shorthand for the Valley’s newest headline-grabber: The Great Almond Heist of 2006. Photos of the two men littered coverage of the case; not only their mugshots, but photos from the courtroom, particularly candids taken while the subjects were unaware. The charges were serious: felony accusations, punishable by up to a year behind bars. The region’s growers exhaled; after months of escalating thefts, it felt like a turning point.
Sukhwinder, the elder of the two men, became a particular focus of press coverage on the case. As the owner of an import company, he had knowledge of supply chains and distribution networks, both across California and abroad, where his company sourced its products. Further, unlike Amrik, he was able to speak in court without requiring a translator, making him an easy fit for "lead defendant." And finally, there was the mustache. It really was quite impressive; irresistibly so for local news.
The nuts had been insured, which meant a civil case as well as criminal charges. This would take a while, and the press would lose interest in what became of the case, and of Grewal himself, over the ensuing years. Reporting on Sukhwinder and his trial slows to a trickle, and then a halt.
Patience is a virtue, they say. In Sukhwinder's case, his patience paid off.
It came as a surprise to many when, in 2009, Sukhwinder was able to avoid jail time with only a $10,000 fine, while the other three defendants in the case, including Amrik, were convicted of serious felonies. Suddenly, Sukhwinder's composure throughout the trial didn't seem, to an outside observer, like that of someone getting by on confidence and facial hair, but like that of a man with a plan, even after everything.
According to a 2009 statement by Sacramento County district attorney spokeswoman Shelly Orio, the light sentence was due to two factors: The first was that Sukhwinder agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. This is common enough in a plea deal, although perhaps a little surprising in a crime of this size and scope.
The second condition, though, was that Sukhwinder become an informant. He was cooperating with the authorities to provide information on unnamed "others" involved with the case. It would seem that, even in 2006, the authorities had reason to suspect that the crime ran deeper than a few men looking to swipe and sell some snacks — or as Don Stuhmer, a San Joaquin County Sheriff's Deputy, referred to them: "local knuckleheads."
It wasn’t just almonds. Whole truckloads of walnuts, pistachios, any tree nut the thieves could get their hands on, really, were being stolen up and down the Valley. And the methods were eerily similar.
Tom had already become a minor local news celebrity for busting the 2006 almond theft. If the papers got wind that career criminals, or something like them, were involved, he knew that the phones at the Stanislaus County Police Department would never stop ringing.
Meanwhile, the fascination with Sukhwinder had faded. With cameras gone, his lawyers had been able to turn the legal tides, so to speak.
It turns out, the right lawyer can argue that you weren't stealing anything when you picked up hundreds of thousands of almonds from a processing plant and started them on a cross-California game of musical chairs that led to a raid a few months later. Of course not. This was just a misunderstanding, caused by carelessness on the part of the processing plant. If you think about it, the careless processors were the ones guilty of something, if anyone was.
The lawyers certainly earned their hourly pay. If not in audacity, then in creativity. And in the Sacramento County Superior Court, fortune favors the bold. In 2011, the civil case brought by Nationwide Agribusiness Insurance Company, the almond insurers, against Sukhwinder was dismissed, even though he'd pleaded guilty to criminal offenses. They even dropped the complaint against Amrik. The ruling was handed down in early January; a happy New Year indeed, at least for Sukhwinder.
But a dismissal like that doesn't help the rumors that had already begun to circulate. Quite the contrary.
It hadn't taken long for whispers to start. This was too coordinated to be local. Too polished to be random. And increasingly, one name surfaced again and again — quietly, off the record.
Armenian Power.
No one in law enforcement saw the gang move in.
By the time the almond shipments started vanishing without a trace — seemingly perfect paperwork, matching truck numbers, no broken locks — there was already a name whispered among growers, processors, and deputies alike.
Armenian Power 13.
Originally formed in the 1980s in East Hollywood, Armenian Power had begun as a street gang. Turf fights, car thefts, and even drive-by shootings. But by the early 2000s, the group had evolved into a quieter, far more profitable version of itself.
Wire fraud. Credit card skimming. Insurance rackets. Now, it seemed, agriculture.
Local officers like Sheriff Deputy Don begin drawing connections between the missing nut shipments and various gangs based in Southern California. They describe operations that were too slick to be small-time: logistics hacked, paperwork forged, ports primed for overseas export.
And again and again, the accents, the names, the documentation: Armenian.
One theft involved rerouting a full truckload of walnuts through fake dispatch orders — replacing real drivers with impostors. The drivers had legitimate-looking paperwork and stickers on their vehicles that claimed to be from the Department of Transportation, but closer inspection would have shown them to be fake.
The suspicion? These nuts weren’t being sold to some roadside vendor. They were heading to Eastern Europe — Russia, Armenia, parts of the Black Sea region. A perfect product: legal to sell, impossible to trace, and lucrative in bulk.
But tying the crimes to the gang was another story. There were no mugshots, no surveillance tapes, no confessions. The trail went cold at the ports, if it had ever really existed at all.
Officially, Armenian Power 13 wasn’t mentioned in police statements about nut theft. Unofficially, everyone was talking about them. The gang, it was said, had ties to both the Russian mafia and the Mexican cartels, and it was no coincidence that the “13” in their name signaled a peace offering with the latter.
“They were sophisticated,” said FBI agent Dan Bryant in 2016, carefully choosing his words when pressed on the investigation. While Grewal had quietly returned to selling imported candy and family-sized sacks of lentils at Bavan Foods, nut thefts had increased.
As almond prices soared, so had complaints of thefts, and by the mid-2010s, even the feds had begun to take notice.
What was clear — terrifyingly so — was that California’s nut industry had made it onto organized crime’s radar. And the criminals weren’t just stealing product. They were learning the system.
Law enforcement, meanwhile, is at a crossroads. The FBI was circling, but with little to show. Detectives like Moebs have made arrests, but the bigger network remains just out of reach. The nuts are vanishing into the ether — legal cargo on forged paperwork, headed for foreign ports.
In the vacuum, a new cast of characters emerges: local sheriffs, frustrated farmers, and private security professionals who realize that if they can’t catch the criminals, they might at least learn to outsmart them.
One of the first to step into that vacuum — loudly, publicly, and with a six-pointed gold star pinned to his chest — is Sheriff Mike Boudreaux of Tulare County.
The self-appointed face of the Central Valley nut theft epidemic, Sheriff Mike, of Tulare County, had spoken to outlets ranging from local gazettes to international, award-winning publications, and he was ready for them all. He knew he was dropping the line that would be quoted far and wide when he said, “I can pull over a car with 20 lbs. of methamphetamine in it and that driver’s going to jail … I pull over 30,000 lbs. of pistachios, I have to prove that those are stolen, otherwise the guy goes on his way.”
Mike is a man who savors the spotlight and was more eager to chat when reporters got wind of what was going on in his neck of the woods. Wiry, grey-haired, and clad in jeans and a cowboy hat when not in uniform, his general demeanor brings to mind the phrase "there's a new sheriff in town."
But, there isn't.
Mike has been the sheriff for years, and even named his personal Instagram after the iconic Sheriff’s badge: @6pointgoldstar. He's far from subtle. On that same profile, there's an entire section dedicated to addressing his unnamed enemies, where he compares himself to the protagonist of the program Peaky Blinders, quotes Matthew McConaughey and ironically, claims that "the most powerful message is silence."
Mike, and the rest of the law enforcement officers of Central California, soon have to face some hard truths. It is one thing to arrest mobsters. It’s another to arrest your neighbors.
Not all nut thieves are just drug lords moving a different product. Not all of the nut heists that followed the 2006 theft are the kind of internationally-reaching operation that Sukhwinder had been involved in. Not all nut thieves sport international mafia connections. Sometimes, the crime is far closer to home.
And so while investigators are focused on finding the criminal mastermind, someone orchestrating elaborate agricultural heists in California’s Central Valley, they aren’t exactly looking for someone like Randal Burtis.
Even on a list of potential farm-country offenders, a detective would likely scroll past Randal several times. He just didn’t fit.
He’s never been connected to any organized crime ring, Armenian or otherwise. He isn't a shadowy figure with secret bank accounts or hired muscle. He's more good ol’ boy than godfather, a man whose roots ran deep in the dusty soil of Stanislaus County. A lifelong Central Californian, Randal spent his career in agriculture, rising to a management position at Westside Hulling Association, an almond processing plant. He is a family man with a steady paycheck, a modest reputation, and a lifelong familiarity with tree nuts — never once tempted to steal them.
Until, perhaps, family becomes the very reason for temptation. In his new role at Westside Hulling, Randal is responsible not just for himself but for his wife, Ronda, and for aging parents who depended on him. Life in Patterson, the small town where multiple generations of Burtises live, is small, and people tend to stay close. And Randal, with what the Modesto Bee would later call “unrestricted access to almonds,” found himself in a position where helping out — or helping himself — suddenly seems easier than it should be.
It starts small. Randy isn’t just a processing plant manager; he is a farmer, with his own acreage and livestock to consider. So, in the early aughts, when he begins skimming a little money off of his company card to buy animal feed for his own animals, it feels less like stealing and more like making sure the creatures under his care had what they needed.
But such small transgressions can beget a major slide — like the slide of thousands of almonds into a truck they weren't supposed to be in. When another nut hulling manager — and a nut buyer — asks Burtis if he wants in on a slightly more elaborate operation, it is hard to say no.
This is how Randal finds himself loading up ghost trucks full of ghost almonds.
Halloween 2008 is marked in Stanislaus County with haunted hayrides and costumes from Target, but the ghosts in Westside Hulling are of a different variety.
A "ghost load" of nuts is an order of non-existent almonds (or walnuts, pistachios, etc.) which are entered into the ledgers along the supply chain, meaning that the payments for them can be pocketed by whoever entered the order. In this case, that was Burtis.
Halloween rolls around at Westside Hulling, and Randalsighs in relief that the ghost almonds haunting the place hadn't made themselves known. Thanksgiving rolls around, and he holds his breath again. It is only two years earlier that Sukhwinder, Amrik, and others had been arrested — was he next?
Not yet. He exhales, and slices into the holiday turkey with Ronda and the kids. But barely two weeks later, as wreaths appear across Patterson and the people of Westside Hulling turned to thoughts of exactly how many almonds go into a box of those little marzipan fruits, the gig is up.
Randal is fired from Westside Hulling on December 14, 2008. The board of directors at Westside had been conducting an audit — nothing suspicious or urgent, just a routine check, nothing to cause Randal any suspicion — when they found a few numbers that didn't quite add up.
It really wasn't a major discrepancy. The accounting team at Westside, looking further into it, hadn't been expecting to uncover a years-long plot. But following one number out of place had led to another, had led to more and more figures that didn't add up, had led to one man (well, one man working for Westside Hulling, at any rate) who had been responsible for a whole lot of trouble. That man, of course, is Randal.
It makes for a gloomy Christmas for the Burtis family, but the next day, December 26, is even worse, when Randal and two co-conspirators are arrested and charged with five separate felonies.
He would be found guilty of conspiracy and fraud and be ordered to pay the United States government $1,500,000, in addition to compensating the nut companies involved. The total he owed would end up over three million dollars, the highest of any of the conspirators. It would be a full decade before his bond was exonerated, and he would serve time in prison. His nut-related business days, legitimate and otherwise, are over. His days in Stanislaus County, however, are not.
Of course, Randal is just one man. And those who watched nut theft grow from petty nuisance to multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise know that one man is not what you have to watch out for.
When I first phone Roger Isom, there is audible, though friendly, surprise in his voice. Media inquiries are not particularly common for the president of the Western Tree Nut Association, but he seems happy to chat. When I tell him I want to talk about the thefts, the ones that had reached a fever pitch in the 2010s, his tone changes. Suddenly, there is a touch of tension, suspicion, even fear.
"Remind me exactly what publication you're calling from?" he asks. I answer, and can hear the relief in his voice. "Alright, then. Thanks. It's just you see, some of the people involved in those thefts … well, you'll understand once I've told you the story."
I suspect I know what he was getting at — but for some reason, neither of us are quite ready to spell it out. I take another verbal step forward. "Do you mean the Eastern European connection? The Armenian thing?"
Again, there is a slight push of relief in his voice, almost a laugh. "Yeah, that. You can understand why I wanted to be sure, even now."
Even years after the thefts had reached their peak, Roger still pauses. He's still aware of the Armenian mafia's alleged role in the nut thefts of Central California, and when he gets a call out of nowhere about those very thefts, it's still worth checking. Just to be sure.
Roger is another California native whose seemingly ordinary resume doesn't quite tell the whole story. If you were to look at a list of his professional history, you'd find it says he's a man who knows tree nuts, and certainly knows California agriculture, but it doesn't say he knows criminals, their tactics, or how to stop them.
You'd be missing something.
By 2008, the shock of the Thanksgiving heist had already faded. Detective Tom Moebs, the man who cracked open that Sacramento warehouse and stared down 135,000 pounds of stolen almonds, was long gone from the case. He’d been pulled into another rural mystery, this time chasing a cattle rustler, tipped off by the rustler’s bitter ex-wife.
Out here, crime doesn’t sleep. It changes.
And tree nut theft? It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t bloody. It was subtle, intricate. Tom couldn’t follow the tendrils of every case, let alone one that stretched from small-town hullers to overseas markets.
If you wanted to understand it, really understand it, you couldn’t start with the men stealing the product.
You had to start with the people being stolen from.
Agribusiness changes quickly, and the front lines can tell a story that law enforcement had missed.
In the mid-2010s, Roger knew that. He had seen the California agriculture market change before. Back then, he had changed with it. But this, he knew, would be different.
Roger stands at the threshold of a bland hotel conference room, the kind with beige carpets, stackable chairs, and a low hum of fluorescent lights. No shadows. No smoke. No drama.
Roger can’t help but notice that this hotel conference room just doesn’t look like a place where a multi-year crime spree could be stopped. It looked like the kind of room where insurance seminars or Rotary Club lunches happened, not the kind of room where people tried to stop a multimillion-dollar crime spree.
But he’s here. And exactly for that reason.
As he waits for the summit, he reminisces about the chain of confessions that started it all.
He had not grown up among almonds or walnuts. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, where the closest he got to agriculture was the occasional Saturday drive past strawberry fields on the city’s edge. He left only for college, earning his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at Cal State Fresno.
That degree had led him into a career on the mechanical side of industrial air-quality regulations. It was technical work — measuring particulate matter, enforcing state environmental codes — but it kept him in the Valley. And he liked the Valley. Compared to Los Angeles, it felt unhurried, knowable.
“Growing up, my dad had to commute two hours each way every day,” he would say years later, shaking his head at the memory. “I commute twenty minutes.” His children, now grown, had chosen to stay here too.
His first foray into agriculture was in cotton, as part of the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association. In the early 2000s, when the cotton industry began to shrink, he expanded into tree nuts, taking on the role of director of what was then the Western Agricultural Processors Association (WAPA), now the Western Tree Nut Association. By 2009, he had been one of the founders of the Western Agricultural Processors Union, which became the only statewide trade group for nut processors — the people who took raw nuts from the grove, shelled them, and made them fit to be sold.
Basically, he’s the collective voice of the victims of the crime.
But by the mid-2010s, Roger 's colleagues, including men and women who had followed him from cotton to the booming world of nut processing, are worried. Those frayed nerves, more than any statistics about thefts increasing, are something he can’t let go of.
He knows Sheriff Mike's lament that nut thieves are harder to track than drug traffickers, and it’s not that he’s wrong — not really. The problem, to Roger, is that the embarrassment of being tricked by criminals has kept farmers and processors quiet for too long. But now, with rising nut prices, a dam has broken, and people are talking.
Roger knows that one of the problems is the law itself. Many nut thieves are released from custody in under 24 hours, according to him.
Even now, when he talks about those catch-and-release arrests, his frustration shines through. The criminals couldn't be held because of the way California law worked regarding theft. Legally, theft by deception — like forging papers and claiming to be taking a legitimate delivery of almonds only to divert them elsewhere — was not recognized as theft at all.
The nut companies had voluntarily handed over the crops. So, technically, this was on them. (Remember that this is how Sukhwinder slid out of civil responsibility, too?) That's where the embarrassment comes in. The processors know each other, but no one wants to be the first guy at the coffee shop to say he's been had.
But by 2015, tree nut prices are so high, the chatter has turned to the value of cargo. And when someone mentions a valuable load being stolen, it doesn’t take long to clarify that this isn’t another case of someone filling a burlap sack to sell at the farmer's market.
One confession leads others to chime in. Soon, the air at the WAPA headquarters is thick with voices, outraged at what has been taken from them. Someone — in the heat of the moment, Isom doesn’t catch who — does the math. There have been over forty thefts in only a few years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in pistachios, almonds, and more.
One day, Isom’s phone rings. It’s a call from a cashew processor, not even a WAPA member, who just experienced a theft. As he listens through the receiver, he can’t help but realize: cashews aren’t grown in California. But they are processed here, and the thieves knew that. Another theft; another company out thousands of dollars, slipping away untraced.
In that moment, he thinks, enough is enough.
This is how the anti-theft-summits began. Isom knows that stopping the thefts will take more than anger and anecdotes. It will take systems. Practical, innovative solutions.
Organized in a hurry and in a bland, unexciting space, the seats are filling with people who wouldn’t normally converge: Sheriffs in pressed uniforms, farmers in baseball caps, insurance adjusters with briefcases, truck yard managers in company polos and cargo theft experts, like Sam Wadhwani.
Sam isn’t a very recognizable guy. That's deliberate. He has, in the era of social media, and despite being the president of a successful company, managed to keep his electronic footprint so minimal that it’s nearly impossible to find his photograph online.
So even in a brightly-lit conference room, he is confident that no one would whisper something like, "there's the private investigator!" In this line of work, that’s power.
Sam is the man behind Transit Risk Management — a bland name for a company in Long Beach that did anything but bland work. He specializes in the shadows of commerce, in the gaps where the supply chain fails. The cargo could be anything: electronics, designer handbags, high-value chemicals. Even tree nuts.
Especially tree nuts.
By the time he reaches the podium, the room has settled into a wary hush. These were men and women used to controlling their own futures. They don’t like being told they need someone else to protect them.
But they need him.
And Sam, ever the ghost, is here to show them why.
Until the 2010s, Sam worked on nut thefts here and there. But as the nut heists increased, his firm becomes invaluable. Sam is constantly consulting with state and local police on how to stop this.
Wadhwani doesn’t work with Detective Tom Moebs because, by the time of the 2015 summit, there was no such person as Detective Tom Moebs, anyway.
A few years prior, he had become Deputy Sheriff Tom Moebs, who had cases to pursue that go far beyond almond theft and cattle rustling. He is no longer confined to rural crime, but is now finally rising the ranks to investigate anything noteworthy in Stanislaus County. It’s a career he’s been hoping for.
Wadhwani is, however, approached by Isom and his team. The hemorrhaging losses facing nut farmers in the mid-2010s causes the nut processors to adopt a different strategy, where Sam goes from investigator to teacher.
When Roger reaches out to Sam, it isn’t to track down any specific truckload of walnuts. Rather, he’s there to show the nut industry leaders how they could keep their crops secure, not only with the barbed wire fences that already prevented a traditional burglary, but with subtler forms of security.
Sam stands at the podium and talks about how to identify forgeries. Not forged pistachios, but forged transit papers, fake documents, and orders submitted under mysterious circumstances. He says that forensic audits can flag suspicious transactions before they spiral into years-long operations. He talks about the types of photo IDs that people who are working in tree nut transit should have at each checkpoint. He shows them how to fingerprint truck drivers and then check those fingerprints when shipments of nuts are sent out or received.
And then he has another idea. He begins developing a plan to keep eyes on truckloads of nuts, to figure out in real time if they are headed somewhere they shouldn't be.
Roger is watching, riveted. This isn’t just accountancy. This is spy stuff. And this, he hoped, is what is going to put the nut thieves out of business.
A truck hatch groans open. The accordion panels rattle along the track before coming to a sudden, slamming halt. Men begin loading crates of tree nuts, processed and ready for sale. Some are almonds, some walnuts, some pistachios. They’re destined for grocery aisles, roadside stands, and restaurant kitchens.
Only a select few — the trusted ones — know a secret about this shipment. Something inedible is going along for the ride. Hidden in plain sight, it will never be shelled or roasted. It’s a silent passenger, but it is communicating. And, critically, miles and miles away, someone will be listening.
This travel companion is a GPS tracker.
It’s just one tool in the arsenal against nut thieves, but a critical one — a final line of defense to keep a truckload of tree nuts from vanishing without a trace. From being swapped or switched or ghosted.
The idea takes hold after the summits Roger organized. ID checks and driver verification were important, yes. But in the end, there was only one way to know for certain where a shipment went.
After all, if you can keep tabs on a lost bag from halfway around the world, why wouldn’t you track the cargo that keeps your business alive? The product of your livelihood?
To Roger, it was common sense — and the processors agreed.
So now, if a tracker strays from its planned route, the people back at the processing plant will know instantly. On their screens, they can watch the movement — tracker and cargo together — and decide whether it’s a harmless detour for fuel or traffic, or something far more troubling.
If it’s the latter, there’s no guessing. They call the police. And thanks to the GPS data, officers know exactly where to go, closing in before another load of California’s most valuable crops slips away for good.
Slowly but surely, as the ideas from Isom and Wadhwani go into practice, Tom and the rest of Stanislaus County sigh in relief as they watch the reports of nut theft slow.
But still, traditional law enforcement is needed, beyond springing into action when a rogue GPS tracker is sighted in the shipping process.
He is right. But while the key to anti-theft education is to think big, the trick when it comes to legislation is to think small. Think local. This was a Central Valley problem — it needed a Central Valley solution.
Roger leans back hard in his chair. It’s yet another conversation where he sees nothing but thumb-twiddling from state lawmakers. And the FBI, well, that only makes him sigh. They are even slower. But watching the local city councils — that makes him smile. Finally, a place that is not bogged down by red tape and endless protocol. A place where things can actually get done.
His smile — for the first time in a long time — widens to a grin as someone utters the magic phrase: Nut ordinances.
Nut ordinances are pieces of local legislation, passed at the county level, which regulate the sale of tree nuts. What, exactly, is in a nut ordinance will vary from county to county, but they can include restrictions on buying, selling, and transporting nuts.
Even today, these remain the most aggressive anti-nut-theft legislative measures implemented. Stanislaus County, one of the hardest hit by the high-value nut theft outbreak, is one of the counties that adopted them, specifically around the walnut industry. While Tom's colleagues are sharing information with rural crime networks in nearby counties, just like in 2006 when police in Sacramento tipped them off about the heist, now, they would be far more likely to respond to requests for help, rather than asking other California PDs for assistance.
Meanwhile, Tom is still hard at work as Stanislaus County's deputy sheriff. He rises to the position without ever knowing that the agricultural law his county has implemented stemmed from the nut case he’d cracked a decade prior. In fact, he barely ever even thinks about that heist. He’s oblivious to the legacy it carries while he leads a rather ordinary life.
But without him, it’s true that the Stanislaus County Walnut Ordinances would never have established an official walnut buying season, which is announced annually, with dates determined by the County Agricultural Commissioner based on the strength of that year's crop. Or that small sellers in Stanislaus County, like roadside stands, are required to show proof of ownership, to ensure that the nuts are legally theirs.
Or that nearby Yuba County has an ordinance called —in a to-the-point way, the Nut Theft Ordinance — which establishes a rather innovative theft-prevention strategy targeted specifically at nut crops. Yuba County describes as one of its most important "agricultural commodities." The county website highlights walnuts as a "leading crop" that's especially "vulnerable to theft."
Where the FBI had stumbled, the locals stepped in.
In 2016, Sheriff Mike had been frustrated that there wasn't much he could do if he were to "pull over a guy with 30,000 pounds of pistachios." The year before, nut growers and lawmakers in his very own Tulare County collaborated to introduce a nut ordinance. In 2017, that ordinance was made even tighter.
Today, much like the one in Yuba County, the Tulare County nut theft ordinance empowers peace officers with probable cause to believe that someone is in possession of stolen nuts to demand a certificate of ownership.
Today, if Mike, who was most recently re-elected sheriff in 2022, pulled over "a guy with 30,000 pounds of pistachios," provided he had probable cause to suspect they were stolen, he would have a way to address that.
The pride in Roger's voice is evident when he says that, thanks to measures like the ID checks and GPS tracking, nut thefts slowed "to a standstill," with trouble only rearing its head when security measures grow lax. Isom, who has now been working with nut processors for over two decades, blames the occasional carelessness on "new people," who don’t know how bad it had once been.
Nuts remain valuable, and not without controversy. The tree nut industry generated over six billion dollars in revenue in 2023 from almonds and pistachios alone. These two nuts are two of the top ten agricultural commodities in California. In 2025, despite concerns by some environmentalists about the intense water use required to grow tree nuts, both almonds and pistachios saw continuously high popularity, especially as pistachio-based desserts have become popular on social media.
While the large-scale nut thefts have slowed significantly, they have not stopped altogether.
Roger, refusing to stop his fight, continues to press for more sweeping legislation. He testifies before Congress and talks, at every chance he has, about the triumphs.
In 2020, he tells the press that an attempted heist has been thwarted in Bakersfield. Two thieves tried to make off with a trailer containing $200,000 worth of pistachios, but they are caught when the Department of Transportation stickers on their vehicles are discovered to be fake — just like Sam had warned growers years earlier.
It was, Isom declared, "a good case of community investigation.” It also proves that hiring Sam Wadhwani was worth every penny. He’s not the only one who thinks that way. A visit to the website of Sam's company, Transit Risk Management, shows that they are still in the business of helping companies prevent losses in their supply chain. Their logo, a stylized compass rose, and the images of freighters that slide past your eyes on their home screen, evoke the high seas, which can, if you think about it, underscore that TRM and those like them are in the business of stopping piracy.
Sheriff Mike can finally say he has locked up a suspected nut thief, too. And this time, no methamphetamine checkpoint is involved. Alberto Montemayor, a 34-year-old trucker, is placed under arrest in 2021 for allegedly stealing 42,000 pounds of pistachios from the Touchstone Pistachio Company.
The case is a clean win for the nut companies. A routine audit flags several tons of pistachios that have been transported but never accounted for. That discovery sets the investigation in motion, leading straight to Alberto.
Better still, the pistachios are recovered — unharmed, uneaten, and ready to be returned to their rightful place in the supply chain.
Armenian Power 13 continues to operate, chiefly in and around Los Angeles. In May of 2025, though, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California announced that, through a partnership with law enforcement in Florida, they had arrested thirteen high-ranking members of two rival Armenian organized crime syndicates. Law enforcement "seized approximately $100,000 in cash, three armored vehicles, and 14 firearms during [the] operation," which led to the arrests, which were on federal complaints of attempted murder, kidnapping, and theft.
The thefts were centered primarily around Amazon distribution centers and warehouses. Agricultural crimes were not mentioned. Dan Bryant does not appear to have commented.
Mike was not only reelected as Tulare County Sheriff, most recently in 2022, but he has since set his sights on loftier ambitions. A look at the website for his failed 2024 Congressional campaign shows a record of the accomplishments he's proudest of, but no mention of nuts, whether stolen or eaten.
Between the trials of the nut theft spree and losing his election, he seems to be walking with softer footsteps these days. His Instagram doesn't mention nut theft, nor a Congressional run. Instead, there are photos of his family, and videos of Mike corralling Tulare County police academy students to take part in a viral trend.
Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Bavan Foods is owned by Sukhwinder's wife, Ravinder Grewal. Although there have been no accusations of theft since the 2006 heist, the business is not without its controversies. These days, though, the scandal doesn't take place in a warehouse, but in Google Reviews.
Logging onto the Bavan Foods Google profile, the grocery wholesaler has caused a war. A rating of 3.5 stars usually signals an indifferent business, but the Grewal family businesses have never been known to inspire indifference.
Reviews of Bavan Foods are either raving about the company as a "perfect place to buy lentils" where prices are "economical compared to other grocery stores," or accusing them of stocking spoiled products. Where one customer claims perfection, another vows they'll "never buy any of your product again."
But, kind or critical, reviews typically get a response. Someone at Bavan Foods, who might be Ravinder, or another member of the Grewal family, will offer thanks, apologies, or even offers of a refund or replacement for a bad product if you "stop by" their Sacramento warehouse. These days, you'll find only their usual groceries there for sale.
Tom, the Stanislaus County detective-turned-deputy-sheriff who had led the raid in 2006 that caught nut thieves and recovered almonds and walnuts before they could be sold, still works for Stanislaus County's police department, although now he goes to work each day at the courthouse.
Tom was not one for the spotlight during the initial spate of nut thefts; seldom interviewed or mentioned in the papers, his name appeared primarily in connection to the 2006 raid, and little else.
When reached, he said the case never registered as something especially significant.
However, his colleagues, Roy Singh, Aaron Costello, and Nathan Crain, speak fondly of how his involvement in the nut heist case of 2006 helped jumpstart rural crime enforcement. This despite, rather than because of, what Crain called "the media onslaught."
And despite Tom's own indifference to what he'd done in 2006. Today, the "Great Almond Heist of 2006" is something he has to wrack his memory to recall, and the parts he describes with the most enthusiasm are the top-notch work of his colleagues — a mirror of how they speak of him.
There were so many cases, Tom remembers, a little wistfully. Nut theft, cattle theft, less dramatic crimes of all shapes and sizes. So many meetings and calls with rural crime divisions across California, so much information shared. He hadn't been thinking about making history or getting his name in the papers. He had been thinking about catching criminals. Even the infamous raid didn't, when all was said and done, feel like a career-defining moment. It felt like another day on the job.
While law enforcement in the traditional sense was a major part of the nut crime spree, stopping it ended up being more multifaceted than expected. At least at first glance. The statewide task force and even the FBI investigation proved frustrating, while the collaborative approach bore fruit (or rather, tree nuts) more quickly.
Meanwhile, the nut thieves themselves will have turned up in a mixed bag of situations. Some are still incarcerated. Others, who were never captured, may still be at large. There was surprisingly little media coverage of who the thieves were, and how they came to be involved in nut crime, even at the height of the nut theft spree.
This may be due, as Mike speculated and Roger confirmed, to the embarrassment both growers and law enforcement felt about the thefts. It may also be because some of those arrested required translators, making their stories harder to tell. It may be because theft is so often assumed to be a simple business, lacking the murky motives of murder.
But the nut thieves were not homogeneous. Some were members of organized crime syndicates. Some were unwitting accomplices, like the truck driver who had not realized his orders to pick up and deliver a shipment of nuts had been tampered with. And some were thieves of the most ordinary kind — opportunists, and otherwise everyday people who couldn't resist the classic American temptation of a get-rich-quick scheme. It was this last category, in all likelihood, that the men behind the 2006 heist fell into, with jobs that put them not only in close proximity to tons of nuts, but in a position to understand their value. And in this combination, they were not the only ones.
Today, if the internet is to be believed, Randal Burtis, formerly arrested as an almond embezzler, is in his 60s and works as a truck driver, specializing in the transport of hay. On his mostly inactive LinkedIn page, you will find no reference to Westside Hulling Association, only to his former business in custom harvesting. His more personal social media profile on Instagram identifies him as a "backroads cowboy," and his highly mobile job lends the claim a different feel than that of Boudreaux's cowboy hats. He's a man living a quiet life, enjoying his work on the open road and the family he comes home to, never thinking about embezzling an almond or even a walnut.
Visitors to his page can see photos of stretches of land from the road, photos of trucks, and of his children and grandchildren, gathered in his hometown of Modesto for a Christmas dinner of roast beef, Caesar salad, and garlic bread. The page, like so many others on Instagram, often includes photos of food. In particular, the photos show the diner breakfasts so beloved in long-haul trucker culture. There are eggs and grits, biscuits and gravy.
There are no photographs of foods that include nuts.
Switchboard researcher Lilly Bartilucci contributed to this story.
Ellery Weil, Ph.D., is a writer and historian. Born in Washington D.C. and currently residing in London, England, she studied political science at the University of Michigan before going on to earn her master's and doctorate in history from University College London. Her work has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Hey Alma, Reactor Magazine, and many more.