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Ron_Akins
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Posted:3/05/2010 9:44 AM |
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U.S. retail thefts are becoming a big moneymaker for organized crime—pulling in as much as $10 billion a year.
Last year, police arrested a Polk County, Florida woman named Blanca Sevilla after she was caught walking out of a grocery store with her purse stuffed with $90 worth of Good Start Soy Baby Formula that she hadn’t paid for.
A classic case of petty shoplifting? Not exactly. After interviewing Sevilla and another baby formula booster named Jessie Lopez as they sat in the county jail, authorities learned that the thieves were part of a 21-member ring of shoplifters headed by Eli Nimrod Castillo-Almendarez, who was arrested in March 2009.
The ring, based in Georgia, was allegedly paid between $100 to $300 a day to methodically steal cans of baby formula in six Florida counties for eventual sale on the black market in North Carolina. The ring’s take in one year totaled $2.5 million, police said, adding that over the ring’s seven-year period of activity, it could have netted $17.5 million.
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