Guy Fieri was shocked to learn that two truckloads of his Santo Tequila had gone missing. Fieri co-founded the tequila company with musician Sammy Hagar.
In an episode of “60 Minutes” — which aired Oct. 5 on CBS — the Food Network star and his company’s CEO shared more information about how an international crime group pulled off a highway heist, stealing two semi-trucks filled with tequila valued at $1 million.
The “Diners, Drive-In and Dives” host explained the president of his company called him with the news — and his immediate concern was the safety of the drivers.
“I said, ‘Elaborate on lost.’ He says, ‘Well, they disappeared.’ I said, ‘Well, wait, wait, wait, is this a hijacking?’ I said, ‘Are the drivers OK?’ I said, ‘Is this–?’ ‘Cause all my mind goes to is ’Goodfellas.’ That’s what I’m thinking is happening,” he explained.
“And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, the trucks, it — they were appropriated, but we don’t know where they are,'” he continued. “I’m like, it’s not a needle in a haystack. I mean, this is a semi-tractor truck. My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila?”
More than 24,000 bottles of tequila went missing in November 2024, when two trucks transporting them to the Santo Tequila warehouse in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, were stolen. The tequila had been transported from Mexico to Texas, then loaded into two trucks bound for the warehouse.
According to CEO Dan Butkus, when the shipment was late arriving at the warehouse, the team received word from the logistics company that the trucks had mechanical issues and would be delayed.
The tequila was originally meant to arrive at the warehouse on a Wednesday, and on Friday they heard from the logistics company that the truck had broken down near Washington, D.C. They then received a video of a broken truck and a message saying the “mechanics advised the truck will be fixed Saturday” and would arrive on Monday.
“We don’t think anything’s wrong, we are a day or two behind delivery. And meanwhile, they track these with GPS,” Butkus said. “Then on Monday, we get an email that the truck is close. GPS says it’s within a couple miles of our warehouse in Lansdale, can you let us know when it arrives?”
The trucks never arrived. The Santo Tequila team later discovered that the trucking company, hired by their logistics provider, had outsourced the job to two other trucking companies. Those turned out to be fake operations using fraudulent email addresses, letterheads and phone numbers — a scam known as “double brokering.”
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Turns out the emails and GPS signals Butkus was receiving were “spoofed” to make it seem as if the trucks were headed towards Pennsylvania.
“It hurt bad. You know, here we are, we’re coming right into the fourth quarter. We lose all the tequila. We can’t fill the shelves. We had to lay off players,” Fieri said. “You know, and that’s the hardest thing? Knowing how many people are counting on you. So yeah, it hurt all the way around.”
Hagar previously alluded to the details of the crime, telling Fox News Digital in December 2024 that “it was a very programmed thing.”
“There was some kind of organization. I can’t talk too much about it, but we’re finding out who it was,” Hagar said at the time. “It was well planned, the truck drivers… they didn’t know anything, they just got hired to pick the stuff up, they had fake cellphones and fake GPS, and then they just sent them to drop it off.”
According to Keith Lewis — a former police officer who now works with law enforcement to crack down on these types of crimes through his company, Verisk CargoNet — these fake companies “bid on jobs they suspected might be valuable and hired unsuspecting drivers online” who think they are delivering their cargo to the intended destination. He added that the driver transporting the tequila likely had “no idea that he’s committing a crime.”
WATCH: SAMMY HAGAR SAYS $1M TEQUILA HEIST AT BORDER TOWN WAS ‘REALLY UGLY’ ORGANIZED HIT
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“If you think about online dating, for example, you can be anywhere in the world and set up a date with someone,” Lewis explained. “It’s the same thing in the supply chain. You can be anywhere in the world, go online and book that load. And we don’t do business face-to-face anymore.”
Law enforcement was ultimately able to track down one of the drivers, who was able to lead them to one of the missing trucks and the 11,000 bottles of tequila inside.
While they recovered part of the shipment, Fieri worried about its condition after three weeks, saying he thought, “This is all gonna go down the drain.” After inspection, however, the tequila was safe to put back on shelves.
Hagar told Fox News Digital in 2024, “we’ll never find the second one because it supposedly has been dispersed into the system.”
“It’s not a thing I wanna go and brag about, like, ‘Hey, we got ripped off.’ You know, that’s not fun,” Fieri told “60 Minutes.” “But if it can happen to us with what I believe were pretty strong measures and security and awareness and, you know, communication and, you know, the way we do business. And to get ripped off for two full semitruck loads of tequila in today’s age, then everybody’s vulnerable.”
