The hijacking of $339,000 worth of rare Japanese KitKats

NEW YORK – Mr Danny Taing’s 55,000 Kit Kats began their long, twisted, and sometimes obscure journey in Japan.

Mr Taing is the founder of Bokksu, a New York company that sells Japanese snacks in subscription boxes, and he intended to make a tidy sum by flipping the sweets in the United States.

The KitKat shipment, which included sought-after flavours such as melon, matcha latte, and daifuku mochi, had cost US$110,000 (S$149,000), but Bokksu expected to make about US$250,000 in total revenue.

“You can fit a lot of KitKats into two containers,” Mr Taing said.

And they are a booming business. In Japan, enthusiasts clamour for the rarer flavours, with some sold for just a few weeks or only in a specific region. In the United States, obsessives fawn over the collectibles, comparing reviews on Japanese snack blogs and shelling out for limited editions.

These particular KitKats would become key players in an ultimately frustrating saga of shell e-mail accounts, phantom truckers, supply-chain fraud and one seriously bewildered cargo freight broker.

Interviews and e-mails shared with The New York Times tell the story of just one instance of “strategic theft”, a growing corner of the criminal world that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has said accounts for some US$30 billion in losses a year – with food being among the top targets.

The precious sweets landed safely enough in California, and were trucked about 48km across Los Angeles County to a temporary storage facility in South El Monte, run by a company called Japan Crate Acquisition.

After weeks of chugging across the Pacific Ocean, they just needed to make the remaining leg of their journey to Bokksu’s warehouse in Carlstadt, New Jersey, and then into the hands of avid candy fans.

That was where Mr Shane Black came in.

Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.

Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.

On Aug 9, Tristan wrote in an e-mail: “Hey man, The first one is loaded and rolling, the second one we’ll pick it up tomorrow first thing in the morning.”

“There was nothing out of the ordinary,” Mr Black said in an interview.