It was a dark night in November that the criminals stole softly upon the sleeping snails. They snipped away the fencing, pried open the door with a crowbar and knocked out the security lights. Then, they advanced upon their victims, who were lying, defenseless, in cold storage.
No use for the snails to flee; heliciculturists breed them for flavor, not speed. The hapless gastropods could only pull in their horns, make themselves as small as possible inside their shells, and wait.
The crooks worked with merciless efficiency. Some 450 kilos of snails soon found themselves shivering in the getaway vehicle as it sped off down a route départementale in northeastern France (where else?), with little to brighten their outlook but the satisfaction of having attained an unlikely 15 minutes of fame. And with that, the Great Snail Robbery was complete. The thieves and their single-footed loot had disappeared without a trace.
While perhaps not as valuable as the jewels stolen from the Louvre a month earlier, artisan snails like these, cultivated on a small family farm in northeastern France, are worth a pretty penny. The unprepared snails would, when processed, result in around 90,000 salable mollusks – about a quarter of the annual production at L’Escargot des Grands Crus.
The hit was especially grim as it came just before Christmas, prime time for escargot, when the visions that dance in Gallic heads are not of sugarplums but of snails swimming in parsley butter.
Large-scale snail heists are extremely rare. But what is especially mystifying about this theft is the seizing of unprocessed snails. It requires specialist knowledge to purge, clean and prepare the mollusks to make them salable on the luxury food market, which points, darkly, to the possibility of a black market so well-established that it possesses its own fly-by-night escargot purgers.
Meanwhile, in Maine, just days before the Great Snail Robbery, 40,000 oysters were snatched from their very beds in Falmouth. The thieves pirated 14 well-filled oyster cages from the cultivator’s anchorage in Casco Bay, quietly cutting them loose from their moorings and towing them away, leaving buoys, ropes and anchors swirling uselessly at the scene of the crime. The shellfish were worth $20,000, a devastating loss for their small-time oyster-farming owner. Only a couple of weeks later, it was the lobsters’ turn. This was a land-shark case rather than piracy on the high seas: a shipment of lobster meat worth $400,000 was picked up by a fraudulent trucking company in Taunton, Massachusetts, never to be seen again, at least on the right side of the table. As in the case of the escargot theft, the details point to a sophisticated crime ring: the crooks impersonated a legitimate carrier using fake email addresses and a counterfeit driver’s license, and went so far as to repaint their truck with the real company’s logo. It seems a long way to go for a little lobster thermidor. But then again, good lobster can be hard to find.
The theft requires specialist knowledge to purge, clean and prepare the mollusks to make them saleable
A shipment of crab was pinched from the same place in December. It’s enough to make you wonder if organized crime is run by a group of upper-crust pescatarians, especially when you put these seafood thefts next to the fact that escargot, morally speaking, is fish. Legend has it that Pope St. Pius V, ruling on what could be eaten during Lenten fasts, declared snails to be seafood for fasting purposes, with the possibly apocryphal words “Estote pisces in aeternum!” “May you be fish for all eternity!”
Unkind persons say this was because Pius himself was very fond of a buttered snail. In fairness to the notoriously ascetic pontiff, snail was considered inexpensive protein at the time, poor man’s fare.
These criminal pescatarians must drink like fishes, too. In November 2024, the same ruse used to steal the lobster relieved restaurateur Guy Fieri of 24,000 bottles from his Santo Tequila brand. Two semitrailers arrived at his Texas warehouse, loaded up the liquor, and headed north for a warehouse in Pennsylvania. They faked GPS tracker results to make it look like they were en route, and phoned in excuses for the delayed arrival: mechanical issues, a broken-down water pump on a Friday, the ETA pushed back to Monday.
Then the airwaves went dead and it became apparent that the trucks weren’t going to arrive. One load was eventually traced to an LA warehouse and recovered, but the other 13,000 bottles were never found. Police suspected a gang based in Armenia, but that was as far as they got.
In July last year, Westland Distillery in Washington loaded $1 million worth of a rare tenth anniversary edition of Westland craft whiskey into the back of a truck and never saw it again – another premium product, recognizable enough that it can now only be sold on the black market.
It seems a long way to go for a little lobster thermidor. But then again, good lobster can be hard to find
In Europe, evildoers still seem to go for the classic break-and-enter: last December, the luxury-food fiends broke into the cellars of the monks of La Grande Chartreuse at 3 a.m. and made off with more than €70,000 worth of the precious green stuff. They were connoisseurs, too: according to reports, they walked past the midrange offerings and went straight for the top-of-the-line chartreuse, which sells at €150 per bottle.
The popularity of Chartreuse has surged in recent years, hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in cocktails and mixology. The monks who make it, however, have responded by stepping back production in order to protect their monastic life, saying they do not want to sell more than they need to sustain their order. This, of course, makes the liqueur even more sought-after.
But robbing monks is always a mistake. The French government under the Third Republic confiscated the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, evicted the monks and sold the Chartreuse trademark (but not the recipe, which the monks kept secret) to a private company. The company promptly went bankrupt and the Third Republic eventually fell. And when it did, the monks somehow got both their monastery and their trademark back.
It may take a while, but a passel of snail-snatching, oyster-grabbing, lobster-thieving pescatarians is no match for the silent monks of St. Bruno. We know who’ll be sorry in the end.
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