When police stopped two men driving a box truck at 3 a.m., they had a four-page list of restaurants and told officers they were “looking for cooking oil,” according to court filings.
Just days before, cops were summoned to a restaurant about 4 a.m. on April 1, 2022, when they observed the box truck drive away in Henrietta, New York, roughly 15 miles south of Rochester, according to court filings.
Officers noted the truck’s back bumper was smeared in spilled cooking oil during this traffic check, and they found two plastic holding tanks and a “dirty water” pump inside, according to a criminal complaint.
According to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York, the two men were part of a group of six people suspected of stealing liters of cooking oil from restaurants in the middle of the night in Western New York.
Prosecutors stated they gained thousands of dollars by selling the stolen cooking oil, which “can be refined into biodiesel fuel for $4.00 to $5.00 per gallon.”
The group was detained on conspiracy and transportation and sale of stolen commodities in interstate commerce charges in connection with the stolen cooking oil plot, according to an April 21 news release from the attorney general’s office.
They were apprehended with over 12,000 liters of stolen oil worth over $73,000 at two warehouses in Rochester, prosecutors said. According to police, investigators determined they profited $60,051 by selling and exporting 95,320 gallons of stolen oil to a refinery in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Matt Rich, an attorney for one defendant, a lady who claims to be married to another co-defendant, told McClatchy News on April 24 that his client “denies any illegal activity.” McClatchy News reached out to attorneys for the other defendants for comment but did not receive a response right away.
Prosecutors claimed the investigation dated back to April 2022, when some of the men facing accusations were spotted draining cooking oil out of many restaurants’ storage tanks and into box trucks. According to the criminal complaint, the two defendants who were pulled over while “looking for cooking oil” were apprehended three days later in their box truck beside a sushi restaurant in Henrietta on April 7, 2022.
According to the complaint, one of the men stated that they were “collecting cooking oil” from the restaurant.
According to the lawsuit, investigators were aware that the sushi restaurant had previously reported that its cooking oil had been taken from a collecting tank in December 2021.
According to the lawsuit, a judge authorized a tracking device to be installed on the box truck after this incident. According to authorities, deputies eventually traced the defendants’ box trucks to two warehouses in Rochester.
