Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar are reeling after their joint tequila business was involved in a devastating incident.
Fieri tells us exclusively that two trucks carrying their Santo Tequila bottles have gone missing after being hijacked in Laredo, Texas.
The trucks were transporting 440 cases of tequila, or 24,240 bottles, including Santo blanco, reposado and a specially-made extra añejo, which took 39 months to create.
Santo president Dan Butkus estimates the total loss to be about $1 million, with the effects on their supply chain to be even greater.
“We’ve worked so hard,” says Fieri. “This is our best year we’ve ever had in Santo. We just had all this momentum, and now whatever’s on the shelf is all people are going to get.”
Santo tequila.
Santo
The company’s distiller in Mexico is “on a 24/7 schedule right now” trying to replenish the supply, according to Fieri.
However, he warns that the holiday season, their busiest time of year for sales, will see a shortage of Santo.
“Our distiller is an independent distiller who’s dependent on our sales for his livelihood and that of his team,” Butkus says. “My sales team, my marketing team, the entire Santo Spirits team is dependent upon these sales. … That’s sort of the piece that’s most hurtful to me. We’ve got to support these people both at the distillery and in the U.S., and we can’t do it right now without the revenue from these cases.”
Fieri was notified of the theft on Nov. 14. The spirit company’s trucking partner Johanson started noticing some “red flags” over the weekend of Nov. 9-10, according to an incident report obtained by us.
Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar.
Santo
One truck was expected to arrive at a warehouse in California and the other to one in Pennsylvania, but neither arrived at their destination.
Johanson then discovered that the loads had been “illegally double brokered” to different carriers, according to the report.
“We believe the GPS tracking signal we were monitoring was spoofed by a GPS emulator application used by the criminals,” reads the report.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in the spirits industry over 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Butkus tells us. “Two of our trucks, four days apart, to be stolen, it’s so out of the ordinary, out of the norm, that we’re wondering why our trucks may have been targeted.”
Fieri suspects “someone could be trying to break the momentum” Santo had been gaining and he said he is especially baffled that the criminals went after two trucks.
“I mean, one is one. But now you’ve got to have double the amount of people to pull off the double heist,” he says. “It just seems so much riskier to take two trucks.”
The Laredo Police Department, Los Angeles’ Cargo Criminal Apprehension Team and a federal organization called CargoNet are investigating the incidents.
“Data analytics from Verisk CargoNet project that cargo theft has reached an all-time high in 2024 and will be over 25 percent higher than in 2023,” a spokesperson for Verisk tells us.
They add that much of the theft in 2023 was related to hard seltzer, but this year, hard liquor like Santo is being targeted “almost exclusively.”
Santo reposado.
Santo
“It’s unlikely that they’ll find these truckers,” says Butkus. “They probably rent the truck, get the bid, get the cargo, sell it, and then disappear. There are some phone lines we have from them that are already disconnected.”
Still, Fieri says they plan to put out a $10,000 offer to try to recover at least the extra añejo “because it’s like the crown jewel of the company, something that we’ve been working on. You can’t reproduce something that takes four years to make.”
He compares the incident to the 1978 Lufthansa heist, which inspired numerous films, including Goodfellas.
“It’s like a movie — I never in a million years thought this was coming down the pike like this,” Fieri says, “but it’s real.”
