Rural Cops Battle Rising Crime in the Cropland

ESCALON, Calif. — The timing of the heist couldn’t have been more perfect. Three hours past midnight, in between milking sessions at the Vanderwerff dairy in this small San Joaquin Valley farm town, thieves struck.

They walked past the dairy’s prized Holsteins and headed straight for the locked closet, bolt cutters in hand. Inside metal canisters suspended in 350-degree-below-zero nitrogen was the object of their desire: some of the finest bull semen west of the Mississippi.

Peter Vanderwerff, who came here penniless from his native Holland 42 years ago, awoke with no way to inseminate his fertile cows. And keeping his herd in a continual cycle of pregnancy and birth was the only way to keep the milk flowing.

“They took my whole tank with all the semen in it,” the 71-year-old farmer said. “For me, it was a $10,000 loss.”

The case landed on the desk of San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Detective Frank Jaworski. Agricultural theft is his beat, and he has heard all the snickers and wisecracks. But the filching of goods from California’s Central Valley, the nation’s richest farm belt, is a multimillion-dollar-a-year enterprise.

And like so many similar thefts--the stealing of peaches from orchards, almonds from cold storage, chemicals and tractors from equipment yards--the case of the missing bull semen was never solved.

“I know it sounds funny, and I thought someone was teasing me at first. Bull semen? But whoever stole those tanks knew what they were doing,” Jaworski said. “They had a buyer already lined up, and it was long gone by the time I got the case.”

No Crime Data Kept

For years, agricultural theft was a crime that got no respect. Somehow, larceny sounded funny, and a little quaint, when the victim was a farm. Officers on the beat complained that prosecutors were hardly enthusiastic about their cases. Even today, no state agency gathers data on losses that investigators say amount to tens of millions of dollars each year.

But attitudes are starting to change.

In San Joaquin County, Det. Jaworski has begun a Rural Crime Alert program that turns farmers into all eyes and ears. Armed with citation books, they ticket cars parked suspiciously near their fields with this warning: We don’t know what you’re up to but it better not be crime. Just in case, this citation with your license plate number is being sent to the sheriff.

In Fresno County, a security guard service has begun specializing in farm protection. In the dark of night, in the middle of nowhere, uniformed guards are posted at vineyards and fruit orchards looking for a telltale sign: thieves wearing a miner’s hat, a dancing light in the trees.

In Tulare County, the Sheriff’s Department has teamed up with the district attorney to form a special unit devoted to agricultural crimes. Funded by the state and county, the task force has recovered $1.7 million in stolen farm property in its first year of operation.

With its own World Wide Web site and fax hotline spewing out the latest criminal modus operandi to law enforcement agencies up and down the state, the program is considered a model.

“We’ve got a policy of zero tolerance,” said Tulare County Sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Matthews, who heads the unit. “Before we got started, farmers weren’t reporting the crimes because nothing ever happened from a law enforcement standpoint. They just assumed that this was the cost of doing business. Well, we’ve showed them that this isn’t so.”

The crimes are every bit as ingenious, and the thieves every bit as brazen, as in the big city.

The night after burglars hit the Vanderwerff dairy, they returned to the area. This time, they targeted Vanderwerff’s friend and neighbor, dairyman John Bartelink. This time, all the semen imported from the premier bull in the world--the Dutch stud Sonny Boy who had sired 2 million milkers--was gone.

“I was only able to make two calves from Sonny Boy’s semen,” Bartelink said. “The rest was stolen.” To discourage future thieves, he has bolted the semen tank to the concrete floor.

In the walnut groves of Stanislaus County, this winter is prime hunting season for the burl, the huge gnarly knot at the base of a mature tree. A good walnut burl--the stuff of fine handmade clocks, custom furniture, fancy gun stocks and dashboards for foreign sports cars--can fetch up to $20,000 on the black market.

Extraction of a 2,000-pound burl is a four-hour affair, and the thieves operate with the precision and will of a dentist performing a root canal. Deep in the grove, they pick out the perfect specimen and set about digging a large hole that exposes the prized knot.

Three hours later, the digging done, they hack at the root with an ax. Worried that so much time in the grove might alert the farmer or passersby, they often cover the hole with loose soil and mulch and drive off. The next night, chain saw in hand, they typically return and remove the burl with a single, quick stroke.

By the time the farmer who hears the buzz can react, they’re long gone.

“Seeing a big gaping hole where a mature black walnut tree used to stand is not an easy thing to stomach,” said Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Det. Giles New.

“The farmer is losing income twice. That tree is in its prime. The nuts bring in hundreds of dollars each season. And then he loses the chance to sell the burl himself when the tree finishes producing.”

New says he devotes more than half his workweek to investigating burl capers. Winter offers all kinds of advantages to the thief. The groves, picked clean of fruit, are empty of workers and farmers. Sap bleeds downward and adds 200 pounds of heft to the burl, which is sold by the pound. Rain makes it easier to dig. And the tule fog that blankets so many San Joaquin Valley nights is perfect cover.

“A good walnut burl is like a pearl. They’re becoming more and more scarce,” New said. “Many farmers have planted hybrid trees that are better for disease, but they provide lousy burls.”

The crime is a hard one to solve. The detective surmises that most of the burl thieves are methamphetamine abusers trying to make a quick score. But matching the polished burl in their possession with the felled tree in the field is nearly impossible.

Burl dealers, who may or may not know that they are fencing hot wood, are a closemouthed bunch, New said. In three years, he has had only three cases end in jail time. Literally, thieves have to be caught red-handed in the field.

“Even then, people see two or three guys in a grove removing a tree and they think nothing of it,” he said. “They look like laborers.”

Law enforcement agencies say many of the thefts are the elaborate handiwork of illicit groups.

In Linden, in the heart of walnut country, 9,052 boxes of high-grade walnuts were snatched from A. Sambado and Sons processing company. At $60 a box, this was a half-million-dollar job.

Detectives theorized that the thieves had someone on the inside. The timing was just too perfect, coming right in the midst of the 1996 cherry season. So busy was the warehouse with processing cherries that no one had noticed that walnuts left over from last year’s crop were missing from cold storage. “You flood the market with that many good quality walnuts and word gets around,” said San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Det. Lori Darneal, who headed the investigation.

Detectives found a man in Modesto who was buying fine walnuts for cheap. He led them to a rental truck, which led them to a Russian emigre living in an apartment near the San Francisco wharf. The emigre was nowhere to be found but inside his apartment were phone bills and other receipts that led to a storage facility. Locked inside were 900 boxes of packaged walnuts still in cases.

Investigators said the suspect’s trail led back to the Sambado and Sons processing plant, where another young Russian emigre was working while attending college. He was charged with felony theft and now faces trial.

“They were renting Ryder trucks and selling the walnuts to different vendors,” Darneal said. “It was a very elaborate operation.”

$200,000 Nut Scam

In Tulare County, detectives tracked a $200,000 embezzlement of pistachios and walnuts to a bogus company in Los Angeles run by a Middle Eastern immigrant. The man ordered the nuts with no intention of paying, investigators said. He lured the shipper into the deal by using five cellular phones and pretending to be five different people--each of whom vouched for the man’s good business practices.

Problem was, the voices all belonged to the man and they started sounding alike. The shipper got suspicious and alerted Tulare authorities. The man was arrested on embezzlement charges and also was wanted in Canada for assault and escape. Detectives said he had been doing similar crimes for six years, and authorities were looking for him in New Jersey.

“We kicked down his door in Huntington Beach and found him in the bedroom,” said Sgt. Matthews. “We managed to recover all but $20,000 of the embezzled nuts.”

Sometimes, it’s farmer stealing from farmer. Last year, the Tulare task force recovered nearly $1 million in stolen tractors and other farm equipment. The man arrested, charged and alleged to be at the center of the ring is a longtime local cotton and nut farmer.

The thieves can be downright shameless. Last summer, according to San Joaquin County authorities, a farmer confronted a man picking plums off his trees. What do you think you’re doing? the farmer asked. The man replied nonchalantly that he was picking plums. The farmer explained that the plums were his livelihood and asked that he hand over the 50-pound bag. The man laughed in his face and drove off.

Det. Jaworski tracked down the man’s license plate and knocked on his door. “He looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You’re going to arrest me? I was just picking plums.’ ”

“I said, ‘What if I walked into Safeway and took $20 worth of plums? Do you think Safeway would want me prosecuted? So why don’t we give the same courtesy to the outdoor store that we give to the indoor store?’ ”