There’s no subcategory of crime quite like booze crime. It can take many forms —
selling counterfeit bottles is, for obvious reasons, a popular one, as are
Ponzi schemes. Earlier this year brought the news that a storied wine shop in New York City was in hot water after it was revealed that
the store owed customers roughly a million dollars. (More recently, the FBI
raided the shop in question, Sherry-Lehmann Wine and Spirits.)
And then there’s the case of an as-yet-unnamed wine thief who broke into Venice, California’s Lincoln Fine Wines by drilling into the shop’s wine cellar from above — and made off with $600,000 worth of bottles.
The
Los Angeles Times has
more details on the theft, including the total time it took to accomplish things (three and a half hours) and how the thief avoided the alarms (entering the space from above). As the
Times reports, 75 of the bottles were valued at over $1,000 apiece.