Three men are facing up to a decade in prison after being accused of stealing from CSX rail cars over a span of nearly two decades.
Among the items they’re accused of stealing from the Jacksonville-based rail company: cases of bourbon.
A train heist might sound like something out of an old Western movie, but prosecutors say this was for real.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Buffalo, New Tork said investigators caught Paul Krieger, Ray Chrostowski and Nicholas Birdwell red-handed hopping on a train, cutting the rail car locks and removing a package.
The three men are suspected of doing this at least 15 times since May.
CSX told investigators similar thefts had been happening in Buffalo since 2000.
Prosecutors say the thefts typically happened at rail yards when trains were stopped to change crews.
“It’s fairly easy to break open. And once they have the door open, they can pilfer anything they want inside the train cars,” said former FBI special agent and Action News Jax Law and Safety Expert Dale Carson. “Anything that you would find in a store anywhere in this country comes on these rail cars.”
The FBI’s most recent stats on cargo theft are from 2016. There were 692 incidents of cargo theft reported across the country that year; 26 of those were in Florida.
About $27 million worth of property was stolen, but only a third of it was recovered, according to FBI data.