When police pulled over two men driving a box truck around 3 a.m., the pair had a four-page list of restaurants and told officers they were “looking for cooking oil,” according to court documents.
Just days before, officers had stopped the same duo after they were dispatched to a restaurant around 4 a.m. on April 1, 2022 — when they noticed the box truck driving away in Henrietta, New York, about 15 miles south of Rochester, court documents say.
During this traffic stop, officers noticed the truck’s back bumper was covered in spilled cooking oil and they found two plastic holding tanks and a “dirty water” pump inside, according to a criminal complaint.
Investigators learned the two men were a part of a group of six individuals accused of stealing gallons of cooking oil from restaurants in the middle of the night in western New York, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York.
They resold the stolen cooking oil — which “can be refined into biodiesel fuel for $4.00 to $5.00 per gallon” — and made thousands of dollars doing so, prosecutors said.
The group was arrested on charges including conspiracy and the transportation and sale of stolen goods in interstate commerce in connection with the stolen cooking oil scheme, the attorney’s office announced in an April 21 news release.
They were caught with over 12,000 gallons of stolen oil worth more than $73,000 at two warehouses in Rochester, prosecutors said.
As a result, investigators discovered they had made $60,051 by selling and shipping 95,320 gallons of stolen oil to a refinery in Erie, Pennsylvania, according to officials.
Matt Rich, an attorney representing one defendant, a woman who said she’s married to another co-defendant, said his client “denies any illegal activity” in a statement to Mister Truth on April 24.
News contacted attorneys representing the other defendants for comment and didn’t immediately receive a response.
The case dates to April 2022, when several of the men facing charges were caught pumping cooking oil out of multiple restaurants’ holding tanks and into box trucks, prosecutors said.
On one occasion, the two defendants who had been pulled over while “looking for cooking oil” were caught three days later in their box truck behind a sushi restaurant in Henrietta on April 7, 2022, according to the criminal complaint.
One of the men said they were “collecting cooking oil,” from the restaurant, the complaint says.
However, officers knew that the sushi restaurant had previously reported its cooking oil had been stolen from a collection tank in December 2021, according to the complaint.
After this instance, a judge allowed for a tracking device to be put on the box truck, the complaint says.
Deputies ultimately followed the defendants’ box trucks to the two warehouses in Rochester, according to prosecutors.
In one example, officers watched for more than an hour as the defendants pumped oil out of a box truck and into a warehouse on April 21, 2022, the complaint says.
The refinery in Pennsylvania bought two shipments of thousands of gallons of oil from one of the two warehouses, prosecutors said. The refinery’s representatives told investigators they had no way of knowing if the oil was stolen, according to the complaint.
If convicted on the charges, the six defendants face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to prosecutors.