Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English,
the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things
about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an unusual robbery.
It's a story that involves agriculture, an organisation labelled a mafia, free market
versus planned economics, a bunch of canny criminals, and $18 million worth of prized
Canadian maple syrup.
But before we get right into all of that good stuff, I want to remind you that you can become
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OK then, let's get started and learn about the great Canadian maple syrup robbery.
There is a saying in English of money doesn't grow on trees.
It's the kind of thing you might say to someone who is spending too much money or
asking for something that costs a lot, to remind them that money doesn't just magically
appear, it doesn't grow on trees.
A parent, for example, might tell a child who is asking for an expensive birthday present
that money doesn't grow on trees, you know.
But in one corner of the world, money does grow on trees, or at least some trees produce
a resource so valuable that it has the nickname of liquid gold.
The tree is the maple tree, and the liquid gold is maple syrup, a liquid 20 times more
valuable than oil.
Now, in case you don't know what maple syrup is, or you have never had the joy of
tasting it, it is a sugary brown viscous liquid that is often enjoyed with pancakes or waffles
or toast, particularly in North America.
There are maple trees all over the world, there are around 132 different species of
maple trees, but only three can produce this liquid gold, only three produce maple syrup.
And if you think that getting this glorious liquid from the tree is as simple as going
up to a maple tree and squeezing the leaves or drilling a hole inside and filling up a
bucket, you would be much mistaken.
Not only are there only three types of maple tree that can produce maple syrup, but the
weather conditions have to be just right to get the liquid out of the tree.
It has to be very cold at night, below freezing, and then above freezing during the day, ideally
between 4 and 7 degrees centigrade.
These temperature changes cause the gases in the liquid to expand and contract, resulting
in pressure changes inside the tree which make the liquid move up and down the tree,
down the tree at night, and then up again during the day.
These conditions are only found in a small patch of North America in the late winter
period, from February or so, and only for a period of around 6 weeks.
Practically all the maple syrup in the world is collected in this short timeframe.
Now the way that the liquid is extracted is by making a hole in the tree, adding a tap
which interrupts the flow of the liquid, and siphoning it off into a pipe or a barrel.
And when you have the liquid, it requires serious processing, it needs to be boiled
at high temperatures for extended periods of time, and you need around 50 litres of
it to produce one litre of what is eventually sold as maple syrup.
The result is this 100% pure, sticky, and, importantly for our story, expensive syrup.
And the world centre for maple syrup is Canada.
Not just Canada, but Quebec, the French-speaking province in the north-east of the country.
Quebec is responsible for around 70% of the world's production of maple syrup.
So if you have ever enjoyed some maple syrup on your pancakes, there is a good chance that
it came from Quebec.
And if you live nowhere near Quebec, and you have ever tasted maple syrup, this is probably
in no small part thanks to the marketing efforts of an organisation called FPAC, the Fédération
d'est Produter à Céricol du Québec, in French, or the Federation of Maple Syrup
Producers in English.
It actually changed its name in 2018, but in the interest of simplicity, I'll use
the old name, FPAC, because the events we will be talking about took place before 2018.
Now, FPAC is essentially a governmental organisation that is responsible for regulating the supply,
distribution and marketing of maple syrup in the province of Québec.
And given how much of a stronghold Québec maple syrup has on the global maple syrup
market, you could say that FPAC is a semi-global regulator of maple syrup, a sort of sugary
OPEC, the organisation that does the same thing for oil.
This maple syrup regulatory organisation was founded in 1966, and has grown in size and
power ever since.
One of its jobs is to promote the interests of maple syrup producers worldwide, so it
does stuff like create marketing campaigns to advertise maple syrup to people around
the world, and create demand.
So that's why you might have heard of maple syrup, or why maple syrup might be able to
be bought at a supermarket near you.
Domestically, it has another, more important and certainly more controversial rule, that
of regulating the supply and sales of maple syrup.
It assigns quotas to each producer, and all maple syrup sales have to go through FPAC.
The rationale behind this is to stabilise the price, ensuring that the market isn't
flooded with too much maple syrup, thereby driving the price down.
Now why is this important?
Well, because of the way that maple syrup is collected, by tapping trees and collecting
whatever comes out, it is quite hard for producers to know how much they will collect at any
given year.
It's not like farming corn or sheep or pigs, where you have a pretty good idea of what
you'll get each year.
The maple syrup harvest is much more variable.
The amount produced each year can fluctuate by 50% or so from one year to the next.
In a completely unregulated market, this can lead to years where large amounts are produced,
and producers are forced to accept much lower prices.
So this is the idea behind FPAC and its quotas, to ensure that this doesn't happen.
If a maple syrup producer produces more than their quota, they need to hand over the excess
to FPAC, which stores it in a strategic reserve, a huge warehouse.
The logic behind this is that during years of lower production, these strategic reserves
can be released, sold onto the market.
So there is a constant amount of maple syrup available.
The nice thing about maple syrup is that, like oil, it can be stored for a long period
of time without going bad.
It has such a high sugar content that it can be kept for several years.
The kicker though, the bad thing for the maple syrup producers, is that they don't get
paid for this excess maple syrup until it's sold.
And this can be several years later.
So they have a boom year, a great year in terms of the amount of maple syrup they produce.
But they won't see any extra money from this, because they have to hand it over to
the FPAC strategic reserve.
Now, as you might expect, not all Quebec maple syrup producers were happy about this.
And from the early 2000s, when this quota and strategic reserve system was introduced,
a thriving black market started to emerge.
After all, like oil, maple syrup looks and tastes pretty similar.
You can mix it together, and it is impossible to trace.
There's no way of telling what is legal and illegal maple syrup.
It's all the same stuff.
FPAC cracked down heavily whenever it discovered producers selling on the black market.
And heavy fines would be issued by the Canadian judicial system.
After all, it was a government enforced organisation.
You couldn't opt out.
It was the law.
All sales needed to go through FPAC.
And if you exceeded your quota, you needed to hand over the rest to the strategic reserve.
But because of the ease of selling maple syrup, and due to the fact that it was designed to be eaten,
and customers would literally eat the evidence,
it was somewhat of an impossibility to completely shut down the black market.
Now, to get into the main course of the episode.
In 2011, after a particularly strong season of maple syrup production,
FPAC realised that it didn't have enough room in its main strategic reserve.
The maple syrup was stored in large barrels,
each containing over 200 litres of maple syrup.
They were piled high up, one upon the other, in a giant warehouse.
But the warehouse was quickly filling up,
and FPAC scrambled to find another suitable location.
They ended up choosing a warehouse in a small town just outside Montreal,
and rented out a large section of the warehouse to act as an extension of the strategic reserve.
The owner of this warehouse was a man called Avic Calle.
It seems that FPAC didn't do much of a background check on him,
because if they had done, they would have discovered that he was a convicted fraudster,
with allegations of mafia connections.
Probably not the sort of person you want to trust, with tens of millions of dollars worth of anything.
And when he was approached by FPAC,
and learned of its precious treasure it was planning to store at his warehouse,
he had a dastardly idea.
He knew that security at the warehouse was lax at best,
it really wasn't a particularly secure location.
There was a security guard and a few cameras, but it was a shared warehouse.
Anyone could rent space and come and go as they pleased.
And FPAC was planning to leave thousands of barrels of maple syrup,
literally tens of millions of dollars worth of stuff, just lying around there.
His plan was simple.
Steal it.
But, of course, he wasn't able to do it on his own.
He had a criminal past, but he had no maple syrup connections,
and no understanding of the industry, other than there was a lot of money in it.
He needed partners in crime,
people who would be able to help him transport and sell the maple syrup.
He first contacted a lorry driver, a man named Sebastian Jutra.
He would manage the logistics and transport,
but he also linked Caron up with a man called Richard Valier.
Now, Richard Valier was the maple syrup connection.
He was a man for whom maple syrup almost ran in his blood.
His father, Ramon Valier, was a maple syrup producer,
but Richard operated more on the fringes as a so-called barrel roller.
What this meant was that he was a sort of trader,
a broker, who would put together buyers and sellers of maple syrup.
Under the table, of course.
In other words, he was a black market guy.
He was the sort of person who could move large quantities of unauthorized maple syrup.
He had the contacts, he knew what he was doing,
and he knew how to do it without attracting the attention of F-back.
Avic Caron needed a few more people, though.
He needed a place to temporarily store the stolen maple syrup, a sort of headquarters,
and Richard Valier was happy to recommend his father's maple syrup farm.
And finally, they needed someone to get the syrup out of Quebec,
to export it not only to other provinces of Canada, but outside the country.
For this, they contacted a man called Etienne Saint-Pierre, who was based in New Brunswick.
Importantly, this was outside of Quebec, so he wasn't under the jurisdiction of F-back.
He could buy and sell whatever he wanted.
So with this, the gang was complete.
Avic Caron had the warehouse in which the maple syrup was being stored.
Richard Valier was the barrel roller and would organize the sales.
His father, Ramon Valier, provided the headquarters and temporary storage.
Sebastien Jutra was the driver, and Etienne Saint-Pierre would sell the stolen maple syrup
to importers all over the world.
But if you are thinking that the next chapter of the story is going to be some daring robbery
in the middle of the night with guns, flashlights, and followed by a police chase with helicopters
and mad pursuits through Canadian forests, I'm sorry, but I must disappoint you.
The theft took place over the course of nearly one year,
from July of 2011 to July of the following year.
And it went like this.
The criminals had rented space in the warehouse as seemingly legitimate paying customers.
This meant that they had access badges and could come and go as they liked.
When they understood the times of the day that the warehouse was likely to be empty,
which was typically in the early hours of the morning, they would enter the warehouse,
not go to the section that they had rented, but continue to F-pack's area, which was filled
with row upon row of stacked white barrels, all neatly numbered, stamped and labelled.
Then they would take them.
They would load them onto a truck, drive them to Ramon Valier's maple syrup farm,
pour out the maple syrup into smaller containers,
then refill the barrels with water from a nearby stream
and drive them back to the warehouse, putting them back in their original location.
They knew that the maple syrup was checked and tested when it first arrived at the facility,
but after that, the only thing that was monitored was the weight,
hence why the men refilled the barrels with water each time.
And it worked. Nobody noticed.
It seemed too easy.
Each barrel had something like $1,300 worth of maple syrup in it,
so they could steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth in an evening.
They went back and back, taking more and more,
until the strategic maple syrup reserves became more like the strategic river water reserves.
But nobody knew.
After all, the barrels were still there.
Nobody was going to check that the maple syrup was still inside.
F-PAK had seemingly not even considered the possibility that someone would steal them.
But the theft was taking too long.
It was an intensive process, especially the filling up of the barrels
afterwards and driving them back to the warehouse to replace them.
Every time they did it, it was a chance that they'd get caught.
So, the thieves made a decision that probably seemed clever at the time.
Instead of taking the barrels away from the warehouse, refilling them with water,
and then driving them back, the men just took the maple syrup out of the barrels
directly in the warehouse, leaving them empty.
This was a big time saver, but what it meant was that there was a load of empty barrels.
If they were weighed, well, the theft would be discovered immediately.
Moving into the spring of 2012, the speed of the theft went up a notch.
The men knew that the annual inspection of the strategic reserves took place in July.
And, understandably, they were nervous.
It was crunch time.
By this point, they had stolen more than 60% of the total maple syrup in the warehouse.
So, if an inspector opened up a barrel, there was a strong chance that they would be met
not by golden sticky syrup, but by stagnant river water, or by an empty barrel.
They did what they could, trying to dim the warehouse lights so it was harder to see,
and spraying dust around to hide any marks or signs of interference.
They could make it harder for their crime to be uncovered,
but there was nothing that they could do to stop the inspection.
On July 30th of 2012, a man called Michel Guevreux was in the warehouse,
conducting the annual inspection.
Barrels were piled up high, six levels up,
and he had climbed up to the top to reach the highest level.
As he was doing that, though, he felt one wobble and start to give way beneath him.
Presumably, thoughts flashed through his mind that he was about to topple to the ground
from a height of more than five metres, or be crushed by hundreds of barrels of maple syrup.
It would have been a strange way to go, and would presumably have made for a good start
to a murder mystery story.
But it didn't work out that way.
Instead of crashing to his death, he managed to regain his balance.
When he had done that, he wiggled a few of the maple syrup barrels.
He moved them to see why they were dislodged so easily.
As he did, it became clear that they were empty.
There was no maple syrup inside.
He alerted FPAC, and more inspectors descended on the facility.
It took a long time for them to ascertain the true extent of the theft.
But by the time they had done this, they concluded that the thieves had drained 9,571 barrels,
and stolen a total of 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup, worth an estimated $18 million.
There was a large police investigation, but it was not an easy case to crack.
The maple syrup had gone, that much was clear, but they didn't know how, when, or where.
The police looked at the other occupants of the warehouse,
after concluding that it must have been an inside job.
They also saw unusual marks on the barrels,
indicating that they had been moved by a particular type of forklift truck.
They called around all of the heavy machinery rental shops,
and found one that had been rented by Sebastien Jutra, the driver,
who was on their list of potential suspects.
He was arrested by the police, questioned, and he soon cracked,
revealing the identities of all of the participants in the crime, and testifying against them.
Richard Valier was determined to be the ringleader of the group,
and given the heftiest sentence, he was sentenced to eight years in prison,
and ordered to repay $9 million of the supposed $10 million he earned from the crime.
Jutra, the driver, got off most likely, given his cooperation with the authorities,
but he was still sentenced to eight months in prison.
As to the question of why they did it, well, the simple answer is the money,
but it seems that there were deeper-rooted reasons, at least for some of them.
The Valier father-son pair had a deep-seated hatred of Epag, and this seemed like one way
that they could fight back at the organisation that they considered to exert a mafia-like grip
over small-scale, honest maple syrup producers.
And this case, and the media coverage of it, raised discussion over the legitimacy
and efficacy of Epag, and the extent to which it benefited or harmed the maple syrup industry in
Quebec. Its greatest proponents say it has finally allowed maple syrup farmers to earn a decent
living, while its critics took this robbery as an example of the lengths to which people will go
to protest against this regulatory oversight. Now, to end this episode, I will answer one
question that you might be wondering. Where did all this stolen maple syrup go? Where did this
almost $20 million worth of sugary goodness disappear to? The answer is that almost all of
it was sold on the open market. It was exported to the United States, to Europe, and to Japan.
So, if you ate maple syrup between 2011 to 2013, let's say, it is not beyond the realms of
possibility that you had a hand in destroying the evidence in the greatest robbery in Canadian
history. Okay then, that is it for today's episode on the great Canadian maple syrup robbery.
I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learned something new,
and that whether you are a maple syrup fan, or you've yet to try it, the next time you pour
some of that sticky golden goodness over your pancakes, well, you'll think of this amazing tale.
As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode. Are there any other interesting
robbery stories that you think we should make an episode about? For the members among you,
you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.lanadoenglish.com,
and get chatting away to other curious minds. And as a final reminder, if you enjoyed this
episode, and you are wondering where to get more than double the number of episodes,
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but they are super helpful, and each one brings a smile to my face.
You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
