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WHAT A LOBSTER HEIST TELLS US ABOUT GOVERNMENT FAILURE  
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Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Jan Dutkiewicz
January 9, 2026
The New Republic
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_ Thieves regularly exploit the tangled, under-regulated freight mess
that puts food on your plate. The answer is not more police, but more
bureaucrats. _

Cooked lobsters sit on ice., Erin Clark/The Boston Globe/Getty Images


 

On December 12, criminals made off with a $400,000 shipment of lobster
meat
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from a freight hub outside of Boston. It was the latest and most
costly in a spate of striking seafood robberies afflicting New
England—involving creating a fake trucking load, malware, a
deceptively painted truck, and a great deal of intel and advance
planning. More _Ocean’s Eleven _than _Goodfellas_, despite lobster
seeming an almost comical choice for grand larceny.

But while this sensational
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and slightly perplexing crime has understandably made headlines, and
would make a highly bingeable Netflix series, it also exposes a
fundamental flaw in how our food system works. Providing American
consumers with the bounty of food
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that lands on our plates on a daily basis is complicated, and freight
trucking is an often overlooked ingredient: one that depends on a
chaotic, poorly regulated market and the exploitation of its workforce
of 3.5 million truck drivers.

Freight industry organizations point to sensational crimes as evidence
that law enforcement needs to crack down on cargo theft, and now
they’ve supposedly enrolled
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increasingly aggressive
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the cause. But the growing
vulnerability of American freight shipping to sophisticated and costly
heists is less about poor law enforcement and more about waning state
regulatory capacity. This under-regulation is what makes our food
abundance possible in the first place.

Fresh lobster meat can cost between $40 and $90 per pound—slightly
less if it’s still live or hasn’t been shelled—making a shipment
of lobster worth vastly more than a comparable shipment of sirloin
steak. But unlike the steak, at room temperature, within as little as
two hours, lobster meat becomes a toxic bacteria bomb no amount of
melted butter will repair. This short shelf life is a boon to thieves.
Lobsters, unlike TVs and laptops, don’t have serial numbers (and
unlike cows or pigs, they don’t have ear tags); once they’re off
the truck and into the pot, they can’t easily be tracked, the
evidence of any crime gobbled up or trashed within a few days.
Consumers would have no way of knowing if they were eating contraband,
and it wouldn’t be hard for savvy crooks to find restaurants,
restaurant suppliers, and markets to absorb a truck of hot lobster
amid the holiday festivities.

Many articles written in the wake of the lobster heist have emphasized
that hijackings of food are a growing problem for the freight
industry, as well as for insurers, groceries, restaurants, and
ultimately consumers. “Affordability” is an odd word to use
here—we’re talking _lobster _affordability, after all—but
hijackings, like other forms of cargo theft, do incur higher overall
costs for companies involved, much of which is ultimately passed on to
consumers in the form of higher prices. And cargo theft can afflict
staple products as much as big-ticket ones. In the midst of surging
egg prices this spring, for instance, thieves in Maryland stole
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a shipment of 280,000 eggs from the nation’s largest egg producer,
Cal-Maine.

Freight industry representatives point to potential links to organized
crime. The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE launched
“Operation Boiling Point
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(no, we’re not making that up) in June to combat this epidemic,
although it’s not clear that ICE has much firsthand intel about
what’s going on. They cite somewhat dubious statistics circulated by
freight industry organizations. In calling for more vigilant
prosecution of cargo theft and increased law enforcement attention,
the American Trucking Association puts
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the value of stolen cargo in the United States at $35 billion per
annum and claims that the number of documented instances increased,
year over year by 36 percent between the first quarter of 2024 and the
first quarter of 2025.

But these numbers are about as reliable as a lobster stew at a Wyoming
all-night diner. After some data scrubbing by criminologist Robert
Burns and sociologist Charles Crawford, a search of the FBI’s
Unified Crime Report [[link removed]]
produces about 15,000 total incidents
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that meet the legal definition of cargo theft, including 3,545 in
2021. Private logistics tracking firms have their own counts that are
in the same ballpark. Either way, it’s a tiny percentage of the
billions of tons of cargo shipped by truck annually in the U.S. by the
over 580,000 registered carriers in three million semi-tractors.

The mismatch between calls for a heavy-handed crackdown and the dearth
of good data on the crimes should indicate something is amiss. In
fact, no one has a clear idea of what’s going on—not the
government, not carriers, not logistics firms. That’s why Burns and
Crawford worry that the increased involvement of law enforcement
officers, a blunt tool at the best of times, will produce “crime
control theater” without eliminating the underlying vulnerabilities
that allow sophisticated criminals to jack the seafood platter.

In reality, theft is commonplace in the American food system because
of its size, complexity, and under-regulation. The American food
system is vast, with well over a million points of sale spread across
restuarants, grocers, and convienence stores. To get food from
producers to sellers, shipping companies, brokers, and logistics
supply firms orchestrate a ballet of freight across a sprawling
network of ports, roadways, and warehouses. Much of this is
increasingly digitized but poorly overseen.

Police are still investigating what happened
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with the Massachusetts lobster heist, but it probably
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went something like this: The bandits used a mixture of low- and
high-tech tricks to gain control of a legitimate carrier’s account
on a “load board,” the online marketplace where brokers and
carriers haggle over proposed freight contracts. Under the guise of
that carrier, the thieves lay in wait for an especially succulent load
to come across the board, at which point, they bid and leapt into
action.

The bandits showed up, as scheduled, at 2 p.m. on December 12. Their
truck was painted with the name of the impersonated carrier, and they
maintained contact with the other parties using a spoof email address
indistinguishable from the real carrier’s address but for a stray
hyphen. Their broker, a company in Evansville, Indiana, got wise
around 4 p.m., when they noticed the lobster haul’s GPS tracker had
been deactivated. By then those lobsters were long gone.

If this all sounds elaborate and surprisingly high-tech for a seafood
scam, that’s because America’s freight infrastructure, for
lobsters and electronics alike, less resembles an orderly city grid
than tangled jungle vines. It’s decentralized, fragmented, and
sprawling. Most trucking companies are tiny businesses—90 percent
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fewer than 10 cabs, and a full 10 percent of cabs are
owner-operated—and fierce competition in the industry leaves them
with tight margins. Smaller carriers often struggle to modernize their
equipment, creating technical headaches when they interact with
logistics support companies, retailers, and brokers. All parties may
be cutting corners and re-brokering loads to make ends meet.
“Double-brokering,” where a contracted broker subcontracts a load
to a third party without the knowledge or consent of the customer, is
technically illegal
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but all too common
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All of this fragmentation makes fraud, such as scammers getting their
hands behind the steering wheel of a truck of lobsters, much easier to
perpetrate.

The fractured and decentralized nature of American truck shipping is,
by design
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the product of bad laws, weak regulations, and hollowed-out regulatory
agencies. The 1935 Motor Carrier Act, a piece of New Deal legislation,
initially imposed strict federal standards on the trucking industry
regarding fleet maintenance, labor relations, workplace safety,
routes, and fare pricing set by the Interstate Commerce Commission, or
ICC. But the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 gutted the ICC’s regulatory
powers and eliminated carrier, fare, and route regulations. The ICC
itself was shuttered in 1995. In 1999, the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Act reimposed some baseline regulations and created the
Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration, or FMCSA, mostly to improve roadway safety.

Last year, Nebraska’s Republican Senator Deb Fischer and Washington
D.C.’s Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton co-sponsored the
Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act
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the FMSCA some additional bite. If passed, it would have required
freight carriers to provide the FMSCA with a valid business address to
register; they currently don’t even have to. The bill did not get a
vote, and, today, it remains farcically easy to register to receive a
USDOT number. With that number, fraudsters could present themselves as
a normal business and register bids for million-dollar contracts.

The federal government deregulated this industry on the premise that
fewer regulations means more carriers and a more competitive freight
marketplace, giving everyone the lower shipping costs they crave.
That’s mostly worked as intended, especially for food, resulting in
reduced shipping costs and quicker delivery.

But this combination of reduced oversight and many more, smaller
trucking companies also creates crime opportunities. As trucking
logistics has become more technologically sophisticated in the past
two decades, it has also created a host of security vulnerabilities.
The technological asymmetry between small carriers and larger
logistics support companies may also be a problem, with criminals
targeting carriers who can’t install the right security update on
older systems or who still rely on phone calls to confirm order
details.

So whom do affected parties have to turn to? The tiny FMCSA—its
1,000 employees monitor 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S.—is
primarily focused on driver safety, not security, and so refers
complaints to the Department of Justice.

Meanwhile, cheap freight also creates more motive for theft in the
form of immiserated workers. Freight truck drivers are miserably
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overworked, horribly underpaid, and have astonishingly high turnover
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rates. Once a prime example of a stable union job, today fewer than 20
percent
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of truck drivers are unionized. To meet contracts, they are sometimes
expected to drive for unsafe (and illegal) durations of time, putting
in 60- to 70-hour workweeks
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and they may still wind up getting docked pay for loads delayed by
weather or traffic. Happy, well-paid employees might reduce theft, and
industries with lower rates of turnover are harder to infiltrate for
malicious schemers looking to scoop intel on vulnerable crustaceans.

Increasing regulation of American shipping might marginally increase
consumer prices, something few politicians are likely to sign off on
at the moment. But the current plan of dedicating more police
resources to cargo theft is unlikely to do much. There are, of course,
less flashy approaches to preventing cargo theft that politicians and
policymakers should consider. Improving the UCR and crime data
tracking in general would be worthwhile, as would working with state
policymakers to create a systematic nationwide framework for defining
and prosecuting double brokering and strategic cargo fraud. Merely
ensuring that the Transportation Department’s FMCSA is adequately
staffed, resourced, and empowered would be a good start, as would the
modest objectives of Fischer and Norton’s stalled Household Goods
Shipping Consumer Protection Act.

There’s an important larger message about our food system, here:
Slashing regulations, firing federal workers, and wrecking the basic
capacities
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of government officials to do their jobs guarantees the bad government
it purports to fix and creates the conditions for the fraud and
corruption that tough-talking politicians pretend to abhor. The
abundance of our food system is the product of savvy business and
novel technology, but also of regulation: of food safety, worker
protections, antitrust laws, and a slew of other laws designed to make
sure safe food reliably lands on our plates on time and at a fair
price. Food system fixes require more of the latter. The solution to
lobster heists looks more like guys with clipboards and visors than
guys with guns and badges.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg teaches at Duke University and is the Duke
Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center.

Jan Dutkiewicz is a contributing editor at _The New Republic_ and an
assistant professor of political science at the Pratt Institute.

_The New Republic_ was founded in 1914 as a call to arms for
public-minded intellectuals advocating liberal reform in a new
industrial age. Now, two decades into a new century, TNR remains, if
anything, more committed than ever to its first principles—and, most
of all, to the need to rethink outworn assumptions and political
superstitions as radically changing conditions demand.

Co-founder Herbert Croly declared that TNR was an
“experiment”—and today we rededicate that experiment, and our
magazine’s legacy, to the urgent challenges of reclaiming the
democratic faith amid dangerous, deranging new upheavals in our common
world.

* Food Industry
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* Deregulation
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* transportation
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