This New Aussie Podcast Unpacks The Craziest Crime You’ve Never Heard Of
"What is the culpability of an industry that is geared towards bringing me everything I want as soon as I want it? What does that take, and who does that hurt along the way?"
You don’t even get through the first episode of Marc Fennell’s new podcast before someone approaches him with a shotgun and a bulletproof vest. It’s not a moment you expect in a podcast about peanuts.
But to describe Nut Jobs in that way would do a serious disservice to just how crazy this story actually is.
On the surface, it’s a tale about a US$10 million heist. In the space of six months 20 trucks carrying millions of dollars worth of products just vanished. The coveted items? Not drugs, or jewellery, or the latest technology — but nuts. Almonds, pistachios, cashews, pecans and walnuts.
In many cases, organised crime groups were able to smuggle the valuable commodities out of the country before anyone even knew they were missing.
But while the the tale starts out as some bizarre whodunnit — who took the nuts, and why (not to mention, how) — Marc told Junkee that unravelling the mystery raised much bigger questions for him.
Along the way, it also changed his entire perspective on our relationship with food.
It's here! A year of my life working on the story of a $10 million dollar heist of Californian Nuts that somehow ends up with NASA satellites, organised crime and a molten Oscar statue. I give you NUT JOBS! https://t.co/9SRPIrTJBy
— Marc Fennell (@MarcFennell) June 1, 2020
While making the podcast Marc travelled to California’s Central Valley, where economic disadvantage has allowed organised crime to flourish.
That lead him down a path that looks at the relationships between health, wealth, the environment, immigration, agriculture and the rise of “wellness”.
“80% of the world’s almonds come from California. If you were to pick one up, how many lives do you touch and what are those lives really like?” he asked Junkee.
“That’s actually what the series ends up being, an examination of what is my culpability as a consumer, and also what is the culpability of an industry that is geared towards bringing me everything I want as soon as I want it?
“What does that take and who does that hurt along the way?”
The answer, apparently, is a lot more people than you think.
During his time in the US Marc tagged along with private investigators who protect almond groves with guns. He met with the farmers who grew them, and truck drivers who transported them. He speaks to people connected to organised crime. And over eight episodes, he discovers why nuts are one of the hottest items on the US black market these days.
For one, they’re expensive — as anyone with a penchant for almond milk coffee will no doubt tell you.
They’ve also got a long shelf life, have no serial numbers, and cannot be electronically tracked. As an added bonus, the evidence gets eaten.
“Let’s say you’re the California Highway Patrol, you pull over a truck and there is a bunch of meth in there. You know a crime has happened, you know who to arrest,” Marc said.
“Now imagine you pull over a truck and it’s full of nuts.
“The fact it is such an innocuous product, but worth so much money, for a period of time it was the perfect crime.”
The people who pulled this off aren’t amateurs — they were highly organised, with specialist knowledge in the trucking, cargo and agriculture industries. Databases were hacked, documents were falsified and security measures were repeatedly dodged.
But while it’s easy to get carried away by the dramatics of a case, it was his conversations with the people who have been affected by this that stayed with him the most.
“As much as the story does start with this quirky heist beginning … this affects people’s emotions, this affects people’s lives, this affects people’s ability to survive,” Marc said.
“I would open up my fridge or my pantry and just look at these objects with this askance view of ‘where did you come from, and how many people did you hurt to get here?'”
Like the farmer, whose sense of pride and identity is so closely tied to the hard physical labour it takes to produce the coveted food items that were stolen. Or the truck driver, who spoke about his sadness at some of the life choices that led to his involvement.
“One thing I learnt from this is that crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Crime happens for a reason, and some of those are opportunity, but a lot of them are economic pressures and cultural pressures,” Marc said.
“I think theres a real responsibility when telling the story of a crime that those facets are understood.”