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Cindy M. Rosen, executive director of the Americas-focused branch of the Transported Asset Protection Association, told me that the job of tracking misappropriated goods across borders and territories and law-enforcement jurisdictions is often futile, particularly when merchandise is moved out of the country before being sold back into the United States online. Rosen would know: Her organization is made up of insurance companies, federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies, security firms, shippers, truckers, railroad companies and manufacturers. “You’re basically trying to catch a fly in a dark room,” she says.
More freight is moved on trucks than on trains, and much more is stolen off trucks, too. Trucking is a chaotic industry, with hundreds of thousands of companies, some as small as a single driver and a truck. Rail, on the other hand, is essentially duopolistic: Just two companies, Union Pacific and BNSF Railway, serve the entire western United States. (CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway dominate the East.) Against trucks, thieves use various forms of digital forgery and cyberfraud, including something called a fictitious pickup, in which someone impersonates an authorized truck driver online and reroutes a truck’s load. This kind of theft increased almost 600 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to CargoNet data. And on the rails, some cargo — coal, grain, cement, fertilizer, petrochemicals, lumber — is just too cumbersome to appeal to thieves. It’s easier to run off with pallets of beer or the newest-issue Nikes.
But railroads have increasingly been vying to move more containerized freight. They want to make the most of the e-commerce boom. The fastest-growing segment of rail traffic is what’s called intermodal, which refers to shipping containers and trailers that move on more than one mode of transit: ships, trains and trucks. These containers often carry merchandise bound for stores or packages bound for consumers. Amazon, for example, now has its own branded containers, in part to meet its net-zero carbon emission goal (hauling a ton of goods on rail produces about eight times less emission than on a truck). Such intermodal trains tend to be long, which can make them more vulnerable.
Over the past decade, in a push for greater efficiency, and amid record-breaking profits, the country’s largest railroads have been stringing together longer trains. Some now stretch two or even three miles in length. At the same time, these companies cut the number of employees by nearly 30 percent, so fewer people now manage these longer trains. (Currently the Federal Railroad Administration does not place limits on freight-train length, despite safety concerns.) The tracks heading away from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are thick with long trains carrying intermodal containers teeming with imports from Asia — electronics, toys, clothing, shoes, food and beverages — just the sort of offerings thieves find most enticing.
“See this?” One of the plainclothes L.A.P.D. Cargo Theft Unit detectives was directing my attention to a box of electronic bird feeders with a yellow sticker on it showing an image of batteries. “Thieves look for placards like this because they know there will be some kind of electronics inside,” he said. We were in a 7,500-square-foot windowless warehouse, surrounded by metal fencing and looped barbed wire, located under Interstate 10 in downtown Los Angeles. The warehouse, packed with $5 million worth of cargo stolen from BNSF Railway, belonged to the California Department of Transportation but had been leased or subleased by thieves the detectives were still trying to identify. They ran across the place almost accidentally a few days earlier, while tracking a truckload of boosted tires.
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