Train robberies are something we associate with Western movies, wherein gangs of outlaws pursue the train on horseback, waving sixguns and jumping from their horses onto the cars to rob the passengers and maybe steal a Wells Fargo strongbox full of gold coins. The notorious Mexican Sinaloa cartel, though, has taken the train robbery up to the 21st-century level. A recent report describes just such a robbery in Arizona, where thousands of dollars worth of Nike shoes were stolen.
Fortunately, the desperados were caught, and the merchandise returned.
The Sinaloa Cartel raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing Nike shoes from a moving BNSF train in their latest railroad heist between California and Arizona, a pattern that has been on the rise, according to law enforcement.
Eleven members of the Mexican transnational criminal organization are in federal custody after stealing the merchandise from a train car traveling north of Phoenix with cut air brakes on Jan. 17, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) said in documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.
For those who aren’t familiar with trains, the brakes on trains are held open by air pressure. Cutting the air lines activates the brakes and brings the train to a halt. In this case, the thieves were spotted – but law enforcement decided to go for the whole gang.
BNSF employees notified police after spotting a severed air hose on a cargo train near Perrin, Arizona. Railroad police noticed a box truck parked a few miles away and, later, several crates positioned near the tracks.
Police said they stopped a Toyota Camry leaving the area of a Ford Econoline box truck and identified its occupants as Jaime Cota Peraza and Sadiel Martinez Soto. While the suspects were distracted, other authorities placed tracking devices into the waiting crates.
After authorities reportedly watched several people load the crates into the box truck, Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers tracked them to Kingman, Arizona, where they chased two men who they said were Erik Portillo Valdez and Noe Cecena Castro over some trees and a barbed wire fence.
The tracking devices led them to a Chevy Tahoe pulling the crates. Inside, authorities found 150 cases of Nike merchandise worth $202,500.
Peraza, Soto, Valdez, Castro and seven other individuals were charged with felony possession or receipt of goods stolen from an interstate shipment. Nine of those suspects were in the United States illegally and six said they are Sinaloa natives.
So, nine of the eleven perps were in the country illegally. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, as Mexican cartels have been operating along our southern border with impunity, largely due to the non-enforcement of the previous administration.
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This being a train robbery, of course, presents dangers above and beyond the robbery of, say, a retail establishment. Railroads run on a schedule, and disruption of that schedule and interference with signals, which the cartel members are also suspected of doing, could result in a disastrous collision. Even cutting the air lines could result in a derailment that endangers the lives of crews, and if the train is carrying tanker cars, it could result in a dangerous chemical spill.
President Trump, after taking office, signed an order designating criminal cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, which gives local and federal law enforcement more latitude in dealing with outfits like the Sinaloa cartel both north and south of the border. That’s not good news for guys like this.
