A Train Robbery

Once, near the Dragoon Mountains, in southeast Arizona, Hall drove a train through a desolate quarter-mile of track littered with hundreds of pairs of Nike sneakers.

*

We will burn your train to cinders

So throw the money down

Open up your damned express car

And jump down to the ground

— A Train Robbery, Paul Kennerly

*

The one-time stronghold of Cochise is now littered with looted shoes. There’s something… absurdist … about that image. There’s a strange kind of Continuity & Persistence at work on the 21st century. Train robbery has made a comeback. Hat tip to reader Mike for scouting up this outstanding piece from The New York Times Magazine.

The explosion of the e-commerce economy has created an opportunity for thieves — and a conundrum for the railways…

Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots. Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019, according to CargoNet, a theft-focused subsidiary of Verisk, a multinational company that analyzes business risks, primarily for the insurance sector. On CargoNet’s map of cargo-theft hot spots, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Memphis show up as distinct, high-incident red blobs. But the biggest blob, a red oblong smear, stretches out over the Los Angeles valley like molten lava.

This is pretty wild stuff. I mean, lookit this:

Sometimes looters hit the trains while they’re running between L.A. and Tucson — hence cargo strewn across the desert where Cochise and Geronimo rode. The stolen goods go up online for resale. As the writer points out, train looting is almost entirely non-violent these days. No derailments with piles of rock; no raiders brandishing guns; no dynamiting express cars.

But the looting causes loss in the billions.

On the website of Operation Boiling Point, which the Department of Homeland Security recently created to go after organized theft groups, the agency states that cargo theft accounts for between $15 billion and $35 billion in annual losses. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a statement emailed to me, estimated that cargo-theft losses amounted to $1 billion nationally in 2021, but the agency acknowledged that that was an undercount. 

I suspect the James-Younger Boys and Butch & Sundance — and maybe some Soviet partisans, too — are looking down from some outlaw Valhalla in bemusement.

I know what you’re thinking: Jim must have a song to go along with this yarn, right? Hah!