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Lieutenant George Ackerman didn’t know who was causing it, but something funny had started to happen.

It was the spring of 2022, and Ackerman was a detective lieutenant with the Philadelphia Police Department, working the Northeast zone that includes the 8th District, a sprawling and hodgepodge expanse of postwar housing and industrial lands at the farthest northeastern edge of the city.

This was two years into the pandemic, a moment when every crime statistic looked like a visit to the Upside Down. Shoplifting got organized. Center City Wawas closed in spite, citing general lawlessness. Carjackings doubled in a single year. Men too young to rent a car might hijack one instead, only to ditch it and then lift two more the same night. Anomalies were the new normal.

But still, this stood out. Beef had begun to vanish by the literal ton, out the backs of tractor trailers. Crabs walked. Booze ran scarce. TVs didn’t show. In the desolate, tree-lined warehouse lands of far Northeast Philly, where the blank wall of a distribution hub can seem to extend beyond the vanishing point, someone had begun using the truck-lined streets as a shopping mall where everything was free.

Ackerman hadn’t seen theft anywhere near this scale in 20 years on the job. First it was a trickle. Then a flood.

Each time, it was pretty much the same. A long-haul trucker would drive into Philly to drop off a load, and maybe get delayed some hours. They’d find a quiet, safe-looking stretch and take a moment’s rest before the assigned drop-off. By the time they woke up, they were cleaned out.

There were three big hunting grounds. The beef and the seafood were parked on quiet stretches near Quaker Valley Foods, a sprawling complex of big-box refrigeration with a fleet of trucks adorned with familiar buckle-capped Q’s. KLS Logistics, a mile away, was an encyclopedic compendium of booze. Almo was TVs, electronics, appliances. Those, too, disappeared in the night.

The truckers weren’t all choosing the same spot. Their schedules were their own. So, Ackerman wondered, how did the thieves know where to find them?

It wasn’t just happening in Ackerman’s district. Cargo thefts had begun to fan out across the city, into the suburbs, and to New Jersey rest stops named for poets and heroes: Walt Whitman and Molly Pitcher. Each time, the contents simply disappeared into thin air.

Cargo theft rose by nearly 60 percent in Pennsylvania from 2022 to 2023 and remained steady over the next year, according to data from Jersey-based cargo theft tracking service Verisk CargoNet. The biggest share of that happened in Philly, and most of what was stolen was TVs, seafood, meat, and liquor.

“We had a truck with, I think, [thousands of] pounds of beef,” Ackerman says, remembering a more recent case in the Northeast Philly district surrounding Bustleton Avenue. “And it just disappears. It’s nowhere. They’re selling it somewhere, right? But where, we don’t know. It’s just gone.”

Usually stuff like this is an inside job, Philly detectives figured at first, trying to account for the thieves’ uncanny ability to show up in the right place at the right time. This line of inquiry went nowhere. Maybe, Ackerman thought, it was just scattered men with bolt cutters, haunting the streets. If so, police didn’t find them.

This cargo theft felt worse than a pandemic anomaly; it was starting to look like a conspiracy. Over the next two years, scores of cargo thefts emptied trucks across the city and region. By the end of 2024, more than 180 cargo theft cases would turn up in Philly’s 8th District alone. The scale was staggering, measurable in the millions of dollars. In 2022, more than 40 trucks were emptied in the 8th District. The next year, it was 94.

“We were getting hit once, twice, three times a week — in multiple different locations,” Ackerman says. Police were stymied. For months they didn’t know how to get a handle on it, who was doing it, how thousands of pounds of food or hundreds of cases of liquor could simply vanish into the ether. “We were getting crushed,” says Ackerman.

It’s unclear how many of these cargo thefts are linked. But it took a year for police to get their first big break: a misbegotten money heist that would bust open what investigators and prosecutors call the biggest and most savvy cargo ring Philadelphia has seen in modern memory. The operation to take it down would eventually involve the FBI, the Secret Service, and state investigators in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The code name for the effort? Operation Beef Bandit. But Philly cops have their own name for it.

“Out here in the 8th,” says Ackerman, “we like to call it the Dimes Caper.”

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There’s a picture Ackerman keeps tacked to the wall of his small second-floor office at the Northeast Detectives office on Levick Street, an otherwise spartan white box whose window overlooks a roof full of condensers and vents. The picture is grainy, a smeary black-and-white printout. At first, it’s hard to make out what’s happening. The image shows a man in shorts and a hoodie, lying down, craning his neck to smile awkwardly at the camera.

The man, whom prosecutors identified as Malik “Stacks” Palmer of Philadelphia, appears to be doing a Scrooge McDuck impression — he’s swimming in his money bin. The bin in question is the bed of a black and burgundy pickup, filled to its wheel wells with thousands of shiny new dimes. “Don’t take a picture of that,” Ackerman says as I wheel up my phone. “That’s evidence.”

Maybe it’s evidence, but it’s also a trophy — a totem of the breakthrough case Ackerman caught by chance on a windy and unseasonably hot Thursday, April 13, 2023. Ackerman, an affable and bald-pated man with a habit of stuffing his ID lanyard in his front left pocket, was a truck driver in the Philly area before taking the cop exam. The beat-up Igloo lunch cooler in his office still sports a Teamsters sticker from those days. Ackerman’s been on the wrong side of a cargo theft case, and to this day he doesn’t carry a wallet when he drives, a precaution he started taking after another truck driver in Jersey was threatened by hijackers with the oldest threat in the book: We know where you live, and we know what your family looks like.

He caught this case by chance; every detective in the Northeast Division has worked cargo theft. Ackerman was just the guy on day shift. The parking lot of the Walmart on Franklin Mills Circle held yet another burgled truck trailer, pried open with tire irons in the night while its driver caught some shut-eye. But when officers arrived a bit after sunrise, they found a wild scene: a truck hemorrhaging money, an empty bucket rolling in the breeze, and thousands of U.S. dimes spilling out like a stain across the blacktop.

The thieves had burgled a truck that had departed from the U.S. Mint. It had been a massive and somewhat sloppy haul, and in the end they made off with more than two million newly pressed dimes bound for Miami, almost a third of a tractor trailer. The dimes amounted to literal tons of money, about 10,000 pounds of it, spirited away in open air.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Philadelphia Police spokesperson Miguel Torres told the New York Times. “How are they going to use it?”

News of the dime heist traveled across the country and as far away as England, where tabloids had to explain that a dime is a tenth of a dollar. But what impressed Ackerman wasn’t just the size of the heist. It was the coordination. Parking lot surveillance footage later revealed scouts and lookouts, a network of thieves ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

“They scout out these trucks that are parked in either parking lots or on the street or whatever, they take a look at it, they break the lock open in the back, they look what’s inside. Then they sit back. And then after a while, they go in and start taking stuff and see if anybody notices,” Ackerman says.

If nothing goes bad after the door pops, that’s when the call goes out. The cavalry comes. A Hino box truck, a rented Dodge pickup with counterfeit paper tags. Six hoodied men unloading the truck into containers. More to keep watch. This pattern played out over and over in later footage found by police. But the Dimes Caper was the first time police knew what they had on their hands: This rash of cargo thefts wasn’t just some pandemic artifact or nationwide trend — although cargo theft has indeed spiraled up nationwide since the pandemic.

This was an organized ring, detectives realized, threading through the surge in cargo thefts all over the region. Philly had a crime spree on its hands.

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Philly is not generally considered a hotbed of cargo theft, says Keith Lewis, a vice president at Verisk CargoNet who worked for years as a cargo theft investigator in Georgia. It isn’t like Dallas, where truckers might hang out in droves. Not like the sprawling port complex of New York, the vast tracts of cargo-rich California, or even the myriad truck stops and rest stops along I-95 in Jersey, where state police have formed a task force.

But there’s still a bit of a history. “You’re in Philadelphia,” says Lewis, “so I know you’ve heard this phrase: ‘Where’d you get that? Oh, it fell off a truck.’” On Abbott Elementary, stuff that fell off a truck is the only thing the school can afford. Lewis hates these jokes, he says, even as he seems happy to tell them, because they make theft seem normal.

In Philly, you hear tales of minor larceny best at bars, two drinks in. The details are always fuzzy. Nobody wants to be quoted by name. There’s that one Pennsport bar where a nearby bartender swears regulars can sometimes walk back into the kitchen to procure fine steaks of unknown origin. Did you get any meat for yourself? I ask the bartender. He tried, he concedes. But when he went down there to get rib eye, all they had on offer was houseplants.

There’s the yarn about the bar in Oxford Circle that used to let neighborhood thieves hold a flea market for hot goods — as long as the bar owner got a cut. And the one about the former Acme warehouse in Brewerytown where, according to a local barfly, local kids would pop the doors on meat trucks when they took a slow, hard turn off Girard, and take a rump roast home for supper. Meanwhile, back in the ’70s, bonus meats from the old Cross Bros. Meat Packers in Kensington somehow apparently showed up like clockwork, every Friday, at a specified street corner that was an open neighborhood secret.

“Oh yeah,” says a Jeff-capped native of Northeast Philly’s Irish neighborhoods, whose current job is too respectable for him to cop to teenage beef larceny. “The truck would pull up, they’d log a skid of eye round but never unload it. Every Friday. We all knew where it went. You’d show up and get your meal.” His neighbor on the next stool confirms these details without admitting complicity.

That’s the more familiar pattern, Ackerman says. If it’s not an inside job it’s often an unplanned snip and grab, a crime of wackily random opportunity. Ackerman tells a story from back in his truck driver days, about a trip through Brewerytown, off of Girard Avenue, hauling a truck full of Pemco lamps. He didn’t even get to a full stop at an intersection before he saw his truck’s door swing open behind him. Thieves had popped the seal on the door while the truck was still moving. “It was full of big street light poles, boxes of street lamps. And they’re taking the street lamps,” Ackerman remembers. What they did with those lamps, he still doesn’t know.

Philly’s recent rash of thefts is in part a function of truck drivers being more vulnerable since the pandemic, says Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association CEO Rebecca Oyler. As consumer patterns shift to e-commerce, more and more trucks are hauling goods across the country. And more and more truckers find themselves on the trucker equivalent of a layover, she says, waiting for a loading bay berth with a full load. This is a problem especially in Pennsylvania, says Oyler, where truck parking is particularly short.

“Our infrastructure hasn’t caught up,” Oyler says. “Our research shows there’s only one parking space for every 11 trucks on the road right now.” So truckers are stuck parking where they can. And out on the streets, they’re helpless prey.

What was vexing about this new rash of big trailer thefts was that the goods never turned up for sale. The thieves were organized. They seemed to have buyers lined up. That or a pallet of spoiled crab might turn up in an alleyway in South Philly, if it couldn’t get sold. Police found cases of pilfered booze on an apartment search warrant. Detectives set up surveillance stings, but multiple times the cargo thieves burned the police tail and tried to walk away from the merchandise before making a sale.

It was unprecedented, Ackerman says. He called police contacts in Los Angeles, a national hotbed of cargo theft: Had they dealt with anything like this? They had not.

Old-school cargo theft rings are tough to crack. They’re small, they’re mobile, and they keep to tight circles, often relatives and childhood friends. Think Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious: all about the family.

Cargo gangs have followed this pattern for most of his career, says Scott Cornell, a national cargo theft expert who heads the transportation unit at Travelers Insurance. Countless past cases have involved a small group of players.

“There were usually somewhere between eight and 15 people,” he tells me. “Either they had grown up together or they were related. They were a very tight-knit group. Law enforcement really couldn’t get undercovers in those groups because if they didn’t know you, or hadn’t grown up with you, or weren’t related to you, they wouldn’t work with you.”

A California ring might fan out over the Southwest. A Chicago crew might range as far as Pittsburgh. Texas stays in Texas, but Texas is big. Philly was traditionally more often a target for New Jersey theft rings than a home to its own rings, Cornell says. Cargo theft is a “learned behavior,” says Captain Jack Ryan, commander of Philly police’s Northeast Detectives.

With this cargo crew, detectives were starting from scratch, building associations one by one, thread by thread. Maybe you get the tag to a car. Maybe you get an arrest.

“If I get your name, I can look and see who you’ve been arrested with, who you’ve been stopped with, and get those people and see who they’ve been arrested with and stopped with. It’s like a web,” Ryan says.

It was the coins that provided the first real leads. Walk in somewhere with 10,000 dimes and you tend to get noticed. Police were able to log large deposits of dimes at locations from the Philly suburbs to the edge of Baltimore. About a month after the heist, Malik Palmer, federal prosecutors say in charging documents, opened multiple bank accounts with more than 10,000 dimes each, then withdrew cash. Others rolled up to supermarkets near Baltimore, prosecutors allege, to hit up Coinstar machines.

And an even more fateful case, perhaps, had come two weeks earlier, on April 1st. That’s when the driver of a truck hauling Continental fridges heard noises in the back of the truck and went back to investigate. The men in the truck grabbed him, prosecutors say, and forced him to the ground, turning a theft into a robbery. And with interstate robbery come the feds.

Local cops can have trouble making big cases out of cargo theft, says Ackerman, the Northeast detective. The truck driver victims drive in and out of town, and they might be thousands of miles away a week later, or even working for a different company altogether. Logistics companies that get hit often aren’t local either. What’s worse, police to this day don’t know who was buying the hot beef and crabs.

But robbery on an interstate truck escalated the case, Ackerman says. Combined with the currency theft, Philly’s cases caught interest from multiple federal agencies. Ackerman tracked the refrigerator truck driver to his next job in Michigan and had the local police show him a lineup of suspects. The driver pointed to a picture. The loose threads had begun to weave together.

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After the Dimes Caper, according to this opinion, Philly police applied for a search warrant asking T-Mobile for what’s called “tower dump”: a list of all the phones that accessed cell towers in the area of the dime heist during the time period of the robbery: “April 13, 2023, between the hours of 12:30 a.m. to 6:15 a.m. (EST).”

This apparently included a bunch of phones calling and texting each other in an otherwise empty Walmart parking lot at Franklin Mall in the middle of the night. In a decision in July 2024, Judge Beetlestone ruled the phone evidence admissible, in a technical argument that sidestepped the question of whether such tower dumps legally constitute “searches,” or whether cell-phone users consent to having such data used.

By the time this decision was handed down, the first federal indictment was already moving through the system. In December, five months after the decision was handed down, the original October 2023 indictment had swelled to 29 pages and 10 defendants. In the superseding indictment, federal prosecutors laid out accusations whose evidence all played out on the screens of a few phones.

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The evidence led to Nicetown.

A daisy chain of information and communications kept coming back to one intersection, investigators now say: 19th and Wingohocking, just off Germantown Avenue.

Nicetown is a neighborhood in North Philly whose name can sometimes seem like a citywide wink, reputedly named long ago after a Mennonite immigrant named Hans de Neues but more recently home to some of the city’s lowest property values and, as of 2019, its lowest life expectancy. On a February visit, the neighborhood smelled sweetly of train diesel and pungent weed, plus the occasional waft of frying fish from the halal hoagie spot at the top of the hill. A police cruiser idled with two wheels on the sidewalk, across from a vacant patch of land strewn with paper.

There’s nothing all that special happening at 19th and Wingohocking, Captain Ryan says. But the theft ring was born there, police now believe, amid a tight crew who lived in the neighborhood’s narrow rowhomes. On 19th Street, the long line of eaves can make it seem like the whole neighborhood shares the same long porch, cluttered with couches and half-barrel smokers.

The phone data surfaced by investigators led to four, and then eventually 10, suspects, according to the federal indictment. Each is listed with a raft of nicknames and aliases: Lew, Haak, Stacks, Slick. And most, says Ackerman, knew each other from time spent on the blocks near 19th and Wingo.

The allegations include thefts wandering from beef and crab to nightclub liquor brands to refrigerators and TVs, all between January and July 2023. Somewhat tellingly, one heist after another after another is documented with text messages prosecutors say were lifted from the defendants’ phones and correspond with the timeline of each crime.

And to be honest, the texts laid out by prosecutors make it look like the alleged beef thieves were having a lot of fun. “It was like a game to them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Bowerman said in a hearing in February, as reported by the Inquirer.

The phone chats detailed in the most recent superseding indictment, from December 2024, look at times shockingly unguarded, especially for crimes whose organization Philly police have sometimes described as sophisticated. Snow crabs, more beef, frozen chicken, yet more wings: The prosecuting document reads like one long joyful smorgasbord, complete with fridges to put the food in.

“Who need some big ass TVs” reads a text prosecutors say defendant Douglas “Ppg” Mathis sent to Saikeen “Killa” Dixon and others in January 2023, alongside photos of a label showing the model of an LG television that had been lifted off a truck in Northeast Philly the same day. Other texts are a little more explicit.

“Just hit another truck shooter” says another text in March, the day 49 cases of bright blue Hpnotiq liquor disappeared from a truck. In texts, the group proposed a meal of “liquor n cow feet.” On March 7th, the alleged haul was 10,000 pounds of turkey wings, and on March 10th it was nearly a dozen pallets of frozen beef. Prosecutors say some of the crew took pictures of themselves with the goods, posing not just with dimes but with allegedly pilfered vodka and seafood.

The 16 heists detailed in that federal indictment, each accompanied by text messages as corroboration, totaled $1.5 million. That case is scheduled to go to trial in August of this year. But some of the same names in that federal report also show up in a 2024 New Jersey arrest report over rest stop thefts up and down I-95. That sting ended with a state trooper treated in the hospital for minor injuries, after police said two of the suspects rammed an unmarked police car and two marked cruisers.

Other cases are pending across Pennsylvania, Ackerman says. Some of the defendants from the dimes case are also wrapped up in a 2023 carjacking case involving a FedEx truck and nine kilos of cocaine.

“We’re not talking about a plumber moonlighting in cargo theft,” says Ryan, who details a laundry list of even more suspected crimes not included in the indictment.

But there’s one name at the center of it all, say federal prosecutors and Philly police: Rakeim Savage, a.k.a. Roc, a.k.a. 24. The federal indictment from 2023 showed an excited text sent from Savage’s phone after the Walmart dime heist showed up in the news.

“We made it!” he texted, according to prosecutors.

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Savage is hardly a secretive figure. On an Instagram account prosecutors linked to him, @zoogang_24, Savage can be seen swimming with dolphins in Cancun, sporting a thick diamond “ZOO” necklace, indulging his love for Louis Vuitton, and holding up a middle finger beneath the street sign at 19th and Wingo.

In May 2023, a month or so after the truck full of dimes was robbed, the Zoo Gang 24 account posted a picture of Savage riding a horse in a bright blue Jamaican sea, wrapped in Louis Vuitton. “Some times I think why God keep blessing me and im committing sins!” reads the caption, hashtagged #BigZooGang.

On Instagram, Savage seems to be hanging with local rap star OT7 Quanny at his birthday party in June of 2024. In one video from the party, a fellow attendee with a diamond necklace and what appears to be a giant bag of weed proclaims that “longevity, financial freedom, and regeneration of wealth” would soon flow from “the biggest cannabis company in the world.”

Savage, say prosecutors in a separate indictment from July 2024, is a key figure in an interlocking group of North Philly crime families called Zoo Gang and Omerta — groups linked to seemingly every money-making endeavor on the books, and maybe a few new ones.

In that indictment, Savage and seven others are wrapped up in a federal RICO case that alleges assault with a deadly weapon, the murder of a 14-year-old boy, and a bungled murder-for-hire plan that left a 24-year-old woman dead and two other women injured — not to mention $2 million in financial fraud schemes.

Much of that alleged fraud centered around passing counterfeit bills and intimidating retail shop owners who didn’t want to take the money. Other parts of the indictment claim a scheme to file fraudulent pandemic assistance applications.

The most recent Instagram post on the Zoo Gang 24 account seems to show Savage in lockup. “JAILING NOT TELLING! LOCKED UP NOT FUCKED UP!” reads the November 11, 2024, post, which received more than a thousand likes and comment after comment declaring “free 24.”

“Free my great nephew,” wrote an Instagram account named Wanda’s Soul Food Catering. “Love you lil Roc.”

But in the end, the biggest and most successful cargo ring Philly has seen in modern memory may have been just a “sideline thing” to a far vaster enterprise, says Ryan: “It was low-hanging fruit.” In part, what may have made them so successful was their network of contacts all over the city, both for scouting loads worth stealing and for unloading goods after the fact.

That said, the millions of dollars in trailer burglary may have been the last gasp of the old ways. In the past few years, a modern wave of international thieves have invented crafty new ways to steal cargo that don’t involve a set of bolt cutters, says CargoNet’s Lewis. This “strategic theft” keeps him up at night, Lewis says. This new school of thieves might lift an entire cargo load by forging papers and impersonating legitimate trucking companies on online job boards.

These outfits might take a short-haul job in the guise of being a real company, then subcontract it out to another trucker. That trucker probably isn’t even a criminal. When they pick up their load, they might think they’re doing a legitimate job. The cargo is then directed to the wrong place, and it vanishes in the wind. Entire trailers might end up on shipping containers, sent to prearranged buyers overseas before anyone even knows they’re gone. Strategic theft, says Lewis, is still a minority of theft. But it’s shot up by nearly 1,500 percent in the past few years, now accounting for a third of all reported thefts.

Philly’s most recent round of beef banditry appears to have subsided for now, after the rash of indictments. Most of the cargo theft cases are still awaiting trial. And in April, Ackerman said Philly police hadn’t had a single cargo theft report in the 8th District this year.

The beef heists have mostly moved out to the suburbs, Ackerman says. “The city just got too hot for them,” he says, with evident pride. That said, police say it’s just a matter of time until another theft ring crops up in Philadelphia. And already in March, police thwarted the attempted theft of $55,000 in beef from a truck parked in South Philly.

“It’s like cutting the grass,” Ryan says. “They cut down all the weeds, and then they grow back. Eventually, somebody gets out of jail, and another generation will come up.”

Published as “The Beef Bandits of Nicetown” in the May 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.