Thieves Steal $1 Million Worth Of Guy Fieri’s Santo Tequila In A Brazen Heist

Someone must really love Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar’s Santo Tequila, because 4,040 cases just went missing. The heist occurred in Laredo, Texas and involved two whole trucks filled with 24,240 bottles of Santo blanco, reposado, and an añejo that took 39 months to make. According to Santo president, Dan Butkus, the total estimated loss is $1 million. 

“We’ve worked so hard,” says Fieri. “This is our best year we’ve ever had in Santo. We just had all this momentum, and now whatever’s on the shelf is all people are going to get.”

With the holiday season approaching, Santo is in a serious bind and has put its distiller in Mexico “on a 24/7 schedule” to restock the supply. The time constraints, however, mean that Santo will inevitably be in short supply. 

“Our distiller is an independent distiller who’s dependent on our sales for his livelihood and that of his team,” Butkus says. “My sales team, my marketing team, the entire Santo Spirits team is dependent upon these sales. … That’s sort of the piece that’s most hurtful to me. We’ve got to support these people both at the distillery and in the U.S., and we can’t do that right now without the revenue from these cases.”

According to an incident report obtained by PEOPLE, Santo’s trucking partner Johanson notified Fieri about the theft on November 14. The trucks were “illegally double brokered” to different carriers, says Johanson. “We believe the GPS tracking signal we were monitoring was spoofed by a GPS emulator application used by the criminals,” the report states. 

The local police department contacted Verisk CargoNet to investigate the theft. “Data analytics from Verisk CargoNet project that cargo theft has reached an all-time high in 2024 and will be over 25 percent higher than in 2023,” according to a spokesperson for Verisk. 

Fieri plans to put out a $10,000 finder’s fee for anyone who recovers the añejo, at least. “It’s like the crown jewel of the company, something that we’ve been working on. You can’t reproduce something that takes four years to make.”

Butkus, however, is less optimistic. “It’s unlikely that they’ll find these truckers. They probably rent the truck, get the bid, get the cargo, sell it, and then disappear. There are some phone lines we have from them that are already disconnected.”