WHEEL STEAL CARGO CRIME CRISIS

Chocolate, cheese, makeup, kegs of Guinness ... no commodity is safe from theft as criminal gangs operate with near impunity on Britain's roads. But as lorries get robbed, raided or hijacked, can one man stop this crime wave?

- By Stuart McGurk

IN AUGUST 2021, Mike Dawber, the UK's leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from officers in Bradford CID. They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of suspicious goods. Dawber drove an hour from his home, in the unmarked police car that doubles as his office, and arrived to discover the description barely did it justice.

As soon as he walked in to the first warehouse, he noticed 17 pallets of golfing equipment. They had, he knew, been stolen three weeks before from a truck at Lymm motorway services, just outside Manchester. He reckoned they were worth about £1m ($1.3m). As Dawber continued his survey, he came across 18 pallets of Asics trainers, stolen three years before, at Warwick services. Then 14 pallets of lawnmowers: five years before, from a truck on the A1 at Colsterworth. He came across IT equipment, sportswear, high-end fashion, electrical goods, toasters, microwaves, beauty products.

One pallet was simply labelled “Eyelash technology”. Dawber didn’t know what eyelash technology was, exactly, but he later learned that a pallet of it was worth more than £500,000.

Dawber did not need to consult the records to know much of this; in many ways, he is the records. Ask him, say, about the time someone tried to make off with a truck of Cadbury Creme Eggs, and Dawber will instantly tell you the date, the location, the true market value of the eggs, the location where the thief had travelled from and where he was arrested. When Nottinghamshire police stopped the driver of a Mercedes Sprinter van on false plates a couple of years ago, with an amount of Martell cognac in the back that didn't suggest stocking up for Christmas (2,300 bottles, worth about £250,000), their first call was to Dawber. He immediately identified that the goods had been stolen several hours earlier in Daventry, 130km away.

The driver was arrested. The goods were returned. You may have drunk the cognac.