Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the
detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles
Police Department during the months they spent investigating the
rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out.
What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his
giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a
self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping
containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him
numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a
police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep
over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had,
jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who
supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric
for him.”
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.
In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going
through a strange revival.
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