Grand Theft Avo, anyone?
As avocado prices have climbed to roughly that of home ownership, it comes at little surprise that the Black Market™ would soon go green.
According to the L.A. Times, three men in America, Carlos Chavez, 28, of Oxnard; Rahim Leblanc, 30, also of Oxnard; and Joseph Valenzuela, 38, of Santa Paula, were arrested on suspicion of stealing over $300,000 worth of California avocados, flipping the goods through the back door of the Oxnard-based plant where they had worked together for several years.
As for the three men, what started as a lucrative plan to take advantage of that demand–selling partial pallets to customers and pocketing the extra cash–quickly went bad after Mission Produce, one of the largest avocado distributors in the world, received a tip that things weren't adding up at their processing center. When the company checked the surveillance tapes, the employees were, as they say, toast.
The lesson here? Don't pit where you eat.
