An Ice Cream Crime Ring Is Pillaging New York Drugstores

Last October, a group of thieves made off with an unlikely pile of loot from a drugstore in downtown Manhattan: 197 pounds of ice cream.

Now, the New York Post is reporting that the heist is part of a larger scheme to steal ice cream from stores like Duane Reade and CVS and sell it to smaller corner stores elsewhere in the city, who can then stock their freezers with pricey pints at a discount. Which means, if you’re eating a fancy pint of gelato with some bad freezer burn from a bodega and it seems suspiciously cheap, well, there may be a reason. 

In February, the Post reports, cops caught seven frozen-dairy shoplifters, including one responsible for an almost-$1700 ice cream crime spree. Still, pints of ice creams like Talenti and Ben & Jerry’s continue to disappear off the shelves of Manhattan drugstores at a rate that’s downright criminal. During one heist, 224 pints were lifted from a midtown Duane Reade; in another, 148 pints disappeared from a CVS that had already been looted for its ice cream twice already. 

According to a manager at that CVS, the thieves take pints over the course of an hour, so no one gets caught with a sack full of ice cream thrown over his shoulder like some kind of evil dessert Santa Claus. However, we would still like a detailed breakdown of how one person can smuggle hundreds of pints of ice cream out of a store undetected.

[h/t Grub Street]