What the shell

Darius and Farshid Assemi left Iran and came to California from Iran in 1978. They built a huge business, the Touchstone Pistachio Company. Pistachio nuts are fairly popular here; those of us of a certain age remember when they used to be dyed red. It seems that long ago, harvesting and processing methods for the nuts left them splotchy and unattractive, like anyone cares what a nutshell looks like! It's the taste we like!

So they don't dye them anymore, which robbed me of the old joke about the kid eating pistachios in class being caught red-handed. But I moved on. And I learned that pistachios are a very big deal in Iran! They are "a cherished and beloved food" there, says the The Washington Post.  And the Assemi brothers have done well for themselves and for the central California economy. In 2020, pistachios accounted for more than 47,000 jobs and added $5.2 billion "with a B" to the economy.

And so, you know what comes next. Thieves.

Touchstone, being a smartly-run business, did an audit in June and found that they were missing 42,000 pounds of pistachios. 21 tons of tasty nuts gone! And it took exactly one day to crack the shell of this case.

The Sacramento Bee reports the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) got the theft report on June 17, and investigators determined that one of Touchstone's tractor-trailers had been driven from its parking spot on their lot in Delano to another location nearby.

They opened the trailer, did the police, and found all 42,000 pounds of the nuts inside. They had been removed from the original 2,000-lb bags and put into smaller bags for resale. 

The Sheriff's Office arrested 34-year-old Alberto Montemayor, the owner of Montemayor Trucking, and charged him in the theft. The sheriff said Montemayor, who contracted with the company to transport stock, was in a position to know how much stock was there for the taking.

Last year, Tulare County Sheriffs arrested a 23-year-old man for stealing two truckloads of nuts, with a value of $294,000. The TCSO points out that the appeal of pistachios as an item to be stolen, aside from their retail value, is that they are untraceable. No serial numbers, no way to identify one nut from another.

Nuts production is a big deal in Central California. The minor league baseball team is proudly known as the Modesto Nuts. And between 2014 and 2017, nut producers were ripped off to the tune of 7.6 million dollars.

At last report, Montemayor is awaiting trial, and could face up to three years and eight months in prison, according to the district attorney’s office.