In 2012 , Michel Gauvreau stepped into a characterless brick storage warehouse with a big problem on his hired man . The storage warehouse , located in the small Canadian town of Saint - Louis - Diamond State - Blandford , check one of the world ’s most precious stockpiles — nearly 16,000 gargantuan brake drum stacked to the roof , each containing $ 1,800 worth of maple syrup . Gauvreau , an accountant , was there to take inventory . His task : matter each one .
But as Gauvreau mount onto one of the 54 - gallon barrels to get a good panorama , it nearly tiptoe over . The cask was empty ! Gauvreau alerted the owners , and together they discover the same was true of nearly 1,000 more barrels . Six million pounds of syrup — deserving $ 18 million — had been steal . It was one of the large stealing in Canadian history .
To make the plot thick , this was n’t any quondam maple syrup warehouse . It was the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve , a cache contend by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers . The Federation is the sirup human beings ’s equivalent of OPEC . As a legal cartel , it oversees about 75 pct of the world ’s maple sirup supply , maintain large reserves to control orbicular syrup damage . That power has n’t made a lot of farmers in Quebec very glad , since they need the Federation ’s blessing to produce syrup to sell on the wholesale market place . latterly , a pitch-dark market for sirup has thunder — and this is what conduce some sticky - fingered thieves to siphon off the Federation ’s supply .
An investigation ensued . police force issued 40 search endorsement and interview nigh 300 the great unwashed . Detectives even did forensic analysis on syrup timpani and forklift . In 2013 , authorisation made close to 30 arrest . By the time the full story was revealed , they ’d learned that the stealer had lease a space in the warehouse and , over the course of a year , stealthily siphoned syrup while the guard were gone . While a reported two - one-third of the stolen syrup was eventually recovered , the rest disappeared in the marketplace . That ’s a lot of hotcake .
