While bidding
farewell to the old year and welcoming the new, this Christmas Eve story out of Canada should not be lost in the holiday news cycle: 

“Over a one-year period during 2011 and ’12,
some 6 million gallons of maple syrup – about $ 18 million worth – were stolen
from the ‘strategic maple syrup reserve’ controlled by the Federation of Quebec
Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ)…. Last week, three men were arrested in connection
with the heist.”

The Mounties have
ridden to the rescue, the arrest total reportedly has reached 18, and weightier issues can now be on the table
than a supply threat to the breakfast calorie count. Namely:

Producers around
the world closely protect their strategic assets – whether Middle Eastern petroleum
(OPEC), Japanese agricultural products (Nokyo), Colombian narcotics (Cali and
Medellin) or American professional football and basketball players (NCAA). So it
should not be surprising that the question is debated about Quebec, why our typically mild-mannered northern cousins
maintain a government-run cartel to promote market stability in the supply and
pricing of gourmet pancake toppings.

A better question,
though, is just how fully one-quarter of the national stock – the equivalent of
16,000 barrels of syrup – could have been siphoned out of
a warehouse described in the FPAQ’s own press release
as “secured by a fence and locks, and visited regularly.”

The question must
inevitably be asked, in short, “Where were the gate-keepers?”

Fortunately for the
appetites of the world’s luxury crepe-and-candy consumers, the thieves were
undone because they chose the hard way, working their felonious little scheme
on the liquid commodity itself. Their sticky footprints left a trail, because to monetize their scheme required a disposition
infrastructure – trucks and warehousing, a processing facility in
neighboring New Brunswick and a sales pipeline through which to channel their
slippery merchandise into the sweets-addicted US market. 

In this, they
suffered the detection risks of scams like that of India’s Satyam in 2009 –
where maintaining a roster of 13,000 phony employees would arouse the curious
to wonder about the absence of ancillary evidence – the ghost workers’
non-existent desks, telephones and withholdings and remittances for health care
and benefits.

Simpler, harder to
detect and far less messy, would have been the time-honored creation of
inventory that was fraudulent and fictitious from the outset. Consider these
classics:

• The
  great Salad Oil Scandal of 1968, by which Tino DeAngelis floated only enough
  vegetable oil on bulk tanks of water to fool auditors who looked and tasted
  from the top rather than tapping the tanks at the bottom.

• Equity
  Funding in 1970’s Los Angeles, with over-stated death benefit liabilities under
  fictitious life insurance policies turned into cash through a Ponzi scheme of
  cessions to reinsurers.

• The
  South American coffee shipper, showing tons of stock on its balance sheet and
  available for collateralized borrowings, in reality comprising only camouflaged
  piles of sand under thin layers of beans.

• Over-stated
  Texas cattle herds, sold to unwary urban tax-shelter buyers – it being no great
  trick to run the same calves repeatedly through a maze of corrals, past the
  clip-boards of credulous city slickers unwilling to dirty their suits to
  exercise the control of chalk-marking the forehead of each passing animal.

• Or the
  related German scheme by which a fleet of trucks was over-counted in their
  repair sheds by auditors distracted from the back parking lots, where the
  vehicles were re-cycled by simply switching their license plates and dashboard
  bar codes.

The examples are as
endless as the ingenuity of the criminal mind. Had the light-fingered Canadians
only thought through the vulnerabilities of their targeted provincial cartel’s
control system, they’d have kept their hands far cleaner while moving phony
paper rather than hot syrup.

And they’d have
made their illegal fortune while avoiding not just the brown sticky stuff, but what
will now be extended stays in government custody, where the pancakes in the prison
cafeteria will not be flavored with so much as a drop of down-market Aunt
Jemima’s.

Happy New Year to all. Thanks for joining
this dialog. Please share with friends and colleagues. Comments are welcome,
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