Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar's Santo Tequila Trucks Hijacked in 'Double Heist.' Now $1M Worth of Tequila Is Missing (Exclusive)

Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar are upset after their joint tequila business is involved in a devastating incident.

Fieri tells PEOPLE exclusively that two truckloads of their Santo Tequila bottles are missing after being hijacked in Laredo, Texas.

The trucks carried 440 cases of tequila or 24,240 bottles, including Santo blanco, reposado and a specially made extra añejo, which took 39 months to make.

Santo president Dan Butkus estimates the total loss at about $1 million, with the effects on their supply chain even greater.

“We worked so hard,” says Fieri. “This is our best year we’ve ever had at Santo. We just had all this momentum, and now what’s on the shelf is all people are going to get.”

Santo tequila.

Santa

The company’s distiller in Mexico is “running 24/7 right now” trying to restock, according to Fieri.

However, he warns that the holiday season, their busiest season for sales, will see a shortage of Santas.

“Our distiller is an independent distiller who depends on our sales to make a living for himself and his team,” says Butkus. “My sales team, my marketing team, the entire Santo Spirits team depends on these sales… That’s the part that hurts me the most. We have to support these people both in the distillery and in the US, and we can’t do that right now without the revenue from these cases .”

Fieri was notified of the theft on November 14. Johanson’s ghost shipping partner began noticing some “red flags” over the weekend of Nov. 9-10, according to an incident report obtained by PEOPLE.

A representative for Johanson did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

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Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar.

Santa

One truck was expected to arrive at a warehouse in California and the other at one in Pennsylvania, but neither arrived at their destination.

Johanson then discovered that the loads were being “illegally double brokered” to different carriers, the report said.

“We believe the GPS tracking signal we tracked was spoofed using a GPS emulator application used by criminals,” the report said.

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“This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in the spirits industry in 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Butkus tells PEOPLE. “The theft of two of our trucks, four days apart, is so unusual, out of the norm, that we wonder why our trucks might have been targeted.”

Fieri suspects that “someone might try to break the momentum” Santo was gaining and said he was particularly perplexed that criminals attacked two trucks.

“I mean, one is one. But now you have to have twice as many people to pull off a double heist,” he says. “It just seems a lot riskier to take two trucks.”

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The Laredo Police Department, the Los Angeles Cargo Criminal Apprehension Team and the federal organization CargoNet are investigating the incidents.

“Analysis of data from Verisk CargoNet predicts that cargo theft reached an all-time high in 2024 and will be more than 25 percent higher than in 2023,” a Verisk spokesperson told PEOPLE.

They add that much of the theft in 2023 was related to hard seltzer, but this year spirits like Santa are being targeted “almost exclusively.”

Santo reposado.

Santa

“It is unlikely that they will find these truckers,” says Butkus. “They probably rent a truck, get a quote, take a load, sell it and then disappear. There are some phone lines we have from them that are already down.”

Still, Fieri says they plan to make a $10,000 bid to try to get at least the extra añejo back “because it’s like the crown jewel of the company, something we’ve been working on. You can’t reproduce something that takes four years to make.”

He compares the incident to the 1978 Lufthansa robbery, which inspired a number of films, including Good guys.

“It’s like a movie — I never in a million years thought this would go down like this,” says Fieri, “but it really did.”

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Source: HIS Education