Texas police first spotted the bizarre theft trend at the beginning of 1996, when Isomil, Similac and other popular brands of formula began disappearing from the shelves of chain stores like Wal-Mart. By the summer of 1997 there had been 120 reported thefts in northern Texas–and so many thousands of tins were missing that parents shopping for formula sometimes found empty shelves instead. Retailers even began yanking the powder from the aisles and dispensing it only on request.
Informants would eventually tell U.S. Customs investigators their strange story: small businessmen “of Arabic descent” were recruiting crack addicts, paying them about $6 for each can of stolen formula and sending the stockpiles to Ft. Worth warehouses to be repackaged and shipped to Iraq. The informants also allege that they were sometimes sent on three- and four-day “road trips” to Houston–all expenses paid, as long as they stole plenty of cans of milk. According to customs affidavits given to NEWSWEEK, the businessmen told their informal bands of shoplifters that the powder could be “sold in the Middle East for high profit because the Arab baby formula plants were destroyed by the United States during the gulf war.”
So far, there is no evidence that shipments of stolen milk powder have made it any farther than New Orleans (where police stopped a container truck carrying 5,343 cases of the stuff bound for the port of Newark, N.J.). But even as customs has widened its investigation to examine similar thefts in places from Arizona to Kentucky, some critics say the Iraqi connection is tenuous at best. Henry Hughes, a lawyer for an Arab immigrant targeted by the police in connection with a possible Lexington, Ky., baby-formula crime ring, insists that his client and others under investigation are not smuggling. Then what are they doing? According to Hughes, they’re just buying up discounted formula in states where prices are low and reselling it in high-price areas of the country.
Still, customs sources tell NEWSWEEK that they eventually expect to indict up to 60 people on federal charges related to the milk racket, and sting operations and raids in the Ft. Worth area over the summer seem to have helped curb thefts. (Wal-Mart has slowly gone back to stocking the formula out on the shelves.) But police admit that some of the smuggling rings will probably just set up shop in other locations. The market in Iraq, after all, doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
