"stolen" news and stories

While one would expect that diamonds are a big draw for thieves, wines seem like a much less likely target. Luxist reports that one of the top restaurants in Sweden had its entire collection of French Bordeaux wines stolen - over 600 bottles of wine. The reason that this particular collection is so significant is that it holds the Guinness World Record for the most unique wine collection in the world. It included bottles from the six Grand Cru vineyards: Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Haut Brion, Chateau d'Yquem and Chateau Latour. All totaled, the value of the stolen bottles is around $500,000.

It seems likely that the bottles will be resold gradually over time and because a bottle of Mouton Rothschild is probably more difficult to track than diamonds are, the restaurant may not be able to recover its collection.

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Three people were charged yesterday by federal prosecutors for stealing confidential information from the Coca-Cola Company's Atlanta Headquarters. Joya Williams, administrative assistant to a top executive, Ibrahim Dimson and Edmund Duhaney "were arrested on charges of wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets," federal prosecutors said. Specifically, they stole insider documents and a bottled sample of one of Coke's newest, unreleased products and were planning to sell them to Coke rival, PepsiCo.

Dimson contacted Pepsi via a letter, mailed in an official Coca-Cola envelope, and asked for more than $80,000 for the stolen documents and drink sample. Pepsi contacted Coke and the authorities were brought in. The investigation culminated when an undercover FBI agent offered to pay $1.5 million for other trade secrets from Coke.

Both Coke and Pepsi complied with and assisted the FBI and other authorities during their investigation. Coke says that it will be difficult to overcome this "breach of trust" from Williams, who "[rifled] through corporate files and [stuffed] documents and a new Coca-Cola product into a personal bag" - actions which were caught on the company surveillance videos - and that they will review its "review its information protection policies, procedures and practices."

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Michael Bauer posted a very interesting story from a reader on his SF Chronicle blog, Between Meals. The gist of it is that, on Mother's Day, the reader and his family showed up at a restaurant, arriving at the time of their reservation, to find that their table (and name) had been taken by another, already seated, party. The manager must not have believed that this family had actually placed the original reservation because, instead of offering to seat the displaced patrons as soon as possible, offering them free drinks in compensation, or even double-checking the cell phone number on the reservation, he said "you need to wait until a vacancy occurs in the reservation list. As it is Mother's Day, and we have only so many tables available, it may be an hour or so." 

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A Concord, Mass., farm that grows produce for local charities recently reported 200 pounds of parsnips missing. According to The Concord Journal, it appears that someone snuck on to the property of volunteer-operated Gaining Ground and uprooted the tasty vegetables. So far, no arrests have been made. What's baffling is that the crops apparently aren't visible from the street and, according to Gaining Ground's coordinator, parsnips are hard to spot anyway. There's some speculation that this may have been an inside job. Hopefully it won't happen again. I really have to wonder how one even manages to abscond with 200 pounds of root vegetables.