Wine Theft Was Like 'Something Out of Ocean's Eleven'

Nazmul Haque Helal had gotten burglary alarm notifications on his phone before, but they had all been false alarms. The alerts that came in on June 30 weren't, and what he found when he arrived at his wine shop in Venice, California, just before 5am chilled him: Some 600 of his most precious bottles had been taken from the cellar of Lincoln Fine Wines, the store he opened some 15 years prior. Above the place where they had rested: a 5-foot by 3-foot hole in the roof.

The Washington Post reports surveillance video captured a white truck with no license plate arriving at the scene shortly before midnight; a masked man exited, accessed the roof, and cut the hole. Some 50 minutes later, the thief used a rope to enter the 55-degree wine cellar and blocked the camera in it using tape. "It was like something out of Ocean's Eleven. We just couldn't believe it," store manager Nick Martinelle tells CNN. No alarm sounded at that point. Stackable crates kept in the cellar were used by the thief to go in and out the hole, says Helal. Hours later, around 4am, the alarm was finally triggered.

By that point, the thief was near the front of the store and had broken a glass liquor shelf. Helal says the intruder dropped a bottle of whiskey and fled through the ceiling. Nearly a third of the 2,000 bottles that were in the cellar had been taken. Helal says the bottles had price tags on them, and that the priciest ones—including a $4,500 bottle of Chateau Petrus 2016—were taken. "To lose 10, 15 year's worth of work overnight is devastating. I'm not sure if I will recover emotionally," he tells the Los Angeles Times. His customers are trying to aid in that recovery though. "Some customers offered hugs and condolences. Others doubled their orders and said they would be back soon," the Times observes.

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CNN reports Helal is compiling a list of what was taken and will provide it to local buyers and auction houses in the hope the thief tries to unload some of it. Martinelle dubbed the crime "creepy" in that the thief seemingly knew where on the roof to pinpoint and that some of the most precious bottles were stored in drawers rather than displayed on shelves. (More wine stories.)