Indictments were handed down by a California grand jury last week against a gang of accused thieves who targeted trucks delivering everything from jewelry to electronics over several months in 2022.
The jewelry heist was worth more than $100 million, according to the indictment. In announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Central District of California described it as likely “the largest jewelry heist in U.S. history.” It added that some of the jewelry was recovered after a June 16 search.
There are seven defendants in total in the indictment by a grand jury sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. All seven were charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit theft from interstate and foreign shipment and theft from interstate and foreign shipment, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The other charges involve various counts of conspiracy.
The indictment puts the date of the thefts from early March 2022 to mid-July of the same year. In discussing the actions that resulted in the charges, the indictments refer to “persons known and unknown,” suggesting other indictments might be possible.
In a trucking market where freight fraud has become a major issue, but involving trickery and deceit in the logistics of booking a shipment and seeing it through to a possibly false consignee, the methods employed by the indicted persons in their alleged fraud were far more direct, according to the indictment. And it is likely to put fear into truck drivers, though such thoughts are always omnipresent on the road.
The seven “would use multiple vehicles to follow victim truck drivers carrying interstate and foreign shipments of jewelry, Samsung and Apple electronics, and other merchandise to a stopping point, including truck stops, where they could rob, steal, unlawfully take, and unlawfully carry away the merchandise from the victims,” according to the indictment.
Some of the gang of seven would serve as lookouts while their co-conspirators would break into the trucks they followed, according to the indictment.
But the theft would not always take place while the driver was in the truck stop or some other place, the indictment said. At times it involved “force and threat of force in the victims’ presence,” the indictment said.
While the indictment refers to “semis” as some of the trucks the group targeted, it is a box truck that draws the most explicit description of a direct threat to a driver.
‘Will F you up’
In March 2022, according to the indictment, the group followed a box truck carrying Apple AirTags that was headed to a warehouse in Fontana, California.
The driver stopped for food. The group went to work on stealing the Apple AirTags. But when the driver returned to the truck and found the ongoing robbery, one conspirators yelled at him “Don’t move, or I will f____ you up!” The indictment said the person who yelled that also was holding a knife.
The group got away with the AirTags, worth $57,377, according to the indictment.
The biggest heist among those spelled out in the indictment was the $100 million-plus theft of jewelry.
According to the indictment, the planning for the jewelry heist began in July 2022 by surveilling a jewelry exhibition in San Mateo, California.
The indictment spells out that the show was scouted for several days prior to the theft. When a Brinks truck described as a semitruck left the show, the defendants who had been watching the exhibition sprung into action. They followed the truck for about 300 miles to truck stops in Buttonwillow and Lebec, both in California, where the conspirators snatched the jewelry.
24 bags, 100 million bucks
There is nothing in the indictment about any sort of confrontation between the drivers and the alleged thieves over the jewelry theft. The 24 bags of loot the co-conspirators took were valued at more than $100 million, according to the indictment.
Among the other successful robberies spelled out in the indictment were two thefts of Samsung Electronics: a theft worth just over $14,000 in May 2025 from a semitruck at a Fontana truck stop and a much larger theft worth $240,573. That one came when the truck driver was stopped at a store in Ontario, California.
The seven indicted individuals charged in the indictment are Carlos Victor Mestanza Cercado, Jazael Padilla Resto (who goes by three other names as well), Pablo Raul Lugo Larroig, who also goes by Walter Loza, Victor Hugo Valencia Solorzano, Jorge Enrique Alban, Jeson Nelon Presilla Flores and Eduardo Macias Ibarra.
According to an Associated Press report on the indictment, two of the seven who were indicted were arrested. A third was already in prison in Arizona. But as of Tuesday, the others had not been arrested.
The U.S. Attorney’s prepared statement on the indictments did not disclose any information on the whereabouts of the seven besides the co-conspirator in jail in Arizona.
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