Grace Sharkey and I traded five cargo crime stories for a Halloween edition of Freight Friends. Every one of them turns on the same weak spot: the moment freight changes hands, and the question of who is really holding it.
We start in Turfan on the Silk Road in the 670s. A merchant vanished on the road to Kucha, and his brother sued for 275 bolts of silk with no contract and only two witnesses. Grace takes us to Chicago in 1982, when someone laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide and Johnson & Johnson pulled about 31 million bottles off the shelves. That recall is the reason pill bottles come sealed today.
From there it's Henry Every's 1695 raid on the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai, worth around $4 million per pirate in today's wages. Grace follows with the ghosts of the St. Lawrence River: the Empress of Ireland sinking in 14 minutes, the villages flooded for the Seaway in 1958 and the freighter that later sank near them. I close with the Reno Gang, who robbed a moving train outside Seymour, Indiana in 1866.
Each story ends with how the same crime looks now, from container theft on China-Europe freight trains to break-ins at rail yards in Chicago, Los Angeles and Memphis.
In this episode
Why a Tang dynasty court gave two witnesses the same weight as a signed contract
How the 1982 Tylenol recall led to tamper-evident packaging and the Federal Anti-Tampering Act
How much each pirate took home from the Ganj-i-Sawai
The captain who caught a murderer by wireless, then survived the Empress of Ireland
Why the Renos robbed a moving train out in the country instead of a depot
Who's in our upcoming Cargo Crime guide on CargoRex
Coming soon: the Cargo Crime guide
At the IANA Intermodal Expo in Long Beach, I recorded six interviews with people who fight cargo crime for a living. They're the heart of our Cargo Crime guide, coming to CargoRex Research the first week of November.
Scott Cornell, SPG Cargo & Logistics and TAPA
Joe Ohr, NMFTA
Bernardo Mendez Arista, GateIn AI
Reed Loustalot, Truck Parking Club
Jared Palmer, EPIC Insurance Brokers
Kristy Knichel, Knichel Logistics
Cargo Crime guide on CargoRex Research
Links from the episode
Grace Sharkey on LinkedIn
Orderful
NMFTA Threat Report Portal, for reporting cargo crime and fraud anonymously
Freight fraud and identity verification companies on CargoRex
More Source to Porch stories
Companies mentioned on CargoRex
SPI Logistics
Orderful
NMFTA
GateIn AI
EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants
Knichel Logistics
Related company listings on CargoRex
Arviem
CargoNet by Verisk
MarineTraffic
Amsted Digital Solutions
Related episodes
Freight Friends: State of Cargo Crime, South American Logistics, and Wicked Dolls
What I Learned at IANA Expo 2026: Cargo Crime, Rail and Autonomous Freight
The Business Case for Paranoia: Best-Of Cargo Crime & Fraud Prevention
$13B Halloween Supply Chains, China's Rare-Earth Grip, and Should You Even Start a Podcast?
Sources for the stories
At Legal Crossroads: Tang Law and Foreigners in Seventh-Century Turfan, China Hands
Chicago Tylenol murders, Wikipedia
Henry Every, Wikipedia
Ganj-i-Sawai, Wikipedia
RMS Empress of Ireland, Wikipedia
Lost Villages, Wikipedia
Reno Gang, Wikipedia
China-Europe freight train trips up 10.8-fold in a decade, CGTN
Maritime piracy in 2026 fell to 1992 levels despite Somalia, Yemen surge, The Maritime Executive
Freight train robberies cost millions, Fortune
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