A onetime Chicago resident was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in federal prison Monday for stealing a semitrailer containing $175,000 worth of Wrigley candy from a Romeoville trucking facility in 2012.
Roderick Earl Nunn, 40, pled guilty to stealing the sweet cargo in March 2012, according to a release from the U.S. attorney’s office of the Western District of Michigan.
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Nunn was arrested on April 15, 2012, on a Michigan stretch of Interstate 94 as he drove to Detroit to fence the stolen goods. The arrest was the culmination of a career of stealing semitrailer cargo that U.S. prosecutors valued at roughly $8 million, although his pre-sentencing report only counted eight prior thefts totaling about $900,000 as conduct relevant to the candy heist.
Court records show that Nunn’s candy heist was foiled by broken tail lights on the big rig he stole from Romeoville.
Nunn and two others, who prosecutors said were never charged in connection with the case, arrived at the Wrigley Midwest Distribution Center parking lot in Romeoville in the early hours of April 15, 2012, according to court records.
A plan had been hatched with an employee of the distribution center that involved Nunn and his two cohorts making off with a semitrailer full of Wrigley gum, according to court records.
Nunn and his associates drove from Memphis to the residence of Nunn’s occasional girlfriend, who lived in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood, according to court records.
The girlfriend’s relative worked at Wrigley and was the inside man, but when Nunn and the others arrived at the distribution center between 1 and 2 a.m., their intended cargo was nowhere to be found, according to court records.
“Undeterred,” Nunn and the others “found a different tractor and trailer loaded with Wrigley candy products at a nearby facility,” court records state.
Nunn used a master blank key to access the tractor, but the key would not work on the ignition, “so he hot-wired it,” according to court records.
They left Romeoville and headed to Detroit to meet their fence.
Near Marshall, Mich., a local police officer noticed that the three lights on top of the trailer were out and began to initiate a traffic stop, according to court records.
When the officer activated his overhead lights, “the truck did not pull over, and a 15-minute chase ensued,” during which one of Nunn’s cohorts jumped out of the truck and hid in a field, according to court records.
Once the runaway semi was pulled over, police determined that the trailer contained 39,000 pounds of candy worth about $175,000 that was supposed to have been shipped to Texas, according to court records.
Surveillance footage also showed Nunn engaged in a theft from Wrigley in May 2011, according to court records.
Nunn was typically paid 10 percent of the value of each stolen load by his fence in Detroit and then laundered the money via Western Union to various bank accounts, according to court records.
Western Union records showed Nunn wiring nearly $475,000 to his bank account between 2006 and 2011, while his girlfriend wired about $346,000 to the same account.
Based on his cut of 10 percent, “the true value of the goods he stole in 2006-2011 was therefore approximately $8 million,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Clay Stiffler wrote.
Nunn has “a lengthy criminal history consisting of 15 convictions dating back to 1995, when he was 21 years old,” Stiffler wrote. Among the items he was convicted of stealing were Freon, computers and microwaves.
“Nunn has been stealing cargo for 16 years, undeterred by any prior sentence of imprisonment,” Stiffler wrote.
Nunn’s father, Earl Stanley Nunn, also stole cargo and sometimes fenced his stolen wares in Chicago, according to a release earlier this year from the U.S. attorney’s office of the Western District of Missouri.
Earl Stanley Nunn pled guilty in July to the May 2013 theft of a semitrailer full of more than $73,000 worth of canned corn in Missouri, according to the Missouri district release. Roderick Earl Nunn was named as a co-conspirator in that case, according to the release.
Earl Stanley Nunn owned a trucking company and “was the leader of a cargo theft ring” that used the resources of his company, according to the Missouri district release.
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In Roderick Earl Nunn’s sentencing memorandum, his public defender disputed the allegations that Nunn was involved in the theft of numerous other trucks, writing that the accusations were made by the cohort who jumped out of the stolen semi.