Thieves Break Into Vehicle and Make Off With $200,000 … in Dimes

The police officers arrived at a Walmart parking lot in Northeast Philadelphia early Thursday, around sunrise, to respond to a call about a possible theft from a tractor-trailer.

As they surveyed the lot, they saw a striking sight: thousands of dimes scattered on the pavement, shimmering in silver clusters that stretched widely.

The tractor-trailer had been transporting $750,000 worth of dimes from the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia to Florida. Officers kept busy picking up the coins, the police said, and tallied the amount that had been stolen by a group of 10 or so men at about $200,000 — or roughly two million dimes, weighing about 10,000 pounds.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Officer Miguel Torres, a spokesman with the Philadelphia Police Department, said on Friday night as the department continued its investigation into a bold theft that has raised several perplexing questions.

Among them: How did the men, whom the authorities are still working to identify and arrest, lug so many dimes into their white Chrysler 300 and dark-colored pickup truck? Did they know the vehicle was carrying such loot?

And how do they plan to cash in such an enormous quantity of dimes, the smallest widely used coin in America, when workers will probably not react kindly to being paid with bundles of change bearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face?

“That’s the weird part about this,” Officer Torres said. “How do they expect to use it?”

Investigators are reviewing surveillance footage from the parking lot. Detectives have interviewed the driver of the tractor-trailer, but it is unclear what they may have gleaned from him.

Capt. Jack Ryan of the Philadelphia Police Department told NBC 10, a local television station, that the driver had parked the tractor-trailer in the Walmart lot overnight Wednesday and slept elsewhere before a long day of driving south. When he returned early Thursday, Captain Ryan said, he discovered that the tractor-trailer had been broken into.

He said that “it’s normal in the trucking industry” for drivers to pick up a load and then get some sleep because of rules that dictate how long they can be on the road per day. Captain Ryan added that his department had seen other instances of tractor-trailer cargo thefts in which other goods, like TVs and alcohol, were stolen.

Officials believe the group of thieves brought a pair of bolt cutters with them to break the lock of the tractor-trailer, Officer Torres said. It is possible, he added, that the men may not have not known that the vehicle was carrying millions of dimes, which are 1.35 millimeters thick and 0.705 inches in diameter. It’s unclear how the dimes were packaged in the tractor-trailer.

The coins originated from the U.S. Mint Philadelphia Facility, which also produces commemorative coins authorized by Congress and medals. The U.S. Mint did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Friday night.

Aaron J. Chalfin, a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it “seems unlikely to be a random crime and was probably committed by a person or people who knew that the money would be there.”

“Millions of dimes is a lot of money,” he said, “so it doesn’t seem so silly.”

An overhead shot of the parking lot shows the dimes sprinkled across the lot, near the back of the tractor-trailer, and faintly twinkling as daylight beamed down. Two garbage-like cans are also visible in the video, as well as officers standing nearby.

Officers spent hours tediously picking up the scattered dimes, collecting the change in buckets to later get a full accounting of the theft, Officer Torres said.

As the department continues its investigation, he offered some advice to those possibly harboring stuffed piggy banks.

“If for some reason you have a lot of dimes at home,” Officer Torres said, “this is probably not the time to cash them in.”