Exclusive: The alarms in wine’s biggest heist were switched off from inside before masked thieves took off with 30,000 bottles worth over $8 million
Source: Fortune ·
Antinori’s wines are so sought after that counterfeiters have copied them for years. Now thieves have taken 30,000 real ones.
From the source
Masked thieves needed about three hours on a Saturday night to empty Marchesi Antinori’s warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, of about 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most collected wine. And they didn’t have to worry about tripping some alarms: they never went off. The day before the heist, the alarms had been switched off from inside the building, Lorenzo Vivoli, who works in Antinori’s communications office, told Fortune. “It’s as if they already knew everything,” Vivoli said in Italian. The thieves arrived with two trucks, and the bottles were ripe for the taking as they were already packed and waiting to get shipped to Antinori’s export markets. “It’s the biggest theft in the history of wine,” Vivoli said. “There’s never been anything this big.” “This is a theft of unprecedented scale for the wine industry in Italy, carried out by a group that was clearly highly organized and well prepared,” Antinori CEO Renzo Cotarella said. The crew took roughly 10,000 bottles each of Tignanello,…