Three men caught in Brooklyn with $1M worth of stolen eels

Cops set the hook and caught a trio of slippery crooks in Brooklyn on Monday in a million-dollar frozen eel heist.


The men were nabbed with a truckful of boxes of the slippery delicacy nearly three months after the theft, authorities said.

The high-end barbecue-style eels were shipped from China to Maher Terminal in Elizabeth, N.J., on June 1, and that’s when the thieves struck, cops said.
They hired a truck driver as an unwitting accomplice, provided him with fake paperwork and had the eels picked up at the terminal, according to police said.
The driver headed to a spot in Borough Park, where the eels were loaded into another truck — and vanished. The caper scored 2,000 boxes of eels, valued at $1.04 million.
Cops arrested three men, Wei Da Li, 39, of Queens, Sheauloon Yat, 51, of Brooklyn, and Fa Deng, 36, also of Brooklyn, charging them with felony criminal possession of stolen property.

In all, police recovered 200 boxes of eels from the men’s truck and another 745 from their warehouse, cops said.

“It’s a small company. This could kill the company,” said the Mars Global representative. “Unfortunately, we didn’t recover the whole thing. It’s a lot of money.”