In a bold heist pretty much guaranteed to prevent scurvy, a family of five from a town near Seville, Spain attempted to steal almost 9000 pounds of oranges using a little Suzuki Esteem sedan and what looks like A Daewoo wagon. Damn. That’s a lot of oranges.
The citrus-obsessives, consisting of a married couple and their three adult sons, none of whom had scurvy, appear to have stolen the oranges from a warehouse in the town of Carmona.
The scurvy-free family was found a few hours after the ship had reported the theft; police officers noticed the cars driving erratically, and followed them down a dirt road before stopping the two cars.
Of course, once the police stopped the cars, they saw they were crammed full of oranges, some packed in sacks, but many, many just loose in the cars.
The family had a pretty solid story, though: see, they just found the oranges. They claimed “they came from very far away and had been picking them up from the ground,” which is just something that anyone driving anywhere totally does. Over and over.
Keep in mind that they had over 4,000 kilograms—about 8,800 pounds—of oranges, and if we assume an average orange weighs about 140 grams, that comes to about, oh, 26,400 oranges.
That’s a lot of stops to pick up random oranges.
A third vehicle was later found, a van, also crammed full of oranges. If we want to roughly estimate how many oranges were in each of those small, compact cars, let’s assume the van held the bulk of the oranges—say 16,000 of the 26,000 or so oranges.
That leaves a very reasonable 10,000 to divide between the cars, so I suspect each car had around 5,000 oranges. Maybe the Wagon had 6,000 and the sedan had 4,000. That’s still a hell of a lot of oranges.
How the hell did they pull off taking all those oranges only a few hours before, without getting noticed? Cramming loose oranges into cars seems like a messy, awkward heist to pull off. I’m more than a little impressed.
Medical tests on the family reported no incidents of scurvy, I imagine.
CORRECTION: Carmona is not on the water. It seems to have been a warehouse, not a ship! Thanks, Juan!