Are Your Bedrock Sandals Actually Stolen?

(Illustration: Joseph McDermott)

The Great Bedrock Clog Heist

Published: Oct 8, 2024

How a small outdoor footwear company lost 5,000 pairs of shoes and found itself entangled in an international crime saga

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Matt McAdow was sitting on a cardboard box in a Montana warehouse, tapping out emails on a laptop and waiting for his shoes to arrive. It was Monday, September 18, 2023, a pivotal moment for , a boutique footwear company headquartered in Missoula. The shoes, Bedrock’s first to be manufactured overseas, were supposed to have arrived four days earlier. McAdow, director of operations, had spent months coordinating photo shoots, producing marketing collateral, and figuring out how to fill a 10,000-unit order for Bedrock’s new mountain clogs—in three colors of suede and nubuck. Cofounder Dan Opalacz was excited that the rollout would occur a week before his first son was due to be born. “It was all lining up with these big work and life milestones,” he says. “Then everything backfired and created more work than I ever could have imagined.”

Unlike Bedrock’s other sandals, assembled by the company in California, the clogs were manufactured in Busan, South Korea, then sent to Los Angeles in a 40-foot shipping container, with the first batch arriving at Long Beach port on Monday, September 11. A total of 447 cartons were scheduled to be loaded into a truck for direct delivery to Bedrock’s warehouse outside Missoula by noon on Thursday, September 14, five days ahead of the biggest product launch in Bedrock’s 12-year history. But when noon arrived, with the ten-person warehouse team ready to receive, quality-check, and prep the inventory for shipping, the clogs were nowhere to be seen.

A message arrived from Landstar System, hired to oversee logistics, revealing that the truck had “mechanical issues” and would arrive by 8 A.M. the following day. This unfortunate news was accompanied by a screenshot of the truck’s location on Google Maps, just a few hours away. Friday morning came but the clogs did not, and McAdow says that the Bedrock crew went into the weekend “bummed, but not suspicious” about the spotty information they’d received. A Monday arrival would crunch QC time and possibly delay some orders, but they’d manage.

Monday again brought no truck, but there was an update from Landstar’s supposed “dispatcher,” who indicated that the driver’s phone was turned off. The dispatcher also relayed the unsettling possibility that the driver “likes to party” and sometimes drank a lot on weekends. This was the last straw as far as McAdow was concerned. He printed out photos of the driver’s license and of the blue and orange truck that had been provided by the shipping company, and scoured several truck stops in the Missoula area looking for his clogs. No luck. Nor were there signs of anyone at the pulloff where, according to the dispatcher, the driver had stopped to sleep. “I was concerned that this guy may have passed out or had a heart attack in some random yard,” McAdow says. A diesel mechanic across the street from the pulloff told him about a truck headed for Seattle that matched the description, but it turned out to be unrelated.

McAdow was now seriously worried that something shady was going on. He went home and, from his kitchen table, researched the driver’s name online, found his cell number, and dialed it. A voice answered. When McAdow identified himself as “Matt from Bedrock Sandals,” the man on the other end asked McAdow to call him back in ten minutes. He proceeded to give McAdow the runaround. Later that day, someone called from a Google Voice number with a Los Angeles area code. The new caller had a thick Eastern European accent and could barely be heard above the background noise. He said that he was in Salt Lake City, driving the truck with “the goods” inside. He explained that the previous driver had hired him to assume responsibility for the load, a frowned-upon but legal practice referred to as double brokering.

“I’m not gonna lie, man,” said the trucker, who identified himself only as Mick. “I’ll have it there tomorrow.”

Bedrock Sandals has nine employees, including Opalacz and his cofounder, Nick Pence. Both former AmeriCorps geologists, they were living on sailboats in San Francisco Bay when they started the company in 2011, working from a 20-by-25-foot shed used to build Burning Man installations. In 2016, after prototyping footwear for almost five years—a process that included an 1,800-mile through-hike of New Zealand’s Te Araroa Trail—Bedrock launched its original Cairn sandal, which had a tractioned Vibram sole, minimalist webbing with a cinch that made it secure enough to walk, run, and even backpack in, and a thong-style strap running between the big and second toes. The do-it-all design became popular with outdoor recreationists, who loved the idea of a sandal that performed like a trail-running shoe even while users wore socks in the cold.

By 2017, Bedrock had more than doubled its revenue, and it continued to refine the Cairn and subsequent Cairn Pro II, adding a durable Vibram Megagrip rubber sole, an anatomically shaped footbed, and other tweaks. In 2018, the company transitioned from in-house manufacturing to contracting out assembly to a partner in California. It grew 70 percent that year. As Opalacz recalls: “We went from a micro-cottage business in 2016, selling 10,000 pairs, to a legitimate small business” that pumped out 75,000 units a year. He and Pence moved the company to Montana in 2019, to be more immersed in the outdoors and the interests of its customer base.

McAdow accused Mick of deception and received a heated response: “Dont contact me man you are disrespecting me … I will be there in 7 hours come and talk to my face, also bring in cash 2000$ to give me by hand or I will not unload this shit.”

In February 2023, Bedrock released the initial run of its first closed-toe, open-back mountain clog, billing it as a “crossover shoe for cool morning commutes, fall hikes, and campfire hangs.” They sold 5,000 pairs in just a few weeks. Eight thousand people signed up for restock notifications, and unboxing videos on TikTok went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments.

“That virality was sending literally 10,000 people per day to our website, up from around 2,000,” Opalacz says. “Influencers sometimes give us a bump, but this was on the level of fiendish.” Demand for Bedrock’s hot-ticket clogs shot up. Unfortunately, so did their value to thieves.

Comic illustration of a truck pulled up next to some shipping containers — (Illustration: Joseph McDermott)

Cartoon illustration of police officers searching a Bedrock warehouse — (Illustration: Joseph McDermott)

In Missoula, McAdow filed a police report while continuing to exchange text messages with the mystery man who called himself Mick, asking for proof of what he’d been told and for photos of the bill of lading, the broken lock on the trailer (in double-brokered deals, drivers break the original lock), and the missing merchandise.

Mick, whose responses usually came after a 15-minute delay, mistakenly sent photos of a truckload of Hey Dude shoes, not Bedrocks. He followed up with an image of Bedrock boxes after McAdow called him out, texting: “Our cargo is not ‘hey dude’ footwear.” To which Mick responded, “I mistakenly send you another pic. Wait few hours you will get it man I am driving cant argue with you via the phone. Will do it face to face.” Quickly pivoting, Mick acted as if this was a test. “I was trying to see u are customrr or somr liar shit. As you know the product you are the real,” he said.

McAdow accused Mick of deception and received a heated response: “Dont contact me man you are disrespecting me. Go fuck yourself I will be there in 7 hours come and talk to my face, also bring in cash 2000$ to give me by hand or I will not unload this shit.” He repeatedly changed the estimated delivery time—first to noon on Tuesday, then to 7 P.M.—and went dark when business hours ended.

Bedrock missed the clogs’ launch date, alerting customers that they would be delayed, and started the insurance-claim process. Meanwhile, by Wednesday morning, the first of the unreleased clogs—in a new sage color—showed up for sale on eBay. A seller in Los Angeles offered to ship them for $99, less than two-thirds the retail price.

The news was shocking to Bedrock and to many of its customers, who made it clear online, after the company announced on social media that its merchandise had been hijacked, that they had no idea this kind of cargo theft was even a thing. But law enforcement officials weren’t surprised. Such theft has skyrocketed in the past four years. But the numbers surged in 2023, and 2024 is on track for another record high.

According to CargoNet, a data-analytics and risk-assessment firm that monitors cargo theft, incidents were up 59 percent in 2023 compared with the previous year, amounting to more than $330 million in stolen goods. CargoNet’s 2023 First Quarter Supply Chain Risk Trends report stated, “Theft reports in nearly every category … increased. Fictitious pickups increased by 1375% year-over-year and 30% from previous all-time highs established last quarter.” Another report pointed out that much of the increase is a result of “ongoing shipment misdirection attacks, a kind of strategic cargo theft in which actors use stolen motor carrier and logistics broker identities to obtain freight.” Reporting this kind of theft isn’t mandatory, and many companies hire private investigators to avoid insurance-premium hikes and high deductibles, which means that the true number could be much higher.

“Everyone in this space has said it’s the worst it’s ever been in their entire 40-to-50-year careers,” says Jimmy Menges, national director at Marine Intelligence and Solutions, a private investigation firm hired by Landstar to locate the clogs. “Law enforcement numbers and manpower are down across the country, and more money goes to investigating drugs and murders,” he adds. “There used to be a lot more dedicated cargo-theft task forces in the FBI and local law enforcement, but they’ve been disbanded.” The prosecution rate isn’t high in many states, and Menges speculates that the rich rewards and reduced risk profile make cargo theft more attractive than other kinds of theft.

For Opalacz, who’d never heard of cargo theft before his company got hit, the situation was maddening. “After experiencing all this, my take was, ‘Damn it, this industry is so sketchy,’ ” he says. News reports show security footage of retail stores getting ransacked by street thieves, but as Opalacz is now well aware, large-scale, organized cargo theft is happening nationwide, inside warehouses and through misdirected shipments, pummeling the supply chain and passing higher costs on to consumers.

“My son was born a week after the theft, and I took virtually no paternity leave while dealing with this, crunching numbers to see if we were going to survive the hit, initiating insurance claims, and poring over cargo marine policy,” Opalacz says. “My wife was definitely fucking mad that I was spending so much time on it. It was all I could think and talk about.”

High-end fashion and luxury brands deal with this issue all the time, as do other shoe brands, such as Hey Dude (owned by Crocs), which Mick may have accidentally revealed as another victim of the same criminal enterprise. In 2022, Sketchers sued a shipping company for losing 247 cartons of its footwear. Large companies receive hundreds of containers per year and will frequently write off any theft after taking the insurance money, but when an entire container is stolen from a small company like Bedrock, it’s a big deal. On average, insurance claims take a year to process and often only cover the cost of making the shoes, not lost revenue or overhead.

“It sucks,” says Menges. “You hate to see this happen, especially for smaller companies just starting to have some momentum. It completely disrupts their business and finances.”

There’s a black market for just about everything, with electronics, food and beverage, and household goods ranking as the three most targeted categories. Last year cargo thieves stole a $50,000 shipment of refrigerated yogurt headed for Florida and demanded a $40,000 ransom. Thieves can always find a reseller, but the chances of recovery are substantially higher when investigation begins in the first 48 to 72 hours, according to Menges. Law enforcement will begin by looking at the different parties involved in brokering the deal and try to figure out what went wrong from there.

One tactic that’s become increasingly common: an imposter intercepts the bill of lading and redirects a shipment to their own network. “A lot of times [companies] don’t want to believe there’s a problem,” says Menges. “Bad actors come up with excuses for why they turned off their tracking. They respond by text or phone, usually via Google or a spoof number, so there’s no way to track it. They buy time by maintaining contact to delay the process of law enforcement getting involved.”

Opalacz says that, even as these things occurred with Mick, he still had a glimmer of hope that the shipment would show up. “I’d never been lied to in such a calculated way before, and thought it was the most illogical shit in the world for them to call us back,” he says. “These guys had ten days to cut up and distribute the merchandise, get it out of their hands to sellers, before anyone even knew it was stolen.” A detective told Bedrock that its shipment never even left L.A.

“Some customers take six months to realize they’ve been hit,” says Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at CargoNet and a retired task-force agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. One of Lewis’s largest customers reported close to $30 million in losses from cargo theft in just a few months. “The problem is, we move freight at the speed of light now, with maybe millions of shipments a day,” he says. Lewis, whose father owned a trucking company, says that when the transportation industry was deregulated by President Carter in 1980, federal enforcement pretty much vanished. “And with the way commerce has changed since the emergence of the internet, thieves can do these crimes from anywhere in the world and be untouchable,” he says.

Product image of a Bedrock clog on a colorful background — (Illustration: Dani Ferrasanjose/Getty (Dots); CSA Images/Getty (Background))

Glenn Master, president of the International Supply Chain Protection Organization—a trade group that connects victims of cargo theft to one another and to recovery and educational resources—has been in the business for 26 years. He’s watched cargo theft get “pretty much out of control in the last three.”

When a company contracts with a logistics broker to make a shipment, that broker will post a description of the cargo on a load board—essentially an online bidding platform used by shipping companies. Whoever wins the bid will often farm the work out to an independent driver or another shipping firm, who might take a cut and farm it out further. With each step, the paper trail gets longer and more complex, with increased opportunities for interception.

“Lots of people from Eastern Bloc countries are very good at creating fictitious LLCs and getting on brokerage boards to target specific types of freight,” Master says. They might show up to a port early with a fake bill of lading, hook up the trailer, and redirect the load to their own warehouse. But methods have evolved into what’s called strategic theft.

“It’s almost a no-risk crime,” Glenn Master, a supply-chain expert, says of cargo theft. “Who is law enforcement going to prosecute? Someone in a cybercafe overseas?” No chance. Not unless a number of the crimes can be traced to a much larger operation.

“Now you have international crime syndicates, primarily in Nigeria and Russia,” Master says. “They’re looking at brokerage boards, impersonating legitimate shipping companies via identity theft, getting the business, subbing it out to a legitimate company several times, then having a legitimate carrier pick it up without knowing, calling them right away, and instructing them to redirect the shipment to another distribution center.” Often, he says, there’ll already be a buyer lined up overseas, and the load will be on its way out of the country within 72 hours. Much of the carrier vetting is automated, and criminals learn how to avoid detection. Thieves are leveraging the vast transportation networks and supply chains already in place to move freight quickly and efficiently.

Master notes that, post-COVID, changes in law enforcement have resulted in a substantial reduction in police force sizes, increasing caseloads for many detectives. “It’s almost a no-risk crime,” he says of cargo theft. “Who is law enforcement going to prosecute? Someone in a cybercafe overseas?” No chance. Not unless a series of the crimes can be traced to a much larger operation.

The question remains whether Bedrock was a victim of its viral success, or if the clog heist was just a freak occurrence. Master is willing to bet that the company was targeted because of its popularity on social media. Other experts, including Menges and Jeff Loftin, an investigator with the California Highway Patrol, think that the perpetrators got lucky by stealing a coveted item.

“Cargo thieves are really good at getting a return on their investment,” says Scott Cornell, a shipping expert with the insurance firm Travelers. “The thing they’re the best at stealing is what they know people want to buy. We see desired commodities targeted every day.” Now that international crime syndicates are in on it, he says, thieves can sell American goods on the global market for up to two dollars on the dollar. Domestically, the return is more like 50 to 70 cents on the dollar.

The Bedrock team pondered these questions while McAdow played daily Whac-a-Mole, trying to get eBay and other resale sites to take down posts selling his stolen clogs, all of which indicated that they would ship from the Los Angeles area. Bedrock has always had a generous warranty program for a small company, repairing or replacing its products without requiring a receipt. Now it was getting warranty complaints for stolen clogs that had been purchased on eBay without ever going through quality control. Meanwhile, the company had no clue if the FBI and Missoula police were still in contact with each other or even working on the case. The FBI wouldn’t call them back, says McAdow, who is still playing catch-up from the weeks of private detective work he did on his own. “That was a dark couple of weeks,” he says. “The case felt pretty cold.”

Bedrock spent two months sweating its losses, waiting for the next clog shipment to put sales back on track.

On November 21, Bedrock got a call from Jeff Bell, a detective with the California Highway Patrol’s cargo-theft interdiction program. He said that they’d just raided a downtown Los Angeles warehouse that contained millions of dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Among them: several precariously stacked pallets of boxes with the Bedrock logo, labeled MOUNTAIN CLOGS and grouped by size and color. A LinkedIn post by Loftin stated that the warehouse was packed with electronics, clothing, perishable items, and shoes, including at least one carton of Skechers.

Bedrock had four hours to retrieve its shipment before the police hauled it away for storage as evidence. The company managed to hire a truck to pick up the 220 recovered cartons—about half the pilfered haul—and deliver them safely to Montana.

As a result of the bust, a man named Manuel Alfredo Revolorio, a repeat offender in the shipping-heist game, and a female accomplice named Alondra Ramirez Cruz were charged with felony grand theft, cargo theft, and conspiracy in connection with the $9.5 million worth of goods found by Bell’s unit.

“We take whatever info we have and run with it,” Bell told me. “Sometimes we only have a first name, and other times we have a photo ID and thumbprint, a plate number, or a GPS tracker. Different crooks have specific MOs.” Sometimes investigators can look at the footprint of a theft and piece together who might be involved.

In the end, Bedrock recovered 2,640 pairs of clogs—which means that 2,724 are still missing. The recovery cut its losses in half, but the remaining deficit is still close to 10 percent of annual revenue.

Ultimately, the clogs whose popularity may have started this whole mess kept Bedrock afloat. Its 3,800-pair restock nearly sold out in October—after the company air-shipped it to Chicago via DHL and paid an armed escort to tail the truck to Missoula, a 25-hour drive. “We just freaked out and couldn’t take any more chances,” Opalacz says. “We’re lucky the clogs were so popular.”

Meanwhile the restocks keep coming, now surpassing 30,000 pairs. But the Bedrock team is significantly tighter about shipment monitoring. Its South Korean factory hides GPS trackers in the inventory, with virtual geofences that alert Bedrock as soon as anything veers off course—even if it’s just a truck’s door opening en route. That might seem like overkill. But for Bedrock, there’s no substitute for a shipment that shows up when it’s supposed to.

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Lead Illustration: Joseph McDermott

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The Great Bedrock Clog Heist

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