The Great Egg Heist: 280,000 eggs disappeared from America's top producer. Then came a ransom note.

Washington Post

9 hours ago

'I'd like to report a crime,' said the man who called a Maryland sheriff's office on April 16. There was a theft, he explained, involving a freight truck.
'So they stole the whole freight?' a dispatcher asked.
'Only took the cargo,' the man answered. It was valued, he said, at about $100,000.
The dispatcher asked what was stolen. The caller hesitated.
'They took … basically … they took a whole trailer full of eggs.'
The hens were unaware of the heist. They had done their part: the shuffling around, the squatting down, the gentle plop! to release one perfect orb, ready to be tucked into a carton and shipped to the grocery aisles and diner griddles and breakfast tables of America.
Before the product of their labor was an item on a police report, it was a shipment headed from Maryland to Florida: 280,000 brown eggs, sizes large and extra large.
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They belonged to Cal-Maine Foods, which boasts being 'number one in the pecking order' of egg supply. About 1 of every 5 eggs sold in America are laid by a Cal-Maine hen. They line the refrigerated shelves of Walmarts, Costcos and other supermarkets, labeled Eggland's Best, Land O'Lakes and various generic brands.
By gobbling up its competitors, Cal-Maine built an egg empire without most egg eaters knowing the company's name. But by the April afternoon when the 280,000 eggs left the farm, that was beginning to change.
A winter spike in bird flu was widely seen as the cause of empty shelves and eggs doubling or tripling in price.
Breakfast joints, from small-town cafes to mega-chain Waffle House, began charging extra for eggs.
Backyard chickens, a DIY solution to one shortage, led to another, of baby chicks.
In his first four months in office, President Donald Trump, who'd declared he'd 'won on groceries,' said the word 'eggs' in public at least 167 times.
With prices soaring, eggs of all brands were reported stolen from porches and farm stands. Two thieves were captured on camera sprinting through snow with more than 500 eggs from a Seattle cafe. A truck full of eggs was driven off an organic farm in Indiana. At one point, federal agents at the border were seizing eggs more often than fentanyl.
Then in February, bandits grabbed about 100,000 organic eggs from the back of a trailer at a facility in Pennsylvania. The theft garnered weeks of international media attention, but it remains unsolved.
The shipment of eggs stolen from Cal-Maine's Maryland farm in April was nearly three times that size.
One worker at the farm suspected an inside job. An employee of a nearby deli wondered who really, really loved egg salad. With Easter just days away, neighbors on Facebook pointed fingers at a certain bunny.
Cal-Maine said nothing publicly about the disappearance and declined interviews with The Washington Post.
In the weeks leading to the heist, Cal-Maine itself had come under investigation. The Justice Department had launched a formal inquiry into the spike in egg prices — and was specifically looking into Cal-Maine's business practices.
Farmers accused the egg giant of price gouging. Lawmakers demanded answers about the company's record profits.
In Maryland, law enforcement suspected that what happened to the eggs was connected to what was happening to America: Prices were high, and folks were flustered. Everybody was looking for someone to blame.
Was this a Robin Hood-style strike at Cal-Maine? A crime of market-driven opportunity? Can someone really get away with stealing 280,000 eggs?
The detective heard a knock on the edge of his cubicle. William Muller, 41, investigated property crimes at the Cecil County Sheriff's Office. Typically, that meant stolen cars and stolen copper. Once, it meant stolen crabs.
'I'm so egg-cited to give you your next case,' joked his boss, Sgt. Michael Kalinsky, on April 16. 'I'm egg-silarated.'
They were familiar with the egg farm, one of many poultry farms on a part of Maryland's Eastern Shore the cops called 'the chicken corridor.' When the farm's hens were sickened with bird flu in 2022, the sheriff's office was tasked with securing its perimeter. What the deputies remembered most about the Warwick farm, though, was the time in 2011 when a fire killed 300,000 hens. The town smelled like roast chicken for days.
Sgt. Michael Kalinsky of the Cecil County Sheriff's Office. Detective William Muller of the Cecil County Sheriff's Office.
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The first step for Muller, who liked his eggs scrambled, and Kalinsky, a sunny-side-up man, was to review the initial police report. A deputy had driven to the farm to get the basics of what happened. His body camera was rolling.
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1 The Post reviewed the footage, law enforcement records and other materials to reconstruct the investigation.
The Post reviewed the footage, law enforcement records and other materials to reconstruct the investigation.
'I thought egg prices were coming down?' the deputy asked the staff.
Eggs, one employee responded, were 'so lucrative.'
'People never think about it, but it's crazy,' she said. She led him to a conference room. Inside was a whiteboard with cartoon chickens drawn on it. Their bulging eyes watched over the meeting.
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The staff began explaining what happened.
'That many eggs?' the deputy said. 'Holy shit.'
They showed him internal invoices that valued the stolen loot at $36,621, or roughly $1.57 per dozen — a fraction of what consumers would have paid at the store.
The deputy asked for the name of the victim in the case. Previously, the egg farm had been owned by ISE America. But in 2024, Cal-Maine had paid about $110 million for around 4,000 acres and 4.7 million chickens, expanding its empire along the East Coast.
It was one of more than two dozen companies Cal-Maine had acquired since it was founded in 1957 by a 6-foot-4-inch Mississippi farmer named Fred Adams Jr. He was known to many as 'The Big Chicken.'
'If we had a Mount Rushmore,' the head of United Egg Producers once said, 'Mr. Adams would most definitely be our George Washington.'
The Big Chicken's big strategy was to own almost every step of the process: the hen breeding, the chick hatching, the pullet growing, the feed milling, the egg processing, the carton packaging, the wholesale distributing. After he died in 2020, Adams's four daughters maintained majority control of the publicly traded company, which churns out more than 8 million eggs an hour — a dozen for just about every person in Boston — and sells more than 13 billion a year.
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2 The Post reviewed company statistics published on its website, investor relations presentations and other securities filings.
The Post reviewed company statistics published on its website, investor relations presentations and other securities filings.
Cal-Maine founder Fred Adams Jr. was affectionately known as "The Big Chicken.'
Not every part of Cal-Maine's business is in-house — it still contracts with farmers to buy eggs and regularly relies on other companies for shipping.
And that, the sheriff's office realized, was where things had gone wrong.
While reviewing the initial report, Muller and Kalinsky noted that it was not a Cal-Maine truck that picked up the 280,000 eggs on April 11. Cal-Maine had hired an outside company, called a freight broker, to arrange transportation.
Minh Dang, who loved a good egg crepe, worked for the Florida broker who handled the shipment. To find a trucker, he advertised on DAT, a popular job site for haulers.
A man named Bernardo responded. He agreed to pick up the eggs and deliver them to two Cal-Maine facilities in Florida. Dang said he took all his usual precautions: He checked Bernardo's credentials, including his motor carrier number, years in business and accident history. He confirmed with Bernardo that the cargo was dropped off in Florida as promised.
But then, Cal-Maine contacted Dang: Where were their eggs?
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Dang assumed it was a simple mix-up. He asked the Maryland farm for paperwork. They sent a receipt from the trucker who picked up the load, showing that he had followed the protocol of taking his 18-wheeler to a truck wash to be sanitized to prevent the spread of disease.
When Dang reviewed the receipt, he realized someone other than Bernardo had paid for the truck wash and picked up the eggs.
Dang called Bernardo. No answer. He emailed, asking for proof of delivery.
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3 The Post interviewed Dang and a co-worker and reviewed law enforcement records detailing the theft.
The Post interviewed Dang and a co-worker and reviewed law enforcement records detailing the theft.
Dang started to panic. It was the week before Easter. The eggs should have already been hard-boiled and dunked in dyes. He'd seen news stories about egg thefts across the country, including the 100,000 eggs pilfered in Pennsylvania.
At 3:45 p.m. on April 15, he tried a new tactic, emailing: 'You will be fine[d] $200 for not sending paper work in time. This fine will increase the longer we wait.'
Bernardo replied within the hour.
'You need to zelle or wire $7500 if you want your eggs.'
A ransom note was sent after the eggs were stolen.
Two months earlier, an Ohio farmer named Angela Huffman had carefully composed an email of her own. Hers, too, was about eggs and a possible crime.
'Attached please find a letter outlining potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination that we uncovered,' she wrote to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department.
Huffman, who scrambled her organic eggs with feta, asked the agencies to investigate alleged profiteering and collusion by the companies dominating America's egg market — in particular, Cal-Maine.
Farm Action co-founder Angela Huffman.
Huffman sent the letter on behalf of Farm Action, a watchdog organization she co-founded. When the 42-year-old farmer wasn't breeding sheep or tending chickens, she was leading a team of six people who fought corporate practices they said were hurting small farmers, food chain workers and consumers.
Usually, she worked out of the rural farmhouse in northwest Ohio that has been in her family for more than 200 years. But in hopes of getting the incoming Trump administration's attention on issues Farm Action cared about, she had boarded her animals, packed up a picture of her farm and temporarily moved to an apartment in the nation's capital.
On the surface, Huffman understood, the rise in egg prices over the past few years made sense. Bird flu had killed millions of hens. Fewer hens meant fewer eggs. Fewer eggs meant higher prices — prices most shoppers, committed to their morning routines and baking needs, were still willing to pay.
But Huffman and Farm Action argued that Cal-Maine and other major egg producers were exploiting this situation, using the avian flu as an excuse to goose profits, then buying up rivals.
In 2022, H5N1 struck commercial poultry.
That year, Cal-Maine didn't lose a single hen to bird flu.
That December, Cal-Maine reported quarterly profits 169 times higher than the year before.
This wasn't the first time the company had come under scrutiny for egg pricing.
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4 Cal-Maine, in its December 2022 earnings report, stated the increase in profits resulted from significantly higher selling prices due to the avian flu and good customer demand.
Cal-Maine, in its December 2022 earnings report, stated the increase in profits resulted from significantly higher selling prices due to the avian flu and good customer demand.
In 2023, a federal jury in Illinois found that Cal-Maine and others in the industry had conspired in the past to inflate the price of eggs in part by restricting the supply of hens. They were ordered to pay out more than $43 million in damages.
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The company is also still fighting a civil lawsuit in which Texas authorities accused it of price gouging during the pandemic.
'Cal-Maine Foods continues to believe that the Company did nothing wrong,' the business said in a statement in 2023.
That year, Huffman and Farm Action alerted the federal government to Cal-Maine's substantial profits, asking for an investigation.
Since then, Cal-Maine had grown even bigger, scooping up more competitors and their hens.
The government had handed Cal-Maine more than $40 million in taxpayer money for bird-flu relief payments.
Cal-Maine was on track to make $1 billion in profits in a single year.
Cal-Maine, Huffman knew, was paying one of its contract egg farmers as little as 26.75 cents per dozen. Shoppers were regularly paying more than $6, and sometimes up to $10 , per carton.
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5 The Post reviewed a copy of an independent egg farmer's contract with Cal-Maine obtained by Farm Action. The contract also includes other support for flock care and egg production.
The Post reviewed a copy of an independent egg farmer's contract with Cal-Maine obtained by Farm Action. The contract also includes other support for flock care and egg production.
Three weeks after Huffman sent the letter, news broke that the Justice Department had opened an investigation into Cal-Maine and other egg producers to determine if they had violated antitrust laws.
At first, the company had little public response, beyond acknowledging that it was cooperating. But after weeks of news articles, reports from advocacy groups and calls from lawmakers, Cal-Maine chief executive Sherman Miller gave an interview and tour to the Wall Street Journal.
'Someone has to get blamed for everything. They're looking for a villain,' Miller told the Journal. 'We don't control the power to lower egg prices.'
Through a public relations official who specializes in 'complex reputational challenges,' Cal-Maine declined to answer all but one question from The Post on the record: CEO Miller most enjoys his eggs in an omelet for dinner after a long day.
Cal-Maine defended its practices in an FAQ posted on its website in April, saying it did not keep eggs off the market to keep prices high, is working to rebuild its flock and cannot do more to bring down prices.
Cal-Maine bought this Maryland farm in 2024. Cal-Maine sells more than 13 billion eggs a year.
Egg producers are not 'price-makers,' Cal-Maine argued, but are 'price-takers.' As a commodity, eggs are priced largely based on a system in which a private research firm crunches sales data from egg producers, retailers and others to calculate what eggs are worth on a given day.
Critics say this system incentivizes egg producers to report inflated rates, ultimately leading the firm to set higher prices.
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'It would be irrational for us to act in any manner that undermines growth in our core egg business,' Cal-Maine's FAQ explained.
Posting these answers didn't put an end to the questioning of Cal-Maine, especially as the company reported that the four daughters of Fred 'The Big Chicken' Adams Jr. had started selling off family shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Executives discussed the move in April in the company's earnings report, in which it announced another quarter of record profits.
Three days later, the 280,000 eggs disappeared.
Before calling the sheriff's office, Dang and his co-worker at the Florida freight broker did some more sleuthing to figure out who had picked up the eggs. They had one clue: the truck wash receipt. It had a details about another trucking company.
Before picking up the eggs, the trucker had his trailer cleaned here.
Dang tracked down the trucker's phone number. A man answered. Dang pleaded: 'Where are my eggs?'
The trucker told Dang — and eventually the detective — what happened. He agreed to share his story with The Post on the condition that he not be named, saying he feared retaliation from people 'with resources.'
The trucker said he picked up the egg delivery on the online job site, like with any other haul. It seemed straightforward. A freight broker gave him an address for the Maryland farm, and a deadline to retrieve 40,000 pounds of eggs with a declared value of $100,000.
The trucker, who was in the habit of putting chili powder and lime on his hard-boiled eggs, said he was paid $1,000 up front, sent via Zelle to the owner of the trucking company he worked for. The broker promised another $900 after the trucker dropped off the eggs.
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6 The Post confirmed the trucker's account with the owner of the trucking company and law enforcement.
The Post confirmed the trucker's account with the owner of the trucking company and law enforcement.
But his destination wasn't Florida: The broker directed him to an address in New York. It was a lot of money for a few hours of driving, but he'd be traveling to one of the most dreaded places for a trucker, or really anyone, in rush hour: Staten Island.
When the trucker was a half-hour away, the broker advised that there were delays at the warehouse. He was redirected to a parking lot near some baseball fields, where he found a man waiting to set up a temporary loading dock.
Muller, the detective, reviews the trucker's route. An 18-wheeler transported the eggs from Maryland to Staten Island.
The trucker had been awake for almost 24 hours. Thinking his job was done, he said, he decided to lie down in the cab of his truck while the eggs were unloaded.
He fell asleep.
When he woke up, it was dark. The people were gone. The eggs were gone.
The trucker found it odd that no one knocked on his cab door to finish the paperwork. But when he called his boss, the trucker learned the other $900 was sitting in the Zelle account, as promised. He assumed everything was fine.
A few days later, the same broker called to offer another job: Get 30,000 pounds of pig skins from Ohio to Staten Island.
The trucker was hauling the pig skins, he said, when he got the call from Dang in Florida. Missing eggs. Stolen goods. Big problem.
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The trucker insisted to Dang that he had no idea the eggs he transported were poached. Dang would come to realize 'Bernardo' had posed as a legitimate hauler to find out where the eggs were, then hired the trucker to take them to Staten Island, where they could have been quickly sold to bodegas throughout New York City.
'Listen, your eggs are gone,' the trucker told Dang. 'But these pig skins, I can still save them.'
Two months later, 'Bernardo' remains at large.
This kind of scam, trucking experts say, has soared in recent years. Identity theft, phishing and other tactics are used to trick brokers and truckers into handing cargo to criminal groups. Eggs — with their fragility and short shelf life — had not been a common target. But as prices rose, so did their value on the black market.
In Staten Island, near the parking lot where the eggs were unloaded, a reporter was kicked out of an auto body shop while asking for security footage. Around the corner, the owner of a bagel shop (voted best bacon, egg and cheese in Staten Island) said he would have gladly accepted black market eggs, but no one ever approached him.
The trucker eventually persuaded the pig skin shipper to take back their goods. Then he got one last call from the scammer.
'I know what you're doing,' the trucker said he told the man.
The trucker's boss was on the line, listening. He said he'd never forget what the scammer told them before hanging up:
'Everybody gotta do what they gotta do. This is how we feed our family.'
Detective Muller and Sgt. Kalinsky believe the scammer stole the identity of a real man named Bernardo, with a real trucking company, which is why his credentials checked out. After The Post contacted DAT, the website where the scammer reposted the job, the company said it tracked down the real Bernardo to help him protect his accounts.
The detective said he believes the price of eggs undoubtedly set the heist in motion, but he said he still questions the scammer's motive. Maybe he was part of an organized crime ring looking to make a score. Maybe he wanted to stick it to The Man. Or, in this case, The Big Chicken.
For consumers, a carton of eggs costs about 69 percent more on average than it did a year ago.
But it is far cheaper than it was in March.
Lawmakers have questioned whether such a 'precipitous drop' — shortly after news of the Justice Department's investigation broke — means egg producers conspired to inflate prices.
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On Capitol Hill, a bill was introduced to stop certain government funds from flowing to large, highly profitable egg producers like Cal-Maine. At the White House, where Trump is said to eat his eggs over-well, officials declined to comment.
Angela Huffman, who asked for the federal investigation, said she could not say whether Justice Department officials have interviewed her and her colleagues at Farm Action. She has since moved back to her farm in Ohio, where her hens provide her with fresh eggs every day.
Huffman reviews the letter her organization sent to the Justice Department. Huffman raises Katahdin sheep on her Ohio farm.
At the Maryland farm, the hens — and their eggs — could be under tighter security. On the day that the Cecil County Sheriff's Office began its investigation, workers discussed with the deputy the need for better cameras. One made a request, in case the culprit was ever tracked down: 'If you find them, can we have them for about 30 minutes?'
The deputy didn't hesitate. 'We'll just put 'em in one of them chicken pens out there.'
'Yeah,' another employee agreed. 'We'll see how they like it.'