Online Desk:
There’s barely any sound from the engine. But you don’t hear it, because they act at night, in the dark, in the country sheds, perhaps the most isolated ones, where there is no one else around and, when things are good, only the security cameras stay on. In Reggio Emilia (but not only there) they call it “the tractor gang”. And it is exactly what the name says: a handful of criminals who intrude into farms, break down doors and tear down windows, even damaging garages, to drive away with their own stolen goods.
Generally John Deere tractors , those gigantic vehicles with wheels up to a meter high, green chrome and yellow rims. We have all seen them at least once, in the fields, among the crops. The latest coup, “the tractor gang” , carried out last Wednesday in Fogliano, Emilia Romagna. Running time: twenty minutes. Value of the theft: around one hundred thousand euros (not counting the money that the Bastardi brothers, the owners of the burgled company, will have to shell out to repair the Messiah premises which had been ransacked by thieves).
STRANGE THEFTS – Two hooded people. They arrived on foot. They cut the sheet of the shed and entered. They moved a snowplough (which is a contraption that can weigh hundreds of kilos) and pulled the two John Deeres out of the hole. Until we meet again. Except that it’s not the first time it’s happened: between Reggio Emilia and Modena, in the last month alone, there have been countless episodes, so much so that the police have intensified checks (and investigations) and at the beginning of October they recovered two tractors. A New Holland and a Landini: they were “parked” in a disused area, a former slaughterhouse, an isolated place which in all likelihood was also the perfect place to hide those gigantic vehicles before handing them over, more or less turnkey, to some fence. In Ferrara, about twenty days ago, two more John Deeres (80 thousand euros) disappeared into thin air; again in Reggio Emilia, in September, six thefts were reported in just four nights; in June, between the Milanese area and the Lodi area and the Lombardy Brianza area, two reports a day and damages of 600 thousand euros a week (said Alessandro Rota, the president of Coldiretti of Milan).
Big shot in the farmhouse.
But as a sophisticated business in heavily guarded bank vaults or diamond districts, it’s much easier (and more profitable) to steal tractors and farm machinery. And, by the way, the phenomenon wasn’t even born today. Nope.
It goes on from damage. Unacma, which is the association of traders who deal precisely with this, i.e. agricultural machinery, already in 2017 presented to the Senate a series of data that says it all: they say, in fact, that the “agro- criminals” strike approximately 9 thousand times a year. While Coldiretti, the farmers’ association, in the same period, reported that this (illegal) business is worth something like 300 million euros (in damages), always every twelve months.
It’s just that one can no longer feel comfortable even in the countryside.
BALKAN ROUTE – Roccafranca, Brescia, three days ago: two tractors stolen. Casalino, Novara, a week ago: three latest generation tractors stolen. Montichiari, Brescia again, last month: two tractors stolen. Stintino, Sassari, because bad habits take over everywhere, mid-September: a stolen tractor. Barneano, Pordenone, early September: a stolen tractor. We could go on forever. Thefts for extensive purposes (some: in the sense that there are those who were asked for a “ransom” of 20 thousand euros to get back the machinery they needed to plow the potato plantation, and without it they couldn’t survive) and on commission ( all the others: who then end up in the foreign racket, most of the time on the “Balkan route”, i.e. resold on the black market of Eastern countries and who knows). Almost always, the latest events in Reggio Emilia prove this concretely, these are not newbies or improvised scoundrels. They are people who know what they are doing, who leave nothing to chance, who come prepared to the shed, and know where to put their hands. “Even knowing how to turn them on without having the keys is anything but trivial,” explains one of the latest robbers.
