Vodka Loot Valuing Over $1 Million Stolen From Miami Warehouse

One million dollars worth of vodka was stolen from a Miami area customs warehouse on June 22. The thieves stole over 4,500 bottles of the premium liquor. Though wholesale the loot is only worth roughly $5,000, each bottle can fetch upwards of $1,000 at a trendy nightclub.

The Spirit of the Tsars Golden Vodka heist involved the thieves snagging 752 cases of it by busting through a concrete wall, reported CBS News. In liquor stores, the bottles go for about $200 a pop. The bottles themselves increase the value of the beverage, as a portion of the label is a 24-carat gold veneer.

"We call it golden vodka for a reason. It's an amber color, a golden color. It's aged in cognac barrels for three years," Mark Owens, president of Spirits of the Tsars Vodka, told CNN affiliate WSVN. "I couldn't believe it at first, that they actually broke through a concrete wall. They obviously crawled through that hole and handed the vodka out to their team," he said.

The thieves, who carried out the theft with a glass-roofed Mercedes, a panel van and a large box truck, took over five hours in total to carry out the operation – from 11 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. It was a team effort in which the vodka was the sole item they were after. During their heist, they ignored other highly valued items in the warehouse, including art, cars and precious metals.

"These sorts of events put us in a difficult position where we deplete our limited stock unexpectedly," Owens said in a statement. "We would … ask our clients to report anyone trying to sell them our product outside of our normal distributors." Only 5,000 bottles of the Spirit of the Tsars are shipped to the Unites States each year.

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