Stopping the flow of stolen used cooking oil to the lucrative black market: Manorville private investigator talks about his curious niche

If last week’s arrests of two New York City men charged in the theft of used cooking oil at restaurants in Wading River had you scratching your head, you’re not alone.

The private investigator whose surveillance work led to those arrests had the same reaction in 2014 when a restaurant owner in Nassau County called him looking for help to catch thieves stealing his used cooking oil.

“I thought he was a madman,” Patrick McCall, president of McCall Risk Group said in an interview this week. “I said, ‘Why would anybody steal this?’”

The restaurant owner, who said he’d already hired and fired four investigation companies, gave him two days to catch the thieves, McCall said. “Or don’t come back.”

“We initiated surveillance and two hours into our surveillance, we caught a group,” McCall said.

And with that, it was off to the races. As the price of oil rose, the value of used cooking oil, which can be recycled for use as biofuel, also jumped. Today, there’s a lucrative black market that attracts thieves who can haul in $4,000 a day — cash money — in McCall’s estimation.

McCall Risk Services now has 11 investigators working full-time on cooking oil theft investigations across the region for seven different used oil recycling companies. Some of McCall’s clients are local, others are bigger companies operating in several states. One is even owned by Nestlé.

The oil recycling companies provide restaurants with containers to store used cooking oil on-site until the recycler picks it up. The recycler pays the restaurant for the used cooking oil and then sells it to a refinery that converts it to biofuel for sale as transportation fuels, as well as fuels for heating or electrical generation.

Unless thieves get to the containers first, that is.

The thieves buy their own pumper trucks, often having them professionally lettered to look like legitimate vehicles. They typically arrive at the targeted restaurant in the middle of the night, break into the containers by cutting the locks, and pump the oil out of the containers. Then, according to McCall, they drive to a biofuel refinery in New Jersey where they sell the stolen oil for as much as $1.27 a gallon at current market prices.

“That’s half the price it’s worth,” McCall said. “But it’s all cash, so these guys are willing to drive three hours each way to sell the oil because they’re making $3,000 or $4,000 a load,” he said. They can’t sell it in New York because the State DEC, which licenses the recyclers, the haulers and the refineries, is “very tough” about making sure the refineries only deal with legitimate recyclers, McCall said. “They will close them down,” McCall said. “New Jersey is lax,” he said. Criminal rings travel from multiple other states to sell their stolen used cooking oil there.

“It’s such a racket. Actually, it really is a criminal enterprise,” McCall said.

When police arrest the thieves and seize their trucks, McCall said the thieves will often have a new truck on the road within a couple of days. “It’s a rat race at this point,” McCall said.

“We have one group that we’re going after, we have 151 counts currently on the books waiting to be basically brought to court and we have another group that’s had 75 counts,” he said.

McCall said his firm’s investigations and surveillance work has led to 168 cooking oil theft arrests in the past two years.

“We use a wealth of technology,” he said, including license plate cameras set up on public highways and their own cameras enabled with cell phone chips set up near yard where the trucks are stored, allowing his investigators to monitor the movement of the illicit trucks in real time.

McCall’s investigators also set up cameras at locations they know are being targeted, based on reports from the recycling companies that hire McCall’s firm. When their containers are being hit, the locks are usually broken and sometimes the containers themselves are damaged. Even without those telltale signs of criminal activity, the recyclers detect a significant drop in used oil in their containers.

“So there’s just a lot of information that we collect on the back end and kind of put together before we even go out to follow these guys,” McCall said. “And that’s why we’re so successful in catching them, because we already kind of have all of our ducks in a row.”

McCall said currently his firm is investigating about 20 groups of used oil thieves. The group that hit the three restaurants in Wading River last week “popped up on our radar recently” at a restaurant in Melville, McCall said. They made a mess at the restaurant and the proprietor called McCall’s recycling company client, Mopac Rendering, to complain. Mopac told the restaurateur their truck had not been there in two weeks. Mopac called McCall. The investigators reviewed the restaurant’s surveillance video for a description of the truck and its license plate number.

“We were able to go to Suffolk County PD get the license plate off an LPR (license plate reader) camera that’s on Route 110 and identify that this vehicle is registered to a female in Yonkers,” McCall said. Employing other license plate data, they found the location where the truck was stored in Queens and staked it out.

“We sat on the truck around 11 o’clock at night. And within 20 minutes of sitting on the truck, two guys pulled up, got out of their personal vehicles, got in this truck and proceeded to head east on the expressway,” McCall said. “So we follow them. We assumed that they were going to go to this Melville area but they pass the exit for Route 110 and keep going east.”

The truck exited at William Floyd Parkway and headed northbound to the Wading River area. McCall and his partner watched them stealing oil at Phil’s Restaurant and Señor Taco. They alerted Riverhead Police, who they were coordinating with, and followed the truck to North Tavern on North Country Road.

McCall said he called Riverhead PD and said, “Listen, they have their hose in the box. They are actively stealing. Why don’t you guys pull in now so you can observe the theft in progress,” McCall said he told the officers. “They pulled in and did a fantastic job and were able to catch these two guys with the hose in the container,” he said.

“Riverhead has been extremely helpful,” McCall said. He said he’s been working with Riverhead Police on a few other cooking oil thefts around town. “They’ve been fantastic.”

McCall, 39, a Manorville resident, said he started working as a private investigator after graduating from high school. He worked for two other firms before launching his own company in 2011. McCall Risk Group, with offices in Southampton and Manhattan, now has 62 employees, including the 11-person cooking oil detail.

“I kind of fell into this back in 2014, first with investigating catalytic converter thefts and then used cooking oil,” he said.

“The cooking oils kind of took off,” McCall said. “And since then, I’ve just been pounding away at it.”