You might remember where we last left the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: investigating the disappearance of nearly 700,000 gallons of maple syrup from a supposedly secure, secluded storage tank in rural Quebec.
The WSJ video link to the story remarks that the 10 million pounds, or 15,000 oil drum barrels of the syrup would require 75 tanker trucks to transport away. Set up the roadblocks. If truly moved off site, it is an astonishing haul.
So far, no further news has been reported on the heist. It reminds me of the story in the 1960s, when Billy Sol Estes, a close friend of President Johnson's in Texas, managed to fool the auditors when they came to verify the presence of soybeans in his storage tanks.
Billy somehow delayed the auditors from inspecting the subsequent tanks after the first one was verified. He took advantage of the delay and had the contents of the first pumped into the second before the auditors got there. Thus, once they arrived at storage facility #2, the tank was full, but #1 was now empty.
The scheme worked for a while, but they finally caught up to Ol' Billy and I think he was convicted and did a little time for fraud.
So whether the syrup might have merely been pumped into a tanker ship and sent out along the Saint Lawrence Seaway will of course be things the RCMP will be looking into.
But back to the obituary. Jake Ebberts, a Canadian film producer, who produced many mega-hits in the States, passed away at 71. The films included 'Dances With Wolves,' 'Chariots of Fire, 'Gandhi,' and many other familiar movies.
In mentioning Jakes's travels it is also mentioned there was a house in Montreal (in the province of Quebec) where his family "created an elaborate system for producing maple syrup, which they distributed to friends each year."
The RCMP would not comment on an ongoing investigation.
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