LEGO Thief’s Legendary Heist Thwarted By Authorities

By TeeJay Small
| Published 27 seconds ago

If you’ve been known to enjoy the odd heist movie from time to time, now might be the moment to start tuning into the news. According to a report from The Guardian, a California man was just caught in a scheme to defraud his local Target retailer out of tens of thousands of dollars in LEGO pieces. The Irvine police department announced that they had apprehended the brick-burgling bandit on April 14, with over $34,000 in LEGO minifigures in his possession.

Though the whole case sounds a little baroque, the heist is a lot more sophisticated than you might expect. Apparently the suspect, 28-year-old Jarrelle Augustine, is accused of pulling over 70 small-scale steals, accumulating his fortune in tiny bits and pieces. You might even say he was building his set, brick by brick. Allegedly every time Augustine would visit his local Target, he would purchase expensive LEGO sets, only to carefully swap out high-value LEGO pieces with dried pasta before returning the boxes.

I Built This Heist Brick By Brick

Needless to say, once Target employees attempted to resell the returned merchandise, they were met with little more than a box of Goya brand durum wheat semolina. Police in the area have been building a case against Augustine for more than four months, and eventually located well-organized bins of LEGO minifigures in his home. Multiple bags of Goya pasta were found as well, offering one of the strangest and funniest evidence photo spreads the department has ever seen. The Facebook reel announcing the arrest even referred to the heist as “a pasta-tively terrible plan.”

There’s no way of knowing for sure, but based on the layout of the minifigs, it looks as though Augustine planned to resell the stolen figurines on an online marketplace such as Ebay. These pieces can sell for hundreds of dollars each online, so the manicotti mastermind might have been turning a pretty penny for his efforts. If not for the Irvine police department, the perp might still be swapping stormtroopers with tortellini to this very day.

One of the strangest details about this ordeal is the fact that it isn’t the only recent LEGO related heist to strike the area. Authorities have previously charged multiple California residents in cases related to LEGO theft, with some operations accounting for millions of dollars in stolen revenue. One Riverside county man even allegedly hijacked two freight trailers full of the children’s toy sets. Clearly there is a booming criminal enterprise with these bricks serving as their foundation.

To my eye, this seems like a story that’s just begging to be turned into a buddy cop movie. I could see Paul Walter Hauser and Walton Goggins teaming up to stop the farfalle fugitive, perhaps played by Keagan-Michael Key. Throw in Danny McBride as the chief of police, and a few budding comedians to round out the criminal underworld, and you’ve got yourself an A+ Hulu original.