Spooky Supply Chain: Pirates, Poisoned Pills and Train Robbers with Grace Sharkey

Grace Sharkey and I traded five cargo crime stories for a Halloween edition of Freight Friends. Every one of them turns on the same weak spot: the moment freight changes hands, and the question of who is really holding it.

We start in Turfan on the Silk Road in the 670s. A merchant vanished on the road to Kucha, and his brother sued for 275 bolts of silk with no contract and only two witnesses. Grace takes us to Chicago in 1982, when someone laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide and Johnson & Johnson pulled about 31 million bottles off the shelves. That recall is the reason pill bottles come sealed today.

From there it’s Henry Every’s 1695 raid on the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai, worth around $4 million per pirate in today’s wages. Grace follows with the ghosts of the St. Lawrence River: the Empress of Ireland sinking in 14 minutes, the villages flooded for the Seaway in 1958 and the freighter that later sank near them. I close with the Reno Gang, who robbed a moving train outside Seymour, Indiana in 1866.

Each story ends with how the same crime looks now, from container theft on China-Europe freight trains to break-ins at…