When more than 30 members of a Russian organized crime syndicate get arrested for racketeering, credit card fraud, and contract killing, it takes something truly special for those charges to be considered afterthoughts. Something like 10,000 pounds of chocolate, which these particular gangsters were also charged with stealing. That comes from NBC News (via Vice), which sadly—and strangely—doesn’t offer any other details on how and why they were trafficking so much stolen chocolate, leaving us to speculate wildly as to the nature of this operation.
It’s possible that these were some kind illegal chocolates, perhaps with levels of dark cacao that far exceed what the FDA allows here in the United States, or maybe they were simply planning to flip them on what we can only assume is a lucrative underground candy market. If not that, then who else would buy so much illegal chocolate? The most obvious answer is Arthur Slugworth, the famously evil candy mogul who wants to steal all of Willy Wonka’s best ideas—particularly the Everlasting Gobstopper. Of course, Slugworth is a fictional character, so that doesn’t really clarify matters at all.
The Russian gang allegedly ran its operations in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada, so if you were about to land a sweet chocolate haul in one of those states, you might need to find a new candy dealer. Anyway, here’s this: