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Food

A Father-Son Crime Duo Stole $41,000 Worth of Chicken Wings

One father-son duo recently teamed up to follow their dreams and steal $41,000 worth of chicken wings over the course of nine months from the Syracuse, New York restaurant where they worked.
Photo via Flickr user Isaac Wedin

Gibson and Glover. Starsky and Hutch. Belushi and Aykroyd. Turner and Hooch.

Hollywood has long known that when two guys at the top of their games get together, the power is awesome and the possibilities are limitless. The one-two buddy punch means "bye bye, bad guys." But what about when two powers combine with less clear motives?

One father-son duo recently teamed up to follow their dreams and stole $41,000 worth of chicken wings from the Syracuse, New York restaurant where they worked. Meet Rojek and Rojek.

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The Onondaga County Sheriff's Office says that Paul Rojek, 56, and Joshua Rojek, 33, were busted for stealing wings from Twin Trees Too! Restaurant over a period lasting from February to November. The Rojeks worked as cooks at Twin Trees Too! and, according to the sheriff's office, the duo would order wings from the restaurant's wholesaler and bill them to the restaurant but destroy the receipts. They would then allegedly resell them at a reduced price to other restaurants or on the street. Buying bulk chicken wings from men on the street seems like the kind of thing you're told not to do from a very young age.

The chicken-wing heist earned Rojek and Rojek charges of grand larceny in the third degree and falsifying business records in the first degree. Though this definitely isn't the intended endgame of Take Your Son to Work Day, the Rojeks get high marks in quality father-son time.

You can order a 40-pound case of chicken wings from ConsumerMeats.com for $45.95, and the price is presumably less for a restaurant with relationships with wholesalers. Each of those 40-pound cases has an estimated 400 chicken wings, meaning that you or I could purchase some 892 cases of wings containing 356,800 wings for $41,000. The Rojeks probably scored even more wings for that cost. That's a lot of wings!

To ballpark an idea of what the restaurant was missing out on in terms of potential sales, an order of mild, medium, hot, barbecue, or boneless wings will run you $9.99 at Twin Trees Two!.

Perhaps the Rojeks would have gotten away with it if they had eaten the wings instead, but that's a lot of wings for two men consume, even if they possess a great love for spicy chicken.

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Though impressive in scale, their alleged crime won't earn them the top spot among chicken wing thefts. Their haul is easily bested by the 2013 Patterson-Jackson wing heist, when Dewayne Patterson and Renaldo Jackson stole $65,000 worth of chicken wings in broad daylight in Georgia. That dastardly theft occurred during Super Bowl season, when wings are in peak demand. The wings were never found.

Truly, just as when buddies team up for good they can achieve great things, you can expect the worst when bad buddies team up to do bad deeds.