Men Busted for Trying To Sell $500,000 Worth Of Stolen Eels on a Street Corner

The movie Gone In Sixty Seconds showed Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie stealing sweet cars and peeling out just in time to make a getaway. The 2001 remake of Ocean's Eleven boasted a George Clooney-led superstar cast of high-flying criminals breaking into the vault at the Bellagio and making off with a cool $150 million. (The 1960 original had an arguably even bigger star-studded cast, with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Crawford).

So now here's the big question: who is going to play Sheauloon Yat, Fa Deng, and Wei Da Li in the movie chronicling how they stole a half-million bucks worth of frozen eels in New Jersey and then tried to sell them on a corner in Brooklyn?

Three men were busted in Brooklyn's Chinatown on Monday for allegedly trying to unload some illicit frozen eels swiped from a Mars Global Trading shipping terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, according to the New York Post. The men had allegedly stolen 2,000 boxes of "high-end" barbecue eels more than two months prior, on June 1, right after they had arrived from mainland China. The Post reports that the crooks hired an unwitting truck driver and provided him with phony paperwork that allowed him to slip away with the eels scot free.

When the owner of Mars Global Trading learned what happened, he called the cops, who enlisted him in a sting to bust the eel thieves. Mars then watched to see where their stolen eels were being sold around the city, according to the New York Daily News.

The sting took place outside a dim sum restaurant in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, an area that the Post describes as "notorious for trafficking goods." When the Mars owner showed up under the guise of buying 200 boxes of eels, he was led to a warehouse where there were 745 boxes of eels. A truck contained an additional 200 boxes.

Cops recovered roughly $500,000 worth of eels, or just under half of the value of the whole shipment. The loss was big for Mars, a small importer. No word on what's going to happen to the recovered eels, but at least three sea serpent criminals are off the streets.

They almost got away with it—if it only weren't for that dang NYPD.