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For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the guardian.com forward slash long read 35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese. Can the UK's cargo theft crisis be stopped? By Stuart McGurirk, read by Nicholas Cam.

In August 2021, Mike Dorber, the UK's leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from

officers in Bradford, CID.

They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of

suspicious goods. This was a job that required Dauber's expert eye. He drove an hour from

his home in the unmarked police car that doubles as his office

and arrived to discover the description barely did it justice.

As soon as he walked into the first warehouse, he noticed 17 pallets of golfing equipment.

They had, he knew, been stolen three weeks before

from a truck at Lim Motorway services just outside Manchester. He reckoned they were

worth about £1 million. As Dauber continued his survey, he came across 18 pallets of

A6 trainers, stolen three years before at Warwick services,

then 14 pallets of lawnmowers, five years before, from a truck on the A1 at Colsterwood.

He came across IT equipment, sportswear, high-end fashion, electrical goods, toasters, microwaves, beauty products.

One palette was simply labelled eyelash technology. Dober didn't know what eyelash technology

was exactly, but he later learned that a pallet of it was worth more than 500,000 pounds.

Dauber did not need to consult the records to know much of this.

In many ways, he is the records.

Ask him, say, about the time someone tried to make off with a truck of Cadbury cream eggs,

and Dauber will instantly tell you the date.

...