The load is gone and so is the Driver

The FBI’s Tampa Field Office posted the case on the bureau’s most wanted fugitive page on April 17, 2026. The posting is straightforward in its facts and deliberate in its request. The bureau wants footage from the southern portion of the Brevard County rest area near the I-95 South ramp between 1 a. m. and 8 a. m. on April 17.

That window tells you what investigators believe happened. Someone met Gonzalez at that rest stop or was waiting for him when he arrived. The truck went one exit south and then reversed course toward Jacksonville. The vehicles came off the hauler and went somewhere. Gonzalez went somewhere else.

Whether Gonzalez is a victim, a participant, or both is a question the investigation will answer. What is not in question is that a finished vehicle transport load went sideways at a rest stop, which is not a new story in American commercial trucking. It is an old story that is getting told with increasing frequency and increasing dollar amounts.

Cargo theft in the United States reached record levels in 2024 and continued to climb in 2025. CargoNet recorded 2,576 cargo theft incidents across the United States in 2025, a 16 percent increase over 2024.

Estimated losses surged to nearly $725 million for the year, a 60 percent increase from 2024, as organized criminal groups shifted toward higher-value targets. The average value per theft rose to $273,990, up 36 percent from the prior year.

Those numbers do not fully capture what happens in the finished vehicle transport segment, because auto transport theft operates on a different economic model than cargo theft from a refrigerated trailer. A refrigerated trailer full of meat is worth roughly what the meat inside it is worth on the open market.

A car hauler with eight late-model SUVs on it is worth what eight late-model SUVs are worth in a market where stolen American vehicles command premium prices, particularly in West Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe, where regulations on imported vehicles are minimal and enforcement is limited.

The FBI’s posting notes that Gonzalez picked up multiple vehicles at the Port of Brunswick, Georgia. Brunswick is one of the largest vehicle processing ports on the East Coast. It handles hundreds of thousands of new and near-new vehicles annually. The people who plan vehicle transport thefts know that.

The pipeline that moves stolen American vehicles out of the country does not run through anything exotic. It runs through ocean containers at American seaports, and the commodity listed on the shipping manifest is frequently furniture. U. S. Customs and Border Protection has been documenting this for years.

In fiscal year 2024, CBP recovered 1,445 stolen vehicles nationally at ports of export, about 10 percent more than in 2023 and 81 percent higher than in 2021. The Baltimore Field Office alone, which covers ports from New Jersey to North Carolina, including Norfolk and Newport News, recovered 250 stolen vehicles valued at $9. 6 million in 2024.

The Port of Virginia recovered $6. 5 million in stolen vehicles in fiscal year 2025 alone. CBP officers at those ports describe a consistent pattern. Criminal organizations conceal stolen vehicles inside shipping containers under household goods. The manifest says furniture. The X-ray shows something that does not match the manifest.

CBP Chief Officer James Askew, who works at the Port of Virginia, described the discovery of three late-model vehicles in a single container intended for Ghana, noting that one container alone represented more than $150,000 in stolen property. A typical container destined for West Africa holds three to four vehicles.

At current market values, that is a profitable criminal enterprise that operates in plain sight through the commercial shipping infrastructure. The vehicles recovered by CBP are the ones they catch. CBP handles millions of containers annually at dozens of ports. The inspection rate for outbound containers is a fraction of that for inbound shipments.

The volume of stolen vehicles that reach ships and leave the country is almost certainly higher than the recovery statistics indicate.

NICB and CBP launched Operation Terminus in 2024 specifically to address this, and the operation has produced seizures at ports from New York to Miami, including Bentleys and G-Wagons bound for Turkey and luxury SUVs destined for Nigeria. The criminal organizations running these exports are not deterred by the seizure rate.

They factor it in as a cost of doing business. The finished vehicle transport segment sits at the intersection of all of these problems. Car haulers carry high-value freight with no physical security beyond the driver, the straps holding the vehicles on the deck, and whatever electronic monitoring the carrier has installed.

Rest stops are the most common location for theft events across all cargo categories. CBP data consistently identifies in-transit environments as a primary location for theft.

A car hauler overnighting at an unsecured rest area with eight late-model vehicles on the rack is a visible, identifiable target that requires no insider access, no cyber intrusion, and no sophisticated planning to assess. The mitigation tools exist and they work.

Fleet telematics that provide real-time GPS tracking on both the tractor and, separately, on individual vehicles on the hauler. Dashcam systems that continuously upload to cloud storage, providing investigators with footage even when the device itself is gone.

Panic buttons and driver distress notification systems that alert dispatch or law enforcement when a driver activates them. Some carriers have moved to requiring check-in calls at defined intervals with mandatory callbacks when drivers do not respond.

Several have implemented geofencing alerts that trigger when a loaded unit leaves an approved route corridor. None of these measures is a regulatory requirement. They are operational choices that carriers make, and the carriers that make them are substantially better positioned both to prevent theft and to support rapid recovery when theft does occur.

The three vehicles recovered in the Florida portion of the Gonzalez case came back partly because GPS tracking on those vehicles was active enough to allow investigators to locate them.

That is the value proposition for vehicle-level tracking in finished auto transport, and it applies whether the GPS is installed by the manufacturer, the rental fleet, or the carrier. Within the first 24 hours, a vehicle’s recovery chances determine whether it ends up in a container. The technology that makes that possible has been available for years.

The industry’s adoption of it has been inconsistent. The Gonzalez case also illustrates a specific risk on the driver side of cargo theft that receives insufficient attention in cargo security discussions. Not every theft event is the result of an external criminal operation.

Some involve drivers, either as willing participants, as victims of coercion, or as people who were approached at a rest stop and presented with an offer they found difficult to decline. The FBI’s request for footage from a specific southern section of the Brevard County rest area suggests that investigators believe the contact point was localized.

Someone knew where Gonzalez was going to stop. That either came from route intelligence or from communication with Gonzalez himself. The investigation will establish which. The broader point for the industry is that the same digital infrastructure that makes cargo theft harder also makes participation in theft harder to conceal.

Telematics data, ELD records, cell phone location data, and transaction records have all been used in federal prosecutions of cargo theft rings involving complicit drivers. The evidentiary trail that modern fleet technology creates is a deterrent for drivers considering participation in a theft and a prosecution tool for investigators when it happens anyway.

Carriers who have not yet built that infrastructure into their operations are not just accepting higher theft risk. They are accepting higher liability exposure when a theft event leads to an investigation of how the cargo moved and who had access to the route and timing information.

The FBI is asking anyone with footage from Brevard County on April 17 to submit it to tips. fbi. gov. The hotline is 1-800-CALL-FBI. Alejandro Jacomino Gonzalez is described as 5 feet 11 inches, 200 pounds, bald with a brown beard and mustache, with a full sleeve tattoo on his left arm and the name Elisia tattooed on his right forearm.

He was born on February 8, 1985, in Cuba, and speaks English and Spanish. If you have information, submit it. The larger story does not resolve when this case resolves. Cargo theft is at record levels and trending higher. The finished vehicle transport segment is a high-value target with inconsistent security practices across the carrier base.

The ocean container pipeline moving stolen American vehicles out through ports is documented, active, and growing. The tools to address all of these problems are available and commercially available. The industry’s obligation is to use them. The post The load is gone and so is the Driver appeared first on FreightWaves.