How 19,000 Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads were stolen, returned to Pittsburgh
One of the strangest stories in Pittsburgh Penguins history came to a conclusion this week. Here's the inside story of what happened. Kevin Acklin, the Pittsburgh Penguins' president of business operations, discovered that a shipment of 19,000 Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads had not arrived in Pittsburgh as scheduled due to engine trouble. Despite initially believing no foul play, Acklin received a call from a trucking company in California informing him that the bobblehead had been stolen. The thieves were identified as the extortionists. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a California-based company and a Hong Kong vendor are all pursuing the thieves. The bobble heads were designed by a Pittsburgh vendor and were transported by a California trucking operation using the same vendors this season for giveaways of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Crosby. The theft highlighted the increasing trend of cargo theft in the United States, with an average loss of $585,000, a 67 percent increase from 2022.
Published : 4 weeks ago by Rob Rossi in Sports General
As Kevin Acklin got comfortable on his couch to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins play the Senators in Ottawa earlier this month, he asked the obvious.
The previous day, a shipment of 19,000 Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads had not arrived in Pittsburgh as scheduled. Acklin remained calm, having no reason to believe there was any foul play involved. A trucking company representative in California said the bobbleheads would be in Pittsburgh the next day by 5 p.m.
“Initial word is the truck driver was having some engine trouble — that they had to pause overnight and it’ll be OK,” said Acklin, the Penguins’ president of business operations.
The time came and went, and still no delivery. While watching the Penguins-Senators game from his Pittsburgh home, Acklin received another call from the trucking company. There was no engine trouble. The bobbleheads had been stolen.
“They said, ‘Well, we don’t know all the details, but apparently the trucking company is in touch with’ — and this is the first time I heard the word — ‘the extortionists.’”
By then, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a California-based trucking company and a Hong Kong vendor were all pursuing the people who’d stolen the merchandise.
“They weren’t sure how they were lifted, but they were in touch with a group that has custody of them,” Acklin said.
And to verify the group had the goods and to determine whether to negotiate, Acklin said, the trucking company had to see if the bobbleheads “were still viable.”
“We’re dealing with a theft that sounds crazy,” Acklin said. “It felt like a story from ‘The Onion.’ When you tell it, it’s like an ‘Onion’ article.”
The Penguins are a franchise known for the tragic, the unusual and the unbelievable.
They’ve also run into issues with giveaway deliveries before.
“In the late 1980s, we had stuff coming from China — same thing, for a promotional night — that didn’t arrive on time,” said Paul Steigerwald, who has spent multiple stints working for the Penguins in various capacities.
Upon hearing the Jagr bobbleheads were missing, Steigerwald chuckled. This wasn’t “life or death,” as Acklin said in agreement.
“But then I started to think how smart the Penguins were to take it so seriously,” Steigerwald said. “This is high-level stuff.”
The theft became a larger-than-life story calling attention to cargo theft, a common, real-life issue that wasn’t on the radar of many people within hockey.
Dating to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, cargo theft in the United States has spiked. Forbes, citing a release from Overhaul Risk Advisory Services LLC in early March, wrote there were approximately $700 million in stolen goods in 2023. The reported average loss, a tick above $585,000, represented a 67 percent increase from 2022. A 35 percent increase is projected for 2024, according to Overhaul.
“It’s only bobbleheads,” said Alex Nedeljkovic, a veteran goalie in his first season with the Penguins. “But what if it had been something really important, something like medicine? I’m sure this happens a lot, but it’s bobbleheads of a famous hockey player that gets all the attention.
“I’d like to say I’m surprised, but it wasn’t too surprising. I don’t know — there’s some weird people out there.”
The bobbleheads — made to honor Jagr on March 14, about a month after the Penguins retired his jersey number — were designed by a Pittsburgh vendor in the fall of 2023 and produced by a Hong Kong company that used a trucking operation in California to transport the merchandise. The Penguins used the same vendors this season for giveaways of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang bobbleheads. Nothing went wrong on those occasions.
On March 11, the date the Jagr bobbleheads were originally supposed to be delivered to Pittsburgh, a different trucking company had gone to the warehouse holding the merchandise. The thieves apparently provided false paperwork and made off with the bobbleheads, Acklin said.
The people who said they had the bobbleheads contacted the original trucking company, which informed the Penguins about the heist, Acklin said. The Penguins never had direct contact with the culprits, and the team knew from its contract that it would be made whole for the loss. The Hong Kong supplier assumed full risk for the loss on the bobbleheads.
“(The unknown truckers) took the pallets, along with some other stuff,” Acklin said. “They got control of (the bobbleheads), however they did it. … I got calls from a lot of companies in Pittsburgh and was told, ‘This happens — cargo theft.’ When it’s the Penguins and Jaromir Jagr, obviously a lot more people pay attention to it.”
The day before the scheduled giveaway night, Acklin learned that the shipment’s GPS tracking device was disabled two hours after it arrived somewhere in Los Angeles County. Miesha Mcclendon, a deputy with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, said the bobblehead theft was called into L.A. County’s Carson Station and referred to a special investigations unit.
A promising lead that morning — that the bobbleheads were in a truck outside a hotel in Columbus, Ohio — went nowhere.
By the afternoon, Acklin had been told by the trucking company — now working with a 15-person task force that included FBI and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department personnel — that there was a 95 percent chance the shipment was still in California.
“They were actively talking to these extortionists,” Acklin said. “It would go dark for a while, but (the culprits) would touch base with them.”
A 9 p.m. PT flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh was Acklin’s last hope to have the bobbleheads in the Penguins’ possession by March 14. He arranged to have FedEx, if the bobbleheads were found, deliver the goods.
“If they found them before then, they were going to put them on a plane and we were going to pay to have them here,” Acklin said. “The hassle of not distributing them on (March 14) was too heavy.”
The heaviness set in when the trucking company alerted Acklin that communication with the alleged thieves had gone silent.
Another sleepless night awaited Acklin, and the Penguins had prepared a news release about the missing bobbleheads to go out on March 14.
As Penguins staffers gathered tickets that would be converted into vouchers for fans attending the March 14 game against the San Jose Sharks, Jagr, who was again in town for Mario Lemieux’s charity fantasy hockey camp, paid a visit to Acklin in his office at PPG Paints Arena.
At that point, the only version of the bobblehead in the Penguins’ possession was stowed away in a locked wall cabinet to the left of Acklin’s desk. While showing the prototype bobblehead to Jagr, Acklin called communications, content, production, marketing and digital executives into the office.
With the bobbleheads’ whereabouts unknown and Jagr in the arena, the Penguins devised an idea to lean into the baffling situation. The result was a viral hit.
“Right by the doors there’s a truck,” Acklin told Jagr. “You have two lines. I need you to channel Schwarzenegger. We have sunglasses for you.
“He kind of looked at me. He has this way about him: He pauses, and then the smile comes. It’s, like, his way of saying, ‘OK, we’ll do this.’”
With that, Acklin and Jagr headed from suite level to the building’s Zamboni entrance. They were met by a pickup truck, the Penguin executives and a prototype bobblehead. About seven minutes later, the Penguins had the makings of a short video that delighted fans already invested in the saga.
Skeptics — including former “SportsCenter” anchor Keith Olbermann — pummeled the Penguins’ social media accounts with criticism and negativity even as the Jagr video was being well received.
“The star of the show was Jagr,” Acklin said. “The way he said that ‘go find your friends’ line — he nailed it.
“Then people started to say, ‘Is this a trick?’ And I’m, like, ‘This is a weird trick. What do I get out of this being a trick? This is a huge pain in the ass.’”
A hockey player himself and the dad of hockey-playing sons, Acklin at least had an actual Penguins game to take his mind off everything.
The opening faceoff between the Penguins and Sharks was set for just after 7 p.m. About a half-hour before, Acklin received a text message from the trucking company. The culprits were back in contact and had sent an image of a map with a pin implying the bobbleheads were not only in Pittsburgh but in a truck on Interstate 579 — easily visible from the glass atrium side of PPG Paints Arena.
Acklin and a few staffers rushed to the arena’s sixth level. They went into the Coors Light Club, which faced the atrium wall. Having called the state police, which employs his brother, Acklin desperately searched for the truck on the interstate.
It was another of many false alarms.
“They just wanted their money,” Acklin said. “Whether they were going to get their money and dump (the bobbleheads) on the side of the road — we were prepared for everything.”
The Penguins weren’t concerned with how the bobbleheads were returned.
As March 15-19 passed without updates, Acklin was focused on delivering the items to fans who had collected vouchers at the March 14 game. He asked the Hong Kong vendor how long it would take to fill a new order. Several months was the answer.
There was only a month left in their season. Not delivering the bobbleheads while also failing to deliver a playoff team — well, this was hardly good business for the Penguins in a season that had started with promise after a busy last summer by Kyle Dubas, a high-profile hire to run the hockey side of the franchise.
A batch of bobbleheads is “a six-figure investment by the team,” Acklin said. “But the bobbleheads are priceless for our fans.”
Early on the morning of March 20 — almost a full week since the public learned of the bobblehead heist — Acklin again heard from the trucking company.
The text read: “They’re delivering an update now. The extortionists reached out and may be delivering to a warehouse in California.”
Long after returning home from the arena, Acklin received another call from the trucking company. The bobbleheads had been located … in Ontario.
“I’m, like, ‘How did they get to Canada?’ How did they get across the border?” Acklin said. “That was my initial reaction.”
The bobbleheads were in Ontario, Calif. With everything that had happened, this qualified as a catching a break.
“I didn’t even know there was an Ontario, California,” Acklin said.
Jagr’s reunion with the Penguins — anticipated for decades — had emerged as the high point in a low season.
The bobbleheads going missing had nothing to do with the team trading Jake Guentzel, a fan-favorite winger, on March 8. However, March was a rough month for morale among many Penguins fans. The team was free-falling in the standings. Fans didn’t want Guentzel to leave. They also wanted their Jagr bobbleheads.
On Monday, five days after the bobbleheads were discovered, the Penguins sent out a news release that felt as though it was months in the making. In reality, the saga lasted only a couple of weeks.
The special task force is still investigating. It’s not clear if the thieves had targeted the bobbleheads or just stumbled into a heist that generated national headlines. What is clear is that one moment they were gone, the next they were in a warehouse in California and back on their original course heading for Pittsburgh.
Jagr’s bobblehead friends were back. The Penguins’ announcement detailed how fans could retrieve their mementos over the first weekend in April.
“Usually you think of someone stealing cash or jewelry, but I guess (bobbleheads) are unique,” said Lars Eller, a veteran forward who joined the Penguins last summer. “You kind of go, like, ‘What?’ And you laugh about it. But I guess it disappointed a lot of people.
“It turned out to be a good story. And I guess people are getting their bobbleheads, so that’s good, too.”
Topics: Crime