Thousands of Dollars in Goods Stolen in Continuing Commercial Burglaries

With the value of certain commodities at record highs as the economy continues to struggle, it appears thieves are investing their efforts in stealing tobacco.

The price for a pack of cigarettes is nearing $10 in Connecticut, perhaps explaining the rationale behind a robbery of the Georgetown Mobil station on Monday. Around 6 a.m. that morning, an employee reported that the store had been ransacked overnight.

Police and store employees are still accounting for the missing items but have determined that at least $300 in cash was stolen from several different registers. But the more costly portion of the robbery included almost all of the cigarette packs in the store being taken, a number that was "apparently in the hundreds" according to police. Depending on how the value is tallied, 200 packs of cigarettes could be worth $1,500 or more, five times the value of the cash that was taken.

"They were pretty well cleaned out," Wilton Police Lieutenant Don Wakeman said.

The robbery comes less than a week after (a few hundred yards from the Mobil), throwing an object into the glass front door shattering it, and then apparently getting scared by something and leaving the scene.

"It's entirely possible that [the Mobil station robbery] is related to the incident at the Georgetown Shell," Wakeman said.

Police are also investigating a Nov. 13 burglary at the Vector Marketing location at 35 Danbury Road. Sometime during the overnight hours, a window was smashed at the location and unknown individuals entered and removed approximately $1,800 worth of goods.

That robbery is the third this year at the location. In Aug. 4, almost . In none of the three cases do either Vector employees or police have any leads or suspects.

Wakeman, however, said that the nature of Vector's business model does make it prone to burglaries. Because of the high turnover rate in their employees (Vector is something of a pyramid scheme-based business that asks individuals to join up with the company as independent contractors and then use their own family and social networks to sell cutlery sets), there are a lot of people moving in and out of the business, most or all of whom know exactly where the valuable cutlery sets are kept.

"Clearly, the focus is always on these boxes of cutlery," Wakeman said.

Asked if anyone had advised Vector to beef up its security methods, Wakeman said police had done just that. But Vector had not taken steps toward doing so. The business remains without any sort of alarm or surveillance systems.

The two commercial burglaries come as Wilton has seen an , as well.