Florida AG James Uthmeier announced the arrests of Mohammed Alsaidi and Zeina Abdul-Hassan Sou Zabib on September 10. The charges are racketeering. The real story is what the 15-month “Formula One” investigation reveals about how organized retail theft actually works, who pays for it, and why baby formula keeps ending up in the gray market.

On September 10, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier stood in West Palm Beach and announced the arrests of two Lake Worth residents: Mohammed Alsaidi, 59, and Zeina Abdul-Hassan Sou Zabib, 49. According to the AG’s office, the pair ran a fencing operation out of their Lake Worth home and a warehouse in Davie that prosecutors allege generated $1.1 million in revenue across just seven months, from November 2024 to June 2025. The charges are conspiracy to commit racketeering and two counts of directing and dealing in stolen property, all first-degree felonies. Each carries a maximum of 90 years in the Florida Department of Corrections if convicted as charged. Both are presumed innocent.

FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations tracks thefts of infant formula alongside stolen drugs and medical devices, and when a large load is stolen, the agency can ask the manufacturer to withdraw every unit carrying the stolen lot numbers, including product still in legitimate channels.

Florida has been charging formula theft rings for at least two years. Eshaud and Sami Suid, members of a Tampa Bay formula ring, were convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering for their role in a separate operation that caused more than $67,000 in losses across 13 Florida counties. Kenneth Jones Jr., a booster who authorities say hit more than 50 South Florida stores between November 2024 and May 2025, was charged in one of the first first-degree felony retail theft cases brought under Florida’s newly enacted HB 549. What makes the Alsaidi-Zabib operation worth examining is the number: $1.1 million, through more than 150 thefts, across eight judicial circuits, in seven months. That is not opportunistic theft. That is a logistics operation.

Alsaidi and Zabib allegedly didn’t steal anything themselves. They hired people who did. In the industry, those people are called boosters: professional shoplifters paid to clear product from retail shelves and deliver it to a fence for a flat rate. According to investigators with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, the boosters in this network were paid approximately $10 per can of baby formula, roughly one-fifth of the retail price. The fence, which is the middleman who buys stolen goods and resells them at a markup, is the role prosecutors allege Alsaidi and Zabib filled. According to Detective Christopher Apple of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, who led the investigation, the couple resold the formula at roughly five times what they paid the boosters. The boosters carried the criminal exposure at the point of theft. Alsaidi and Zabib, according to prosecutors, sat several layers removed from any individual store and collected the spread.

When investigators executed search warrants on September 1, 2026, they recovered approximately 1,000 cans of baby formula at the Davie warehouse, with a retail value of about $38,000. The warehouse was not air-conditioned. Alongside the formula, investigators found roughly 1,300 cans of tuna and sardines stored in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees. At the Lake Worth residence, the AG’s office said investigators recovered ledgers documenting formula purchases and sales. Those ledgers are the kind of record that tends to define a racketeering case: they show a pattern, a price structure, and a volume that no reasonable jury will read as casual. The charges weren’t built on one bad day at a Publix. They were built on 15 months of surveillance, communications records, financial records, and now paper from inside the house.

Nine boosters have already been charged in connection with the operation, according to AG Uthmeier’s office. The ring spanned eight judicial circuits, which triggered prosecution by the Attorney General’s Office of Statewide Prosecution rather than a county-level state attorney. Florida Statute §812.015(10) makes that jurisdictional jump: when retail theft occurs in more than one judicial circuit within a 120-day period, the value of stolen property across those circuits can be aggregated, and the case transferred to the Office of the Statewide Prosecutor under §16.56. The aggregation rule is the mechanism that converted what looked like a series of misdemeanor shoplifts into a racketeering case worth 90 years of exposure.

That rule got its teeth from HB 549, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed on April 9, 2024, at a Walgreens in Stuart. The bill extended the aggregation window from 30 days to 120 days, created new first-degree felony thresholds for repeat offenders and armed offenders, and specifically targeted multi-person retail theft enterprises with escalating penalties based on how the ring was organized and recruited. Under HB 549, a retail theft committed with five or more individuals is a third-degree felony regardless of merchandise value. Using social media to recruit participants elevates that to a second-degree felony. The law went into effect October 1, 2024, roughly six weeks before the Alsaidi-Zabib operation allegedly hit full stride. Florida’s racketeering statute, §§895.01-.06, layers on top of all of that, adding the conspiracy charge that brings the 90-year ceiling.

The gray market for consumer staples isn’t new, and baby formula isn’t a random target. It’s portable, high-value per unit, doesn’t expire quickly enough to make short-term resale difficult, and sits on open shelves in stores that weren’t built to stop someone with a tote bag and a routine. A can of infant formula retails for roughly $45 to $55 at major chains. At $10 a can wholesale, the booster quickly recoups a grocery run. At five times the purchase price on resale, the fence makes a return that would look reasonable to any commodity trader, on a product that sells itself because parents need it. The 2024 baby formula supply-chain disruptions that emptied shelves nationwide trained parents to grab product wherever they could find it. The gray market is the downstream of that anxiety, and it didn’t disappear when the supply chain stabilized.

The broader theft environment is the context. According to Verisk CargoNet’s annual analysis released January 21, 2026, estimated losses from cargo and supply-chain theft in the United States and Canada surged to nearly $725 million in 2025, a 60 percent increase from 2024. Confirmed cargo theft incidents rose 18 percent year-over-year, from 2,243 to 2,646. The average value per theft climbed to $273,990, up 36 percent from $202,364 in 2024. CargoNet’s data captures the freight-in-transit end of the problem. The retail-origin end, where product is taken from the shelf before it ever reaches a shipper, flows through different reporting channels and is almost certainly undercounted. The Alsaidi-Zabib ring is in neither dataset. It’s in a county sheriff’s case file and an attorney general’s press release, which means the scale of the organized retail theft problem that both datasets are trying to measure is bigger than either one shows.

In May 2022, with Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Mich., shut down and shelves emptied nationwide, CargoNet warned that infant formula and computer electronics were the loads most at risk of theft over Memorial Day weekend, and told shippers to hide covert trackers in the freight and keep drivers from stopping within 250 miles of pickup. Fences have moved shelf-stolen formula the same way legitimate distributors do. In May 2019, Chandler, Ariz., police arrested a couple they said bought formula from about a dozen boosters recruited on OfferUp and shipped more than 25,000 cans, about $425,000 worth, to a distributor in El Cajon, Calif. The last sale an undercover detective made to them was a full pallet valued at more than $15,000. That same year, federal prosecutors in Cincinnati charged three men with paying boosters out of a Colerain Township convenience store register and shipping the formula to other parts of the country, a route investigators tracked with a GPS monitor hidden in a can of Enfamil. In a federal case in Arizona that produced indictments against 27 people in a scheme worth about $11 million, undercover agents loaded a Walmart truck with 1,440 cases of formula near Quartzsite and told the suspects it was stolen. According to a search warrant affidavit, the suspects cross-loaded it onto a second truck and delivered it to a Mesa trading company that repackaged it for resale, including some to stores authorized to take WIC benefits.

The consumer on the receiving end of a gray-market can of baby formula didn’t get a discount. They got the full liability exposure of a product stored in an unconditioned warehouse in a South Florida summer, transported in unknown conditions, and sold through channels with no quality control, recall traceability, or chain of custody. A can of formula that spent time at 90-plus degrees in a Davie warehouse may look identical to one that came off a climate-controlled pallet at a distribution center. It isn’t. The manufacturer’s lot number and recall notification systems don’t reach products diverted from the legitimate supply chain. The parent who bought it from a discount reseller has no way to know that. That is what Uthmeier means when he says the crime isn’t victimless. The revenue harm to retailers is documented. The health exposure to the end consumer is not, and it’s worse.

Alsaidi and Zabib are alleged to have operated this enterprise under cover of a legitimate business. Alsaidi runs a hookah company. Investigators say the warehouse in Davie was leased under that operation’s name. That structure, a legitimate entity providing the address, the lease, and the legal paperwork while a separate revenue stream runs through it, is what the racketeering statute is designed to prosecute. Showing the theft isn’t enough. The state has to show the enterprise and the pattern of racketeering activity that connects the defendants to it. The ledgers, the financial records, and the booster network give prosecutors the pattern. Whether that pattern survives a jury trial is what the next phase of this case decides.

Nine boosters have been charged. Two alleged ringleaders are in custody. The formula that was still in the warehouse on September 1 is in evidence. What investigators don’t have yet, at least publicly, is clarity on where the other product went: who bought it, through what channels, and whether any of it has been recalled or flagged for safety since it left legitimate retail.