Thieves steal thousands of dollars worth of cacti

Some bandits made out with something really valuable in the middle of the night this weekend.

They were swift, prepared and ready to take off with more than a dozen cacti. It happened in Cielo Dorado Estates in Anthony, New Mexico on Saturday overnight.

Herb Galliart, who has a penchant for his prickly plants was a victim to the theft. His carefully thought-out landscaping is a tribute to the desert landscape.

“It’s beautiful. It doesn’t use water. It grows by itself,” he said during an interview on Monday.
Saturday morning he awoke to several of his captivating cacti cut out of the ground.

“Well, they came by in the middle of the night so you can’t see very well and cactus are not easy to handle unless you know what you’re doing. They’re sharp. They have thorns. And some have barbs. And so you’d have to know how to dig them up, which plants to dig up. And you’d have to know how to handle them so that you didn’t get hurt yourself,” Galliart said.

The crooks took off with five of herb’s plants and a dozen more from two neighbors.
“Saguaros are anywhere between $100 and $150 a foot and we had some 3 and 4 footers so they probably took about $1,000 or more from our yard and at least $1,500 to $2,000 from some of the neighbors’ yards,” Galliart said.

Galliart and his neighbors have their theories.

Just a few days before the theft, his neighbor had nine cacti planted by a man who sold it to him from a pickup truck. The thieves somehow knew those same nine were the easiest to take.

“I just thought, ‘well someone’s looking to make a buck…’?Leaving the plants in the front yard is sort of like leaving hundred dollar bills laying around. They just come by and dig them up and away they go,” said Galliart.

His pretty plants are now part of a botanical black market.

Herb said it’s important to remember that if you buy plants from sellers that are not affiliated with a nursery, it’s possible you may be buying stolen cacti. In other words, if the price is too good to be true, something may be wrong.

ABC-7 tried calling the man who sold the cacti to Herb’s neighbor but the cell phone was unavailable.