A Florida Hotel Worker Was Caught Stealing 192 Lobster Tails
Diego Alfredo Medina-Acosta, 37, had a pretty good thing going for a while. As a kitchen employee at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, he allegedly helped himself to a steady stream of high-end inventory — lobster tails, pork belly, snapper, calamari, chorizo, shrimp, gnocchi, coconut milk — over the course of several weeks. It came to an end when a head chef started asking questions about why the inventory numbers kept not adding up.
Medina-Acosta now faces a grand theft charge. Police say the total value of missing food came to $7,854.36.
How the Kitchen Figured It Out
The Biltmore maintains a weekly inventory log — an Excel spreadsheet tracking what comes in and goes out of the kitchen. When the head chef started noticing consistent discrepancies, hotel security got involved and surveillance footage was pulled.
What the cameras allegedly showed was fairly damning. Medina-Acosta was recorded arriving before his scheduled shift began and entering food storage areas where the missing items had been kept. In one clip, he was seen removing a cart loaded with a large quantity of lobster and returning it later — without the lobster on it. When investigators confronted him about the cart footage, he said he had moved the lobster “in order to allow it to thaw.”
Police also alleged he was seen entering and leaving the kitchen through doors other than the standard employee entrance, a pattern that suggested deliberate avoidance of normal traffic areas.
The Complete List of What’s Missing
The 192 lobster tails were the headline item, valued at $6,525. But the full inventory allegedly taken covered considerably more ground: 116.7 pounds of pork belly worth $637.18, 30 center-cut snapper portions at $273, 11 cleaned calamari worth $137.40, plus shrimp, Argentinian chorizo sausages, gnocchi, and coconut milk rounding out the rest of the alleged haul.
It’s quite a pantry.
His Exit and the Aftermath
Before hotel management could formally terminate his employment, Medina-Acosta resigned. The timing, investigators noted, was not coincidental.
The head chef later told police that after Medina-Acosta left, the kitchen suddenly started having substantially more food remaining at the end of each inventory period — a detail that added some clarity to the pattern that had been developing.
He was arrested on October 5 and made his first court appearance before Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mindy Glazer, who found probable cause for the grand theft charge. The judge reportedly could not help herself, observing from the bench: “Apparently, he has a taste for lobster tails.”
Biltmore Hotel president and CEO Tom Prescott said in a statement that the hotel has zero tolerance for theft or conduct that compromises trust, and that an independent investigation corroborated the findings of its own internal review.
Grand theft in Florida generally applies when stolen property exceeds $750 in value — a threshold Medina-Acosta allegedly crossed with the lobster tails alone.
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