“Mission Impossible III” in real life: A Denver company used a satellite tracking system to help find a stolen truck in Florida filled with millions of dollars’ worth of art.
The 24-foot Budget rental truck – loaded with seven paintings by abstract expressionist Milton Avery plus sculptures and antiques – went missing April 17 while being driven from southern Florida to New York.
It took more than two weeks for officials to realize that the truck had a Global Positioning System. Once police found out, it took just 10 minutes to recover the truck and artwork May 3 from an abandoned shopping center in Gainesville, Fla., said Mike Mauro, a detective at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which oversaw the operation.
Police arrested truck driver Patrick J. McIntosh, 36, at a nearby trailer park, Mauro said.
While McIntosh’s motivation is unclear, the GPS signal was a beacon.
“Nobody told us there was a tracking device in the truck,” Mauro said. “Once they did, Cartasite gave me the exact street address, and we went right to it.”
Cartasite is a Denver-based company that has installed Global Positioning System technology on a fraction of Budget’s 35,000-truck fleet, said David Armitage, Cartasite’s chief executive.
“It was an unbelievable coincidence that he would end up with a truck with this installed on it,” Armitage said this week. “The cops called us and said, ‘Your system might be able to do this.’ We said, ‘It’s a one-in-35 shot,’ but then we (tracked the truck and) said, ‘He’s in Gainesville right now.”‘
In “MI3,” Tom Cruise uses a GPS tracker in his cellphone to get street-by-street directions as he races down the back streets of Singapore to save his wife from the bad guys.
Cartasite, founded in 2003, works with transportation companies to track fleets of cars and tracks, as well as rail cars and cargo containers.
The small black boxes cost about $200 each to install plus about $15 to $20 each per month to monitor, Armitage said. Beyond location tracking, the devices can be used to help calculate gas costs, routes and operational efficiency.
Denver-based Kerr Vehicle Resources is installing Cartasite’s devices in the 11,000 cars it leases to client companies in the Rocky Mountain region.
“It’s an invaluable management tool,” said David Kerr, a founder of the company.
Transportation-tracking devices range from LoJack’s anti- theft device to car navigation systems. Radio-frequency identification tags can be used to track products.
But such tools also raise privacy issues because individuals could be tracked without their knowledge or consent.
“Do you have any reasonable expectation of privacy? I don’t know,” said Ed Jurkevics, principal of Chesapeake Analytics, a company in Arlington, Va., that studies technology issues. “I think GPS is good.”
Staff writer Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503 or bpotter@denverpost.com.
