by Justice William W. Bedsworth

"Police are asking for the public’s help,” was the phrase that grabbed my attention. As I am no longer a member of the judiciary, I have been looking for a group to join. The problem was, to borrow from Groucho Marx,¹ I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.

It’s been my experience though that “the public” is not all that choosy. They’ll take almost anybody. Even me.

So, after considering the low standards and even lower accountability of “the public,” I decided to join that group and try to help the police who were reaching out to me.

I mean, “Twenty-First Century Crime Fighter”² is a much more exciting title than “appellate court justice,” don’t you think? This seemed like a great opportunity.

Me, Spenser, Spider-Man, and Harry Bosch: superannuated crime fighters bringing bad guys to justice.³ Move over, Avengers, there’s a new Justice League on the beat.⁴

So you can imagine how excited I was about Irvine PD reaching out to the public and bringing me my first case. I figured it was almost certainly a murder case. They don’t reach out for public assistance very often, so it had to be something big, right?

Well, it turned out to be something very big. Something highly unusual. Maybe even unique. Certainly it was something I’d never heard of, and I’ve been involved in law enforcement for fifty-five years.

Caviar theft.

That’s right, somebody stole caviar.

This is such a groundbreaking crime that the voice recognition program on my phone translated it as “caviar syft,” obviously unable to process the previously unencountered idea of caviar theft.⁵

Who would sink so low? What kind of Riddler-level, low-life scum would steal caviar from the people it was intended for? People who obviously needed it. Who would do such a thing?

Well, I was going to find out, wasn’t I? If I was going to earn my chops as a new member of the Justice League, this would be my first task.

Our wrongdoer had stolen $1700 worth of caviar from a Whole Foods store in Irvine. I wasn’t sure just how much that was. I grew up blue collar, and my tastes have remained pretty determinedly plebeian.

I could tell you how much seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of baloney is, or how much seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of cookie dough is. I am proud to say I have raised myself up to the point where I could even tell you what seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of steak looks like.

But what that much caviar would look like was a mystery to me. Just how big an object was taken here? Of course, if it was me doing the evaluating, it would take three strong men and a forklift to get seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of caviar through the front door.

I pretty much make it a practice to limit my egg consumption to the ones produced by birds. Mostly chickens.

Fish eggs . . . platypus eggs . . . armadillo eggs . . . not my jam. So to be worth seventeen hundred dollars there would have to be a small mountain of the stuff.

But the IPD answered that question for me by saying that our suspect had dropped the caviar into an empty Whole Foods bag he brought into the store. That’s your MCLE for this column: Seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of caviar fits into a shopping bag.

We had only one tenuous clue, one tiny little hint about our suspect. We had his photograph.

Store security cameras had picked him up putting the tiny eggs into the bag. And from IPD’s description of the crime, I learned that caviar eggs are packaged somehow and not sold individually like bananas or tangerines. So my picture of what we crime-fighters call the “miscreant scenario”⁶ is solid.

And the likeness is pretty good. Picture a down-at-the-heels Jason Statham. Being a successful actor would be the type of thing that would give you a taste for caviar. And then going broke would force you to steal it. Damn, I’m good at figuring out motive.

But with nothing more to go on than a photograph of the criminal, it was going to be a difficult crime to solve.⁷

Unfortunately, IPD came to me too late,⁸ so my can’t-miss suggestion of gathering up all the discarded caviar packages in Orange County and running them for fingerprints and DNA was no longer feasible.

So of course, I turned to another branch of cutting-edge twenty-first-century crime-fighting technology. I did an AI search. The result was exciting.

“Caviar theft often refers to major smuggling busts involving illegal international trafficking of endangered sturgeon eggs, like the 2004 Marky’s case or Operation Malossol, but also includes recent local retail thefts of expensive caviar, such as a January 2026 incident in Irvine, CA, highlighting both large-scale black market issues and opportunistic shoplifting, with ongoing investigations into poaching and illicit sales, particularly concerning paddlefish in the Midwest.”

This was just what I’d hoped for. Terms like “major smuggling busts,” “international trafficking”—big deal criminal investigations that even merited the buzzword “Operation.”

And my case was right in there with ’em.

There was even a suggestion of what my next case might be: paddlefish crime in the Midwest.

Once me and the Irvine PD solve this case, my post-retirement career is gonna take off like it has jets on it.

I’m working the case right now. I don’t want to divulge my methods in case the criminal is one of my eleven readers.

But I’m on it. An arrest is imminent.⁹

If you happen to walk past a man who looks vaguely familiar, wearing a trench coat, a fedora, and dark glasses outside the Irvine Whole Foods store, comparing customers to a large photo in his hand and periodically going in to count the caviar packages, say hello.

I got this one.

BEDS NOTES

1. Never a bad idea.
2. You can almost hear the dramatic music in the background as the announcer’s voice booms out that title, can’t you?
3. Even Spidey’s gotta be past retirement age by now, don’t you think?
4. I chose the appellation Justice League for obvious reasons.
5. And so startled that it made up a word. “Syft”? Really?
6. One of the best things about the Justice League is that it allows me to make stuff up.
7. Since I’m no longer a member of the judiciary, I’m going to dispense with the convention of saying “suspect” or “the man who allegedly committed the crime.” We have a picture of him putting the damn caviar into the damn bag. This man’s a criminal; if we arrest someone, we’ll deal with the presumption of innocence then. Right now, in the photograph, he’s a criminal.
8. Not their fault; they didn’t know I was available.
9. Has been for a couple of months now.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.