The usual way to steal a Lamborghini involves getting close to one. Houston police say the luxury car theft ring they broke up this month had them brought over on a truck instead. When some of the cars surfaced again, at the Port of New York and New Jersey, they were already loaded into shipping containers marked as rebar.
The Houston Police Department’s Auto Theft Division says the operation recovered 15 luxury vehicles valued at $3 million and ended with four adults and one juvenile charged with engaging in organized criminal activity. Three of the five are one family, according to court records described by Houston TV stations: a married couple from Katy and their 17-year-old son.
None of them has been convicted. The Auto Wire did not find a public statement from any of the defendants or their lawyers.
What Houston police released
HPD announced the case in an Oct. 16 post on X, saying the Auto Theft Division had run an operation “targeting the illegal transportation of stolen luxury vehicles.” A booking-photo graphic in the post names the four adults: Dheyaa Abd, Iman Al Saedi, Matthew Gonzalez and Saifuldeen Al Gburi. The department did not name the juvenile, and neither does The Auto Wire. Court records list the adults’ ages as 41, 35, 29 and 30, respectively, Fox 26 Houston reported.
The second image in the post is a grid of recovered cars, each with the HPD seal pasted over its license plate. Three are parked outdoors: a Range Rover, a Cadillac Escalade and a four-door Mercedes-AMG GT 63. The fourth photo was taken inside a steel shipping container. An orange McLaren GT fills the box nearly wall to wall, its tail at the doors, with a silver BMW SUV wedged in ahead of it.
HPD Auto Theft Sgt. Ben LeBlanc told KPRC 2 the ring went after “pretty much anything that had a very high price point, well over $100,000.” The station reported that the targets included Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys.
How police say the cars were taken
No broken glass appears anywhere in this account. The cars were already on the road, strapped to legitimate car carriers and headed to customers.
LeBlanc described the method to KPRC: the suspects allegedly posed as transport companies to win shipping jobs, collected the details of each vehicle, then contacted the legitimate carriers and rerouted the cars to Houston. Once a car arrived, he said, the factory tracking devices were disabled.
“It was very sophisticated as to they knew exactly what time and location these were going to be delivered,” LeBlanc told the station. “They would have their group there to take immediate possession of it.”
One delivery shows how ordinary that handoff could look. According to court records described by Fox 26, a driver hauling a 2025 Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 bound for Florida got a message telling him to take it to a Houston residence instead. A woman and a teenager met the truck, paid for the tow and drove the Mercedes away. The records identify the pair as Al Saedi and the 17-year-old, the station reported.
In other words, the alleged thieves settled the shipping bill on the way out.
Then the cars went out by sea
Rebar is the ridged steel rod that gets buried inside concrete and sold by the ton. It is also, LeBlanc told KPRC, what the paperwork said was inside the containers holding some of the recovered cars at the Port of New York and New Jersey, which were waiting to be shipped overseas.
Where they were going is laid out, in the prosecution’s telling, by one of the defendants. Court records say Gonzalez told investigators he had worked for months with Abd and Al Gburi, who told him where to pick up and drop off vehicles, Fox 26 reported. He allegedly said Abd disabled the tracking systems and arranged shipments to Dubai, that he collected his payments at Abd’s business near the Galleria, and that Abd’s son once paid him directly to steal a car. Those are statements attributed to Gonzalez in a court filing. None has been tested at trial.
Days before the couple’s first court appearances, HPD searched Abd’s mechanic shop near Fondren Road and Richmond Avenue, ABC13 reported.
Shipping a stolen car abroad inside a container declared as something else is a familiar route. It is the same exit police described in a Quebec dealership fraud case earlier this month, where the vehicles were obtained on paper rather than lifted off a lot.
A hack, or a phone call?
How the ring got the jobs in the first place is less settled than how it got rid of the cars.
At an Oct. 9 probable-cause hearing, a judge said the suspects “hacked into Central Database and rerouted shipments of luxury cars at different drop-off locations,” according to ABC13. Court records name Central Dispatch, an online board where dealers and shippers post vehicles that need hauling and carriers bid to move them, as one of the platforms targeted, KPRC reported.
Central Dispatch told KPRC it has no evidence that its platform was hacked. “Bad actors typically target shippers and carriers with very convincing phishing and social engineering schemes,” a spokesperson said, aiming “to steal their credentials, including their second factor authentication method.”
The distinction matters to anyone with a car on a truck. A breach would point at the platform. A stolen password or a convincing phone call points at whoever answered it, which is why LeBlanc’s advice is aimed at the person handing over the keys.
“If you see any discrepancies at all, don’t let your car go,” he told KPRC.
What the charge carries in Texas
All five are charged with engaging in organized criminal activity, according to court documents cited by ABC13. Under Texas Penal Code Section 71.02, that offense is punished one category higher than the most serious underlying crime the group committed, and theft is on the list of qualifying crimes.
Value drives the rest. Theft of property worth $300,000 or more is already a first-degree felony in Texas. When the underlying offense is first-degree, the organized-crime charge stays first-degree but carries a minimum of 15 years, with a maximum of 99 years or life. HPD values the recovered cars alone at $3 million. Whether prosecutors can tie that total, or any part of it, to each defendant is a question for the case.
Where the case stands
Abd and Al Saedi each posted $100,000 bond and Gonzalez posted $50,000, according to KPRC and Fox 26. Al Gburi was arrested in Collin County, north of Dallas, and was still being held there as of Oct. 15, KPRC reported.
KPRC reported that this is the first time HPD’s Auto Theft Division has arrested and charged suspects in a case of this kind. The station said investigators accounted for roughly 15 vehicles over a three-month window, while court records cited by Fox 26 describe alleged activity running from August 2025 to September 2026. Police have not said how many other cars may have taken the same route, or how many reached the far end of it.
By the police account, the trucks in this case arrived right on time. Just not where the buyers were.
Should car-shipping platforms be required to verify a carrier by phone before a load can be rerouted, or is that on the person who booked the shipment?