Transcripts

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CURTIS GILBERT: It could have been much worse. A few hours after reporting the car stolen, my phone rings, and it's good news. The police in Inver Grove Heights have found it. Detective Joshua Otis tells me what happened.

JOSHUA OTIS: A little bit past midnight, an officer saw a vehicle speeding down the roadway. So the officer attempted to stop the vehicle. The occupants exited your vehicle and all ran in different directions.

CURTIS GILBERT: Three of them get away. But the cops chase down the 15-year-old driver on foot and arrest him. Crime solved.

The police say I should be able to pick up the car the next day. But when Detective Otis gets to work in the morning, he smells something. Actually, everyone in the department smells something.

This awful stench permeates the entire parking garage. And it's starting to seep into the main building too. These are cops. So they investigate.

JOSHUA OTIS: And we figured out that the smell was coming from your vehicle. And we noticed that you had some humidity on your back window. And that's not normal for a car that's sat in an air-conditioned building.

So we pop the trunk. And I looked at my partner. And I let go of the trunk lid and I said, you got to be kidding me. Chickens.

CURTIS GILBERT: 25 chickens. 24 of them are still alive. And you can imagine the mess they made during their day and a half in my trunk. Detective Otis figures they were stolen.

JOSHUA OTIS: I don't know if they were going to use them to raise, or if they're going to use them for some kind of meal. Who knows?

CURTIS GILBERT: The guys who stole my car probably stole the chickens from John Jeffries. They're the breed he raises. And they're in his kind of crates. He didn't actually report any chickens missing. But when you go through between 700 and 1,000 chickens a week, it's easy to miss two dozen.

JOHN JEFFRIES: Here we go. New chickens. Choose a good one now.

CURTIS GILBERT: At 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning, the 76-year-old Mr. Jeffries is on his knees counting chickens. His arm is a blur as he pulls birds out of one blood-smeared crate and stuffs them into another.

JOHN JEFFRIES: Uno, dos, tres, quattro, cinqo.

CURTIS GILBERT: He can count in Hmong too. The place is full of customers. And it's equipped with scalding tanks, meat hooks, and butcher tables. That's because it's not just a chicken farm.

It's a slaughterhouse. A self-service slaughterhouse. You buy your chickens, or your pigs, or your cows, or your sheep from Mr. Jeffries. And then, you kill them yourself right on site.

JOHN JEFFRIES: Well, I've been mixed up with chickens all my life. I started out showing chickens--

CURTIS GILBERT: 18 years ago, Jeffries was a cattle trader. But that business was drying up. He was having a hard time buying enough cows just to fill up his semi-trucks.

JOHN JEFFRIES: Well goodness, I discovered we could make as much on a pickup load of chickens as we could on a semi load of cattle. And these people eat more chickens than any other nationality of people.

CURTIS GILBERT: He's talking about Minnesota's growing Hmong population. It worked perfectly. Inver Grove Heights won't let Mr. Jeffries run a conventional slaughterhouse. But he can provide facilities for people to do it themselves.

And there were plenty of recent immigrants who were used to doing things that way too. Today, John Jeffries is a millionaire. And he's not the only one around here running this kind of operation either.

JOHN JEFFRIES: I have two other competitors that do a lot of chickens. And I appreciate them being in business because we sure couldn't handle them all.

CURTIS GILBERT: It's the kind of place I never would have stumbled on in my regular yuppie food co-op life. And believe it or not, being out here on a Saturday morning with chicken guts on my shoes, it almost makes all the hassle and expense of having the car stolen worth it. 10 years from now, my little Honda Civic will be long gone.

I'll have forgotten the $700 I spent replacing the steering column and cleaning the trunk, which will never smell the same. But meeting Mr. Jeffries and touring his slaughterhouse, well that's the kind of experience you carry with you your whole life. And I have the car thieves, chicken thieves, to thank for it.

[CHICKENS CLUCKING]