The Sticky: The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist the new Margo Martindale crime series is based on, explained
In The Sticky, Margo Martindale stars as a caustic maple syrup farmer who steals millions' worth of the sticky stuff from a "corrupt" organisation. (Supplied: Prime Video)
Between 2011 and 2012, approximately $CAD18 million ($19.88m) worth of maple syrup was stolen from the federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (QMSP) in Canada.
Turns out a group of people had been siphoning off the golden treat to sell on the maple syrup black market.
The sickly crime caper has now been turned into a TV series called The Sticky, starring esteemed character actor Margo Martindale — who is just as shocked as you are that any of this happened.
"I first thought this couldn't be a real thing. It was wild to learn about it. I love knowing about this now … I learned way, way, way, way too much about maple syrup," she told Variety in October.
However, The Sticky is "absolutely not the true story".
So, what really happened?
To understand how there's even such a thing as a maple syrup black market, we first have to get into the history of the controversial QMSP, which has existed in some form since 1966 and currently controls around 80 per cent of the world's syrup.
In response to years of poor yield and a lack of stockpile, the federation created the International Strategic Reserve (ISR) of syrup in 2000. This consists of a warehouse full of maple syrup barrels.
At the time of the heist, the maple syrup reserve was only inspected once a year. (Supplied: IMDB/Netflix)
Two years later, the QMSP became the central agency for all syrup sold in Quebec and in 2004 it implemented a quota that determined how much maple syrup producers could sell per season. It also introduced rules around who could buy it.
In years of high yield, excess syrup is placed in the ISR and, in low-yield years, that syrup is released into the market. The goal of all this is to keep prices stable.
Some syrup producers appreciate the regulation but others disagree with it and want a return to a free market, which the neighbouring province of Ontario uses.
Before the reserve, maple syrup prices fluctuated drastically in low versus high-yield years. (Netflix)
The frustration has led many to sell their heavily regulated sap on the black market.
Syrup producer Richard Vallières, the so-called ringleader of the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, was one of them.
How the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist went down
Back in 2007, Vallières was fined more than $CAD1.5 million for selling syrup on the black market.
In 2011, he was introduced to Avik Caron, whose wife co-owned the warehouse that stored the syrup stockpiles, by their mutual acquaintance, Sébastien Jutras. Together, they devised the plan that would see them siphon millions of dollars worth of syrup from the ISR.
In October that year, Jutras began driving full barrels of syrup from the ISR warehouse to a separate warehouse. There, Vallières decanted it into new barrels and filled some of the original barrels with water (leaving others empty) before returning them to their original spot.
Vallières then sold the stolen syrup to legitimate buyers with the help of syrup reseller Étienne St Pierre.
It took police a few years to cotton on to the syrup heist, but by 2017, Vallières, Caron (pictured) and St Pierre were all convicted. (IMDb/Netflix)
Vallières told a parole board in 2022 that he was motivated by more than just money: "I had run-ins with the federation, and one day I'm being offered maple syrup and I knew it was stolen.
"I really wanted revenge. I wanted revenge because … they pursued me and had my house seized."
Big Syrup realised something was up the following year during the annual ISR inspection, when it became apparent 9,571 barrels' worth of syrup were unaccounted for.
By 2017, Vallières, Caron and St Pierre had each been sentenced to years in jail and/or home imprisonment and given multi-million-dollar fines. Jutras also did time in jail, and Vallières's father, Raymond, was convicted too.
How much of The Sticky sticks to the true story?
Much like the real heist, The Sticky is largely a story about one person taking back what they feel they deserve from what they perceive to be a corrupt organisation, with a couple of other people along for the ride.
There is no Vallières to be seen in The Sticky, though.
Instead, the Prime Video comedy-drama stars an undiluted Martindale as the fictional character Ruth Landry, a disgruntled and foul-mouthed maple syrup farmer from Quebec whose husband is in a coma.
The benefit of Martindale's character being fictional is that she was able to make Ruth entirely her own — which is to say, she is peak Martindale. (Prime Video)
We meet her not long after the syrup federation, personified by Leonard Gaultier (Guy Nadon), has threatened to take her farm away due to a paperwork issue.
Then, disgraced Bostonian mobster Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos) and soft French-Canadian ISR security guard Remy (Guillaume Cyr) ask Landry to help them steal millions of dollars' worth of syrup. And she, like Vallières, is more than willing to get revenge on the federation, given all they've put her through and how tight money is.
Landry's character also bears a striking resemblance to real-life maple syrup producer Angèle Grenier, who has been outspoken in her distrust of the QMSP for years — to the extent that she featured heavily in the 2018 Netflix documentary episode on the heist in Dirty Money.
While security guard Remy seems to stand in for Jutras, Caron appears to have served as the inspiration for Mike — except Mike, unlike real-life Caron, doesn't have a problem breaking peoples' legs to get what he wants.
In The Sticky, Remy is the lone security guard tasked with keeping an eye on millions of dollars' worth of syrup, which means he knows all the system's weak spots. (Prime Video)
"In many ways this is a show about labour," writer Brian Donovan told the CBC of the heavily exaggerated characters and events in The Sticky.
"It's about people, workers who are getting screwed over and are tired of it.
"We really let that guide us. And … if we happened to use some things that really happened, great.
"But our real goal was to tell the most interesting story about these people in this universe and let the chips fall where they may in terms of how real it ended up being."
Remy (left) and Ruth (centre) are the hard-done-by workers in The Sticky, whereas Mike (right) is the disgraced mobster desperate for a big win no matter the stakes or cost. (Prime Video)
This is why Ruth drives a maple tree into Leonard's office in a fit of rage and Mike commits murder in the name of the heist. It's also why The Sticky's writers went hard making the heads of the syrup federation obviously "corrupt and using it for clearly the wrong reasons".
"We're not saying that is true of the real world at all … but we wanted Ruth to be put upon so she could strike back," Ed Herro, another writer on The Sticky, explained to the CBC.
Is The Sticky worth seeing or should you just watch Dirty Money: The Maple Syrup Heist?
If you want the true story, watch Dirty Money: The Maple Syrup Heist.
If you want to see Martindale flawlessly breathe life into yet another one of the complicated and caustic characters she has become synonymous with later in life and you only want broad strokes of the truth, The Sticky is the show for you.
With The Sticky, you get to watch Martindale yelling at people for the bulk of the series' six half-hour episodes, and you also get to learn a lot about syrup. (Prime Video)
And for all the killing and lukewarm one-liners poking fun at the tension between French versus English-speaking Canadians added into this story, The Sticky does just as good a job as Dirty Money at depicting the plight of maple syrup producers in Quebec.
Sure, this is something you could have gone an entire lifetime without having learned. But would that life have been anywhere near as sweet?
The Sticky is streaming now on Prime Video.