This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember it being about 6ft x 6ft x 6ft. It was a bunch of cardboard shipping boxes with clear wrap around them. I think I was paying £10,000 per pallet. He told me he would just skip scanning a pallet at the docks as they were loaded into his trailer, and then his mate would meet him at a roadside services on the motorway with a van and they would somehow move the pallet off the semi into the van.

Sometimes I would hit the jackpot and get dozens of the really expensive bears. I sold 800 bears once for $250,000 in cash to a guy who flew into the UK from Chicago.

The truck driver found me. He must have seen one of my adverts in the press or maybe someone he knew came to one of my Beanie Baby fairs, or heard one of my adverts on the radio. He lived in this crazy council town near me in Bristol where every house appeared to be of government construction, even the church. I remember sitting in his living room one day and there was a literally constant stream of little kids coming through his front door emptying bags of shoplifted merch onto his floor, and he would pick through and buy a couple of things and then they would go to the next house.