Once upon a time, in the bustling literary world of New York City, lived a writer named Barnaby.

Every era gets the nut jobs it deserves. The 20th century gave us the high-modernist crackpots, men like , who, while revolutionizing poetry from his cage in Pisa, also believed that usury and a vast Jewish conspiracy were the root of all cultural decay. His Cantos are a masterpiece of unreadable, beautiful, and morally repugnant obsession. To read Pound is to swim in a brilliant, poisoned stream. He is the patron saint of the genre: a writer so convinced of his own system that the system eats the art alive.

"It's about the human condition," Barnaby said, eating a pistachio. "Also, it's funny."

This eight-part series explores a massive, high-tech nut heist in California where dozens of truckloads of almonds vanished from American highways.