The women, it turned out, didn’t even catch the worst of the damage Arno Smit wrought in the Central Valley. He arrived in the late ’90s — boom times for the California dairy industry. Business had dried up by the time Arno disappeared in 2009, but by then he’d made off with an estimated $12 million from local dairymen he’d duped in a massive fraud. Locals were so embarrassed about how badly they’d been taken by Arno Smit that, for a time, most of them didn’t speak about it, even to one another. Their sheepishness meant the extent of his fraudulent activity in the Central Valley wasn’t fully appreciated until after he’d left — until an investigator named Rocky Pipkin came along. ... The scale and scope of the crimes vary. Honey embezzlement. Almond heists. One time, Rocky and his agents spent months on a sting operation to expose an elaborate organic fertilizer fraud. That case involved a decoy plant where the crooks pretended to make organic fertilizer with fish meal and bird guano; a second plant, fortified by walls of wooden pallets stacked 40 feet high, where they actually made the product with chemicals; and an intricate underground pumping system that would clandestinely fill the “organic” tanks with the conventionally made fertilizer.