Giant koi fish statues disappear from Dix Hills business; police offer reward

Arriving for work last Monday, Shawn Rosen, owner of Koi Market Aquatic Nursery in Dix Hills, noticed something fishy.

The two 6-foot-long koi statues next to the waterfall outside his business were gone, vanished. Taken.

“Koi fish are supposed to be good luck,” Mike Varrone, the shop's head of wholesale sales, said Tuesday.

Now, Suffolk County Police say they are looking for the thief — or thieves — who stole the statues, which were imported from Indonesia and are valued at $6,000 each. Police have put out an alert, asking the public's help solving the crime, including a cash reward.

Police concede there have been similar thefts in the past. Back in 2021, some high school kids swiped a horse head — no, it wasn’t a "Godfather" reference — off a big yellow horse statue nicknamed Taxi. It turned out to be a prank: The head was returned to its home at an antiques market in St. James and reattached to the horse.

This?

“This is definitely not a prank,” Varrone said Tuesday. “These are not easy to house. You couldn’t have taken this in a car or a pickup truck or something. You had to have a box truck or a U-Haul. And what are you going to do with them: Sell them on the black market?

“I mean, they’re hard to hide," Varrone continued. "It’s not like you can put them out in your yard or something. I don’t get it.”

Japanese koi are prized ornamental fish believed to have been domesticated in early 19th-century Japan, where "wild, colorful carp were caught, kept and bred by rice farmers," according to the Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. They can grow to 3 feet in length, and though native to bodies of fresh water around the Black, Caspian and Aral seas, they are now found in ponds around the world — including in thousands at homes across Long Island.

A koi can live for 40 years; the oldest is believed to have lived 230 years, the Smithsonian said.

Koi Market, located on the LIE's North Service Road at Deer Park Avenue, bills itself as the largest koi fish seller in the Northeast. Varrone, who has been in the fish business 35 years and has a koi fish tattoo on his leg, said it has an on-site inventory of about 10,000 fish — some worth as much as $8,500. The company also performs pond installations and maintenance and sells supplies and bonsai trees.

Varrone said the two statues were installed earlier this summer alongside a waterfall to advertise the site. They were bolted to a pedestal that was cemented to the ground.

There are no surveillance cameras in the area and no apparent witnesses. Police ask anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”