Dog only disobeys when Im not home

Question
I have a wonderful two year old lab mix (think he may be mixed with beagle) and the only trouble I have with him is when I am not home.  Originally I crate-trained him and, though he did a lot of damage to the crate, he was house-broken and I did away with the crate.  He was fine for quite a while but gradually he figured out how to get into all kinds of things.  I've given up on trying to keep him off the couch but he began getting into kitchen cupboards and even started getting into the fridge and getting into the food - even opened the meat and cheese drawer and ate it all!  I bought a child lock for the fridge so now he just keeps clawing it up.

I can't figure out how to teach him this is wrong since I can't ever catch him in the act.  And I don't want to crate him again because I've been raised with dogs all my life that have had free roam of the house while we were gone and I know there is a way to have that with this guy.  I trust that he is smart enough to learn - can you help me figure out how to teach him to leave stuff alone?

Thank you!

Answer
It sounds like he was given too much freedom too fast and doesn't know how to behave with that much freedom.He may not be ready for that much, my 4 1/2 yr old Dane was kept confined to certain rooms until he was about 2 and we then increased it to specific levels of the house and was only given free roam a little over a year ago(we never had a crate for him once he grew up).Try confining him to a certain room or area of the house and if you don't want to do that line your countertops with mousetraps(or buy a shriek alarm from the Drs Foster & Smith company) and put alarms on the fridge door and garbage so when they get opened by him it will scare him.The alarms I am talking about are like stick on window alarms that I have seen at walmart,it has worked on numerous dogs that are garbage diggers. Making sure he gets plenty of vigorous exercise will help too.