FBI Arrests Florida Man in Heist Of $4.8 Million in Gold From Truck
FBI Arrests Florida Man in Heist Of $4.8 Million in Gold From Truck
FBI Arrests Florida Man in Heist Of $4.8 Million in Gold From Truck
FBI Arrests Florida Man in Heist Of $4.8 Million in Gold From Truck
The FBI has revealed how thieves made off with gold bars worth $4.8 million in a truck robbery on Interstate 95 last year, and it reads like a heist fit for Hollywood. Agents say the armed robbers painstakingly prepared for the job, using high-tech gizmos including a GPS tracker and a remote-controlled pepper-spray launcher to subdue the drivers. Agents said the heist’s ringleader was Adalberto Perez, 46. He was arrested this week at his home in the Miami suburb of Opa-Locka, almost exactly a year after the March 2015 robbery in Wilson County, North Carolina. Two accomplices remain at large. It appears the case was cracked when a friend of Perez came forward just a few months ago. According to an FBI affidavit unsealed in federal court this week, the friend said Perez spent about a year preparing for the heist. The target: a routine shipment of gold bars aboard a semitractor trailer sent by Miami-based Republic Metals to a processing plant in Bridgewater, Mass., that serves jewelry makers in the Boston area. The FBI says that friend — now a confidential informer — said Perez bought a GPS tracking device online and had it mailed to the friend’s address, without telling him what was in the package. The affidavit doesn’t say how Perez was able to gain access to the truck, if he had any relationship with the TransValue shipping company, or if the plot involved still more accomplices. But the friend said “Perez said he placed this technology under the TransValue trailer in order to track its location,” and that Perez also rigged a pepper-spray device inside the cab, the affidavit says. TransValue chief executive officer Jay Rodriguez has said the truck left Miami about 4 a.m. that Sunday. The tractor-trailer appeared much like any other traveling up the East Coast. The drivers apparently had no idea they were being tracked by three armed robbers following them in a white van.
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