Record drug heist was 10 years ago
Amed and Amaury Villa walk across the Enfield warehouse parking lot. They peer into its front entrance and then through a rear door by a loading dock. As expected, they don’t see any security guards.
It’s almost 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 13, 2010. The men, who are brothers, grab a ladder that an accomplice had dropped off at the warehouse about an hour earlier. The edges of a nor’easter hitting the region lash them with wind and rain, but it doesn’t matter — it’s go time.
Amed is 6 feet tall and a bit over 200 pounds with brown eyes and a crop of salt-and-pepper hair. He’s in his mid-40s but keeps pace with his brother, nine years his junior, as they climb the ladder to the roof.
Amed is a security-systems expert and selects a spot on the roof that he guesses, or somehow knows, is vulnerable. Using tools purchased the day before, they saw into the roof, carving out a sizable hole.
After fastening ropes to the roof, they lower themselves into the warehouse. Avoiding a variety of security sensors with evident skill — and, some would later argue, uncanny knowledge of the securitysystem layout — they disable the warehouse’s alarm system.
Two other men, Yosmany Nunez, aka “El Gato” (“The Cat”), and Alexander
Marquez, arrive. Marquez backs a leased tractor trailer into one of the warehouse’s seven loading bays — the only one not covered by a security camera.
A fifth man, Rafael Lopez, who had traveled to Connecticut with Amed, is in a car nearby, told to keep an eye out for police. But his full involvement in the crime is unclear. He would later claim he was unaware of what was taking place in the warehouse.
Using the warehouse forklift, the four men begin loading the tractor trailer with pallets filled with boxes of a product that had recently become more valuable to thieves than cash, jewels or even art — medicine.
They are inside a major distribution warehouse for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The drugs on the pallets they are loading into their truck include thousands of boxes of Zyprexa, Cymbalta, Prozac and Gemzar.
When sold on the black market, these medications could net millions. It’s a new type of crime for a new millennium, and they are good at it.
Working into the earlymorning hours of March 14, the men load more than 40 pallets of pharmaceuticals onto the tractor trailer. By 3:40 a.m. the crew drives away.
They had just pulled off one of the largest heists in U.S. history.
This had been done by pros.
The investigation
That much was evident to Det. Brian Callaghan of the Enfield Police Department. It was March 14, the day after the burglary at the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical supply warehouse in Enfield.
Callaghan, the lead detective on the case, didn’t know exactly what or how much had been taken, but he could plainly see the gaping hole in the roof through which the thieves had accessed the building. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ power of deduction to tell this was no ordinary theft.
“It was clear that it was probably something that was worked out ahead of time and not just a random burglary,” he says in an interview, 10 years after the brazen crime was committed.
The warehouse itself was as nondescript as they come: an unmarked gray building in a quiet section of town. Even members of the Enfield Police Department didn’t know what was stored in it.
“I had seen the building hundreds and hundreds of times, but had no idea what its contents were,” says Lt. Willie Pedemonti, who supervised the investigation and is now Enfield’s detective division commander.
As for Callaghan, he was only vaguely familiar with the place. He knew it was associated with Eli Lilly but didn’t realize it was one of the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant’s three major distribution centers.
He also didn’t know that, over the past decade, soaring pharmaceutical prices and sometimes lax security had made pharmaceutical warehouses like this increasingly attractive targets to thieves.
The burglary he was now investigating was the largest score in an era later dubbed the “golden age of pharmaceutical thefts,” a period in the 2000s when pharma heists became more lucrative than bank robberies — far more lucrative.
A year earlier, in 2009, a total of $200 million in pharmaceuticals had been stolen in dozens of burglaries, more than four times what had been taken that year from banks.
Eli Lilly estimated that $90 million worth of medicines had been stolen from its Enfield facility. That number would be disputed and was ultimately lowered to $60 million. Even so, it is the largest pharmaceutical heist in U.S. history and one of the largest of any kind.
It was almost three times the size of the real-life Lufthansa heist at the heart of the film “Goodfellas,” in which mobsters made off with more than $5 million (about $23 million in today’s dollars) from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1978.
Enfield investigators say they didn’t get caught up in thinking about the value of what was stolen. “We treated it like every other burglary down to its simple core,” Pedemonti says.
On the warehouse floor, the thieves had left tools and water bottles that they appeared to have used. Enfield detectives carefully gathered that evidence.
They also interviewed the few full-time employees at the warehouse as well as subcontractors who regularly worked there.
All employees and regular subcontractors were “pretty quickly ruled out,” Callaghan says.
Bringing in the FBI
Because of the size of the crime and because the cargo thieves had likely crossed state lines, the FBI began assisting the Enfield detectives. Special Agent Damian Platosh supervised the investigation of the theft from the FBI’s New Haven Division.
A native of Newington and a veteran agent, Platosh had never seen a case where thieves had accessed
a building through the roof “other than on TV on Bugs Bunny cartoons.”
As spectacular as the crime was, Platosh knew that tracking down the culprits was vital. The FBI was in communication with the federal Food and Drug Administration, where officials worried that, if the stolen drugs were sold on the black market, they could be dangerous.
Some medications lose their efficacy over time, others need to be stored at the proper temperature and humidity.
Before long, analysis of the DNA on one of the water bottles came back. There was a match. The DNA was from a Florida man who had been arrested in the early 2000s in connection with a series of small thefts. His name was Amed Villa.
Amed Villa was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1965. According to statements Amed made to investigators, which are contained in court documents viewed for this story, he lived an eventful life.
Amed said his father was chief of police in Havana.
Amed grew up in relative luxury in a large, two-story house, where he says the family wanted for nothing.
After mandatory military service for three years, Amed spent several years working in the kitchen at his father’s police station. He seems to have wanted something more out of life.
In 1994, when Amed was 27 or 28, he and three friends built a raft by hand and drifted out to sea in hopes of reaching the U.S. They floated for a week. They had no food or possessions, and at times Amed says he could feel sharks bumping against the raft.
They were ultimately picked up by a Philippine ship. When the ship docked in the Port of Miami, because they were Cubans, they were permitted to stay in the U.S.
Years later, when asked by investigators why he came to the U.S., Amed’s answer was simply, “rock music.” He told them the music “filled my mind” and made him want to travel here.
In the land of rock ’n’ roll, he settled in Miami. Eventually he found work as a handyman and independent contractor installing garage doors and alarm systems. But like the outlaws sometimes glorified in the music Villa loved, he had run-ins with the law.
In 1999, when he was 33, he and another man were caught by police near a construction site with $12,000 worth of stolen tools. Over the next few years he was caught and charged in similar incidents and served six months in prison in 2002.
A lucrative partnership
After 2002, Amed claimed to have lived a law-abiding life for some years. But according to court documents filed in 2016 by Amed’s lawyer, beginning in 2008 Amed felt he needed more money to support his family (he has three children and his youngest son has learning disabilities).
Amed’s younger brother Amaury, who had followed him to the U.S., was already involved in warehouse thefts, the documents say. Amaury had intel on warehouse alarm systems and a list of drivers he used as fences.
Amed began working with his brother; his specialty was disabling the same type of alarm systems he once installed.
In addition to the water bottle linking Amed Villa to the crime scene, investigators in Connecticut were making progress in other ways. They got an anonymous tip that the people involved had Cuban names and one of them went by the street name “El Gato.”
Suspecting the Cuban mob was involved, the FBI began to coordinate the investigation with experts in cargo theft at the FBI’s Miami division, which has a cargo-theft task force.
Prior to this case, “I knew nothing about the Cuban mob,” Agent Platosh says. “I came to learn that it’s not like La Cosa Nostra, the Italian mob.” He says it’s less centralized, and more of a loose association of operators who participate in crimes as a “side hustle.”
If someone is planning a theft, they might say “I need an alarm guy, or a driver, or a packer. Now I need a couple of guys.”
The tools left at the warehouse provided another lead. “They all seemed to be Husky brand, which is proprietary to Home Depot,” Callaghan says. When they contacted Home Depot, the company ran the combination of tools through their system.
“There was only one purchase of that combination of tools and it was in Flushing, N.Y., the day before the burglary. Then we got video of that, and started linking some plates.”
Detectives also began trying to better track the movements of the potential perpetrators before the crime by looking at hotel registries in the area.
Members of the FBI’s cargo-theft task force advised the Enfield detectives “that a lot of cargo-theft organizations will use lower-end motels, kind of cheaper motels,” Callaghan recalls.
Finding the hotels where the thieves stayed required old-school, shoe-leather detective work.
“The whole detective bureau was out there, going essentially lobby to lobby up and down I-91,” Callaghan says. They would ask to see the registry at a hotel and then check likely dates against the initial names of the thieves they had gathered. They searched the cheaper hotels but couldn’t find mention of the thieves.
They started searching more expensive conference centers and found they had stayed at Hyatt Summerfield Suites in Windsor and the Hilton Garden Inn in Springfield, Mass. The thieves either registered under their own names or used credit cards with their names to pay for their rooms.
Investigators also discovered that Amaury Villa and Yosmany Nunez had made a scouting trip to Enfield in early January, two months before the burglary. During that trip one of the men was caught on surveillance video looking into the front door of the Eli Lilly warehouse.