Citizen of Cuba Sentenced to 7 Years for Eli Lilly Theft, Additional Multimillion Dollar Burglaries
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/citizen-cuba-sentenced-7-years-prison-eli-lilly-theft-additional-multimillion-dollar
Department of Justice
U.S. Attorneys Office
District of Connecticut
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, December 5, 2016
Citizen of Cuba Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Eli Lilly Theft, Additional Multimillion Dollar Burglaries
AMED VILLA, 51, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in New Haven to 84 months of imprisonment, followed by five years of supervised release, for his role in the theft of pharmaceuticals from an Eli Lilly Company warehouse and storage facility in Enfield, Conn., and similar warehouse burglaries in Illinois, Virginia, Florida and Kentucky.
According to court documents and statements made in court, in early 2010, Amaury Villa, Amed Villa, Yosmany Nunez and Alexander Marquez planned to steal pharmaceuticals from the Eli Lilly Company warehouse and storage facility in Enfield. The investigation revealed that, prior to the theft, Amaury Villa and Nunez traveled from the Miami area to Connecticut to gather information about the warehouse facility and the surrounding area. Shortly before the theft, Amed Villa and Rafael Lopez traveled to Flushing, N.Y., where they purchased tools needed to break into the warehouse facility, and then traveled to Connecticut.
In the evening of March 13, 2010, individuals involved in the theft dropped off a ladder in the rear parking lot of the warehouse facility and left. That same night, Marquez drove a tractor trailer to the facility. Thereafter, Amed Villa and Amaury Villa carried the ladder to the building, checked for security in the front area, climbed onto the roof, used the tools Amed Villa and Lopez had purchased to cut a hole in the facility roof, dropped down into the facility and disabled the alarm system. Amaury Villa, Amed Villa and Nunez then loaded more than 40 pallets of pharmaceuticals into the tractor trailer, which had been backed up to the loading dock of the warehouse. The pallets of pharmaceuticals included thousands of boxes Zyprexa, Cymbalta, Prozac, Gemzar and other medicines, valued at approximately $60 million.
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Subsequent investigation revealed that Amed Villa and others also stole more than $13.3 million in pharmaceuticals from the GlaxoSmithKline warehouse in Colonial Heights, Virginia, in August 2009; more than $8 million in cigarettes and a cargo trailer from a warehouse in East Peoria, Illinois, in January 2010; approximately $7.8 million in cellular telephones and multimedia tablets from the Quality One Wireless warehouse in Orlando, Florida, in January 2011, and more than $1.5 million in cigarettes from the Coremark Cigarette Warehouse in Leitchfield, Kentucky, in March 2011.
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The loss attributed to Amed Villa is approximately $90 million. The exact amount of restitution to be ordered will be determined after further submissions by the parties.
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