Two Florida men accused of cutting a hole in the roof of an Enfield pharmaceutical warehouse and making off with $80 million in prescription drugs in 2010 have pleaded guilty to felony charges in what's largely considered the biggest heist in Connecticut history.
Yosmany Nunez, 42, and Alexander Marquez, 41, both Cuban citizens, pleaded guilty in court Wednesday. They'll be sentenced in February and could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
They are two of the five suspects federal prosecutors have charged in the 2010 heist at the Eli Lilly warehouse in Enfield — a crime that U.S. Attorney David Fein said police began to unravel thanks to a water bottle that one suspect, Amed Villa, left behind at the crime scene.
Villa and his brother Amaury Villa are also charged in the heist, as is Rafael Lopez. The Villa brothers have also pleaded guilty to the crime.
Federal prosecutors say the men propped a ladder against the warehouse the night of March 3, 2010, climbed onto the roof, cut a hole in it, dropped down into the warehouse and disabled its alarm.
There, prosecutors say, they loaded more than 40 pallets of prescription drugs – including thousands of boxes of Zyprexa, Cymbalta, Prozac, Gemzar and other pills worth tens of millions of dollars – into the back of a tractor-trailer.
The stolen drugs were found in a Florida storage facility more than a year later.
U.S. & World
Enfield police chief Carl Sferrazza called the heist "the largest theft we've ever had, not only in Enfield, but probably the largest pharmaceutical theft the country has ever seen."
