Two multi-million-dollar alleged crime families, specializing in buying and selling stolen goods, were busted in a joint police-FBI-IRS operation in San Jose yesterday. Both families are Viet — Le and Vo — but apparently were not working together, said law enforcement.
“Using tool stores and luxury homes as fronts, a pair of San Jose crime families ran multi-million dollar empires of stolen men’s razors, Oil of Olay, Pepcid AC and teeth brighteners like they were a shadow Safeway or a criminal Costco,” wrote the San Jose Mercury News here.
The operation is simple enough: Allegedly, thieves steal stuffs from stores, sell to either the Le or the Vo family for 25 cents on the dollar. These fencers will then pack the goods and ship out to legitimate retailers.
According to the Mercury News, the police accuse the Vo family of working out of two tool stores in San Jose. “The organization would regularly ship out four to six pallets of stolen products a month to various locations in Utah, Florida and New York. Police estimated that each pallet is worth approximately $120,000 in retail value.”
The Le family, on the other hand, purportedly worked out of homes, “including within the luxury Silver Creek Estates in San Jose.”
According to the Mercury News, the stolen products may even end up “at legitimate distribution centers that sometimes resold the products back to the chains that had been robbed in the first place.”
The trick to their success, according to the police, was for the fencers to only buy products with long expiration dates, said officer Jesus Mendoza, the undercover agent who sold “stolen” products to the families. “Mach III razors, Zantac, Benadryl,” said the Mercury News.
Probably so that they can collect large number of the same product through several shop-lifters, and ship out a big pallet of, say, Benadryl, and look less suspicious that way.
The joint task force “arrested 17 people, including 11 in San Jose, on charges of federal money laundering and interstate transportation of stolen goods.”
They confiscated six semi-trucks loaded with $5.5 million in goods and seized $140,000 in cash, gold bars, Mercedes and diamonds.
This is like low-budget Soprano. Great!
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran