Two former New York City police officers and another man have been sentenced for their roles in the armed holdup of a northern New Jersey perfume warehouse last year.
Thirty-year-old Kelvin Jones of Yonkers, N.Y., who prosecutors described as the bandits' ringleader, was sentenced Wednesday to more than 16 years in state prison.
The other former officer Brian Checo, a 26-year-old New York resident, got more than six years.
Another man involved in the robbery, 33-year-old Gabriel Vargas of New York, received a 5-year term.
According to prosecutors, Checo and LeBlanca entered the warehouse in Carlstadt on Feb. 9, 2010, brandished guns and badges and yelled, "NYPD! Hands up!''
Garcias, Gabriel Vargas, and at least one other man then showed up and helped the cops restrain nearly a dozen In Style USA employees, securing their hands behind their backs with plastic ties.
At one point, one of the alleged robbers told the store employees that they were performing a routine "inspection" of the storage facility. When one of the employees asked why they had to be restrained if the inspection was "routine," he was taken aside to speak with one of the men involved in the operation, who flashed his badge and ordered the employee to hand over any surveillance equipment used by the facility along with any cash in the company's cash drawer, according to the complaint.
The victim complied, turning over the equipment and about $3,000 to $4,000 in cash that had been in the cash drawer.
While the officers and two others engaged in the armed robbery, four other men, along with more than a dozen day laborers apparently hired to assist in the operation, loaded hundreds of brown boxes, all containing various types of perfume, into trucks the suspects had rented in advance of the operation, according to the complaint.
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Once the trucks were loaded, two of the defendants named in the complaint drove them away.
Carlstadt police arrived at the warehouse at about 9:30 p.m. after receiving a 911 call. They arrested two of the suspects and seized two trucks that contained hundreds of boxes of perfume inventory meant for sale in New York and other national and international locations -- about $1 million worth.
