Three suspected burglars who stole millions of dollars from two NY banks were caught after using a personal credit card to buy the tools of their trade, authorities said.
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“The thieves stole not just people’s money but memories too”, Manhattan Federal Attorney Preet Bharara said during a press conference Tuesday.
Michael Mazzara, 44, Charles Kerrigan, 40, and Anthony Mascuzzio, 36, appeared before a judge on Tuesday accused of using a welding torch to cut through the banks’ roofs and vaults, and plundering the contents. “What was left at the banks and on the roofs of the banks looks like something out of a scene of a movie”.
The HSBC branch was burglarized between 1:45 p.m. on April 8 and 5:30 a.m. on April 10, a time when the community was in observance of shabbos.
Bratton said in a release that the burglaries resembled scenes from the movie “Heat” because they were well organized, meticulous and hard for law enforcement to investigate.
The crew struck again the weekend of May 20, again cutting through the roof of a Maspeth Federal Savings Bank on Woodhaven Boulevard after constructing a makeshift shack on top of the building to hide their activities. Investigators found that the burglars had cut through the roof of the bank and into its vault. The burglars reportedly disabled the bank’s alarm system and Verizon phone lines in the area before the robbery.
Bratton credited “painstaking persistence” by investigators left with few clues as they probed a string of recent bank burglaries.
The suspects were all charged with conspiracy to commit bank burglary and bank burglary and are all facing up to 20 years in prison.
That included USD 330,000 in cash and a valuables from HSBC, and USD 296,000 in cash and USD 4.3 million in valuables from the Maspeth bank. Near a hole in the roof was a black plywood structure that the burglars apparently built to shield themselves from view. “From the plywood purchased at a nearby Home Depot, to the torches from a Brooklyn welder used to muscle into the vault, the picture slowly came into focus, resulting in today’s arrests and charges”.
The suspects of the NY heists are set to be arraigned in court on Wednesday.
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After the heist, they returned to their hangout, on the block where Kerrigan and Mazarra live, splitting their bounty.
