By Peter J. Sampson
The Passaic County Herald News
A jury returned swift guilty verdicts on all counts Thursday against a New York City police officer accused of leading a band of cops-turned-robbers in the brazen theft of $1 million in perfume from a Carlstadt distributor in February.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours over two days before finding Kelvin L. Jones, 29, of Yonkers, N.Y., guilty of conspiracy to obstruct interstate commence by armed robbery, armed robbery, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence and conspiracy to transport stolen goods across state lines.
Jones, a five-year veteran of the NYPD, did not react as the verdict was announced at the conclusion of a three-week trial in U.S. District Court in Newark. Two women seated in the gallery behind him sobbed quietly.
U.S. District Judge William H. Walls set sentencing for March 21 and ordered that Jones return to the Hudson County Jail, where he has been held without bail since his arrest in March.
Jones, who has been suspended without pay and will now likely be terminated, faces a statutory maximum of up to 20 years in prison on the two armed robbery counts and five years on each of the other charges.
“Kelvin Jones chose to use his badge to commit crimes,” U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said. “We have no tolerance for this behavior, and we thank the jury for confirming that enforcers of the law are also beholden to it.”
Edward Kahrer, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark division, said the verdict marked the end of Jones’ crooked path and a sad day for law enforcement.
“We hope it sends a clear message ... that those sworn to uphold the law and not entitled to break it,” he said.
Jones did not testify in his defense, but his lawyer argued he was set up by rogue cops and criminal associates who staged the robbery and then fingered him in a bid for lighter sentences. In his summation, Michael A. Orozco argued the evidence against his client was based on “lies and garbage.”
Prosecutors countered that the defense was grasping at straws, hoping to misdirect the jury’s focus away from “a mountain of evidence” that Jones was the mastermind of the Feb. 9 robbery at the In Style USA warehouse on Gotham Parkway.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher Gramiccioni and Eric T. Kanefsky presented evidence that Jones was involved in every aspect of the crime, from recruiting fellow officers to planning and executing the holdup and later selling the stolen perfume and covering their tracks.
The investigation, led by Woodland Park-based FBI case agent Theresa Reilly, used cellphone records to map Jones’ whereabouts on the day of the robbery. She used cell tower locations to trace his route from his home in Yonkers to Edgewater, where he dropped off his BMW, then on to Jersey City, where two trucks were rented, and the warehouse in Carlstadt and back to New York later that night. Jones used a prepaid phone that was not traceable to him. But during a search of his home, the FBI found auto-repair and moving-company receipts on which Jones listed the cellphone’s number.
The most harrowing testimony came from one of the victims, Shilpa Bawa, a former In Style account supervisor from Wallington. She described the shock and fear she felt as armed officers stormed in under the pretense of conducting a legitimate investigation, herding 11 workers into an office and tying their hands behind their backs. She and her colleagues were forced to sit on the floor for more than three hours as robbers ransacked the warehouse, she said.
The theft of more than $1 million in high-end perfumes and fragrances forced her employer out of business, she testified.
Nine co-defendants, including three former NYPD officers who implicated Jones during the trial, pleaded guilty before the trial. The FBI recovered about 700 boxes of perfume at a Linden warehouse in August, but three other truckloads are believed to have been sold.
The Carlstadt heist was a virtual rerun of an earlier warehouse robbery in Brooklyn that featured the same stickup team and modus operandi, Gramiccioni said. But in the In Style robbery, Carlstadt police arrived in time to arrest two suspects and seize two partially loaded trucks, the last of six rental trucks used in the caper. Those two Penske trucks were quickly traced to a Jersey City company where they had been rented by cops who used their own debit cards and driver’s licenses.
That blunder triggered alarms among the exposed officers, and Jones instructed them to report that their IDs had been stolen. After their arrests, Jones tried to buy the silence of one of the officers by offering him a $100,000 bribe, Gramiccioni said.
Copyright 2010 North Jersey Media Group Inc.