MIAMI—Three men who stole thousands of N-95 masks and millions of medical gloves from a Broward County supply company—one of the largest known thefts of personal protective equipment in the U.S.—will be going to prison.
A federal judge in Fort Lauderdale sentenced Alexander Jolly, Kenold Million and Pietro Sinclair to 28 months in prison and three years of supervised release. In a Wednesday hearing, U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith also ordered them to pay $470,000 in restitution for the PPE thefts, which occurred during the early months of the surging COVID-19 pandemic.
They all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit theft of pre-retail medical products.
According to court records, Jolly and Million both worked at Owens & Minor, the healthcare logistics company they robbed, while Sinclair worked for the Penske Corporation, the trucking company hired to take the equipment from the company’s Sunrise warehouse to front-line medical workers.
In April 2020, a time when hospitals were facing critical PPE shortages, Sinclair loaded his work truck with extra pallets of PPE—mixing the stolen pallets with legitimate shipments. Then, he delivered the stolen pallets to Jolly and Million’s house in Fort Lauderdale, prosecutors say, where they used cardboard and furniture to disguise the shipments.
From there, they moved the pallets to other locations in Broward and Miami-Dade using rental trucks and vans.
In total, the trio stole 8.5 million pairs of gloves, 57,000 respirator masks, along with dozens of medical gowns. It cost $470,000 to replace all the equipment.
