Federal and city investigators seized about 266 kilograms of cocaine from a self-storage facility in Long Island City on Wednesday in what the NYPD said is its largest cocaine seizure in at least a decade.
“Think about the scale of what was intercepted here,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference Friday. “More than a quarter of a metric ton of cocaine sitting in boxes and ready to move through an illegal distribution network.”
The cocaine has an estimated street value of $10 million and would have likely been cut with fentanyl before reaching city buyers, prosecutors said. Cocaine now factors into more than half of all overdose deaths in New York City, they said.
“It is often mixed with other dangerous substances such as fentanyl,” Lisa Tompkins, chief assistant district attorney at New York’s Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, said at the news conference.
Prosecutors charged Nelson Salcedo, 35, of Englewood, New Jersey, with first- and third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance. He pleaded not guilty in Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday evening. He is being held at Rikers Island on $50,000 cash bail or $100,000 bond.
Tisch said that he was seen unloading numerous boxes full of drugs. Salcedo’s attorney, Patrick Brackley, questions this.
“Salcedo was gainfully employed as an elevator mechanic and the issue will be if he had knowledge of what was in those boxes,” Brackley said.
Authorities said two other people have also been arrested in the investigation, but did not provide their names.
The investigation began in June, when NYPD detectives partnered with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Jersey field division to look into suspected trafficking in Upper Manhattan, Tisch said. A DEA search in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on Aug. 12 turned up about $170,000 in cash, a firearm and 15 kilograms of cocaine, she said.
On two consecutive Wednesday evenings, investigators watched Salcedo deliver heavy brown cardboard boxes to another person near the north end of Central Park, prosecutors said. Expecting the pattern to continue, officers tracked his silver Nissan van, registered to an elevator repair company, to the storage facility at 4102 Northern Blvd. on Wednesday afternoon, officials said.
Officers arrested Salcedo after watching him load 12 boxes into the van, with seven more on the ground nearby, Tisch said. A police dog alerted to narcotics, and investigators obtained a search warrant before opening the boxes, officials said. Inside were roughly 230 brick-shaped packages of cocaine, they said.
The cocaine’s purity indicated it had not yet been cut and would likely have been stretched three or four times before reaching buyers, officials said.
Towanda Thorne-James, a special agent in charge with the DEA New Jersey Field Division, said the investigation traces back to a cartel. Authorities declined to identify which one.
Prosecutors said more arrests are anticipated.
