Three South Florida men sentenced in one of largest PPE theft rings in U.S.

Three members of one of the nation’s largest PPE theft rings were sentenced to prison Wednesday in Fort Lauderdale, officials said.

Alexander G. Jolly, Kenold Million, and Pietro Felipe Sinclair were each sentenced to 28 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $470,000 in restitution, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.

They were convicted for stealing large quantities of personal protective equipment, including N-95 respirator masks, nitrile medical gloves and medical gowns.

The trio stole more than 8.5 million pairs of gloves, more than 57,000 respirator masks and dozens of gowns from the medical supply company’s warehouse in Sunrise in what is regarded as one of the largest PPE thefts in U.S. history, federal officials said.

Jolly and Million worked for a Broward medical supply company that provided PPE and other products to frontline hospital workers during the early stages of COVID-19.

Sinclair worked for a trucking company used by the medical supply company to transport pallets of the equipment to hospitals.

In April 2020, Jolly and Million used their jobs at the warehouse to move pallets of the equipment to certain areas of the warehouse. Sinclair would combine the ill-gotten pallets along with legitimate pallets onto his work truck and transport the stolen equipment to the carport of Jolly and Million’s home in Fort Lauderdale.

They hid the stolen equipment with cardboard and furniture, and used rental trucks and vans to transport the stolen equipment to various locations in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

The cost of the stolen equipment is $470,000.