Two brothers toting more than $1 million in Apple laptops destined for two New Jersey high schools made an alarming report last year to the police in Yorktown, New York: Their haul had been stolen from a parking lot near their home.
One of the brothers followed up that report with another one on the same day: While driving on a highway, he had spotted the truck in a different parking lot more than 20 miles away in Danbury, Connecticut. A window was smashed and the computers were gone.
But, prosecutors said on Wednesday, a few things had not added up.
Shattered glass was found not in the Yorktown parking lot that the brothers said the truck was stolen from, but in the Danbury lot. Detectives also determined that the truck would not have been visible from the highway as the brother had claimed.
Then there was a surveillance video showing the yellow Penske truck on the night it was said to have been stolen taking a detour toward the home of a friend of the men.
The brothers, Anton Saljanin, 43, and Gjon Saljanin, 40, were arrested and charged on Wednesday, along with the friend and another man, with stealing 1,195 laptops bound for public school students in a federal criminal complaint that checked off the ways their claims were undermined by the most obvious evidence.
According to the complaint, Anton Saljanin, who was a driver for a shipping company, had successfully delivered a shipment of 1,300 laptops in January 2014 and was called upon to pick up another load a week later from a technology company in Massachusetts. He brought along his brother in the rented truck.
That night, surveillance cameras showed, the truck was seen leaving a 7-Eleven toward the parking lot in Yorktown, in Westchester County, as the men had said. But then the truck made a turn and was seen within one-eighth of a mile of the home of the friend, Ujka Vulaj, 54, the complaint said.
Cameras captured the truck heading toward the Yorktown lot 29 minutes later, a detour that "corresponds to the approximate length of time it would take to drive to Vulaj residence, unload the computers, and return to the route to the Front Street parking lot," the complaint said.
Eventually the FBI tracked down the buyers of the stolen computers through an Apple registry, finding that Vulaj and another man, Carlos Caceres, 37, of New York City, had sold them to more than a dozen people for as little as half their usual $1,000 price, according to the complaint.
The men were charged with conspiring to steal from an interstate shipment, and the Saljanin brothers and Vulaj were also charged with transporting stolen property in interstate commerce with a value of at least $5,000.
The three men were released on $100,000 bail, and Caceres was released on $50,000 bail, after they appeared in federal court in White Plains on Wednesday. Lawyers for the Saljanin brothers said they expected them to plead not guilty at a hearing; lawyers for the other defendants did not respond to phone messages.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service