The three young masked men carefully staked out a white delivery truck that was making stops at luxury malls. Inside, it was packed with hundreds of Apple watches, iPhones and iPads, federal prosecutors said.
Within minutes, the men had stormed the truck, zip-tied its occupants and made off with the merchandise, worth more than $1 million.
A set of fingerprints on paperwork helped investigators identify the culprits, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, Alan Christhofer Cedeno-Ferrer, 27, Michael Mejia-Nunez, 29, and Ennait Alexis Sirett-Padilla, 24, were arrested by the F.B.I. and police from New York City and Nassau County. They each have been indicted on federal robbery charges in the January heist and face more than 10 years in prison.
Evan Sugar, a lawyer for Mr. Sirett-Padilla, said he intended to “ensure that the presumption of innocence and all of his rights are fully honored.” Lawyers for Mr. Christhofer Cedeno-Ferrer and Mr. Mejia-Nunez could not be reached for comment. All three men are from the Dominican Republic.
The brazen robbery on Jan. 3, as outlined by federal prosecutors in charging papers, was targeted at a delivery truck making a series of stops at the malls on Long Island. The first delivery on the freezing January morning was at an Apple store at the Americana Manhasset, on a stretch of high-end stores known as “Miracle Mile,” an area once exalted by Billy Joel.
Two hours before the store opened, at around 8 a.m. on a Saturday, prosecutors said the thieves, wearing masks and armed with handguns, stormed the truck. One delivery worker was zip-tied and ordered into the container; the other was instructed to drive to a remote lot.
The men followed in three vehicles, one of which was a Home Depot truck, prosecutors said. They then hauled the merchandise into that truck and slammed the white delivery truck door shut, leaving both drivers in frigid conditions.
The thieves then took off in the Home Depot truck, driving all the way to a storage unit in Paterson, N.J., where they unloaded the electronics into a U-Haul. The next morning, the authorities found discarded packaging for Apple products scattered in a parking lot in Passaic, N.J. Their getaway truck was left abandoned in the Bronx.
But careless mistakes led investigators back to the three suspects, prosecutors said.
Mr. Sirett-Padilla rented the storage unit in his own name, and Mr. Cedeno-Ferrer’s fingerprints were left on the rental agreement for the storage unit, prosecutors said. Video surveillance from the storage facility shows both Mr. Sirett-Padilla and Mr. Mejia-Nunez, unmasked, prosecutors said.
And in the days after the heist, Mr. Cedeno-Ferrer also activated two Apple Watches that were stolen from the truck, prosecutors said.