The small town of Enfield is about 20 miles north of Hartford. “You would never guess there was a warehouse there with millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals inside,” said Special Agent Damian Platosh, who supervised the investigation of the theft from the FBI’s New Haven Division. Among a select group of criminals who specialize in cargo theft, however, the facility’s location was well known.

These particular cargo thieves—part of a criminal group known as the Cuban Mob—were experts at their trade. They targeted facilities that stored drugs, cigarettes, and consumer electronics such as cell phones. They understood how to conduct surveillance, were proficient at recognizing and disarming alarm systems, and they knew how to load and move freight.

On the night of March 13, 2010, one of the thieves stashed a ladder in the rear parking lot of the warehouse. Later that night, after checking for security guards, the tractor-trailer pulled in and two of the burglars carried the ladder to the building. They climbed atop the warehouse and cut a hole in the roof. Using ropes, they lowered themselves into the facility and disabled the alarm system.

“They knew exactly how that type of alarm system was set up,” Platosh said. To anyone monitoring the system remotely, it looked as if the storm had knocked out the power. What warehouse employees discovered when they arrived at work was the ladder, the hole in the roof, some discarded tools, and the alarm system beeping as if it needed a battery.

They also discovered the absence of 40 shrink-wrapped pallets of pharmaceuticals, including thousands of boxes of popular medicines such as Cymbalta and Prozac. “They took the cream of the crop,” Platosh said, “and they loaded the exact number of pallets that would fit into the trailer. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

Because of the magnitude of the crime, the Enfield Police Department called the FBI for assistance. As news of the theft spread in the media, an anonymous caller tipped the police that the people involved in the heist had Cuban names, and one of the thieves was known as El Gato—the cat.

“We started to reach out to our Bureau counterparts who were knowledgeable about cargo theft and the Cuban Mob,” Platosh said. Subject matter experts in the FBI’s Miami Division, which has a cargo theft task force, suggested that the thieves probably used a “follow car” in addition to the tractor-trailer, and that they would have likely headed south after the burglary and driven about 300 miles before needing to stop and rest.