A Florida man has pleaded guilty in federal court to helping steal more than $1.5 million worth of cigarettes from a Leitchfield warehouse.

Ivan Romero, 42, also known as “El Negro,” entered the pleas in late January in U.S. District Court in Louisville to charges of conspiracy and theft for the March 2011 break-in at the Coremark Cigarette Warehouse. He’s scheduled to be sentenced in April, and could face up to 15 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, Romero and several co-defendants were accused of traveling from Florida to Kentucky to break into the warehouse.

Prosecutors said the men rented hotel rooms in Elizabethtown between March 18 and March 20, 2011, broke into the warehouse through the roof, disabled the alarm system and loaded a stolen tractor trailer with the cigarettes. Romero admitted to driving the cigarettes to the New Jersey/New York area for sale, prosecutors said.

Romero, a legal permanent resident from Cuba who last lived in Miami, had been serving a state sentence from Florida before being transferred to federal custody. According to Florida Department of Corrections records, he was sentenced in 2013 to six years in prison after being convicted in Polk County on grand theft and burglary charges.

Kentucky authorities had requested Florida detain him since March 2014. He currently is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.

