Accused used addicts to steal $2M US in merchandise: jury

PITTSBURGH — A recordstore owner is charged with using heroin addicts to shoplift more than $2 million US worth of books, videos, and other products that he then resold online.

Anthony Cicero, 50, has been charged with running a corrupt organization out of his Slipped Disc record store in Oakland, a trendy Pittsburgh neighbourhood home to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

The investigation stretches back to 2008, when a Barnes & Noble investigator began tracing about $30,000 a week in stolen items to the addicts allegedly employed by Cicero, according to a grand jury presentment included with charges filed Wednesday. Cicero is also charged with theft, receiving stolen property, retail theft and conspiracy.

The state attorney general’s office said Cicero clearly knew his shoplifters — known as “boosters” — were addicts. One shoplifter told the grand jury that she saw Cicero in his store with another addict who was sick from heroin withdrawal.

Cicero gave that woman “a loan’ so she could purchase heroin to, as Cicero explained, ‘Go get right’ so that she could steal items for him,” the grand jury document said. Cicero would then deduct the loan amount from what he later paid the woman for the stolen items. “This occurred on an almost daily basis,” the grand jury found.

Cicero’s defence attorney, Charles Porter Jr., declined comment.

The attorney general’s investigation included a raid on his record store and home last August, during which about 1,500 brandnew stolen items worth more than $44,000 were found. Undercover agents also made online buys of stolen merchandise from Cicero, who charged close to full retail price while paying his booster’s a small fraction of the items’ value, the grand jury found.

The boosters were being paid a total of about $3,000 a week from Cicero. The boosters stole books, DVDs, weight-loss supplements and even Legos, which Cicero resold on Amazon and eBay.