Grady Judd reveals arrests from 'brilliant' multi-million dollar Walmart theft operation

involving walmart merchandise connected to the walmart in auburndale for being with us today i am first before i provide my comments going to introduce our attorney general ashley moody i want to brag on general moody just for a moment i've known her since before she was the attorney general and when she was running for office we had several conversations and she said i'm going to make the people of florida safer i'm going to look out for the constitutional rights of everyone in the state of florida i'm going to be proactive i'm going to be engaged in all the communities she's done exactly what she said she would do and it's certainly my honor to be with her today and to for us to talk to you about a case that her office and our office work together as you know i have an organized retail crime team and that's what they do they focus on organized criminals these aren't petty shoplifters these are organized criminals but before i give my comments in color i thought i would first turn this over to our attorney general thank you well good morning and thank you so much for being with us today as we discuss what i believe is one of the biggest cases in organized retail theft that we've handled not only does this involve millions of dollars it involves numerous states nearly every circuit in our state 18 circuits thus far and we're still uncovering facts and it and it shows you that when people steal it doesn't necessarily mean it's only affecting a business enterprise in fact if we can clear up one thing first and foremost this morning when organized retail thieves get together and steal across our states across our circuits it is consumers florida consumers that are paying for this and so i want to dispel any notion that it's not floridians that are harmed because of this behavior and i commend sheriff judd for being so proactive putting together a team that would work not just within his own county but would look outside and how people are coming not just into his county from other counties but into our state from other states in fact the four folks charged in the information are from georgia and their behavior the millions of dollars that they were able to steal will affect florida consumers and we are fed up with people whether they're using technology or whether they're going into our stores preying on floridians from other states other countries we won't tolerate it here in florida so not only do i commend your amazing sheriff sheriff judd but the detectives that worked so diligently in shaping this case and putting it together uh detectives goodlett thomas and collins who worked so hard on this task force you know we just celebrated black friday and for those of you that don't know that's where traditionally you cross over from retailers crossover from red into black and the reason it takes them so long in a year to reach profitability is because of schemes like this we know nationwide 30 billion is stolen from businesses in our country up to 60 billion if you include cyber theft and employee theft and other types of elements of this retail theft 60 billion dollars that means you and i the sheriff the detectives people of these communities are paying for it and so thankfully for the good work of these detectives that looked not only just at the one incident but started uncovering how this was a scheme how they were accomplishing this these folks now instead of continuing to do this through the holidays continuing to cause increased prices for floridians taking their floridians hard-earned money those folks now will trade their homes for a jail cell their beds for a bed in a county jail so thank you you know in my office we have been so focused on this type of organized retail theft we have gone after and now since taking office we have 180 defendants of an organized retail theft 61 targets and we're not done sheriff judd and i are excited about continuing our work together and we won't stop until more of these folks that are coming into our state causing floridians to pay more out of their hard-earned money go to jail so we appreciate you being here today giving a voice to what these detectives have done to better protect our communities thank you again detectives and sheriff judd let me introduce you to our crew today these folks are responsible for at least 3.6 million dollars in organized retail crime in the state of florida and across this country we know that from the time we initially discovered them and i'll talk about that in just a second before we could get the investigation wrapped up which which which was a complicated investigation and it was more complicated because of covid they made 600 additional purchases and thefts we anticipate that as a result of the wonderful work by rita with the statewide prosecutor's office that these folks are facing 160 years up to 160 years in prison as they should now there are still those across this state they want to call this low-level non-violent crime would just gag me with a spoon this is not low-level non-violent crime this is organized and here's how it all started we had jorge ortiz and we had a gentleman who is now deceased all show up at auburndale along with jokori an auburndale walmart well interestingly enough a loss prevention walmart employee in downtown winterhaven had gotten off work was on his way home and go oh i forgot to pick up that item at the store so he wheels in to make a purchase at walmart in auburndale and he sees the same people that they just refuse to accept televisions from in winter haven and he says to a self self i believe we've got a theft going on here he notified the sheriff's office and in a van quite frankly there's more televisions here this was when we made this the last stop but in a van such as this there were several televisions so when the police officer or the deputies arrived in auburndale they go why are you bothering us here's our cash receipts from walmart walmart looked at the cash receipts and said yep look illegal to me so we gathered all the information took all the photographs our detectives who are simply the very best knew something was wrong but we had to dig into how this came about because on its face the product to be returned matched but you know we were born in the morning but it wasn't yesterday people don't ride around with a van full of televisions all needing to be returned with cash receipts so the investigation is underway well we determined all of these folks were from georgia and when we started the investigation we found this was our ring leader right here shantan and i have no idea how you say his last name but he was born in thailand he's from duluth georgia he owns three dodge vans that he moves this product he when he was stopped he had the 25 televisions when we stopped him with a search warrant in georgia not only did he have the 25 televisions but as we walked up to his car he had his cell phone in his hands breaking it we currently have that with our tech folks who are doing everything they can to recover it because we know that is a treasure trove of information but he wasn't concerned with the fact that we caught him with the 25 televisions as much as he was we were going to get that cell phone we know that he has worked and we see where they have made trips all the way up the east coast of the united states but we also know that they predominantly worked here but when you look at his criminal record you see that he's only got six misdemeanors and a felony but they're scattered over five different states you see people treat retail theft as a singular event when in fact these folks are engaged in an ongoing criminal enterprise and then we were going to arrest this gentleman eric grigsby and the reason we didn't arrest eric is because he's dead we thought it'd be a waste of time just between you and me but we did investigate to make sure that his buddies didn't knock him off thinking he may be the weak link we did find he died of natural causes he had some health issues so no he was not knocked off by his buddies but he is dead and now jesus has got to deal with him on all his thefts then there's jorge which we talked about he's from lilburn georgia he only has three misdemeanors and one felony have we clearly pointed out as you'll see between our last two that are still at large none of these folks have outstanding criminal histories most of the people i talk about here have a long pedigree when i stand behind this podium i'm talking about 20 and 30 and 15 and 50. these don't if we dealt with this through individual prosecutors offices as an individual event it could easily be a probation grand theft and that's what they hope for that's what they bank on but in reality they have a system in place where they are very elaborate system and we're not going to give you the details here because quite frankly we don't want to train other people as to how to do what they were doing but i can tell you it was brilliant i can tell you that when we discovered it walmart and walmart security is awesome and walmart and walmart security worked with us and they were very patient they understood that it took time for us put to put this case together and they absorbed more loss in order for us to put a case together that was worthy of the statewide prosecutor and general moody is working with us so now we have jacorey holland and michelle walker they're friends but they're not boyfriend girlfriend or husband and wife we know they're both in the columbus georgia area and they're at large when we stopped jakoy originally he said that well we work for a company installing tvs for celebrities that's why we have a van full of them you know and that show bar rescue we've worked on that but they're at large they're hiding we know that they move between georgia and alabama as you know columbus is on the state line jorge's only got seven felonies and two misdemeanors we know in the last seven months this group has operated in 14 different states we know that their theft is incredible so when you look at this i want to point this out you see the big chart over here this would be an absolute total nightmare if we had to go to each of the prosecutorial districts to get prosecution done this is the beauty of working with the attorney general's office but i must point out in decades past there wasn't the proactive attitude at the statewide level because they had their own issues but our attorney general moody and our past attorney general both have worked with us remarkably well it's necessary it's mandatory in order for these to be discovered they hide under the under there you go they hide under the cloak that they hi they thank you ma'am they hide under the cloak that if they get caught they're going to get caught for one theft one theft and the reality is look at the counties in the state of florida and look at the states across the nation if you have any questions the general and i will be glad to entertain them but general moody on behalf of all the people of the state of florida thank you but on behalf of walmart thank you and and our team that did a remarkable investigative job thank you very much because this is how we're effective when we all work together any questions i like it when it's silent so they bought the salvage televisions right and they would return the basic the basics were that they would buy a new television then they would buy salvage televisions and change the parts and then they would return the one they just paid cash for and say i just bought this new television and it had a cracked screen when i got home well it's labor intensive because you can't walk into a walmart and bring three broken televisions but on that particular day when we were alerted in auburndale they'd already tried it and were denied in winterhaven winterhaven said take your television back to jacksonville where you bought it from and they were also denied in lake wells but keep in mind they've got to buy these televisions change out the parts really quickly and return them really quickly because there's limits of time you know you can't buy a television today and return it six months from now because it's broken they had a great system in place to switch out parts and return televisions do we think we've caught all of them no we think there are others that are actively engaged with this group that we have yet to identify but we will identify them because i'm confident we'll do some plea like well instead of 160 years we'll only give you 99 if you tell us who your compadres are and the reality of it is that these folks need to go to jail for a very very long time grigsby we're going to give him a break okay he's not going to jail columbus that's that's where they'll allegedly live but columbus is right on the alabama line and they hide back and forth across the states and we're looking for them we've worked with our partners at the gbi the gwinnett county sheriff's office local law enforcement there we there was also a retail store involved in georgia where you could go there and buy the second-hand televisions and it was quite an elaborate system okay any other questions we've got a short surveillance video right here that that we're going to cue up for you and then we'll make extra copies of that available if you need it later i might also add that michelle walker was arrested last year for doing the same thing at target stores bought him a couple of televisions and out of the store he goes they're broke and they did that 3.6 million dollars worth between 2014 and 2020. we share this information across with other retailers we have several retail teams that are involved with us we work with all them all the major stores across the state and we've coached them and they're looking out for this trick so the next person that wants to try it it's not gonna be so easy because there's education and training that we've done in order for them to stop that theft up front but quite frankly you can imagine and and i think it was new jersey you know they they bought some television in in a walmart in georgia and took it to new jersey and tried to return it you know even new jersey went what you bought it in georgia and you're up here in new jersey trying to return it take it back to georgia good for them so they have been denied when it was suspicious but they're busy selling product and if somebody to just said oh time out how much earlier could they have blown the whistle on this at the retail level but you know they just denied it pushed them out the door and went on with their daily business television sets how much do they go for on average well they they were selling them for probably about 50 percent of the retail normally yeah can you talk about the difficulty of trying to catch a large organization like this and trying to prosecute them absolutely and i want to thank our prosecutor with statewide prosecution rita peters who i think sheriff judd has coined rico rita we have some very experienced prosecutors within the office of statewide prosecution and again when i started talking this morning i said i wanted to dispel any notion that this only affects retailers what's important to remember when you're looking at large-scale organized retail theft operations and schemes is that ultimately those theft those damages are passed on to consumers so floridians are going to pay the price for folks coming from out of state and organizing these schemes just like we have in this case and and stealing from retailers which then as you're trying to buy for your family for the holidays i have a young son we're in the midst of doing that right now and looking at what everything costs it's going to cost more for law-abiding citizens because of these criminals that devise these schemes and the reason it's so hard to prosecute is because you've got to have willing law enforcement partners and investigators sheriffs like grady judd and detectives like goodlett thomas and collins who are willing to put the pieces together look outside their immediate vicinity work with other states other counties other circuits and then piece together the puzzle and that's the work of good investigations good law enforcement and that's why again like i have always said and will continue to say we must support the recruitment of good men and women into law enforcement and give them the resources they need to do these jobs and put together great cases like this one did you say they have been doing it since 2014 that's the information that we've developed right now that that we can track this back to about 2014 and we extrapolated their the the value based upon what we've seen during the time of the investigation that's a long time staggering but once again they moved all over the state of florida and up the eastern seaboard so that they did not wear out their welcome and make it easy to detect them make no mistake about it you know i see a bunch of criminals here the people that don't think they should be locked up see a lot of low-level non-violent people well they're not low-level and non-violent when they they're stealing millions of dollars but what i also see here is brilliant criminals they devised this scheme based upon a lot of work and brainstorming and it worked for them for a while now they're going to go to state prison where they belong for a very long time any other questions you know i always knew attorney general that that rita was was powerful i never knew her last name was peters i always just called her rico rita so but let me tell you if you're if you're contemplating violating the law you probably need to go to another state because if i can tune you up and get you before a general moody and she assigns it to rico rita you know she counts decades of how long you go to prison not how many months or years she counts in decades okay thank you very much god bless you have a good weekend polk county sheriff grady judd florida attorney general i'm going to be like the main dude the grand marshal in the for frost proof parade you know why i don't think they could find anybody else see you all later a final note here from polk county sheriff grady judd here about being the grand marshal of a parade here jb

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Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020