August brought an unexpected kind of snow to New York.
Police this week carried out what officials described as the “largest cocaine seizure” in decades, confiscating 580 pounds of cartel-linked drugs hidden inside a Long Island City storage unit, authorities announced Friday.
Nelson Salcedo, an Englewood, New Jersey, resident, was arrested Wednesday as he was allegedly moving cocaine valued at about $10 million, in a case police say is connected to a broad drug trafficking operation.
“This was a massive shipment of narcotics, tied to an interstate trafficking network with connections across the country, including in New York and New Jersey. And because of the work of the investigators standing with me today, those drugs will never make it into the streets of New York City,” said NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Investigators began closing in on Salcedo after tracking other suspected traffickers who were allegedly transporting drugs between New Jersey and Upper Manhattan, Tisch said.
The Drug Enforcement Administration found $170,000 in cash, a firearm and 33 pounds of cocaine in Fort Lee, then began surveilling Salcedo on Aug. 12.
Prosecutors said Salcedo allegedly moved multiple cardboard boxes from the Public Storage facility in Queens on Wednesday nights to a site near the northern edge of Central Park.
Salcedo, 35, allegedly made deliveries on Aug. 12 and Aug. 19, and was loading his Nissan van for another suspected delivery on Aug. 26 when police moved in and arrested him.
There were 12 boxes inside his van — which is registered to an elevator repair company whose name cops did not disclose — and another seven on the ground near the vehicle when Salcedo was cuffed.
There were a total of 230 brick-shaped packages of suspected cocaine in the boxes — totaling an incredible 586 pounds of the illegal drug, cops say.
Field testing confirmed the product was cocaine, though NYPD lab analysis is still pending.
The bricks appear to be pure, with the DEA saying the investigation “traces back to the cartel.”
It’s the largest seizure of cocaine by the NYPD in at least a decade, and the largest seizure by the special narcotics prosecutor’s office in over two decades, officials said.
“Think about the scale of what was intercepted here: more than a quarter of a metric ton of cocaine sitting in boxes and ready to move through an illegal distribution network. That is an enormous quantity of narcotics that will never be broken down, that will never be packaged, sold or distributed in our neighborhood,” said Tisch.
Salcedo and two others have been arrested so far as part of the sting.
The man who accepted the deliveries has not yet been arrested.
Salcedo was arraigned in Manhattan criminal court on first- and second-degree Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance charges.
