High-tech Miami jewel thieves stalked the rich, including a N.Y. Yankees star, cops say

Xandi Garcia and his crew used Instagram to flaunt what appeared to be a luxurious lifestyle, draping themselves in showy watches and chains, posing with exotic cars and preening aboard boats.

The lifestyle, police and prosecutors said Tuesday, was actually fueled by marijuana grow houses and carefully planned burglaries targeting the wealthy and their jewelry.

And technology proved to be their downfall.

Garcia and at least nine others charged on Tuesday left a powerful digital trail of crimes stretching over two years, prosecutors said.

In one case, Garcia’s own internal home surveillance system — including audio — captured them planning a heist, and returning with stolen goods hours later, police said. Miami-Dade police detectives said they also discovered that Garcia was using social media to monitor New York Yankees star pitcher Arnoldis Chapman, and even dispatched two cohorts to surveil and video record the player’s Davie home.

Investigators believe Garcia’s girlfriend, an Instagram model named Maybel Sanchez, posed on one Instagram post with some of the jewelry and items stolen in one heist — which didn’t escape the notice of the victims, according to an arrest warrant.

One of the suspects, Daniel Pacheco, even posted a photo of himself on Instagram wearing a hoodie over his head and carrying a bag with the caption: “No face, no case.” Miami-Dade detectives found surveillance footage of a man believed to be Pacheco wearing the same type of hooded sweatshirt.

“It appears he was mocking the ability of this great team to capture him,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The ring is facing a slew of charges including racketeering, conspiracy and burglary. Garcia’s mother, Mirta Lora, is also accused of laundering money for the ring.

While the burglary on Chapman’s house never actually happened, Garcia and others are charged with conspiracy to commit burglary.

Garcia, 30, was already in jail awaiting trial on a separate case — an allegation that he broke into the South Beach hotel room of the celebrity jeweler known as Eric The Jeweler, stealing a safe full of luxury bling, on the day of Miami’s Super Bowl 54.

Even as he was under investigation earlier this month, detectives learned from an anonymous source that Garcia was at the famed Seybold jewelry marketplace building in Downtown Miami, trying to sell a custom-made ring.

The ring, investigators soon learned, had been stolen during the Feb. 2 Super Bowl from the hotel room of jeweler Eric Mavashev. The contents of the safe were valued at between $1.3 million and $1.7 million in jewelry, according to police.

“The State Attorney’s Office has assembled their A-team, the Miami-Dade police their finest detectives,” said Bob Pardo, Garcia’s defense lawyer. “We look forward to the anticipated litigation and plan to vigorously defend Mr. Garcia — who is presumed innocent.”

Garcia is well known to law enforcement. In 2018, as he was facing a marijuana trafficking charge for a grow house, he tipped off authorities to a Miami-Dade police officer who was allegedly dealing in stolen cars.

His involvement eventually led to the arrest of Miami-Dade police officer Orestes Verdura, who is still awaiting trial on last year’s charges of dealing in stolen property and organized scheme to defraud. Garcia got probation for the 2018 marijuana case.

“He’s the State Attorney’s star witness against Mr. Verdura,” said the officer’s defense lawyer, Michael Mirer. “It’s mind-boggling they relied on Xandi’s testimony.”

Even though he was a witness in the Verdura case, Garcia was still under investigation by Miami-Dade’s narcotics bureau since 2018, a probe that began to mushroom.

Investigators say they soon learned that Garcia and his friends were burglarizing homes, first other grow houses, then moving on to breaking into homes to steal high-end jewelry and cash. They’d often stalk the victims on Instagram, and watch the homes for weeks, sometimes using GPS trackers to follow their victims, investigators say.

Much of the evidence, police say, was found on Garcia’s own phones, seized during a raid in December. That includes images of the victims they were watching, images showing the GPS tracking results and images of the loot itself. Investigators also found text messages between the members discussing the burglaries and other crimes, and how to sell the stolen items, according to an arrest warrant by Miami-Dade Detective Carlos Garcia, who is not related to the ringleader suspect.

“look at our next victim, look him up on Instagram so that you can see how many watches he has,” Xandi Garcia wrote in one text message to one of his crew, police said.

The warrant depicts a group of criminals who often double-crossed each other, and planned each burglary as though it were an heist from the Ocean’s Eleven flick. Among their alleged crimes:

▪ Garcia burglarized the Northwest Miami-Dade home of an associate in July 2018, stealing jewelry and a gun and the man’s black Mercedes-Benz S63. The victim, Lazaro Hernandez, who regularly flaunted his luxury watches on Instagram, believed Garcia was to blame and confronted him.

Garcia, police said, denied it and even tricked Hernandez into paying him $10,000 to help find the burglars. But then Sanchez, Garcia’s social-media influencer girlfriend, began posting photos on Instagram that appeared to show her wearing a gold necklace with diamond pendant that had been stolen in the heist.

“Additionally, the victims saved pictures of Maybel Sanchez wearing Rolex watches, sunglasses, designer purses and Louis Vuitton heels, which they said were identical to the ones removed from their residence,” the warrant said.

A lawyer for Sanchez, 32, of Miami Lakes, could not be reached for comment.

▪The group was running a marijuana grow house in Colorado Springs, police said. The state has become a haven for Miami indoor growers who produce weed there illegally — hoping to escape law-enforcement scrutiny since marijuana use is legal in Colorado — while shipping the product back to South Florida.

▪ An associate named Jossie Pintado-Martell provided Garcia with inside knowledge of a watch collection owned by a friend named Gilberto Fontaine, text messages revealed. In July 2018, the home was burglarized, the watches stolen.

Garcia later claimed “the stolen watches were fake and worthless,” a ruse police believe was done to “avoid paying Jossie Pintado-Martell.”

Pintado-Martell, who is charged with four felonies, portrayed an equally Miami lifestyle on Instagram. In one series of photos, Pintado-Martell seemingly appropriated the photos of another man — the two looked similar — posing with famous rappers at a strip club.

“My guy is peripherally involved and we look forward to our day in court,” said Pintado-Martell’s lawyer, Erick Cruz.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Jossie Pintado-Martell in a photo caption.

This story was originally published February 18, 2020 at 9:30 AM.