Inside the $4.8M Gold Bar Heist

The FBI has revealed how thieves used high-tech gizmos to make off with gold bars worth $4.8 million in a truck robbery on Interstate 95 in North Carolina and it reads like a heist fit for Hollywood.

A year a go, a truck that was on its way to Massachusetts to deliver gold bars worth millions, was intercepted by three armed men near Wilson, North Carolina.

Agents say the armed robbers prepared for the job using a GPS tracker and a remote-controlled pepper-spray launcher to subdue the drivers.

Agents identified the alleged ringleader as Adalberto Perez, 46. He was arrested this week at his home in the Miami suburb of Opa-Locka, Florida, almost exactly a year after the March 2015 robbery in Wilson County, North Carolina. Two accomplices remain at large.

It appears the case was cracked when a friend of Perez came forward just a few months ago. According to an FBI affidavit unsealed in federal court this week, the friend said Perez spent about a year preparing for the heist.

The target: a routine shipment of gold bars aboard a tractor-trailer sent by Miami-based Republic Metals to a processing plant in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, that serves jewelry makers in the Boston area.

The FBI says that friend — now a confidential informant — said Perez bought a GPS tracking device online and had it mailed to the friend’s address, without telling him what was in the package.

The affidavit doesn’t say how Perez was able to gain access to the truck, if he had any relationship with the TransValue shipping company, or if the plot involved still more accomplices.

But the friend said ‘Perez said he placed this technology under the TransValue trailer in order to track its location,’ and that Perez also rigged a pepper-spray device inside the cab, the affidavit says.

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