It’s snowing in August.
Police executed the “largest cocaine seizure” in decades this week when they seized 580 pounds of the cartel-tied drugs stashed in a Long Island City storage unit, officials announced Friday.
Nelson Salcedo, of Englewood, New Jersey, was arrested in the middle of moving the alleged $10 million in coke Wednesday in what cops say is tied to a wide-reaching drug trafficking scheme.
“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 were tipped off to Salcedo’s alleged scheme while following other suspected traffickers who were moving drugs between New Jersey and Upper Manhattan, Tisch said.
Drug Enforcement Administration found $170,000 in cash, a firearm and 33 pounds of cocaine in Fort Lee, and began following Salcedo on Aug. 12.
He allegedly delivered multiple cardboard boxes out of the Public Storage facility in Queens on Wednesday nights to a location near the northern end of Central Park, prosecutors said.
Salcedo, 35, allegedly made deliveries on Aug. 12 and Aug. 19 and was loading up his Nissan van to make another suspected delivery on Aug. 26 when cops pounced.
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.
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