SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – A bubble tea shop in San Francisco's Tenderloin District is a suspected front for the international sale of stolen goods obtained from city car burglaries, according to prosecutors.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin on Tuesday announced the arrest of Quoc Le on a dozen felony and misdemeanor charges of possession of stolen property after tracking a number of stolen goods to his wife’s boba shop on Larkin Street.
Le was arrested under an initiative that Boudin and his office calls "Operation Auto Pilot."
"We take a rental car that appears to belong to a tourist, and we leave it in a high auto-burglary location," Boudin told reporters on Tuesday afternoon. "And we leave valuable merchandise, electronics or other high-end retail goods, and we wait for somebody to break into it."
Boudin said the investigation’s aim wasn’t to catch auto burglars in the act. Instead, he said his office left tracking devices in the disguised rental cars which allowed prosecutors to “both follow electronically and in person.”
"The goal of this operation was to map out the flow of stolen goods in San Francisco and beyond," Boudin said.
Boudin's office said in a release on Tuesday that Le was ensnared in "Operation Bulldog," which fell under the "Auto Pilot" umbrella, after prosecutors alleged Le stole a laptop from one of the rental cars. Investigators followed more stolen goods to the boba shop, which allegedly were sold and shipped to Southern California, Vietnam and Hong Kong, among other locations.
At that point, Boudin's office reached out to inspectors from the U.S. Postal Service and investigators from the Department of Homeland Security. They compiled their case and made the arrest on Monday.
"When we executed yesterday's arrest, the search warrants, we weren't sure exactly how much stolen property we would find," Boudin said. "We knew we were on to a major fencing operation. What we found gives us a sense of the scope of the fencing operation that we’ve uncovered."
Investigators estimated they recovered 1,000 laptops, cell phones, tablets and other electronics.
Le was arraigned on Tuesday, according to San Francisco Superior Court records. He is scheduled to appear in court again on June 21, two weeks after voters in the city will decide whether or not to recall Boudin.
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