PORTLAND — The driver of a van that carried three Bronx men to several Maine Home Depot stores — including Auburn — in an effort to defraud the stores was sentenced to time-served behind bars.
Mickey Augusto Mejia Rosario of the Bronx, New York. Androscoggin County Jail
A U.S. District Court judge last week sentenced Mickey Augusto Mejia Rosario, 25, of New York on a charge of conspiracy to possess a fraudulent access device to the one day on which he was arrested and booked at Androscoggin County Jail in Auburn, plus three years on supervised release.
Rosario had been facing up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine for the felony.
According to an affidavit written by U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Tyler Martin, Rosario was driving the van at the time it was pulled over by Auburn police after leaving the Home Depot on Mount Auburn Avenue.
He showed police a Dominican Republic identification card.
Rosario “hasn’t been in the stores,” Martin wrote. “However, he is the driver, knowing what is taking place and he has driven them from New York.”
The three men were arrested and the van was secured, Martin wrote.
Rosario pleaded guilty last year to the charge.
According to court records, he and two other Bronx men were arrested in Auburn in November 2019 by local police after his co-defendants had tried and failed to make purchases at self-checkout stations at the Mount Auburn Avenue store using recently obtained store credit obtained by using false identities.
Rosario and his two co-defendants must pay a total of more than $16,000 in restitution to Home Depot and Citigroup.
Prosecutors said the trio had sought to defraud the big-box chain stores in Maine by opening store credit card accounts using driver license information belonging to deceased people. After establishing credit, they would attempt to buy merchandise at the stores and take the stolen goods back to New York to sell. They had stopped at the chain hardware stores in Biddeford, South Portland and Portland before arriving at the Auburn store.
Last month, U.S. District Court Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. sentenced one of Rosario’s co-defendants to the same one day in jail plus three years of supervised release. The other co-defendant, whom Woodcock had characterized as the “ringleader” because he had covered the travel expenses and provided the false identities used in the fraud, was sentenced to six months in jail plus supervised release.
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