He owned a blue BMW. He made his living stealing mail sent to Miami and Coral Gables
A Cutler Bay man with a habit of using the car he shares with his mother to steal mail will be receiving his mail in federal prison for the next several years.
Yunior Blanco-Pedroso, 25, was sentenced to 10 years Thursday after pleading guilty to one count of theft of mail and two counts of possession of stolen mail — five years on the mail theft, three years on the possession of stolen mail counts (to run concurrently with each other, but consecutively with the mail theft) and an extra two years for violating supervised release from a 2015 case.
In that one, Blanco-Pedroso stole a postal carrier’s arrow key, which can be used to open mailboxes, while the postal carrier was working in the 2200 block of Northwest Seventh Street in Little Havana. The postal worker and nearby construction workers chased him down.
The Bureau of Prisons database says Blanco-Pedroso is at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.
His admission of facts for the current case says he “stole checks and mail as part of a pattern of criminal conduct engaged in as a livelihood.”
The stolen mail case
According to Blanco-Pedroso’s admission of facts, the blue BMW that the criminal complaint said was registered to Blanco-Pedroso and his mother was stopped Sept. 8 because the car matched the description of a car linked to mail and package thefts in Miami.
“The BMW contained a large quantity of stolen mail and other packages addressed to other people,” the admission states. “An officer recognized the name on one of the packages in the BMW and summoned the addressee to the scene.”
She said she saw Blanco-Pedroso steal the package an hour or two earlier from her doorstep. And he apparently wasn’t meticulous about cleaning out his theftmobile every night. Checks stolen three days earlier were still in the BMW.
Once police began looking into open stolen mail cases in Coral Gables and Miami, they began finding Blanco-Pedroso and his Blue Beemer.
Just two days earlier, Sept. 6, a home security system caught Blanco-Pedroso following a FedEx truck, then stealing a package. Later on the same day, he was recorded checking out one home’s mailbox, then swinging next door to steal a package. He made a third theft that day, too.
Surveillance cameras caught him on Aug. 31 stealing checks mailed to Majorca Avenue in Coral Gables. But Blanco-Pedroso’s phone gave him up, also.
It “contains images of dozens of checks addressed to other people,” including the Majorca Avenue checks. One photo had those two checks, seven other checks, drug paraphernalia and “art supplies which can be used to modify checks.”
Also in the phone was a photo of a fake driver’s license.
Blanco-Pedroso’s “phone contains photographs of tens of thousands of dollars in checks made out to the name appearing on the fake driver’s license,” the admission says. “The total face value of the checks appearing in images on (his) phone in the year 2020 exceeds $150,000.”
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