Thief steals $250G in jewelry from Queens Zales store during brazen New Year’s Eve heist: feds
A serial thief rang in the New Year by grabbing $250,000 in bling during a gunpoint robbery at a Zales jewelry store in Queens, federal prosecutors alleged.
Fernando Frias, 51, was busted Friday for the Dec. 31 heist.
The feds say he walked into the Zales in the Queens Center Mall on Queens Blvd. just after 11:20 a.m. on Dec. 31 wearing a mask and orange gloves. He asked to see a diamond ring, and when a clerk opened a jewelry case, he whipped out a gun and told her to keep it open, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
The robber then began “shoveling jewelry into a bag,” a criminal complaint stated.
Video surveillance picked up his route from his home to the mall and back. Frias stepped out of a van that “strategically” dropped him off a short walk from the mall and waited under an overpass for him to return, the complaint alleged.
An NYPD detective recognized him as a prolific thief with several past arrests, including a February bust in which he was charged in three separate felony-level thefts, prosecutor s alleged. Frias is also a person of interest in 20 other crimes over a one-year period.
The alleged thief wasn’t home when the feds went to search his South Ozone Park address on Jan. 17 — he was taken into custody by the NYPD’s Warrants Squad just moments earlier, after trying to escape out a window, according to court filings.
When grilled about the jewelry, he said that “if he had stolen $300,000, he would be in Ecuador,” feds alleged.
After his arrest, Frias was charged in state court with a T-Mobile store stick-up and other crimes in Queens, then charged in Brooklyn in a petit larceny before he was taken into federal custody Friday for the Zales robbery.
Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes ordered Frias held without bail Friday. He’s slated to appear again in Brooklyn Federal Court on Feb. 23.
His lawyer did not immediately return a call seeking comment Monday.
