[VanityFair] A Vast Burglary Ring From Chile Has Been Targeting Wealthy U.S. Households
On an icy evening—January 21, 2020—the four suspects were about to step right into it. “We had everything planned out,” says the lead detective on the case.
That’s Jesus Bonilla, of the Nassau County Police. The detective recalls the tension he felt as he waited with other officers on a residential street in College Point, Queens. For months he had been pursuing a four-member crew that included its reputed leader, Bryan Herrera Maldonado. Though only 24, he was said to be among the most wanted burglars in the New York City area. Bonilla estimates that Maldonado’s gang broke into at least 100 private homes across the country. They allegedly stole cash, jewelry, electronics, watches, and designer clothes and handbags—loot Bonilla believes amounted to millions—from mansions in towns like Bronxville, Greenwich, Hewlett Harbor, Old Westbury, and Sands Point. But that was just a fraction of the haul Maldonado was alleged to have swiped on a “theft tour” across the U.S. and in various countries around the world.
According to Bonilla, Maldonado’s was just one of about a dozen theft gangs Bonilla and his colleagues were chasing—and, in some cases, still do. But because many of the burglars are well versed in police practices, they always seem to be one step ahead of the law. Almost to a man (and, occasionally, woman), they originate in Chile before flying to a designated country, generally on a 90-day tourist visa. Once overseas, they move from city to city, committing crimes, fencing their goods, and sending home their illicit gains—before returning to Chile and, many times, heading out on the road again. “Some come here to work every day,” Bonilla asserts. In fact, one member of Maldonado’s team had landed in the U.S. just two days earlier.
Lately, violent crime has been surging in cities around the U.S. But more than a year ago, I got interested in how our globalized economy affects property crime. It became quickly apparent that many successful criminals—no different than their counterparts in aboveboard enterprises—can now move almost seamlessly between countries. Yet unlike people in legitimate businesses, thieves have to figure out where the best pickings are, how to deal with local cops, and, once they steal something, how to transfer the proceeds home without getting caught. That led me to spend months reporting on Maldonado after he became the focus of police scrutiny in the New York City region, and I learned he was imprisoned, serendipitously, several miles from where I live. He turns out to have been an unusually adroit burglar and one with a prototypical life story of a very particular type of globe-trotting break-in artist. More importantly, his story, and those of other alleged thieves I tracked, gave me a handle on the operations of a network of gangsters who have been systematically plundering wealthy citizens worldwide. Until now, that bigger picture has not been laid out in full.
Maldonado and his crew, for all their purportedly pilfered millions, turn out to be little more than bit players in a global explosion of a very particular sort of crime. (Maldonado refused to comment for this story despite repeatedly being offered an opportunity to participate.) The criminals have become so pervasive that they have earned a moniker among law enforcement officials as “Chilean tourist burglars”—although some call them South American theft groups or “crime tourists,” acknowledging overlaps with other nationalities within the crews. In the coming months, according to an inside source, federal teams are set to fan out and come down hard on the thieves, hoping to finger the shadowy figures they believe oversee the operations: Chilean ringleaders back home and in the U.S. as well as their partners—Colombian coordinators and fences, who manage to turn the stolen caches into cash.
After viewing surveillance footage of the break-ins, he tells me, “we began to develop a common picture of the burglars. They were younger and not very big. They dressed all in black, wore gloves, and carried backpacks.” Following a few arrests, he says, “we found out they tended to be Chileans.” After being alerted by police elsewhere in California to large numbers of similar crimes and learning that law enforcement officials in other wealthy Western countries were also busting large numbers of Chileans for the same types of break-ins, “a lightbulb went on.” Maher concludes, “This is truly an international crime trend.”
His task force, he calculates, has made more than a thousand arrests for what he terms “organized burglaries”; this past year, he says, “the trend has been gaining steam.” In 2019, prior to the COVID outbreak, investigators with the LAPD and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office reportedly attributed hundreds of local crimes to Chilean crews. According to Maher, during the height of the pandemic, when people remained at home, the pace of the break-ins slackened, but smash-and-grab jobs skyrocketed. Lately, the home invasions have rebounded. And back east, says Bonilla, who has become a leading figure investigating the gangs, “affluent neighborhoods are getting destroyed right now.”
According to the Los Angeles special agent with the FBI, the crime wave actually started off in 2014, when Chile joined the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) program. The 40-nation initiative grants those countries’ citizens virtually automatic 90-day visa waivers, permitting them, with just a passport, to jump on a plane to other ESTA destinations. (Chile is the sole Latin American country in the program.) Prior to COVID, more than 200,000 Chileans came to the U.S. each year. But within two years of Chile’s new ESTA status, “word of mouth,” the Los Angeles special agent with the FBI asserts, led more and more Chileans with larcenous plans to take quick vacations. The FBI agent says that “they see people come home having made thousands and even millions”—leading others to try their luck.
In January, The Washington Post reported on theft rings operating in the D.C. suburbs. According to the Post, local detectives suspect the perpetrators, after researching their quarry online, tend to home in on houses of well-to-do Asian and Middle Eastern residents due to the fact that, as the investigators put it, the “burglars believe they sometimes keep family wealth in gold and jewelry or have large amounts of money on hand because they may run businesses that rely on cash.”
Given the similarities in the thieves’ methods and their whack-a-mole routes from state to state and country to country, many police officials assert that Maldonado and the others are part of a sophisticated criminal network. “There is somebody they answer to,” Bonilla insists. “Who’s paying [for] the plane ride and hotel to start off? They travel everywhere. Montana! How the fuck do they know that affluent people live there? There is rank and structure. It’s like the mafia.”
Miami gangbuster Hague shares this view and intimates that evidence he has seen “suggests coordination, that somebody in each major city is giving [thieves] assignments.” Another person with insight into the inner workings of the operations says that few sources talk about the underworld’s tactics because they fear retribution: “The syndicate is very powerful and has the means of hurting you. If you talk, there are repercussions.” 
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