Cardenas Brothers
Queens
County, New York
Date of Crime: July 21, 1994
When some jewelry vendors were returning to their hotel in
Elmhurst from a gem show in Manhattan, four Latino men snatched three cases
of Tahitian black pearls from them. The pearls were valued at $1.5
million. As they escaped, the thieves attempted to carjack an
off duty police officer. The officer managed to shoot his service
weapon, a 9-millimeter Glock, before he was knocked unconscious. He
later told detectives later that he thought he had hit a robber who was
grabbing at the barrel of the gun.
That same night, Napoleon Cardenas accidentally shot himself in the hand
with a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he had been showing to two
visitors at his girlfriend's apartment. He showed up screaming in pain
at the same hospital that the off-duty officer and one of the jewelry
vendors were being treated. A detective put Napoleon in a lineup, but
none of the robbery victims identified him. A friend cleaned up the
blood in his girlfriend's apartment. The police never searched the site.
Napoleon was due to serve a four-month sentence for credit card fraud. Days before it was to begin, he fled to the Dominican Republic. In his
absence, one of the vendors called a detective days after the crime, saying
he could now identify Napoleon as one of the robbers. The police
visited Napoleon's brother, Carlos Cardenas, to ask about him and they began
to suspect that Carlos had been involved as well. When the jewelry
vendors returned to New York from California a year later, the police put
Carlos in a lineup. One of the vendors chose someone else. Another
chose Carlos.
At Carlos's trial, a jewelry vendor identified him. With the
coincidence of his brother's gunshot wound, Carlos was convicted and
sentenced to 8 to 25 years in prison. A year later Napoleon
surrendered to federal marshals in Columbia. He served his credit card
fraud sentence and was tried for the jewelry heist. After the off-duty
officer and a jeweler identified him, he was convicted and sentenced to 15
to 30 years in prison.
Napoleon's trial lawyer did not investigate his alibi. Napoleon's
friend, Eddie Padilla, who had cleaned up the blood after Napoleon shot
himself, had the bullet jacket from the bullet Napoleon fired. It had
an aluminum casing unlike the police ammunition fired during the jewelry
heist, which had a copper casing. After years of imprisonment,
Napoleon began to think that he had held proof of his innocence in his hand
all along. In 2005, he had surgery to remove bullet fragments from his
hand. The fragments removed were of entirely of lead, which did not
prove helpful. Nevertheless, the surgery convinced the DA to take a
second look at the case. The DA's investigator became convinced from
informants that others were responsible for the theft. After Napoleon
and Carlos were given and passed lie detector tests, the pair were
exonerated and released in 2007. [4/07]
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Reference: New
York Times
Posted in:
Victims of the State,
Brooklyn-Queens-Staten Island Cases
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