Accused Ecuadorian thief agrees to plead guilty in largest U.S. jewelry heist

LOS ANGELES An Ecuadorian man has agreed to plead guilty to a federal robbery charge for his ​role in the theft of roughly $100 million worth of jewelry from an armoured truck ‌five years ago in California, considered the largest such heist ​in U.S. history.

Carlos Victor Mestanza Cercado, 32, an ⁠Ecuadorean national arrested two years ago in Panama during a layover on a flight from Guatemala to his home country, was one of seven men indicted on ‌charges of robbing a Brink’s truck at a highway rest stop north of Los Angeles on July 11, ‌2022. The armoured vehicle was robbed while transporting 73 sacks of precious gems and fine jewellery from a major exhibition in the San Francisco Bay Area to a storage facility hundreds of miles south, ahead of another show scheduled in Pasadena.

Mestanza and his co-defendants, who had followed ​the jewellery shipment in multiple vehicles ‌for 300 miles (480 km) while coordinating by cellphone, broke through the locks of the armoured truck while it was parked at a rural Kern County rest stop and got away with 24 bags ‌of treasure, authorities said.