The Largest High-Tech Heist in Bay Area History

The largest high-tech heist in Bay Area history -- with computer chips worth $37 million stolen by 15 people in a takeover armed robbery -- was an inside job, authorities said.

Pierre Ramos, 28, and Leonardo Abriam, 31 -- two of nine Bay Area men arrested in connection with the Feb. 27 robbery at Unigen Corp. -- were employed at the Fremont tech company at the time of the crime, said Simon Ip, a Unigen spokesman.

A day after the heist, the two men were back at the office park on Warm Springs Boulevard, working at the company they had just robbed, the spokesman said.

Ip would not disclose what positions Ramos and Abriam held at Unigen, saying only that they joined the company "not long before the robbery took place."

He added: "Officially, they were employees until they were arrested."

The other seven defendants are Dylan Catayas Lee, 32; Rolando McKay Secreto, 39; Faustino Adona, 39; Roy Jiminez, 34; Alexander Robb Santos, 29; Jimmy Trieu, 28; and Jesus Meraz, 25.

The investigation is being spearheaded by REACT -- the multicounty technology crimes task force led by the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office. The multiagency organization arrested Ramos, Abriam, Lee, Secreto and Meraz in a 10-day period between March 29 and April 7, authorities said.

The other four suspects -- Adona, Jiminez, Santos and Trieu -- were arrested in subsequent weeks.

All are San Jose residents, except for Ramos, who lives in Union City.

An additional six people in the robbery ring still are at large, said Ralph Sivilla, a prosecutor with the California Attorney General's Office in Alameda County.

On Wednesday, several of the defendants are scheduled to appear in a Fremont courtroom where each will face numerous felony counts, he said.

Each man is accused of five counts of robbery, five counts of false imprisonment, one count of grand theft and one count of second-degree commercial burglary, authorities said.

The charges also come with special allegations, accusing the men of committing a crime while being armed with handguns and of stealing property worth more than $3.2 million, according to court documents.

If convicted of the charges, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, Sivilla said.

The case started on a quiet winter Sunday morning five months ago.

About 8:40 a.m., the 15 robbers -- armed with rifles and handguns, and wearing masks and matching black clothing -- entered Unigen's gated 95,000-square-foot complex, at 45388 Warm Springs Blvd., by cutting through or going over a fence near the rear loading dock.

Within minutes, they had tied up and blindfolded five employees while others loaded the computer components onto a bobtail truck, authorities said.

"They stole NAND chips, which are high-powered memory chips," Ip said.

The company surveillance tape showed the suspects driving away into a large truck at 9:11 a.m., police said.

The heist, which authorities called "disciplined and sophisticated" was unusually well-organized.

"In the cases done in the past several years, I've not seen one like this come across my desk," Sivilla said. "It's a highly violent case and involves an excessive amount of loss."

Since then, Unigen has increased its security measures, adding more surveillance cameras and security guards to patrol its parking lot at all hours, Ip said.

The Unigen official on Friday praised the special law enforcement team for the arrests.

"We really appreciate all the work of the REACT task force," Ip said. "We're very grateful for how quickly they moved to solve the case."

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