The porcelain tile, about 8,500 pounds of it, was imported from Modena, Italy, by a family-owned tile store in Brooklyn.
What happened to that load of tile one afternoon in November is anyone’s guess. In a carefully orchestrated caper, with a buyer who did not know he had bought anything and a trucking company delivering the load to a home that was not expecting it, the tile vanished on a busy Brooklyn avenue.
“It’s not an iPhone you can grab,” said Joel Mertz, a manager at the store that sold the load, Tile Depot of New York, in Clinton Hill.
The store has been in business since 1979. Mr. Mertz received a call from a man named Peter — his last name is being withheld — in late November, asking about a certain brand of tile. It was what is called a wood-look design to resemble a hardwood floor, and it was popular after Hurricane Sandy. In fact, the store was out of that particular line, Mr. Mertz told him, and showed him, via e-mail, a similar brand.
I’ll take it, Peter said. Two thousand square feet.
The cost, at $3.15 per square foot, came to $6,859.13 with tax. Peter said he was calling from Boston but was doing work on a house in New York City. He sent Mr. Mertz an e-mail with his American Express card number, expiration date and the card’s security code, and followed up with a scanned, handwritten letter authorizing the purchase and listing his home address in North Carolina.
His e-mails kept coming, with supporting documentation that bordered on overkill. Peter not only scanned an image of his American Express card, front and back, but also his passport, complete with his picture, that of a 47-year-old businessman with no-nonsense glasses and a hairstyle to match.
The purchase was approved by American Express, and delivery of the tiles was arranged that same day, through FreightCenter.com, a third party that connects a customer to a truck. For this delivery, the company used New Penn, a regional trucking company based in Pennsylvania.
The bill of lading was marked “residential delivery,” listing an address on Lafayette Avenue just several blocks away from Tile Depot. On Nov. 26, three pallets of porcelain tiles, each weighing almost 2,900 pounds, were loaded into the New Penn truck.
The truck drove away.
Weeks later, in North Carolina, a man with the same name as the one Peter used, living at the same address, discovered the purchase on his American Express statement, along with others that he knew nothing about, he said, and he called the credit card company to report fraud.
Soon after at Tile Depot, the owner, Sol Mertz, was startled to discover a charge-back had occurred. American Express had withdrawn the money from the tile purchase. He dug out the bill of lading from the trucking company and learned that the payments for the delivery service had been withdrawn, too.
And there appears to be more. The tiles may have been part of a larger shopping spree. The fake Peter used FreightCenter.com for other deliveries in that same time period, said Terese Kerrigan, the company’s director of marketing.
She declined to elaborate because the case is under investigation by the police. The 88th Precinct took the report from Tile Depot just two weeks ago, and had no further information on Friday, the police said.
Peter — the real one — looked at the scan of the passport, and said the picture and date of birth on it were not his, but he, too, declined to say more.
So where was the tile delivered? The receipt showed the address on Lafayette Avenue, and it was signed by a driver and a recipient, who used the name Johnathan Miller. The building itself, three stories of brick, needs work of a more urgent sort than Italian tile, with taped-over cracks in windows and a “Beware of Dog” sign on the worn front door. A 25-year-old man answered a knock this week.
He wouldn’t give his name, but said he had lived there with his mother all his life. I asked if they had bought thousands of dollars worth of porcelain tile.
“That’s crazy,” he said. “If I had $7,000, you think I’d spend it on some tiles?”
Whoever orchestrated this theft must have noticed this particular house and seen some reason to send the truck there. Did he meet the truck with one of his own? Did the young man see anything unusual on this day in late November?
His reply suggests why the whole scheme worked, and how somebody got away with more than a month’s head start on the police.
“I’m not outside,” he said, “paying attention to stuff.”
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