Brooklyn mask hoarder arrested for coughing on FBI agents claiming he has coronavirus
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: A 43-year-old man claiming to be infected with the novel coronavirus allegedly coughed on FBI agents while they were investigating him for hoarding medical supplies.
The accused —Baruch Feldheim — is now facing charges of assault and making false statements to the officers.
Officers visited Feldheim's Borough Park residence on March 29 where the 43-year-old allegedly used to peddle and stockpiled a huge amount of N95 respiratory masks. According to the federal officers, Feldheim is also accused of price-gouging. On March 18, he reportedly sold about 1,000 masks for $12,000 to a New Jersey doctor, a markup of roughly 700 percent.
The alleged fraudster was planning to sell the masks and medical supplies to another doctor whom he directed to an Irvington, NJ, auto repair shop to pick up the order. There, the said doctor tipped off the investigators and charged that Feldheim was allegedly hoarding enough medical supplies "to outfit an entire hospital.” Other medical materials sold by Feldheim included chemical cleaning supply agents, Clorox wipes, hand sanitizers, and surgical supplies.
According to reports, the accused was operating from his Brooklyn home, offering to push surgical gowns to a nurse. He also received a huge shipment to his home of about eight pallets of face masks.
Federal agents then started keeping a watch on his house after noticing empty boxes of N95 masks outside. They also saw several people coming to Feldheim’s house on March 29 and walking away with what appeared to be medical supplies.
After that, the officers confronted the accused calling him out of his home. They also maintained a safe distance from him over coronavirus fears.
“When the agents were within four to five feet of him, Feldheim allegedly coughed in their direction without covering his mouth. At that point, Feldheim told the FBI agents that he had the coronavirus,” a US attorney’s release said.
He also lied about the medical stocks he had illegally piled up at his home and their sale. Feldheim said that he worked for a company that bought and sold PPEs and that he never took physical custody of the materials, the official statement added.
Following a detailed interrogation, Feldheim was arrested. The officers also raided a warehouse on Pennsylvania Avenue in an industrial section of Linden, NJ, that contained Feldhim’s suspected stash of 80,000 masks, The New York Post reported.
The arrest comes after President Trump claimed that some medical supplies were being stolen from New York City hospitals, which Mayor Bill de Blasio dismissed as insulting.
At a White House briefing on COVID-19 pandemic, Trump said he did not understand the surging demand for masks at city hospitals. “Something is going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Are they going out the back door?" he said.
Blasio found the statement of the POTUS insulting and said, “I don’t even know where he’s getting that information. It’s not true and it’s the wrong thing for him to do and he should just get back to work.”