VANCOUVER — A former London Drugs employee has been sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $2 million worth of electronics from the company over five years.
Carlos Cenon Santos, 34, was sentenced last month in Richmond provincial court in a judgment posted online this week.
Santos pleaded guilty to theft over $5,000, admitting to “large-scale employee theft” of London Drugs products between 2017 and 2022.
Santos was hired in October 2016 as a merchandise handler and was moved into handling high-value items, including electronics. Starting early in 2017, he began taking items from the company and the thefts became more frequent after he began working in the high-value area of the warehouse.
Provincial court Judge Nancy Phillips summarized the “unsophisticated” scheme during a sentencing hearing by video conference on July 19.
“He would remove items such as laptops from their packaging, secrete them under his shirt, go to his locker area in the employee room, and then secrete the item in a pack,” read the ruling. “He would leave at the end of the shift with the item in his pack.”
Santos was taking advantage of knowing backpacks were not searched when an employee left at the end of a shift.
He would list the items for sale on Craigslist at a discount, raking in somewhere between $750,000 and $1 million. The retail value of the stolen goods was about $2 million.
Phillips noted Santos repeated the backpack trick many times to reach those big numbers, and used the money to “fund his lifestyle and to do such things as paying bills, to buy medicine for his family, and to make online purchases.”
London Drugs management first became aware of the serial thefts when a supervisor spotted Santos slipping a laptop into his clothing. He was surveilled and CCTV video was reviewed during which he was seen taking about $100,000 worth of goods.
After that investigation, Santos was confronted by management and was described by both Crown counsel and defence lawyers as “being fully co-operative with the employer. He admitted to stealing items over the past five years and ultimately provided an itemized recounting of all the thefts and the approximate profits from those thefts.”
Santos was also said to have co-operated with the police investigation and confessed in a statement to the years-long theft. “He added that he was unhappy with the company and its wages and pace, and he started to steal in a bit of an act of vengeance against his employer.”
He surrendered 13 items he had not yet resold so the company could recoup some losses.
A victim impact statement written by London Drugs’ manager of investigations Kimberly Radomsky called it a “devastating theft of merchandise from their distribution facility” by a trusted employee who violated that trust.
Radomsky said many of the thefts came during the pandemic when the sa国际传媒-based retailer was struggling, and the investigation consumed hundreds of hours that took an “emotional toll.” She asked the court to hold Santos accountable.
A joint submission from the Crown and defence suggested similar offences usually result in jail terms from 18 months to four years, with the Crown suggesting Santos’s sentence should be in the higher end because of his abuse of trust. However, “his guilty plea and full co-operation” should also be considered, Phillips agreed.
Defence lawyers also asked the court to consider that Santos has no criminal record, “admits shame” and “deeply regrets his behaviour.” He also accepts that “one of the biggest consequences to him will be that his employment prospects in the future will be hugely negatively impacted.”
“He understands he has to pay for what he has done,” said Phillips.
But the court noted Santos “allowed his dissatisfaction as an employee with London Drugs to cause him to act out in vengeance and from there it gained momentum.”
Though the scheme was unsophisticated, the judge agreed that $2 million in stolen goods — about 245 items over five years — was an aggravating factor that was “staggering relative to other cases.”
On top of the two-year federal jail term, Santos was ordered to pay $750,000 in restitution and submit a DNA sample. While the judge said prospects for paying that restitution by the July 2025 deadline are slim to none, it at least spares London Drugs from having to make a civil claim against Santos.
