At least one of the four people sentenced in the March 2022 thefts at the luxury Balenciaga store in East Hampton Village committed the daytime heist while wearing a GPS ankle-monitor as part of a sentencing in similar previous crimes, Raymond A. Tierney, the Suffolk County District Attorney, said on Monday night at a meet-and-greet in Amagansett hosted by the East Hampton Town Republican Committee.
In an interview before the event at the American Legion, Mr. Tierney, who is serving his first term as the county’s top prosecutor, drilled down on criminal justice issues of especial interest to East End residents, including a rash of auto thefts last year and a rising fentanyl crisis. The Balenciaga theft — in which one woman remains at large — was emblematic of a rising tide of retail thievery on both the North and South Forks, he said.
“This summer, communities got really hit hard with car thefts,” he said, noting that the thieves would work in groups of up to six and liked to go “shopping” for their preferred vehicles: white BMWs.
Mr. Tierney — who lives in Holtsville but emphasized Monday that he is the D.A. from Babylon to Montauk — said that officers deployed to the East End Drug Task Force had been reassigned last summer to deal with the rash of auto thefts.
Asked about a substantial drug-ring takedown that took place in Montauk late last year and involved a large quantity of fentanyl, numerous arrests, and international intrigue, Mr. Tierney said the drug was an insidious menace that impacts communities and people from all walks of life, given its potency and ready availability.
“It crosses all lines,” he said.
And while Mr. Tierney stressed that gang-related violence “hasn’t really found its way out here in any organized way,” the associated drugs and theft have arrived in East Hampton, and in force.
Another multi-indictment investigation was reported by the D.A.’s office in December and involved the so-called NFL, or No Fake Love gang. Members of the gang were variously charged with murder, stealing dogs, possessing handguns, and other crimes in a countywide net of arrests that also touched East Hampton: Two of the defendants in the NFL case were arrested in June while driving a 2015 BMW stolen in East Hampton last May. Police also recovered a .9mm pistol that had been used in a gang-related shootout in Mastic last year.
Later, addressing the American Legion crowd on the fentanyl scourge — Long Island leads the New York Metropolitan region in per capita overdose deaths from the powerful narcotic, he said — Mr. Tierney hinted at further “significant arrests coming up.”
Mr. Tierney did defer on a question put to him about the status of another highly publicized incident from last year: the fatal August house fire in Noyac that killed two young women from Maryland vacationing with their family, and that led to multiple citations for Southampton Town Code violations against homeowners Pamela and Peter Miller for their failure to, among other charges, provide adequate fire alarms.
Attorneys for the family of the two young women have been pushing the D.A.’s office since October to pursue criminal charges against the Millers.
Andres Alonso, one of those attorneys, told The Star via email on Feb. 2 that “We have been trying to get a meeting with the D.A. We were set to talk last week, but he ended getting stuck on a murder trial.”
“We’re looking into it,” Mr. Tierney said on Monday. “We’re investigating it.”
This story has been updated since it was first published to correct a reference to the defendants in the Balenciaga theft.
