Bergen County Man Charged After Cops Find Quarter Ton Of Cocaine

BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — A Bergen County man was charged Wednesday after police found a quarter of a ton of suspected cocaine near a self-storage facility in New York.

Nelson Salcedo, 35, of Englewood was arrested and later arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, said the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City.

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The 266 kilograms or 580 pounds of suspected cocaine — worth an estimated $10 million — was seized outside a storage facility in Long Island City. The drugs were intended to be distributed in New Jersey and New York, officials said.

The Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, along with investigators in New York City, began investigating a high-level cocained trafficking case earlier this summer, officials said.

On two Wednesday evenings in August, agents and officers twice saw Salcedo dropping off heavy cardboard boxes to someone near the northern end of Central Park, officials said.

The recipient put them into a Nissan van that was registered to an elevator repair company, officials said. That suspect is still at large.

Investigators established surveillance on the van and tracked it to a self-storage facility at 41-02 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City.

Last Wednesday, around 4:20 p.m., they observed Salcedo make two trips inside the facility. He brought out several cardboard boxes, officials said.

The boxes were loaded into the van.

Investigators obtained a warrant and found 12 boxes with 147 brick-shaped packages of alleged cocaine. Another seven boxes on the ground had 83 bricks.

"This appears to be the largest single cache of cocaine my office has seized in 20 years," Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said. "Cocaine trafficking has caused significant damage to our city and continues to claim lives, especially when mixed with fentanyl and sold to unwitting buyers."

"This seizure of 266 kilograms of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $10 million, represents the NYPD's largest cocaine bust in at least a decade," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

Field tests yielded positive results for cocaine, while NYPD laboratory analyses are ongoing, officials said.