Couple Embezzles $3.7M From Williamsburg Pharmacy To Open Competing Store, Prosecutors Say

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — A Queens couple allegedly stole $3.7 million from the sick owners of a Williamsburg pharmacy to open a competing pharmacy on the same block, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Vanhia Narvaez, 44, and her husband, Jorge Vergara, 43, have been embezzling money from Gardner’s Pharmacy at 371 Broadway since owner Rafael Abreau became sick in 2007, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office announced Tuesday.

Abreau’s daughter Gloria Adorno was granted Power of Attorney that April, but because she was also sickly, Adorno let Vergara, a pharmacy employee, take over daily operations in 2008, prosecutors said.

Vergara spent the next eight years channeling funds from insurance companies — who paid the pharmacy for medications their customers had bought — into fraudulent checking accounts in the business’s name, said prosecutors.

Vergara deposited a total of 934 check worth $3,697,399.35, then used the money to pay for vacations, trips to casinos and Disney World, and even funded a competing pharmacy on the same block as Gardner’s, said prosecutors.

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Adorno discovered the alleged embezzlement after Vergara resigned from the pharmacy and she found to notices and other documents from banks she didn’t recognize, prosecutors said.

Narvaez and Vergara, of Jackson Heights, were charged with grand larceny, criminal possession of a forged instrument and falsifying business records, among other charges, in Brooklyn Criminal Court on Wednesday, prosecutors said.

The couple, held on $2.5 million bail and expected to return to court on Sept. 6, face up to 25 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.

Contact information for the defendants' attorneys was not immediately available.

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