Park View, D.C.

The Manny & Olga’s at 3624 was recently discovered to be serving stolen iPhones in addition to pizzas

I was quickly alerted by business owners on Friday, July 6th, that there appeared to be an undercover operation at Manny & Olga’s (3624 Georgia) in the mid-afternoon. In reaching out to MPD, it was confirmed that there was an ongoing investigation involving the business, but I was unable to find out much else.

Thankfully, DCist reporter Martin Austermuhle was also on the scent and by tracking down the arrest warrant found a wealth of information about what exactly happened.

From the full DCist article, the following paragraphs sum up the scene fairly accurately:

On May 16, two people parked their car outside a Manny & Olga’s pizza shop on Georgia Avenue, just steps away from the Looking Glass Lounge in the Northwest neighborhood of Park View. A man emerged from the shop and got in the car, where he was shown an iPhone. The drivers of the car said that the iPhone had been stolen from a woman, and a physical altercation had taken place during the theft. The three laughed, and after an extended negotiation with a fourth person, settled on a price for the stolen phone—$40.

Little did the buyers of the phone know that the drivers of the car were undercover police officers, and that they had been investigating the sale of stolen goods to employees of that Manny & Olga’s location since a month prior. Last Friday, D.C. police officers raided the store, arresting a number of employees and recovering a number of stolen phones and electronic gadgets, including an iPhone, various BlackBerries, an iPod Touch, and a Bluetooth headset.

The incident at Manny & Olga’s, culled from a search warrant filed by police on July 5 and executed the next day, is but a small insight into how stolen phones and electronic gadgets—a hot commodity among consumers and criminals—are passed along from thieves to individuals and businesses that resell them.