Two detectives and a police officer had been waiting near David Mazerolle’s apartment for about five minutes on Oct. 15, 2009 when Mazerolle and his girlfriend came home at about 6:30 a.m.
Police followed them up a flight of stairs. Mazerolle realized they were there.
“What’s up, Ben?” he said, recognizing Shelton Detective Ben Trabka.
And with that, Mazerolle’s $70,000 crime spree was over.
Off To Prison
Mazerolle was sentenced to five years in prison Friday for an August 2009 Derby burglary, which was investigated by Shelton police and Derby Detective Charles Stankye III.
Last week was an especially rough one for Mazerolle, 36.
The day before he was sentenced for the Derby crime, a federal judge gave him five years for his part in a series of bank burglaries.
Mazerolle and a crew from Waterbury broke into two banks in the fall of 2009, stealing about $50,000. The Shelton resident was anything but a ring leader in the bank jobs — he apparently netted just $2,500 for his work.
Read more about that crime here.
He’ll serve the prison sentences concurrently, meaning he’ll do five years total, not 10.
Career Criminal
In sentencing him for the Derby burglary, Judge Richard Arnold noted Mazerolle’s extensive criminal history, which dates back to 1992.
Court records state that Mazerolle has 24 arrests and convictions on his rap sheet for crimes such as burglary, larceny, credit card theft and identity theft.
He was on probation and had narcotics charges pending when he appeared in Judge Arnold’s court last week.
Aside from a stretch in the late 1990s, “it doesn’t appear he has taken a vacation from the career of crime,” Arnold said before sentencing him to prison.
The Derby Job
Mazerolle’s latest brushes with the law started in August 2009, when he burglarized a house on Harold Avenue in Derby while the homeowners were away.
His loot was substantial — a laptop, jewelry, a flat screen television, a GPS device, a Coach purse — in all, $7,800 worth of valuables.
Oh — and he stole the homeowner’s Pontiac G‑6 after finding the keys in the home. The car was valued $11,700. It was quickly discarded in Bridgeport.
A month after the Derby burglary, Mazerolle helped thieves break into a TD Bank in Huntington.
In that case, Mazerolle and his partners cut the phone lines to the bank, then pried their way into the building. A week later, the crew broke into a TD Bank in Waterbury and stole an ATM machine after a long struggle.
As Derby police investigated, they teamed with Shelton detectives, who were already eyeing Mazerolle for the bank theft in Huntington.
Police gathered enough information related to the Derby burglary to convince a judge to sign a warrant authorizing police to search Mazerolle’s apartment on Brook Street in Shelton — which is where police encountered him the morning of Oct. 15, outside his apartment.
Article continues after the document.
‘I Want To Get In Front Of This’
Once inside, Mazerolle and his girlfriend sat at their kitchen table, according to a report on file in Superior Court authored by Detective Stankye.
Cops immediately noticed Mazerolle was wearing a white Skin Industries hat — just like the one stolen from the house in Derby.
Mazerolle knew why police were in his kitchen. He wanted to come clean.
“This is all on me,” Mazerolle said, before agreeing to take a ride with the officers to the police department on Wheeler Street.
He rode in the back, but cops didn’t lock the door. He let himself out once at the police station.
After having a cigarette outside and a cup of coffee in the interview room, Mazerolle told police what he had been up to the last two months.
“I want to get in front of this and not involve my girlfriend,” he said.
Anatomy Of A Burglary
Mazerolle was an employee of a Shelton-based remodeling contractor. The company had done work at the Derby house. He further claimed he knew the owners of the house.
He got into the house while they were on vacation by climbing through a basement window.
Once inside, he stole everything he could — even a jar full of loose change.
He drove the Pontiac to Bridgeport and rolled the coins — about $27 worth.
“I threw all the jewelry out in a Dumpster in Bridgeport because it wasn’t worth anything,” Mazerolle said, according to Stankye’s report.
A credit card stolen from the house was used in a spending spree all over Connecticut.
Mazerolle said he let a buddy borrow the credit card to run up a $500 bill at a clothing store in Waterbury.
He partied with friends at Captain’s Gallery Restaurant in West Haven, where he ordered $175 worth of food and drinks.
He kept calling the credit card company to see how close he was to maxing out. Then he tried to change the card’s security PIN. The credit card company contacted the card’s real owners, asking if they had requested the change.
They hadn’t — the credit card company provided the owners with the cell phone used to make the request.
They realized it was Mazerolle’s number — the guy who had recently done some exterior work on their house.
Article continues after the document.
Master Thief?
While acknowledging Mazerolle is a career criminal, Trabka, the Shelton detective, stopped short of calling him a “professional” burglar.
“There’s no question he’s a career criminal,” Trabka said. “But a professional is someone who makes a living off what they’re doing. He was doing it for drugs.”
In fact, Mazerolle was coming from a methadone clinic when Trabka encountered him. He told police the flat screen television he stole from Derby was immediately sold to a drug dealer in Bridgeport.
Addiction
After being sentenced to five years in prison for the Derby burglary, Mazerolle looked his attorney in the eye, shook his hand and thanked him.
He looked relieved — an assumption backed up by Peter L. Truebner, the Stamford lawyer who represented Mazerolle in federal court for the bank burglaries.
Truebner said Mazerolle lived in Shelton since birth and developed problems with drugs as a young adult. He’s a capable plumber and has carpentry skills — but has unable to get off drugs for years.
“He’s a very genuine guy,” Truebner said. “He’s not an evil person.”
Mazerolle’s grandmother submitted a letter to federal court summarizing his problems: “David is a good boy with a good heat. If it were not for those darn drugs …”
Truebner said Mazerolle was in state prison 11 of the last 16 years — but he never received substance abuse treatment.
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous visited the program to tell their stories, but Mazerolle lacked any formal counseling in the Connecticut prisons.
Mazerolle is now relieved he’ll be doing his five years —plus three years of supervised release — in a federal prison, because the feds have better drug programs than state prisons. He hopes to get into a program that requires 500 hours of drug counseling.
Federal prosecutors, who agreed to the five-year sentence, also recommended Mazerolle get drug counseling.
Truebner said he hopes Mazerolle can get clean and stop committing crimes.
So, Mazerolle’s pattern has been “life imprisonment, on the installment,” Truebner said.
“The problem has been that he has not been learning from his periods of incarceration,” Truebner said.
As of Wednesday, Mazerolle was still being held in a jail in New Haven, waiting to hear about where he’ll be transferred.
