By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — A former Stuyvesant High School teacher on leave from the Department of Education moonlighted as a gun runner and drug dealer before his arrest Tuesday night at a warehouse that served as the "nerve center" of a multimillion-dollar smuggling operation, authorities said.
Theophilis Burroughs, of Newark, N.J., was among 15 people arrested in a year-long sting by the Bronx District Attorney’s Office and state tax officials.
Many of the smuggling transactions took place at the Halperin Avenue warehouse facility in the Bronx. Burroughs also did his gun deals with undercover agents at a storage facility in Spartanburg, S.C., Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson said.
Burroughs, 49, was named in an 82-count indictment charging him with the sale of 12 guns, ammunition, marijuana and the painkiller Oxycodone; money laundering; evasion of cigarette taxes; and conspiracy. He faces up to 25 years in prison for several of the charges.
He sold the guns to undercover agents posing as representatives of Middle East terror groups, the New York Post reported.
Burroughs allegedly praised Hamas and Hezbollah, the Post reported. "Hezbollah good, Hezbollah strong," he allegedly said at one point in the investigation. On another occasion, he suggested to undercover informants that they blow up a police station or the Jewish Community Center on Amsterdam Avenue at West 76th Street. Those allegations were not included in the charges outlined by authorities Wednesday. A spokesman for Johnson told the Post investigators found "no proof of a terrorist connection."
Burroughs, a city teacher since 2002, taught music at Stuyvesant for a couple of years before leaving in 2004. He is on unpaid leave from the city Department of Education for an unrelated February 2009 incident in which he was accused of verbal abuse and teacher misconduct at Cobble Hill High School for American Studies in Brooklyn. The department is in the process of firing him, a spokeswoman said.
When agents raided Burroughs’ Newark home this week, they found more than $73,000 cash, two guns, cartons of cigarettes, counterfeit cigarette tax stamps and an iron that was allegedly used to apply the stamps to cigarette boxes. When he was arrested at the Bronx warehouse, he was carrying $30,000 in cash and more than 100,000 counterfeit cigarette tax stamps.
The other 14 people arrested in the sting did not appear to be involved in Burroughs’ gun deals. Most of them, including the owners of a Hell’s Kitchen Sunoco station, specialized in dealing untaxed cigarettes.
During the course of the sting operation, the cigarette smugglers bought more than 130,000 cartons of untaxed cigarettes for more than $5 million, evading more than $6 million in taxes that should have gone to New York and New Jersey, Johnson said.
