Feds seize 213 lbs. of pot, $200K in cash at home of cold case slay suspects
Federal authorities seized 213 pounds of marijuana and about $200,000 in cash from the Brooklyn home of two suspects charged with the cold-case murder of a cafe owner in 2011, it was revealed in court Tuesday.
The suspects, 27-year-old Kevin Taylor and 26-year-old Michael Mazur, shared separate levels of the home on East 3rd Street near Albemarle Road in Kensington and allegedly dealt large quantities of pot from the house, prosecutors said during a telephone arraignment Tuesday night.
Mazur’s mother also lived with her son on the first floor, where investigators found the hundreds of pounds of weed and $200,000.
Mazur, Taylor and a third suspect, 37-year-old Gary Robles, are accused of killing 30-year-old Joshua Rubin at a McDonald Avenue apartment in 2011, then torching his body in a rural area of outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
All three of them pleaded not guilty at the arraignment Tuesday, where they were ordered held without bail. They each face the death penalty if convicted.
A federal prosecutor said the three suspects hatched a plan to rob Rubin, a local cafe owner, of a pound of marijuana in 2011 caper, and Robles ended up shooting him once in the chest during the theft.
After the shooting, the trio allegedly went to a Home Depot store and bought plastic bags, a plastic trash bag and latex gloves to dispose of the body and cover up the slaying, prosecutors charged.
They then wrapped the body in plastic bags and drove it at least two hours away to Pennsylvania, where they sprayed the body with an accelerant and set it on fire, prosecutors charged.
Federal investigators recovered cellphone data that placed all three of them at the scene of the murder and at the scene of where Rubin’s body was found.
Rubin owned Whisk Bakery Cafe in Ditmas Park and owed at least $14,000 to creditors at the time of his Halloween disappearance, sources told The Post at the time.
“He was a great guy, just a young entrepreneur with a great business down there,” Chris Houghton, president of the co-op that rented space to Rubin, said at the time.