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The detectives responded to a call from the operations manager the Budget Rental Car agency at Newark Airport about the suspicious bag found under the dashboard of a returned Chevy.
Courtesy PAPD
It was brought to the agency’s attention by a customer who said he’d received a call from a man identifying himself as a Budget employee and telling him to look near the car’s fuse box for a black bag containing “kid’s medicine.” Instead, the manager retrieved the bag and immediately called Port Authority police.
Inside the bag, detectives found five bundles of heroin wrapped inside magazine pages. Inside them were roughly 250 small packets of heroin stamped “Fat Boy.”
Investigators determined that 30-year-old Carlos Tavarez had rented the car on Sunday, then drove it to and from Boston before returning it, the authority’s Joseph Pentangelo told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Tavarez later called the renal company, saying he’d “forgotten item in the auto and wanted to retrieve it,” Pentangelo said.
They told him to come pick it up at the airport yesterday.
PAPD Detective Lawrence Mays, acting as a Budget employee, took the 5-foot-10 inch, 160-pound into custody after he arrived, signed for the bag and collected it around 4 p.m., Pentangelo said.
Tavarez was being held on $150,000 bail in the Essex County Jail, charged with having heroin that police said intended to sell.
An investigation was continuing.
MUGSHOT: Courtesy PORT AUTHORITY PD
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