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A Big Apple pharmacist allegedly hoarded and hawked personal protective equipment at a massive mark-up as health care workers dealt with a shortage of supplies amid the coronavirus outbreak, The Post has learned.
Richard Schirripa is accused of buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in masks and other types of PPE earlier this year and price gouging in April, according to a federal search warrant unsealed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York Friday.
The 66-year-old pharmacist owns Madison Avenue Pharmacy on Madison Avenue near E. 98th Street.
“He, unfortunately, is not locked up yet,” a law enforcement source told The Post, adding that the agency was working with others to determine the possible charges.
Schirripa was allegedly recorded discussing the sale of surgical and commercial grade N-95 masks at $22 and $15, respectively, according to the warrant. Those masks typically sell for less than $1.50, the court documents say.
Federal agents say the pharmacist spent over $200,000 on masks when the virus started to spread through China earlier this year but had not yet reached the United States, the documents say.
But Schirripa told potential buyers he got the masks from a supplier in Florida, where they were obtained on the “the black market” and marked up from $20 to $400 a box, according to the court docs.
“I paid a very high for them, but you know something, when you have something no one else has, it’s not a high price… I used to sell a box of these for like $20, now it’s like $15 a mask,” Schirripa allegedly said to undercover agents.
“I can only fit a thousand masks in my car,” Schirripa told agents, according to the docs. “I don’t want anyone to see the stuff — this stuff is like gold right now.”
The federal sting allegedly caught Schirripa making deliveries of PPE to various pharmacists and doctors offices on the Upper East Side before selling the undercover agents nearly $3,000 in marked-up masks, according to the warrant.
“At one point during their conversation, Schirripa said, unprompted… ‘I feel like a drug dealer standing out here,” while making the sale to undercover agents on Thursday, the warrant reads.
He claimed to only make a 10 percent profit, the warrant says.
When federal agents searched Schirripa’s Long Island home they found around 5,500 masks, according to a source. They found another 1,000 at his Upper East Side flat.
The bust was a joint operation between Homeland Security, NYPD and USPS.
Schirripa previously settled a federal case in 2013 in which he was accused of failing to report the theft of OxyContin from his pharmacy.
The pharmacist could not be reached for comment.
