A Pittsburgh man is headed to federal prison for five years for leading a multimillion-dollar operation that laundered money and resold stolen goods at jacked-up prices through a series of retail stores in the area, prosecutors said Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Mark R. Hornak sentenced Durrell Waters, 41, in federal court in Downtown Pittsburgh on Wednesday. A jury had found Waters guilty of four counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy in August 2024.

Three years of supervised release will follow Waters’ prison sentence.

Attorney Eric A. Jobe, who represented Waters at sentencing, declined comment Friday.

Acting U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti’s office said Waters and a co-defendant, Anthony Costanzo, opened what prosecutors called a fencing operation in 2012, after Waters had worked for a resale store that traded in used electronics and stolen, brand-new DVDs.

Hornak in January sentenced Costanzo, of Carnegie, to 27 months in prison, court records show.

“Once he was out on his own, Mr. Waters and his co-conspirators used their knowledge of the resale industry, and how to avoid getting prosecuted, to change the game in the Pittsburgh region,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed in February.

Prosecutors said Waters purchased and re-sold “pretty much anything that could be resold online” at a series of secondhand and resale businesses in the Pittsburgh area: Trader Electronics, Last Call Entertainment and The Outlet.

The goods they bought and sold ranged from retail items — stolen DVDs and electric toothbrushes — to makeup, hair and skin products, and over-the-counter medication.

Waters conspired with others to use these businesses as a front for a criminal fencing operation from 2013 through 2016, court documents showed.

Known shoplifters would bring Waters hundreds of dollars’ worth of brand-new products multiple times a week, then sell them to him for less than half their value, prosecutors said.

Waters met some sellers after hours, sometimes in a gas station parking lot, court records show. He sometimes bought goods out of sellers’ car trunks.

He then resold the goods at huge markups.

“The fact that these products were stolen was obvious,” prosecutors said in court documents.

Investigators found a bin full of health and beauty aids in Waters’ Dormont store labeled “these items are stolen,” according to prosecutors.

Between January 2013 and November 2016, just one of Waters’ Amazon storefronts handled more than $3.3 million in sales, court records show.

Hornak, the federal judge, called evidence against Waters “extensive.”

Unlike crimes that take place as a single event, Waters’ criminal conspiracy spanned years and “required [Waters] to decide every day to keep doing this,” Hornak said.

Prosecutors sought 70 to 87 months imprisonment for Waters, court documents showed.

He received 60.

“Durrell Waters was a major player in a retail crime wave that harmed all levels of society in our region,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo.

“He exploited people suffering from addiction (and) he exploited retailers trying to make an honest living,” they said. “He exploited consumers willing to pay extra at a legitimate business, or unwittingly buying stolen goods online.”

Correction: This story has been edited to correctly state the sentence for Anthony Costanzo and when it was imposed, as well as the name of the lawyer representing Durrell Waters. An earlier version also misstated the contents of a bin labeled “stolen.”

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