Year In Jail For South Carolina Resident.
BOCA RATON, FL (BocaNewsNow.com) (Copyright © 2026 MetroDesk Media, LLC) — A South Carolina man who spent more than a year working as a fiber splicer for AT&T in unincorporated West Palm Beach quietly stole more than $86,000 worth of specialized telecom tools from his employer — then pawned them at pawn shops in Boca Raton and West Palm Beach in 19 separate transactions, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office records. Daniel Charles Tumillo III, 50, of Greenville, South Carolina, pleaded guilty this week in Palm Beach County Circuit Court to dealing in stolen property and false verification of ownership and was sentenced to 366 days in the Palm Beach County jail.
The scheme ran from nearly the moment Tumillo started at AT&T. Investigative records show he was hired as a temporary facility technician on March 5, 2021, and began pawning company-owned equipment just four months later. Investigators say he exploited a gap in AT&T’s inventory controls — the company only tracked and serialized tools costing over $2,000. Tumillo ordered tools just under that threshold, submitting requests to different supervisors who didn’t realize he had already received identical items. By the time he left the company on November 17, 2022, he had personally ordered 507 tools worth $86,003.44 through AT&T’s internal purchase system. Twenty-eight of them — worth more than $25,000 — were missing from his work van when it was inventoried at his departure.
The case unraveled in an unusual way. An investigator from Frontier Communications, conducting an unrelated probe into missing fiber equipment at their own company, stumbled upon Tumillo’s pawn activity while searching recent transactions at local shops. The records showed Tumillo identifying himself as an AT&T employee while pawning high-end fiber optic testing equipment. AT&T’s asset protection team was alerted, confirmed the tools matched items sold to the company by vendor AFL, and reported the theft to PBSO. Detectives then ran Tumillo’s name through a pawn database, and found he had conducted over 300 pawn transactions — buys and pawns — at multiple Palm Beach County shops while employed at AT&T. Among them: at least one pawn shop in Boca Raton. Fingerprints were matched to Tumillo by PBSO investigators.
Under the terms of his plea deal, Tumillo was sentenced to 366 days incarceration with credit for 276 days already served, along with fines and court costs. Restitution was also ordered under a separate order.
