Man who stole Kristi Noem’s purse gets 3 years in prison
Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, was at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with her family when her bag was taken with $3,000 and her security badge inside.
The thief who snatched a Gucci handbag last year from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, while she was dining with her family at a restaurant in Washington was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison in connection with the brazen robbery and two others.
The man, Mario Bustamante Leiva, 60, a Chilean citizen who is in the United States illegally, made off with $3,000 in cash and Noem’s security badge and passport during the heist last Easter, federal authorities said.
Bustamante Leiva pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree theft and three counts of wire fraud in November, according to prosecutors, who noted that all three victims in the case were women.
He faces deportation once he completes his sentence, said Jeanine Pirro, the United States attorney for Washington, D.C.
“He methodically targeted women at restaurants, stealing their purses and monetizing the stolen cards within minutes,” Pirro said in a statement Wednesday. “His pattern of theft ends here.”
Two federal public defenders for Bustamante Leiva did not immediately respond to requests for Wednesday.
Neither did representatives for Noem, who was fired as the secretary of the Homeland Security Department in March by President Donald Trump while facing a series of scandals at the agency that had brought unwanted headlines for the administration.
On the night of April 20, 2025, Noem had taken her family to dinner for Easter Sunday at the Capital Burger in downtown Washington when Bustamante Leiva sat down at a table next to her, unaware that Noem was the head of homeland security, authorities said. Her purse was on the floor.
Security camera images showed Bustamante Leiva using his leg to slide Noem’s purse toward him and reaching down to pick it up while trying to hide the theft with his jacket.
Bustamante Leiva, whose face was covered with a medical mask, then left the Capital Burger and took a bus to another restaurant where he used Noem’s American Express cards to make five food and alcohol purchases totaling $205.87, investigators said. He had earlier discarded Noem’s driver’s license.
The police and Secret Service arrested Bustamante Leiva six days later and connected him and a co-defendant, Cristian Montecino-Sanzana, to the robberies of three women in eight days in Washington, including the one involving Noem.
Montecino-Sanzana, who is also from Chile, was sentenced to 13 months in prison in March. He is also facing deportation.
Bustamante Leiva received a visa waiver when he entered the United States in August 2021 and that waiver, federal authorities said, required him to leave the country that November. But he did not leave, and he now has active warrants in New York and Utah stemming from retail and credit card theft and stolen property charges from 2021, prosecutors said.
During Noem’s tenure in Trump’s Cabinet, she was intensely criticized for her use of expensive private jets, as well as for spending tens of millions of dollars on government ads that prominently featured herself.
Noem told Congress that Trump had approved the ads, which the president disputed. Her claims appeared to be the final straw before Noem was removed and reassigned to a newly created post: special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
Noem also bore the brunt of public anger over the administration’s immigration crackdown, particularly after the Jan. 24 killing of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse protesting the raids in Minneapolis, by federal agents.
After her ouster, Noem encountered another public relations crisis, a personal one: The Daily Mail published photos that appeared to show her husband, Bryon Noem, dressed up in women’s clothing, with balloons placed in his shirt to look like breasts.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Be civil. Be kind.
Read our full community guidelines.To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address