SAN JOSE, CA., Friday, June 4, 2004 - At 6-foot-7, 300 pounds, Howard Allen Young is hard to miss. But until last week, the man police call Silicon Valley’s most wanted high-tech bandit had eluded capture for nearly four years. Police at San Francisco International Airport last Friday picked up Young on a $5 million warrant. His luggage contained bolt cutters, gloves and the trademark tan suit he wore when, according to authorities, he robbed 26 high-tech companies of nearly $3 million in CPUs, memory boards and switches from network servers from 2003 to 2004.

Among his victims: Oracle, Google and Sun Microsystems, authorities say.

“His victim list is a ‘Who’s Who’ of high-tech companies,” said Menlo Park police detective Alex Bouja, who began investigating the burglaries in 2000. “He was a one-man crime spree.”

Santa Clara Deputy District Attorney James Sibley called Young “the single most prolific and sophisticated high-tech burglar I’ve seen.”

His arrest, announced Thursday, closed nine separate investigations of burglary and grand theft, Sibley said. Young, 41, remains at the Elmwood Men’s Jail in Milpitas on $5 million bond and is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.

Young had been referred to the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office on Thursday, but had not been assigned to an attorney. Young could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Even with Young’s arrest on suspicion of committing 26 burglaries of high-tech companies in the county, Sibley said investigators are still working to connect the man to other similar unsolved crimes across the country. Authorities believe Young is also responsible for 10 high-tech burglaries in San Mateo County, three in Alameda County and a few unsolved cases in Colorado and Massachusetts.

Young was previously convicted in San Francisco for kidnapping a cab driver after a retail burglary in 1992.

Young is accused of sneaking into companies early Saturday mornings and presenting himself as an employee from another office. He would enter the server rooms and methodically collect expensive equipment, police say.

Bouja and Palo Alto police detective David Flor cataloged crimes allegedly committed by Young. They also joined forces with the REACT Task Force, a 6-year-old state-funded law enforcement team that focuses on high-tech crimes.

The crack in the case came from an unlikely source: a mother putting together a computer for her son. The unidentified woman bought two faulty 1-gigabyte memory chips on eBay, Sibley said. When she called the manufacturer to complain, the company checked the serial number she read to them over the phone. The company discovered they were manufactured for Google, which had reported them stolen in February.