MIAMI LAKES, Fla. – Over the span of two decades, Catalina Morales worked her way up from bottle filler to corporate operations manager at a Miami Lakes cosmetics manufacturer before leaving last year.
Police accuse the 43-year-old of stealing trade secrets and raw materials from LaDove, Inc. for her own business, selling some of her now-former employer’s products under the name of her own company.
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Authorities arrested Morales, of Miramar, on Tuesday.
According to police, in concert with her husband, Morales stole a total of $800,000 worth of “trade secrets, cosmetic formulas, raw materials, finished products and packaging materials” from LaDove, located at 5701 Miami Lakes Drive, for her own company, Volare Filler Solutions, Inc., based at 2440 W. 80th St. in Hialeah.
Morales worked for LaDove from Oct. 11, 2001 to July 5, 2023. She set up Volare in 2019, police said.
A Miami-Dade police report states that the investigation began in December after a LaDove executive was approached by the wife of a man who Morales hired at Volare, offering up information on thefts from LaDove. Police would later interview her husband.
LaDove then hired a private detective firm, which surveilled multiple Hialeah warehouses owned by Volare, police said.
The report states that at 2440 W. 80th St., the private investigator videotaped a series of totes, described as “large plastic containers used to store liquids used in the dispensing and mixing process,” along with “drums, cardboard boxes, and other raw materials” identified by a LaDove executive as property of LaDove.
The totes included documents with LaDove’s logo on it, police said.
“The totes and other materials were marked in the same form and fashion in which LaDove marks their inventory,” a detective wrote in the report.
Police interviewed the man who they said worked for Morales and acted as a courier.
According to the arrest report, he told investigators that he worked for Volare from March 2020 to December 2023.
“During his employment, he initially believed Volare and LaDove were the same company, due to the way products would come and go without any questions,” detectives wrote.
Authorities said the man received two to three totes per week from LaDove containing “the finished cosmetic product, raw materials to manufacture such product, and packaging materials or said product” and said Morales instructed him to visit LaDove to return empty totes using a box truck provided by Morales’ husband.
The man told police that Morales, while she worked at LaDove, would text him daily with instructions, the report states.
Police said after Morales resigned from LaDove, “she began to become more paranoid and anxious and ordered him to sanitize all the trash being thrown out from Volare for anything that included the name LaDove.”
In the report, he described overhearing one of Morales’ phone conversations.
“At last we got the last of it out from LaDove and they are not going to notice,” Morales said, he told detectives. “We stacked the pallets high and blocked the new camera. The only thing they have on us is that we took one of their clients.”
The man told detectives that Morales “noticed that he had overheard what she said during the call, and after that time, (she) changed her demeanor in a negative way towards him until his dismissal a few months later.”
He also described receiving an intellectual property book containing “formulas to manufacture beauty products, including the necessary ingredients and ratios needed to formulate various cosmetic products,” the report states.
Authorities conducting a search warrant Tuesday at multiple addresses connected to Morales found multiple LaDove totes, a hard drive with “confidential” LaDove information and LaDove documents marked “confidential.”
The allegations against Morales, however, are now in the public domain. After her arrest, a judge found probable cause to charge her with first-degree grand theft, dealing in stolen property, theft or embezzlement of trade secrets and offenses against intellectual property.
As of Thursday, Morales, a Colombian national, was being held in Miami-Dade County’s Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $47,500 bond.
It’s not clear if anyone else, including her husband, will face charges in the case.