Man Pleads Guilty in Home Invasion Using Fake Deadly Virus

One of three masked intruders who told a Connecticut multimillionaire and her partner that they had been injected with a lethal virus and would receive the antidote only if they paid $8.5 million has pleaded guilty in the 2007 home invasion, prosecutors said.

After spending more than a decade as a fugitive, the man, Stefan Alexandru Barabas, 38, pleaded guilty last week to an extortion charge, the federal prosecutor’s office for the District of Connecticut announced. Three co-conspirators have already been sentenced.

Prosecutors said that just before midnight on April 15, 2007, Mr. Barabas, a Romanian citizen, and two other men entered an estate in South Kent, Conn., wearing masks and carrying knives and imitation guns. A fourth man drove them close to the home and later picked them up.

The men bound and blindfolded Anne Bass, an arts patron, and her longtime partner, Julian Lethbridge, an artist.

The men injected each of them with a substance that they claimed was a deadly virus and ordered the couple to pay $8.5 million or they would be left to die from the injection, prosecutors said.

The couple did not have a way to pay, prosecutors said, so the men drugged them with sleeping pills and left in a stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle was found abandoned the next morning at a Home Depot in New Rochelle, N.Y.