A brazen and meticulously planned robbery of the Harry Winston store in central Paris last weekend netted the unknown thieves about $28.4 million in gems, one of the largest jewelry thefts ever, French investigators said Thursday, after an inventory of the raided safe.
An elite Interior Ministry unit, the Serious Crime Squad, has been put on the case, but so far investigators lack leads to either the robbers or their haul.
The police said that four or five masked men entered the Harry Winston boutique at 10 a.m. on Saturday — a shop just around the corner from a police station and mere footsteps from the tourist hordes of Paris’s best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées.
The robbers, who were armed, overwhelmed the six employees arriving for work, one by one, then calmly ordered them to open the safe. The robbers vanished with a bag full of heavy necklaces and gems, including a large diamond worth $2.8 million. None of the employees were hurt.
“It was a standard holdup, like you see in any store in any neighborhood when a bunch of kids steal money from the cashier,” said one official close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“These guys are professionals. Beginners don’t dare go near top-end jewelers,” the official said, adding that the real test of the gang’s acumen would be whether they could resell the stolen gems on the black market.
Because of the risk of detection, stolen jewels tend to fetch only a fraction of their retail price, sometimes as little as 20 percent, analysts say. French investigators have been circulating information about the stolen merchandise to the police in other countries in the hope of catching the thieves when they approach a prospective buyer.
The Harry Winston robbery dwarfs other recent robberies in France and beyond.
In Paris, the theft of two diamonds worth an estimated $18.5 million at an antiques fair in Paris in September 2004 came closest. The police never found the perpetrators. In 1994, armed robbers stole about $21 million in gems from the jeweler Alexandre Reza in central Paris.
Diamonds are a thief’s close friend, to judge by recent years. There were 253 recorded robberies of French jewelers last year, 20 percent more than in 2005, according to an internal report of the French jewelers’ federation. Some police officers speak with concern of a “new era” of criminality in the luxury sphere.
Luxury outlets also are attracting criminal attention beyond France.
Last month, a gang of moped riders in London robbed the boutique of Luella Bartley, a prominent British designer, and escaped with more than $20,000 worth of handbags. Asprey, a British jeweler, has been robbed several times, losing $800,000 worth of gems on one occasion.
In March, necklaces and rings from Avakian were stolen by a gang on mopeds, while in June tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of shoes were stolen from Roger Vivier.
Source: nytimes
No comments:
Post a Comment