LONDON
When Kim Kardashian West was dramatically relieved of nearly $10 million (Dh36.7 million) of jewellery — including a 20-carat diamond engagement ring — two weeks ago in the early hours of Monday morning, she became perhaps the highest-profile victim yet of what professional criminals like to call the “art” of armed robbery.
With Paris still on high-security lockdown, following the past year’s wave of terror attacks, even hardened thieves might have baulked at such a brazen raid on an American reality TV star whose every move is tracked by the world’s media.
In a series of Mission: Impossible-style manoeuvres, two English-speaking men, posing as policemen, overpowered the concierge at the exclusive Hotel de Pourtales, stormed the penthouse, and bound and gagged Kardashian at gunpoint — clearing the place of gems, smartphones and credit cards before fleeing, with at least three accomplices, on rented bicycles.
Who would suspect foreign “tourists” on two wheels — rather than in high-speed getaway cars — of having just committed an armed robbery audacious enough to have been scripted by Hollywood? Rumours and recriminations abound, but having spent several decades immersed in the professional criminal underworld, since first reporting on the Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1983, I find jewellery heists of this magnitude aren’t confined to movies — they’re big business, worth more than a billion dollars a year. (And that’s not counting those that go unreported, because they’re carried out on other criminals themselves.)
In many ways, the “specialists” who targeted Kardashian have never had it so good. There were immediate and predictable claims of an inside job, but today’s professional criminals can glean all they need via social media and computer hacking. They don’t need to befriend and/or blackmail anyone.
Gone, too, are the days when a two-timing “fence” would call up his favourite Flying Squad detective to say he’d just been offered some dodgy diamonds to recut and sell on.
Today, ever-shrinking police forces, combined with foreign gangs that are harder for domestic officers to infiltrate, have left the way clear for gem raiders to thrive.
One senior ex-Scotland Yard officer said it is tougher than ever to monitor the movements and activities of professional criminals moving across the soft borders of Europe using false documents: “We have no local knowledge any more. Many of the most successful gem robbers are from places like eastern Europe and we haven’t a clue who any of them really are.”
Successful thieves
The Kardashian heist certainly bears hallmarks of the “Pink Panthers” — the most successful diamond-thieving gang in history, who hail from the Balkans and are renowned for meticulous planning, imaginative disguises (they dressed as golfers for one job, Hawaiian tourists for another) and escaping with maximum hauls by means of minimum violence.
Since 1999, Interpol estimates they have stolen more than £280 million (Dh1.2 billion) in jewels during 380 armed robberies in 35 countries, from the UK to Japan.
A loosely affiliated network of around 200 ex-military personnel, mainly from Serbia and Montenegro, the Panthers’ first-known strike was the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in 1984, when they cleared its shelves of gems worth £39 million (while brandishing fully automatic weapons, but without firing a single bullet) before calmly strolling off down La Croisette.
But it was during United Nations (UN) sanctions against Yugoslavia in the early Nineties that they flourished, as small, localised smuggling routes were forged for basic goods — paving the way for an international flow of arms, drugs and diamonds to follow. Likened by Interpol to Al Qaida, in that they operate as a series of independent cells, they were dubbed the Pink Panthers by the press after pulling off the largest jewel heist in British history at Graff, the Bond Street jewellers, in 2003.
Having identified a Montenegrin suspect, Scotland Yard raided his Bayswater flat, to find a $600,000 diamond ring hidden in a pot of face cream — a ploy cribbed from The Return of the Pink Panther.
Perhaps the Panthers’ most audacious job was at Dubai’s Wafi Mall in 2007. Driving two high-powered Audi S8s, they rammed through the mall’s glass walls (in reverse, so that the airbags wouldn’t open on impact) and into the door of the Graff jewellery store, where a thief in a black bodysuit and balaclava swiped $2 million of diamonds, before the gang sped off. The entire job took just 170 seconds.
Their elegant execution balances a show of brute force with razor-sharp wits. In one raid in Biarritz, they gave a public bench near their target jewellers a fresh coat of paint to stop any passers-by sitting down and becoming accidental witnesses.
Gangs like the Panthers have adjusted their modus operandi since the introduction of CCTV monitoring, DNA matching and GPS tracking systems, sometimes even exploiting technology to their advantage. Having planned their crime with military precision, no doubt the perpetrators of the Kardashian heist revelled in the publicity in its aftermath. Not all are so tech-savvy.
Most of the “old school” criminals who carried out last year’s dramatic $20 million Hatton Garden heist were quickly rounded up by police because they didn’t throw away their mobiles and laptops and were identified through CCTV. Only the youngest member of the gang remains at liberty, because he was artful enough to place a large sack on his shoulder to prevent any of his facial features being recorded.
Valuable loot
In some cases, the perpetrators of these spectacular heists are unprepared for the vast value of the gems they steal. Disposing of tens of millions of pounds in gold, cash or jewellery is a risky, complicated business. Most are passed immediately to prearranged contacts who courier them across borders to buyers, often in Antwerp, where they will be recut and sold back into the legitimate market — perhaps with a forged certificate of origin — to make it on to the hands of unsuspecting brides. But Kardashian’s bling is more likely to have been stolen to order.
An ex-safe-cracker, who now specialises in handling valuable jewels, says: “There’s been ... speculation that the gang will struggle to sell the gems because they’re so well known, but that’s rubbish. They’ll have customers in place who are so wealthy that just owning a Kardashian piece is all that matters. We’re talking about [people] who don’t care about the notoriety.”
Successive UK governments have promised to freeze the assets of crime bosses and impose multimillion-pound fines on firms aiding villains. But as one former south London gems raider said, from his multimillion-dollar villa on the Costa del Sol: “The politicians are living in cloud cuckoo land. No one’s gonna stop gangs like the Panthers from making millions every year, because if you inform on them you’re signing your own death warrant.”
The creation of Interpol’s Pink Panther Working Group in 2007 has, at least, increased arrest rates — five alleged members were caught by Spanish police in Barcelona in August, after a tip-off from their German counterparts — and with Serbia and Montenegro in the later stages of accession to the European Union, the gangs are less safe back home. Still, globalised financial and information infrastructure have helped them cover their tracks with a vast array of legal businesses established as fronts for their transnational activities.
National Criminal Intelligence Service officers say that takings from crimes such as the Kardashian raid are invested in pubs, restaurants, clubs and even banking. Criminals also dip in and out of property deals, working with “legit” nominees. As Richard Hobbs, a sociologist at the University of Essex, says, the underworld elite “don’t see themselves as criminals, they see themselves as businessmen”.
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2016
