An international manhunt is underway after two well-dressed men pulled off Britain’s biggest jewellery raid at the Graff Diamonds store in London’s Mayfair last Thursday, getting away with £40million of rings, bracelets, necklaces and watches, encrusted with around 1,437 diamonds.
After being dropped off in a black cab in the middle of the afternoon, the robbers sauntered past security guards, turned guns on staff and then briefly took a woman hostage before escaping with their haul. In a matter of minutes they cleaned out 43 of the most precious items up for sale in the Graff store, before making their getaway using three cars.
The stolen items include a platinum and gold flower necklace embedded with 268 diamonds, a gold buckle Chronograff watch and a number of yellow diamond rings. Britain’s previous biggest diamond heist was also at Graff’s in 2003, where thieves made off with £23 million of fine jewellery.
The theft occurred almost a month after a Cartier boutique in Cannes was robbed of £13m of jewels, in a raid that was thought to be the work of international jewellery robbers, The Pink Panther Gang. The gang, which got its name following the theft of a £500,000 diamond ring from a Mayfair jewellery shop in 2005, has stolen hundreds of millions of pounds worth of jewellery in sprees from around Europe over the past decade or two. Shop wonders if the Graff robbery bears the same Hallmark?
In a curious twist of fate ‘great train robber’ Ronnie Biggs finally made a successful bid for freedom last week, decades after he made off with booty worth almost exactly the same as the Graff thieves’ haul. Shop now wonders if the recession is fuelling a rise in sophisticated crime. The precious jewellery trade is increasingly suffering, leading the National Association of Goldsmiths to help set up the Safer Gems initiative with insurer T H Marsh to help tackle the problem.
www.theglobalparty.com
on Aug 14th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
There seems to be a new ‘mystique’ building up around the exotically named gangs that allegedly commit these crimes. Worryingly a feature in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph (‘A raid that’s a cut above the rest’) seemed to imply that robbing a jewellers shop imbued the perpetrators with some kind of cachet, and elevated them to an upper echelon of robbers. The author of that piece seems to be inhabiting a curios never land where ‘gentlemen’ jewel thieves were once the zenith of their profession – and presumably always wore evening wear to commit their criminal acts!
Furthermore, on the slim evidence that a suspect has been picked up in Ilford, the same author predicted a return to the halcyon days of the East End ‘blaggers’ who were the ‘aristocracy’ of the underworld, and implied that they represent a better class of criminal than the Eastern Europeans who are alleged to have dominated the scene lately. After all, the theory goes, you knew where you were with and East Ender – and they were always good to their mothers! You know the kind of thing.
Isn’t it time we stopped getting misty eyed over re-runs of The Sweeney and the mythological East End wide boys with their hearts of gold, and see the people who use threats of violence, firearms, and coshes to steal, whether its diamonds or not, as what they really are? Calculating criminals!
I doubt that any of my members’ staff held at gun point, verbally abused, beaten up, or taken as hostage, ever reflected on how ‘sophisticated’ the robbers were, or come to that felt that their attackers were ‘gentlemen’. Wearing a suit to steal and intimidate no more makes you a gentleman, than robbing a jeweller improves your status in the criminal fraternity!
National Association of Goldsmiths
on Aug 14th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
my sentiments exactly!
on Aug 14th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Hi Michael
You’re absolutely right about all that. We didn’t see the piece in the Telegraph, but we certainly don’t think it’s good to glamourise crime. In fact, it is rather worrying that the thieves are becoming so blatant.
The first Shop heard about the Pink Panther gang was from Retail Jeweller, but admittedly we found the furore surrounding Ronnie Biggs’ release rather nauseating - it just suddenly occurred to us that there may have been some kind of link between his reappearance and the Graff robbery, it seemed an odd coincidence. Maybe it seemed like the kind of thing an ‘old school’ East End crime syndicate might try to do, though on balance it appears more likely that a different gang was responsible…
In any case, let’s hope the Safer Gems initiative gets some good leads and manages to catch the criminals, Pink Panther or otherwise.
http://www.retail-jeweller.com/page.cfm/action=Archive/ArchiveID=2/EntryID=371
on Aug 18th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Looks like they’re getting closer to finding the thieves now, I think they’ve managed to identify one of the suspects based on a mold of his head taken to create the latex disguise mask he used….
on Aug 19th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
[...] coined after they hid a diamond ring in a can of facial creme, like in an old Pink Panther movie. One of their most famous heist was in Dubai on April the 15, 2007. They robbed a store in the mall, capturing [...]
on Aug 20th, 2009 at 9:58 am
As reported on in today’s Daily Telegraph, the Metropolitan Police have made two arrests in conjunction with the robbery, although officers have said they are on the hunt for at least four people.
on Aug 21st, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Latest update on this is that three men have now been arrested, with the last one picked up by The Met yesterday. A mammoth £1 million reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest.