Their timing was as impeccable as a Tourbillon, a luxury timepiece whose name means “whirlwind.”
As the second hand ticked, four men — three disguised as women with long blond tresses, sunglasses and winter scarves — stood in front of an intercom and demurely requested to enter the fabled Harry Winston jewelry store on Avenue Montaigne. It was just before closing time on a chilly evening along this golden triangle of boutiques that includes Dior, Chanel and Gucci, the ornate facades and trees resplendent with Christmas lights.
Buzzed in, the men rolled a small valise on wheels into the hushed inner refuge. Then they pulled out a hand grenade and a .357 Magnum. As Parisians strolled unawares past the store’s wrought-iron gates, the robbers smashed display cases and barked out orders — and the names of some of the Harry Winston employees. They spoke French with strong Slovak accents.
There was no time for the police from a nearby station in the luxury district to rush over. In less than 15 minutes the diamond thieves were gone, roaring away in a waiting car through the 5:30pm twilight on Dec. 4 with sacks of emeralds, rubies and chunky diamonds the size of tiny bird eggs valued at more than US$105 million.
The robbers may not have been as suave as celluloid jewel thieves with the charm of David Niven — the debonair phantom bandit, Sir Charles Litton — but the meticulous planning, swift execution and creative style raised suspicion that the Harry Winston heist was the handiwork of a loose global network of battle-hardened ex-soldiers and their relatives from the former Yugoslavia.
Investigators, marveling at the gang’s ingenuity, have dubbed this unlikely network the Pink Panthers. The parallels between film and reality are perhaps best summed up in zee accent and words of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, himself from the original 1963 The Pink Panther.
“In a strange way,” he said of his nemesis, the phantom bandit, “I admire him for he has a unique flair for the dramatic.”
The Serbian Pink Panthers — many whose grim Interpol wanted posters show they come from the town of Nis in southern Serbia — have been roving the world’s luxury capitals since at least 2003 on reconnaissance missions for hard diamonds that can be, in the parlance of luxury security specialists, “soft targets.”
Defense lawyers for some thieves who have been arrested insist that the name Pink Panthers is an invention of drama-loving law enforcement authorities. But investigators say there are about 200 members in the group — linked by village and blood — and they blame the group for scooping up jewels worth more than US$132 million in bold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco. They live all over Europe, with some working in mundane jobs as hospital cleaners, waiting to be summoned for the next discount flight to a foreign capital, they said.
In Paris, investigators are trying to determine if it was the Pink Panthers that struck again — this time in flowing foulards and wigs — at Harry Winston.
“Of course there is a hypothesis that it is the Pink Panthers, but we cannot at this stage say absolutely that it is them,” said Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office.
It was the second major robbery at the same store in the last year.
“We’re open to all theories,” she said.
The risk adjustors and insurance syndicates with Lloyds of London — the Harry Winston insurer that also plays a supporting character in the original Pink Panther movie — harbor the same suspicions. They have placed classified advertisements all over the world, including the former Yugoslavia, to publicize a US$1 million reward for information that leads to the recovery of the Harry Winston sparklers.
But to underline their suspicions, they have also placed a classified notice in France — not in one of the grand newspapers like Le Monde, but in a local daily, Le Parisien. The journal reaches the working-class outskirts, the banlieue of Paris where the adjusters suspect that many of the professional thieves live.
France is already home — or make that a cold jail cell — for two former Pink Panther members from Serbia whom prosecutors blame for jewelry robberies that reaped more than US$9.8 million in glitter from swank boutiques along the French Riviera from St. Tropez and Cannes to the Atlantic Coast at Biarritz.
Just a day before the Harry Winston robbery the two men — Boban Stojkovic and Goran Drazic — were sentenced in Chambery, in the east of France, respectively, to six and 10-year sentences. The group’s fugitive ringleader, Dragan Mikic, was sentenced in absentia to 15 years. He vanished from prison in 2005 after sliding down a ladder while his accomplices attacked the watchtower with machine-gun fire.
“Almost all of them are intelligent,” said the prosecuting lawyer, Gilbert Lafaye, at their sentencing. “But with this intelligence why do they follow the path to easy money?”
That cool cleverness, boldness and speed are the hallmarks of the ultra lux robberies, which led investigators to speculate that the Pink Panthers are casting for ideas from the creme de la creme of movie thieves — right down to hiding a signature US$657,000 blue diamond in a jar of face cream, as one did for his girlfriend.
Looking at the details of other robberies blamed on the gang shows that the Harry Winston job, despite the violence — some workers were struck in the head — was almost subtle by comparison.
In Dubai, masked members of the gang were blamed last year for ramming two Audi automobiles into the window of a Graff jewelry boutique in a gleaming Wafi City shopping mall. They scooped up US$3.4 million in diamonds and then bolted away in the same cars — in a daylight heist that has become a YouTube classic with more than 200,000 hits. Later, they burned the cars to erase their traces.
It took well-dressed Pink Panthers less than three minutes to attack the Graff store in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 2004 and stuff a sack with rare yellow diamonds worth more than ¥3.5 billion, or almost US$38 million, the brazen proceedings captured on videotape.
Included in the haul was a 125-carat necklace of 116 diamonds, the Comtesse de Vendome, that has not been recovered and is worth an estimated US$31.5 million.
In London, thieves believed to be Pink Panthers last year stepped out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley and struck a jewelry store in Mayfair.
Sometimes they match their brutality with cleverness. In Biarritz, for example, they coated a bench with fresh paint to deter pedestrians from resting near a jewelry store that was a target.
“The modus was always the same,” Olivier Jude of the police department in Monaco said. “Very fast, very well-organized with a plurality of perpetrators, and violent, too. The criminals used to break the shop windows most of the time with hammers.”
In the summer of last year, jewelry thieves struck the Ciribelli shop in Monte Carlo, prompting the police to request an international conference of investigators that was held a month later in Lyon, France, at Interpol headquarters. Interpol now presides over what it calls “Project Pink Panthers” to share and coordinate information about the gang.
As part of that effort, Interpol started circulating the names and pictures of Pink Panthers on its “red” list of fugitive criminals. One of them was Dusko Poznan, 30, whose mug shows a mournful man with dark hair and circles under his eyes, dressed in a sweater and tailored shirt.
Poznan, fluent in Russian and English and a native of Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a suspect in the Dubai robbery and also one in Liechtenstein. In October, Poznan drove to Monaco with another man in a rented Audi A3 and headed for Casino Square, home of designer shops like Cartier, Hermes and Louis Vuitton, the authorities said. There he was crossing the road on foot when he was hit by another car.
He initially resisted medical treatment, police said. But once at Princess Grace Hospital, an officer made the connection to the red list fugitive photo. He is being held.
Both Poznan and his companion had forged passports, but insisted they were simply holiday tourists, Jude said, noting dryly that the camera surveillance later showed that “they were exactly in the area of jewelry shops and they weren’t doing their Christmas shopping.”
Yet for all their daring, there have been times when the thieves have been tripped up by little details.
In Dubai, investigators found DNA evidence in the fire-scorched Audi rental cars and found a mobile telephone number on the rental agreement.
That led them on the trail of a 27-year-old woman from Nis, Serbia, who is fluent in English and Russian. Her mobile phone led investigators to six men.
When caught, some of them denied everything — including what appear to be their images in jewelry store robbery photographs — while others, like Boban Stojkovic, have spoken in detail to investigators.
“I don’t demand your pity,” Stojkovic said as he was sentenced in Chambery the day before the Dec. 4 robbery. “Because I know that I have to pay for these crimes. But just leave me an open door to remake my life.”
Stojkovic’s lawyer, Emmanuel Auvergne-Rey, said in an interview that Stojkovic had been a soldier from the former Yugoslavia whose role was as an enforcer. But, he said, he had the manner of what can only be described as a gentleman bandit.
“He committed robberies with a minimum of violence,” said Auvergne-Rey, who insisted that Stojkovic was not part of the Pink Panthers. “I find him extremely sweet, extremely polite and nice.”
If he was so clever, then why did he become a bandit?
“Permit me to say something,” Auvergne-Rey said, pausing. “It’s not necessary to be an idiot to act like a fool.”
Although he was arrested before the Paris job, Stojkovic described aspects of his gang’s modus operandi that should help investigators. For example, he revealed that his group would observe a target for up to 10 days before striking.
Such painstaking surveillance may well have led to the decision to wear wigs at Harry Winston: women, even fake ones, glimpsed through a security camera might appear less threatening to weary workers. It could also reveal how the robbers knew some of the workers’ names — other members of the team may have visited enough to pick up identities, the authorities said.
Thomas O’Neill, the president of Harry Winston, who was in Paris on Thursday, said: “We are working on reopening the salon as soon as possible, and we are appreciative of the work of authorities and our insurance carrier in this very unfortunate matter.”
At the shuttered store on Friday, in a window where jewels once glittered, a photograph of jewels sits in their place. Authorities investigating the Dec. 4 robbery will also be reviewing the robbery at the same store a year ago, a crime that now feels absurdly small — slightly more than US$13 million in jewels.
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