Why diamonds are a criminal's best friend

[LatinAmericanview]

This just funny. The world biggest gangsters and not one mention!

Fun bullshit article. It is what it does not say that is comical.

Jewel heist: Why diamonds are a criminal's best friend
One crime still excites gangsters more than any other: the diamond heist.
 

By Richard Edwards
Published: 6:21PM BST 12 Aug 2009
Jewel heist
The raid on a Mayfair jewellery store last week proved that the old-fashioned dazzler is still very much in vogue Photo: GETTY

While much of the criminal underworld oscillates between running drugs rackets, frauds or internet scams, one crime still excites gangsters more than any other: the diamond heist.

Glamourised over the years in numerous Hollywood thrillers, the £40 million raid on a Mayfair jewellery store last week – the biggest in British history – has proved that the old-fashioned dazzler is still very much in vogue.

The lure of them is simple to discern. In one audacious swoop, a robber can make more in minutes than a racketeer might make in a lifetime.

Barry Phillips, former head of Scotland Yard's Flying Squad, agrees that it appeals to the most egotistical of criminals.

"It's a niche market, and for a criminal there's something extra in it to say you've got away with a diamond heist, rather than just old fashioned ten pound notes," he said. "It puts them into a different league in their own reckoniing of their standing in the criminal world."

The tiny gemstones also carry a practical advantage.

"Diamonds are easy to conceal and therefore they are an easily transportable commodity, not heavy like gold or bulky like cash," Mr Phillips says. "They hold their value, and with the right contacts and networks it is easy to move them on and have them reconfigured."

Diamonds, then, are the ultimate currency of the global underworld – and there has been an upsurge in criminal activity.

The raid on Graff's in cental London last Thursday is the latest in seven multi-million pound raids in European capitals in the past two years. Paris has been a particular target, where insurance companies reported a 70 per cent rise in robbery claims from in January and February this year.

The culprits have predominantly been organised criminal gangs from Eastern Europe, including one infamous group dubbed the "Pink Panthers" – a reference, again, to the aura of film legend. But the one outstanding difference in the Mayfair robbery is that the suspects had London accents.

The first arrest linked to the crime was made yesterday in Ilford, east London, leading to an intriguing question for police: is this, perhaps, the return of the East End "blagger"?

From the 1960s to the 1980s, London's cadre of career armed robbers were regarded as the aristocracy of the underworld, and the "epic robbery" the zenith of criminal ambition.

A breed of mainly white, working-class armed robbers, people like Bertie Smalls and Micky McAvoy, emerged from Walworth and Bermondsey, Hackney and Islington, Stepney and Bethnal Green.

London's capital of gems, gold and silver, Hatton Garden, was both a target and a source of criminality, with many jewellers acting as fences for criminal gains.

Infamously, Solly Nahome, a Hatton Garden diamond merchant, was shot dead by a hitman outside his north-London home in 1998. Nahome was known to have links to the notorious north-London crime clan, the Adams family, and is thought to have been skimming off some of their profits.

Scotland Yard's Flying Squad finally got a grip in the late 1980s, helped by the increase in police firearms units. These officers generally shot to kill, as increasing numbers of robbers found out to their cost.

The proliferation of the illegal drugs trade offered a profitable and relatively low-risk alternative to the jewellery-heist, so the number s dropped off, but did not diminish entirely. Soon Eastern Europeans had filled the gap, injecting a new element of competition into the gem-robbery scene.

The notorious "Pink Panther" gang, formed in the wilds of Balkans bandit country in the aftermath of the civil war in Yugoslavia, are suspected of stealing around £100 million in more than 20 daring raids worldwide. They acquired their nickname in 2003 after a £500,000 diamond, stolen from the same Mayfair store of Graff's raided last week, was later found hidden in a jar of face cream - a tactic used in the original 1963 Pink Panther film, starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

The methods used recently are even more inventive than a Hollywood script. Last December, armed male robbers disguised as women stole around £70 million worth of jewels from Harry Winston's store near the Champs-Elysee in Paris. Months later, a "gentleman robber in a suit and a fedora hat took £5.2 million worth of jewels from the nearby Chopard boutique.

Scotland Yard detectives, who are on the tail of the London culprits, know also that this latest high-profile raid could inspire a new wave of robbers lured by the opportunity of a massive one-off heist. Diamonds, as Marilyn Monroe once sang so famously, are a girl's best friend. But they also remain the best friend of criminals and money-launderers the world over.

[LatinAmericanview]

Gem robbers 'used latex disguises'
AFP - ‎44 minutes ago‎
LONDON - The two smartly-dressed robbers who pulled off what is thought to be the country's biggest jewellery heist in London may have worn film-style rubber masks to conceal their identities, media reports said on Thursday.
Graff jewel heist: diamonds stolen to order Telegraph.co.uk
British arrest heist suspect Philadelphia Inquirer
The Press Association - guardian.co.uk - BBC News  - Wikipedia: Graff Diamonds Robbery
all 1,280 news articles »

[LordLindsey]

No one ever discusses the largest heist in human history which occurred in Amsterdam's diamond district.  Literally POUNDS/KILOS of diamonds were stolen with the burglary having occurred when no one was in the building where the diamonds were stored; this happened several years ago--maybe five or six--and I remember it because it absolutely reeked of an inside-job where the result was somewhere in the BILLIONS!  I am going by memory, but why this is never, ever discussed is beyond me because that was the biggest burglary in history.

LINDSEY