2: Thick as Thieves

My name is Zavikonnen.

I am former police officer, was working in Paris and was in charge the highest robberies of jewelries in Paris. So I've been in the police during twenty five year.

Captain ervekon Nan was the lead investigator on multiple robberies by the Pink Panthers in Paris starting in the early two thousands. He saw firsthand how a group of Serbian jewel thieves turned themselves into a global brand.

The name of Pink Panthers was given after the robbery in London after the graft.

Robberies back in two thousand and three, two men in expensive suits entered a Graph jewelry store on New Bond Street in London's West End. One of them was wearing a conspicuous black wig that a security guard later said looked like a cat. It was the middle of the day and this luxury shopping district was full of people. Suddenly, one of the men pulled out a gun, the other a hammer. Three minutes later, the pair walked out into the busy London streets with over thirty million dollars worth

The name of Pink Panthers was given by the newspapers in England because our colleagues in London they found diamonds in a pot of cream.

Cream.

It was a jar of face scream and inside police found a blue diamond worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The thieves had left it behind when they made their escape from London.

Okay, the fun of diamonds and it was a reference to a movie, Pink Panther, and so the name was given to this gang.

At this time.

It was something right out of the classic Peter Sellers movie Return of the Pink Panther. The name given by the British press stock media across Europe just loved it. But this was not the first time the newly branded Pink Panthers had struck. In fact, the Pink Panthers was simply a new label for a vast underworld network that was already running like a well oiled machine, and vlad and Lazarevich, b Yana Mitch and Milan Lipoya were just

The most daring and successful diamond thieves in the world.

Thirty to forty seconds in.

Out They've stolen half a billion dollars worth of valuables.

Two well dressed men strolled into an exclusive jewelry store in London and walked out with sixty six million dollars in jewels. They called the Pink pantherst They're a loosely connected group of over educated, underemployed, ambitious young people who rose from the ashes of the Yugoslav Wars of the nineteen nineties to commit elaborate smash and grab heists all across the globe, often in broad daylight. This is infamous international The Pink Panthers Story Episode two, Thick as Thieves.

They have attacked Beauchamp, the jewelry on the place b Loom and they attack the main windows.

In fact, it was in the morning, very early.

The shop was still closed.

Okay, but the jewelries were still visible from outside.

Millions of dollars of jewels sitting on display right behind the front window of a closed shop. It seems like it's inviting trouble. But the store had a very special security system.

It is a specific glasses, very sophisticated. It resists when you eat the window with the ammer or axis. But if the departure is very high the glass, you can break it. So they burn, in fact, the windows with I don't know if the name in English, with a big flame.

It was a blowtorch. The thieves knew what they were up against, and they had planned accordingly. They hid the glass until it's brutal, neutralizing the security feature.

So they break the window like this, and they have took an egglace in the jewry. It was maybe three millions.

It's very very smart.

It was like in a movie.

It was just like a movie. It's almost like that was their intention.

I always thought that the most important part of their exploits was this part of them being media said, you hear these guys out there interested in their image, you know, interested in the way how public perceives them.

The misvoint of is a Serbian film scholar who wrote a film about the Being Panthers. For him, the Panthers' style was clearly inspired by popular movies and television.

In a very same way John Dillinger appeared after a very long stint in prison, you went to cinema in order to learn to speak again. So he used to mimic dialogue for films. And I think that Pink Panthers are a lot like Dillager. You know, their actions resemble a lot of films using masks or some kind of disguise that's from Mission Impossible.

You know.

It's a very curious thing, you know about how media and movies informed.

This, and journalists have made that connection as well.

We've seem so many fun heist films.

We love a complicated crime that is well executed, and apparently they do too. My name is Eric Pape. I'm a longtime investigative reporter. I've worked extensively for Newsweek magazine, The Daily Beast that I've written for Vid Debray publications around the world.

Eric Pape was based in Paris, where he first started covering the Panthers in the late two thousands.

I started writing about the Pink Panthers almost fifteen years ago. They very much capture something in the popular imagination.

Pay reported on a number of the Pink Panthers heists and some of the details struck him as especially creative.

Police this may be one of my favorites talked about the four busty ladies who entered the Henry Winston jewelry shop in Paris, threw out a magnum and a grenade, and then they escaped with about one hundred million dollars in jewelry. Police said that they believed it was Pink Panthers in drag.

For the Panthers, plenty of heist is similar to making a movie. Everyone has their part, their costume, They spend weeks rehearsing, and on the day of the robbery it's time to perform. Eric Paper calls another Panther heist where distracting woodrobe choices play the key role.

I believe it was in two thousand and five and it was in Centrope on the Mediterranean coast.

You would think they might want to dress in the most mundane.

Clothes imaginable to blend in, but instead they dressed in these loud, very tacky tourist T shirts and they went into a store right near the waterfront.

Streets were thronged with tourists. That's something that they often do. They often use.

Masses of people or traffic as a cover because a you can try to blend in afterwards, you can change out of that flashy T shirt, for example, but also the traffic and all the people make it hard for police to respond. So they basically walked through the tourist bron streets that were impassable to cars, and they got in a waiting speedboat.

A speedboat like something out of James Bond or maybe the Italian Job.

It's brazen and very well thought through.

At the same time, if they just went in looking like a couple of normal people like me and they left, then would we be talking about them?

These early highs show how big patners develop a signature style, the one that reflects a deliberate use of drama and misdirection.

They have made a tactical decision to draw attention to themselves. It's kind of an interesting thing if you think about it. The idea of having flashy when you want attention and switching to to nondescript when you need to Everything is thought through quite brilliantly.

It's almost like a magician.

The magician wants you looking somewhere, and they don't want you looking somewhere else. And they have given so much thought to what it's going to grab your attention and what is going to not And in this case, the you is all of the different witnesses.

Who are likely going to end up speaking to authorities.

So to me, it just gets at something really well crafted.

Crazy costumes, expensive cars, speedboats, all of it designed to distract onlookers from the actual crime.

They want the wow factor.

And so I think strangely, by being extremely visible, by dressing up these big, strong men, dressing up as women, by doing all of these things that we associate with being Panther films, with James Bond films, with countless heist films, I think it actually makes it very very hard to catch them, because it's not just someone walking in with a gun saying this is a robbery and then running

Captain Irve Konnan of the Paris Police says, these early years we're a kind of golden age for the Panthers.

Between two thousand and two thousand and seven, they had a fantastic opportunity to rub everywhere in the world because you were able to travel.

With false passport or for spassport.

It was easy.

You had no DNA, the TV was very bad and sometimes did not exist, and Montenegro and Serbia there were a lot of corruption in these countries, so they know that as soon as they were in that country they were not in danger. So there are ten years it was open bar.

They were able to do everything they want in the world.

An open bar everywhere in the world. And though there was no way to predict where the Pink Panthers would strike next, their targets all shared a specific profile. Anywhere the rich and famous gathered and shocked. They hit London, Paris and Liechtenstein, Monaco and ski resorts in the French Alps. And as their ambitions grew, so did the distance the Panthers were willing to travel.

One was the guy we arrested.

We had wire tape on him and we understood that he traveled in Japan, and after that we found picture where he's in Japan with his girlfriend, so he was going there to check if he was able to make a robbery.

They were traveling everywhere in the world, and two major robberies.

Were committed in Tokyo by them, two major robberies.

So the pig Panther thing is kind of legendary in Japan because it was one of the first international jewel heights ever in the country.

Jake Adelstein is an investigative journalist who has been covering crime and for thirty years. He literally wrote the book on it. His memoir Tokyo Vice became a major TV series he remembers one of these panther heists.

So, first of all, the crime took place in Kinza, which is one of the most expensive places in Tokyo. Even now, it's loaded with these high end shops like Uivatan shops and Channel shops and Bulgary and these luxury brands that are high end and the Japanese people of certain wealth really love, and so it's also a place where a very expensive high end jewelry.

It's May two thousand and seven, just two months after the heist at the Wafimont. Two panthers arrived at Tokyo's Narita Airport with their sites on a particularly valuable piece of jewelry, a diamond encrusted tiara. They've given themselves two months to put a plan in place. They study the area carefully and decide to approach the story they've targeted on bicycles Towards the end of the workday. The streets will be crowded and they'll easily blend in.

It's five pm on June fourteenth. First came this guy in wearing a suit, and then came another guy in a white mask almost immediately after him. He shot the tear gas in the faces of the clerks. They stole this tierra and a necklace and other things worth about the tier itself was worth like two million dollars, and then they sold a necklace and other things were probably worth maybe close to a million dollars. And they did

This kind of thing never happens in Japan. The Tokyo police are totally taken aback.

So the Japanese police were kind of baffled by this crime because they came in fast and they left very fast, and this was the time before Japan was covered in closed circuit TV, so there wasn't great footage of these guys. They didn't leave any fingerprints behind, even though they were not wearing gloves, which really surprised anybody, and all they did was take the merchandise they are aiming for.

But since the Waffi mol heist in Dubai, the Panther brand of robbery had become all too familiar for law enforcement, and the Tokyo police immediately have their suspicions.

From the very beginning, they suspected that these might be members of the Pink Panther.

They also have one small bit of evidence. The thieves dumbed the empty can of tear gas not far from the jewelry store.

So they decided to go with the can of tear gas and see what they could find. But they found out that the spray was a mass market animal repellant, which used in France to scare of wild dogs and other animals.

This one clue is enough to convince them that the crime is international in nature and that is enough to bring an INTERPOL.

The Japanese police are incredibly good at cooperating with Interpol and working with them even with the language barrier, and making sure that the crime is perpetrated on Jepanesy soil, and they want to capture the person. They're dedicated and they spend lots of manpower in hours and they will send people overseas to help gather the information to put together the case.

With the help of INTERPAL, Japanese authorities are able to track the serial number and they can to a military surplus store in Marseille in the south of France. Meanwhile, Tokyo police are able to piece together the timeline of the heist.

So what the police were able to put together is that they came in at five pm thirty two seconds. They had stolen everything that they needed. They hopped on bicycles about four hundred meters away. They threw away the tear gas, They dropped the bicycle, They got in a car. They took apart the tierra. They took off all the diamonds what they couldn't use from the tier. They flushed on the toilet. Then they headed in the Reda airport

The Japanese authorities, together with Interpol, embark on an international manhunt using global intelligence gathering and surveillance, and their diligence pays off. One suspect is caught in two thousand and nine in Cyprus, the other in twenty ten in Rome. The jewels themselves were never recovered, but the details of how these Pink Panthers dismantled the highly recognizable tiara into loose stones points to another hallmark of the Pink Panther brand.

Now, let's talk about what you do if you've come into possession of a large amount of stolen high end jewelry.

Scott Selby is the author of Flawless Inside, the largest diamond heist in History. He's a leading expert on the black market diamond trade.

The Panthers they like to hit high end shops high end jewelry. These are things that are already polished, that are already ready to be sold. They've been cut in such a way to really have the highest value, to look the most beautiful. There's a lot of things that then come into play with how you fence those, depending upon exactly what you stole and what kind of value you're expecting to get back from it.

The panthers intentionally target the most expensive jewelry from the most famous stores, but these are not the easiest items to turn into quick cash.

Generally, they've stolen from high end, name brand jewelry stores, and so with those you're going to be facing some decisions pretty quickly, right because having a brand name associated with a jewelry as well as the intricate design of that jewelry gives it a high percent of the value.

Right.

So now imagine that Tiffany's diamond. You've now removed the polished diamond from the engagement ring and you've melted the ring down for its silver value, which is tremendously less than you know it being a finished product.

But let's be honest, when what you've stolen is worth tens of millions of dollars, you can probably afford some markdowns. And what about really big.

Stone, It's going to depend. Like let's say you have a big necklace with the pink panther. Sometimes they've stolen something where there's a primary stone that's large, famous enough maybe even to be named. It's going to be something really special that anybody in the world in the business would recognize it.

Something for example, like the one hundred and twenty five carrot diamond necklace known as a contest de vendome. The panther stole that in two thousand and four. It was worth an estimated thirty one point five million dollars.

So that one, let's put on the side. It's really hard to move, but there's going to be a lot of accompanying stones with it, and a lot of these will be relatively generic, so it should be pretty easy to move. They're probably going to be flawless. One carrot maybe two carrot white diamonds. The first thing you're going to want to do is look on it's called the girdle, and what that basically is is if you have your gemstone line flat, so you have a profile view. It's

There a certification that could identify the jam and tell you exactly where it came from.

So that's the first thing they're going to look for, is are their numbers on the side, And if there are, that's a problem because anybody anywhere along the process could look it up right. You could very easily polish those off, but you need somebody that's in the business that polishes diamonds. So that's something where you're going to need a corrupt individual to work with.

Finding a corrupt individual in this shadowy world's called Selby's talking about doesn't sound difficult. I mean, this is where the Pink Panthers live. On CNN, Anderson Cooper talk to filmmaker Havana Marking, who made a documentary about the Panthers, about the group's extensive support network.

Diamonds are the key thing that they are professional at and do the best at, mainly because they've got incredible connections to diamond centers like Antwerp, a huge European center of diamond trading. I was lucky enough to make a contact of the Panthers called mister Green, who is a fence and he's the person who they take the diamonds too.

So once he gets something into the legitimate stream of commerce, you've got it made. Because one diamond could change hands eight times in a week in Antwerp, Belgium.

Scott Selby again.

But the problem is is people there will remember certain kinds of stones. These are people who really care about what they're doing, and there's an artistic element to it. These are communities where people know each other and have heard of things. So you can't just introduce basically the big pendance stone from some necklace you stole in Japan. You can't just introduce that on the other side of the world and nobody has any questions, right.

Right, These rare stones might be the most valuable, but they're also the hardest to fence without bringing a lot of unwanted attention. Still, when you have the right connections, you have options.

One choice is is you can sell it on so the buyer knows it's stolen and they're comfortable with that. And traditionally there's a market for very high end stones in Hong Kong and Dubai where people might not ask so many questions, right, So you could have people who are willing to buy something like that. So that's one option.

Okay, but what if we're dealing with a stone that is a little too famous.

Something that's sort of unfortunate but sometimes needs to be done. Is if you have something truly unusual, you may find yourself forced to cut it into smaller pieces. If you show up with a thousand of these stones, the first person to buy its going to know that it's stolen, and there'll be a big discount involved, right, But the person they sell it on to you will have no idea, and the person after them and the person after them,

Given how complicated it is to move stolen diamonds and the criminal network required to do it, you have to wonder about the economics. Is stealing diamonds actually a good business. My colleague Elon Greenberg spoke to Don Palmery, a master genmologist, appraiser a gem certification and assurance lab in New York.

We are greaters and certifiers of diamonds and gemstones, and we do a great deal of work for the law enforcement and insurance industries. I've been involved in so many of these cases afterwards, when they begin to recover some of the jewelry and especially things like big diamonds that have been recut and then try to remarket through the legitimate marketplace. Sadly, there's always a market for hot diamonds and jewels of great value, and very sadly it's tied

Once this compromiser degraded, right, how do they recoup that original value? How do you inflate it? I understand how you decrease it, but how do you increase.

It again by getting a legitimate grading report on the previously stolen stone. And the way to do that is to in some way disguise it. Real way to disguise it would be either to damage it where you're creating flaws in the stone, or you recut it. But if you recut it enough, you can remove other tailtale identifying marks, then the laboratory just grades it. They're grading tens of millions of diamonds every year, and I think some things have slipped through the cracks.

So when someone pulls off a heist right and steals millions of dollars worth of let's say, diamonds or other gemstones, it seems like then they fence it for pennies on the dollar. Why don't they knock off a liquor store like it seems like for all that effort and all that, you know, it looks glamorous, but they're getting pennies. You know why at an atm you know, it doesn't seem like the margin is there.

Oh it is. Explain how first of all, the average bank robbery they only get what a few thousand dollars anymore, three, four or five thousand dollars. But if you gee, I don't want to encourage your audience to think about this as the next great thing to do. But we're talking about small items with one of the greatest stores of inherent value. So if you've got a ten kara d flawless diamond, you know, basically you're talking about a million dollar stone. Let's say you only get two hundred thousand

Diamonds were always a high priority target for the Panthers, but they also had a soft spot for high end watches. Thorpe is a retired watch dealer with forty years of experience in the business.

And now I'm spending my time as a full time YouTuber and enjoying every minute of it. Mainly focused on anti watch crime.

Paul fell under the spell of watches early.

My dad was a big watch guy. I remember falling in love with a TIMEX on another boy's risk at school when I was five years old, and that was it. I was bitten by the bug. I caught watch disease. I've taken every known medication a man to cure it, but it's never worked.

Paul's love of watches gives him an insider's understanding of their appeal to thieves.

I think the big thing is with what is and you've also mentioned diamonds. There is the fact that they are easily transportable, They are obviously valuable, and therefore a great desirable asset for the criminals because you can't get on a plane with a million dollars in cash someone who's going to stop and ask you questions. But you can fit a million dollars with a diamonds in your pocket, or a million dollar watch, and no one is going

Stolen, and that value has only grown over time.

The black market pre two thousand, I mean back then, the value of our Rolex watch on the black market would have been about a third of its retail value, so still a decent return if you've got enough of them. Today, by comparison, that same watch on the black market is worth between eighty and one hundred percent of its retail value, and in some cases two hundred percent of its retail value,

From drugs to watches. Is it really such a better business.

That it's risk versus reward for these criminals. If they're caught with a kilo of Class A drugs, they're going to go out to prison. In the UK, you're looking at say between ten and twelve years. If you steal a luxury watch, you're probably going to be out in

With those kind of returns, it's no wonder that watches grew in popularity with the criminal class, and like other jewelry stores, watch dealers have had to adapt.

Two thousand and ten, we were pretty regular, you know, no real more security than anyone else at any other jewelry store. There were times when we'd even leave our door open, but it got to the stage where we would need well, I'll give you an example my last shop, which was fairly small, I think we spent seventy five pounds on security. Smoke cloaks. Smoke cloak is it's just a simple box. You hit a button and it fills the room with smoke so that people can't see where

But with the increased security at watchdealers, their stores themselves have become less attractive with thieves. Now they've taken to targeting individuals instead.

These people are going to the smarter areas where the high end boutiques are and the fashionable, swanky restaurants are to find their victims, and they find them in the street. They can have spotters inside working inside the restaurant, a waiter or a waitress. It's very simple. They serve a customer, they see they're wearing one hundred grand watch, they WhatsApp their friends outside and then when he leaves, they'll follow him. No strike. But these guys are very well educated. They

The Panthers focus on these enormously expensive items like diamond t rs and million dollar watches. Makes up these sense for a thief. They're targets graph and other elite brands. Makes sense too, since these are places best stocked with what they're after. But for this gang of Serbian criminals, the choices they've made about what to steal and who to steal from might be coming from a more personal place. Coming up next on Infamous International, the Pink Panther's story.

The previous secutive sanctions imposts on Serbia totally criminalizes the economy smuggling becomes a huge part of the economy. And that's really starts in the nineties and has never changed.

In Serbia, a decade of sanctions in civil war leaves the country in shambles.

There was a resentment built to the West with its riches and wealth and fleshy lifestyle.

And a generation who see crime as the best career.

As soon as he turned eighteen, he started doing little robberies and when a manager of that job, when he saw a group of Serbian students coming in, he calls security immediately because they knew about Milan Yepoya.

That's next time on Infamous International, The Pink Panthers Story. Infamous International The Pink Panthers Story was produced by Best Case Studios in association with Koda's Story, hosted by me Natalia ant Lava and written by Katrina Wolfe, Adam Pinkis, Suzanne Myers, and David Markowitz, with help from Brent Katz