It sounds like a scene from a bad crime story: A jeweler has bought watches and jewelry worth about half a million dollars in downtown Los Angeles, and now he drives through the busy traffic Highway 101 towards the north. Suddenly the car in front of him slows down and comes to a standstill – not uncommon on this street, especially at rush hour. So the jeweler, who supplies customers like football player Tom Brady and entrepreneur Caitlyn Jenner and doesn’t want to see his name in the newspaper, stops. “I thought it might be a breakdown,” he says – but then everything happens very quickly: the SUV reverses and crashes into the jeweler’s car. Three men jump out; One slashes his tires, another breaks the windows, the third opens the trunk and steals the valuables – and then the men are gone again; the attack lasted less than five minutes.
“I was completely dumbfounded,” says the jeweler, and he was even more dumbfounded when he found out that he wasn’t the only victim. In recent months there have been a series of robberies in broad daylight on crowded highways in and around Los Angeles. The crimes were apparently so well planned and carried out that both the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the California Highway Patrol (CHP), the agency responsible for highways, have been despairing of solving the problem for almost a year. “It’s not one gang that’s doing all the robberies,” said Alan Hamilton, LAPD’s investigations officer. These are sophisticated crimes carried out by, as he says: “robber-tourists.” This means that the attacks are probably planned by one or more gangs in California, and those carrying out them only come to the country for a short time.
According to Hamilton, the perpetrators come to the USA from South America on tourist visas; then the verification is not as intensive as with other visas. This is not new, especially in the south of the USA, alleged tourists break into houses, deliver the loot to accomplices in the USA and leave the country as quickly as possible. In March, the police caught a 17-year-old Chilean who, with two accomplices, had broken into villas in a posh area of Los Angeles. Using a fake passport, he opened a bank account and transferred more than $23,000 to his home country. In December, police arrested a gang in Beverly Hills with stolen loot worth more than $1 million in their vehicle. Hamilton doesn’t give exact figures, he just says that tourist break-ins in villas have increased “immensely”.
What is new about the highway robberies: the precise planning. The organizers would explore well-known jewelry trading points in and around Los Angeles, for example the so-called “Jewelry District” in the city center, for weeks to find out: who buys what, when, on which route are the valuables transported and how are they secured? This research would then reveal the perfect time for an attack; then those who carried out the crime would come to the USA.
The perpetrators follow their victims using a tracking device and the crime scene is determined in advance
The perfect place: highways, for several reasons. The perpetrators attach a tracking device to the victim’s vehicle and are therefore able to follow him unnoticed. The exact crime scene was determined in advance and chosen so that, on the one hand, no security cameras recorded the crime and, on the other hand, CHP officers needed as long as possible to reach him after the emergency call. “I couldn’t chase the robbers with four slashed tires,” says the jeweler who is on the Highway 101 has been robbed.
The perpetrators “don’t use pistols or rifles because they don’t want to be charged with weapons possession,” says Officer Hamilton. The victims are mostly traders who transport goods in the low six-figure range – valuable enough to make it worthwhile for the perpetrators; but not so valuable that victims would use armored vehicles or carry a firearm themselves.
The Los Angeles police do not want to comment more specifically on the ongoing investigation; it just means that there is evidence linking the jewel robbers on the highways to gangs responsible for tourist burglaries. The robbed jeweler’s tip: attach a tracking device to your own goods and make the data available to the authorities if you are robbed. Of course, that also sounds: like in the movie.