The Perfect Crime

Amy Winslow is the West Coast regional manager for the Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America, based in Los Angeles. She used to sell diamonds on the road. "When I started, I told my mother under no circumstances, even if the caller says he is my boss, tell anyone where I am going or where I live; you would be setting me up to be killed. One night in Memphis, I could feel them casing me on the back of my neck. They rear-ended me near a freeway entrance, but I floored it and got away.

"I grew up with guns. I feel comfortable using them, but there are too many ways for a weapon to be taken away from you and used against you -- although a lot of reps do carry them."

In their efforts to elude their tormentors, mostly in vain, frightened salespeople have learned karate, hired bodyguards, carried fake jewelry, and driven evasively with an eye cocked on the rearview mirror and a cell phone in hand.

Daniel Ballard works for PM West, a gold jewelry manufacturer in Los Angeles. "I saw a guy with a razor cut my tire at a stoplight. I saw his compatriots tailgating me. I backed up and bowled him over and took off. They chased me and then changed their minds.

"It's getting increasingly violent. I am an instructor for defensive pistol. But these robberies take place in crowded shopping malls. The best of the best with a gun will not shoot back in a mall."

Wholesaler/appraiser Daniel Tenenbaum sits at his desk in front of two open safes bursting with black boxes full of gems, in a San Francisco Financial District office stuffed with jeweled clocks and valuable paintings. "The INS needs to control the borders better. The jewelry industry is suffering grossly. We need a total effort by the FBI to stem the tide. These crimes are a product of globalization, easy communication, access to the whole world; the worst fallout is that the robberies raise the cost of doing business.

"We used to feel safer here in San Francisco than we did in L.A.," says Tenenbaum, who has been in the gem trade since he was 17. "That's over. I lose several hundred thousand dollars a year by not traveling. Almost every salesman I know has been wiped out at one time or another."

Large jewelry manufacturers now transport their goods for inspection at the stores via Brink's trucks. It is a cumbersome process, but relatively safe, says Richard Horne, president of luxury retailer Shreve & Co., next door to Tenenbaum's building. Small manufacturers and freelance designers, however, still lug their sample cases from store to store, month after month. For demonstration purposes, some companies have tried replacing the real deal with fake stones and brass fittings, but unfortunately, mock jewelry cannot truly convey value. And photographs are useless.

"Displaying product on the Internet cannot replace actually handling the jewels," Horne remarks. "A diamond is not just a diamond, they are all different. And jewelry fashions change every year." Horne goes to Europe and Las Vegas for the bigger annual trade shows. But there are tens of thousands of smaller retailers who depend on regular visits from door-to-door salesmen. "There is a very high level of paranoia throughout the industry," Horne says. "A lot of salesmen quit, deciding it's not worth the stress."

One reason the thieves have flourished for so many years is that the jewelry industry has been closed-mouthed about the SATGs, fearing copycats. But that has changed. "We learned you can't encourage law enforcement without the media," says John Kennedy, head of the Jewelers' Security Alliance. "Cops are more knowledgeable now than they were five years ago. And the crooks are not swayed by publicity anyway.

"We lobbied Congress for FBI attention," he says. "That's how we got the task force in L.A., which drove the criminals toward San Francisco."

Kennedy laments that busts are infrequent. "I don't think there will be any one solution. You get them under control in one geographic area, they pop up elsewhere. It's too lucrative. There is an inexhaustible supply of criminals waiting to come to the promised land and join one of the loosely connected gangs. They respect territory and some rules. They check in with local bosses when on the road, but there is no top-down administration. The new generation of players is younger and more violent."

Insurance companies are definitely not out to catch the gangs, Kennedy says. When all is said and done, the thieves' take barely scratches the value of jewelry manufactured in the U.S. annually: $7.5 billion.