Great Jewel Robberies: Thieves, Times & Places

Robert West Howard writes:

Since antiquity, the jewel thief has never been unemployed

$600,000 Gem Theft in Africa (special to New York Times): Johannesburg, South Africa, Dec 6, 1955—Diamonds and jewelry valued at $600, 000 were reported today to have been stolen from the home in a Johannesburg suburb of Harry Oppenheimer, member of parliament, and son of Ernest Oppenheimer, South African diamond and gold mining magnate.

Police Arrest Two Men in Johannesburg Hotel (Cape Times correspondent): Johannesburg—Colonel Ulf Boberg, Chief of the CID on the Witwaterstrand, said last night that the jewels stolen from the home of Mr and Mrs Harry Oppenheimer at Little Brenthurst, Johannesburg on Dec 5, were recovered yesterday.

Detective swooped on a hotel in the central area of Johannesburg last night, arrested two Europeans and took possession of 98 percent of the $595,000 haul of jewels. The Oppenheimers were wild with joy when minutes later Colonel Boberg telephoned them and told them to come to town to identify their jewels…

Royal Tombs Looted! Cemetery Guards Discover Big Jewel Theft! These would have been the headlines, had there been newspapers in 2000 B.C. Whether in ancient Ur, Thebes, Babylon or Athens, entire treasure troves, buried together with the dead, were stolen from the tombs of kings and pharaohs almost as soon as the graves had been closed and secured. With the advance of history, Rome, Paris, London, and Granada joined the places in which not only the royal an wealthy, the dead and the living, but temples and residences as well as tombs and places became the targets of jewel thieves. Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I, Nadir Shah, and Louis XVI were among the highborn victims. And gems like the Kohinoor, the Hope, the Sancy and Orloff diamonds have ‘criminal records’ because they were stolen and restolen on the furtive journeys to spirit them from India to Europe.

Has the situation changed? Not at all. Even the safety devices invented in this age of science seem to have helped the professional burglar. That much security experts themselves admit. ‘The electronics age burglar can walk right through a wired door and up to a safe that is supposedly protected by an electro-sonic device,’ James B White of the Jeweler’s Security Alliance told a recent convention of the Retailers Jewelers of America. ‘How does he do it? The telephone line is the Achilles Heel. Some of these men are so expert that they can match the signal, which the alarm sends, so that it will indicate ‘every thing is all right’.

Furthermore, the invention of the super-torch has simplified the master burglar’s task. Its ‘thermic lance’ heats to 6000°F and thus can melt passageways through the concrete and steel walls of modern banks or jeweler’s vaults.

There probably are about two or three thousand professional thieves in the world today. They are so well organized that they work with a corps of lawyers and with ‘fences’ who can, within a day or two of the ‘heist’ smuggle the loot to confederates in South America or Asia. Many of these professionals live the lives of respectable ‘pillars of society’ in fine suburban residences.

However, only one-fifth of the 50-100 millions of dollars in precious gems stolen annually can be blamed on professionals. About 80 percent of the thefts are brought off by amateur thieves, frequently by hold-up men whose work has been simplified through the carelessness of jewelry owners.

A classical example of the case with which an unarmed man, equipped only with an eight-inch strip of celluloid, can steal $600,000 worth of gems from a residence took place at the attractive Harry Oppenheimer mansion in a Johannesburg suburb during the evening of December 5, 1955.

Ernest Oppenheimer, the head of the famous Oppemheimer clan, who won a large fortune (and a knighthood) via his vast gold and diamond mining properties in South Africa, lived with his son, Harry, in adjoining red-roofed Cape Dutch homes in a walled 20-acre park in the Johannesburg suburb at Parktown, Harry’s wife, Bridget, kept her favorite brooches, rings and necklaces in a bedroom wall safe. She carried one key to the safe in her handbag and kept a duplicate in a satin ‘odds-and-ends’ box in a closet near the safe.

One of the workmen who reroofed the Harry Oppenheimer house during the summer of 1955 was a British war veteran, Donald E Miles, who had been decorated for valor during World War II. Miles had served as a saboteur in the Near East. France and Denmark, and had learned how to open a locked door with a piece of celluloid, how to catwalk window ledges, and how to judge guards.

The repairs on the house were made while Harry and Bridget Oppenheimer were in Europe. Miles, according to subsequent testimony, ventured into the couple’s bedroom, explored it, and found the duplicate key to the wall safe. Whereupon he quietly said to the foreman, ‘This place could do with a security officer.’

Unable to find employment after the roofing job was finished, Miles discussed prospects with Percival W Radley, credit manager for a local airline that operated charter flights, between Johannesburg and Amsterdam. Then, or later, Miles allegedly told Radley about the appalling lack of security maintained at the Oppenheimer residence.

William L Pearson flew into Johannesburg on November 7. He was 33 and with a record as a gambler, bookie and jewel smuggler, was ‘on the lam’ from the Sydney police. During the next week he met Radley, learned that ‘a big heist is coming off soon,’ and made plans to fly to London and Amsterdam to contact potential fences to handle the ‘ice’.

About 7 o’clock on the evening of December 5, Mrs Harry Oppenheimer took four pieces of jewelry from her wall-safe to wear to a dinner party. When she and her husband returned home at about ten o’clock, she noticed that a pillowslip was missing from her bed. She thought nothing of it. Tired as she was, she did not call the night maid but replaced the missing slip herself. The jewelry she had worn she left on the dresser overnight.

The next morning, soon after breakfast, Bridget Oppenheimer took four pieces of jewelry to the neatly lined-up jewel boxes. As she opened one of the boxes she quickly realized that her 23 carat emerald cut diamond ring was missing. She searched frantically in the other boxes. The search revealed only that other jewels, too, were missing: her 11 carat blue white brilliant, her emerald cut pink diamond ring with emerald and sapphires, her blue marquise and white marquise diamond rings, and several favorite brooches.

Within half an hour, Johannesburg’s ace detective, Colonel Ulf Broberg, had deduced that the $596,400 worth of jewels missing from the safe had been carried off the grounds in that missing pillow slip while the Oppenheimers were at the party.

Insurance investigators flew in from London on December 7. They confirmed the rumor that a $42000 reward was being offered. Meanwhile, neither they nor Colonel Broberg could find any clue to the theft. There were no strange fingerprints on the premises. No doors had been jimmied. No windows had been broken. The duplicate key lay serenely in the satin box. The servants maintained that they had seen no strangers in or around the house during the evening of Dec 5.

It was, of all people, Pearson, who had contacted the fence, who broke the case. For a reward of $200,000, he proposed to the insurance investigators that he would arrange for the missing jewelry. The police bullied him down to a figure of $60000. Thereupon, Pearson set up a meeting with Miles and Radley in a hotel room. The latter, of course, having walked into a trap, were immediately arrested. All but $22000 worth of jewelry was found on them.

At the trial, Radley turned state’s witness. But Miles was eventually acquitted. Officially, then, the robbery was never solved. However, testimony sustained the theory that during the evening of December 5 either Miles or Radley walked up to the Oppenheimer front door, forced the lock with a celluloid strip, and made their way, unnoticed, to the bedroom. Within ten minutes, they had found the spare key in Mrs Oppenheimer’s satin box, the safe had been opened, the choicest jewels deposited in the pillowslip, the safe relocked, and the key returned to its place. Since they were wearing rubber gloves, the thieves left no fingerprints during the entire operation. Only a small bundle of ‘laundry’ went out of the house with them.

More spectacular even than the Oppenheimer case, which the South African press called ‘the most amazing jewel robbery of all time,’ was the jewel theft by two amateurs one October night in 1926 at the Chateau of Duc d Aumale near the Chantilly racetrack in the suburbs of Paris.

The Treasure Tower of the chateau, officially a national museum, housed a number of rare jewels, among them the 50 carat Grand Conde diamond, the cross of diamonds that King Joseph Bonaparte had given to the Baron Aymard after the Battle of Talavare, a diamond studded belt once owned by a Bey of Tunis, a gem studded dagger, and the cross of the Legion of Honor awarded to the Baron in 1809 by Napolean Bonaparte.

Security at the Treasure Tower was minimal. Since a moat surrounded it, no burglar alarm had been deemed necessary. At night, the bridge was simply raised, preventing all access. Not even the night watchman at the Chateau was required to make rounds between two and five in the morning.

The ‘brain’ of the spectacular d’Aumale robbery was Leon Kauffer, a 29 year-old World War I veteran who was a rabbit-fur dealer in Strasbourg. He persuaded Emile Souter, a 20 year-old Alsatian, to join him as his ‘ladder man’.

The pair took a midnight train to Chantilly. They went to the racetrack, climbed the fence and appropriated two of the ladders that were stored under the grandstand. When two o’clock in the morning came, and the night watchman’s rounds had been completed, they carried the ladders to the moat. They used the longer ladder to make their way across and carried the shorter one with them. Once on the other side, they pulled up their improvised ‘bridge’ and wired the two ladders together. The makeshift contraption was just long enough to reach the window of the room of gems.

The only tools they needed were hammers to shatter the window. The sound of the glass breaking was muffled by the flannel in which they had wrapped the hammerheads. A half-hour of quick work and they had the gems in their pockets. The rest was easy. They retraced their route across the moat, calmly pushed the ladders down into it, then went to the railroad station and waited for the four o’clock early morning train to Paris.

The theft remained undiscovered until the watchman made his usual round at dawn. Before breakfast time, Paris detectives were at the Treasure Tower. When the ladders were sighted in the moat, they concluded that the job had been done by at least four men. A systematic search for ‘fences’ and ‘stool pigeons’ was initiated, with an international alert to police and jewel experts.

For two months, nothing.Then the break came. Through an apple…

Suzanne Shiltz was a chambermaid at the Hotel Metropole, one of the non-descript boarding houses near the boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris. Suzanne had been intrigued by the bowl full of big apples and pears that the occupants of one of her rooms kept on a closet shelf. They were two quiet young men, conservatively dressed and extremely polite to a girl. They never appeared drunk, never gambled, and never consorted with the neighborhood streetwalkers. Obviously, respectable guests. As for the bowl of fruit, clearly the young men liked apples and pears for they replenished the supply everyday. Indeed, those apples looked appetizing.

On the morning of December 19, as Suzanne was cleaning the young men’s room, the sight of the fruit and its appealing aroma became overpowering. She hesitated. But one apple would not be missed. She reached for the bowl, selected a large, luscious-looking apple, and took a hearty bite and—cried out in pain. Her teeth had bitten on something very hard, very solid. One hand now to her throbbing jaw, she stared at the apple. In the center of the core something glittered. Tentatively she pulled at the stem. Out came a shiny heart-shaped stone, about an inch long.

She trembled. How had that come there? She was bewildered. What to do? She tried to push the stem back, but it would not fit now. In despair, Suzanne took the apple, stem and shiny stone, to the hotel manager. Weeping she confessed….

That afternoon, when Kauffer and Souter returned to their room, gendarmes were waiting. Kauffer’s confession was of greater importance than the little chambermaid’s. True, the smaller pieces of the stolen jewelry he had sold, together with three pounds of gold and silver, to a woman ‘fence’ for less than $2000. But the Conde’ diamond and the other large gems were still lying concealed inside the apples and pears. Kauffer had devised the bowl of fruit as the best hiding place until things quieted down. He and Souter had hollowed out the apples and, to maintain the bright appearance of the bowl had each day replenished a number of pieces. Later, Kauffer planned to smuggle the jewels to Holland and have them cut into smaller gems for eventul resale.

What about the inquisitive Suzanne? The hotel management fired the little chambermaid. Not until months later did the Paris police hand her a ‘petit’ reward for her pains. So much for virtue.

So much for the ingenuity of amateur thieves. Their audacity was easily matched by the jewel thieves of antiquity. The Egypt of the great Pharaohs, for example, was plagued so regularly by tomb pilferage that the priesthood chose a distant bleak valley on the west bank of the Nile, later called the valley of kings, near Thebes, for the elaborately guarded royal cemetery. About 1530 B.C the advisors of Thotmes I even resorted to tunneling into a rock a mile or more from the lavish memorial chapel for the dead for the actual burial of royal personages. After the burial ceremonies, the entrance chambers to the tombs, as wells as the tunnels and narrow entrance passageways were heaped with rubble and graded. For additional security, so the gruesome evidence suggests, the workmen were killed to keep safe the innermost secrets of the burial places. All to no avail. The treasures buried with the illustrious dead for the use of their ‘ko’ in the afterworld were so rich that guards, craftsmen, and even priests, became confederates of the daring robbers, and thefts continued for centuries.

The thoroughness of these ancient grave robbers was revealed by the Egyptologists whose discovery of the heretofore untouched tomb of the young Pharaoh Tutankhaman exposed what incredibly rich treasures posterity had been deprived of in those other tombs that had already been pilfered. Even there on the threshold of Tutankhamon’s tomb the thieves had nearly succeeded.

Years of fruitless search had preceded the uncovering of the Tutankhomon tomb. Then a fight of sixteen stone steps that led to the 30-foot entrance tunnel was exposed. The excavation during 1923-25 revealed that the tunnel, like the flight of stairs, had been filled with rubble rock, but at least one team of thieves, making their efforts well before 1000 B.C had penetrated the rockfill and dirt to the three massive sealed doors at the threshold of the Golden Shrine burial chamber. They must have been caught before they could begin the actual rifling. Fortunately. For the treasures reclaimed from the tomb by the Carnarvan-Carter expedition provided a complete re-evaluation of Egypt’s craftsmanship and industrial techniques during the fourteenth century B.C.

The death mask that covered the head and shoulders of Tutankhamon’s mummy is of polished gold inlaid with gemstones of lapis lazuli, green feldspar, carnelian, obsidian and alabaster, proving that at the time of his death, in 1357 B.C the jeweler’s art was well perfected. The mummy’s headrest, which was forged from wrought iron, indicates that Egypt’s metallurgists had already stepped from the Copper into Iron age.

Along the Nile, grave robbing may have been hereditary and quite acceptable profession, but the more lucrative stealing of large gems developed in India and spread west along the Great Silk Road to Persia, Greece and Rome. No wonder, India was the primary source of diamonds, emeralds, rubies and other jewels. Lapidary work may have been practiced more than 5000 years ago in some Himalayan valley, the first crude efforts in faceting and polishing probably undertaken in tribute to some local deity. The Kohinoor (Mountain of Light) diamond, when still a massive 600 carats, is believe to have been the eye of a Hindu statue. Huge rubies, emeralds, and sapphires were similar objects of reverence in Buddhist monasteries and shrines, and over the centuries, acquired their own legends and lore and were believe to posses magical powers.

These gems, because of their size, beauty, rarity and mystique became coveted prizes for conquerors and kings. Four of India’s largest diamonds—the Kohinoor, Hope, Shah, and Orloff—are famous, even notorious for their individual histories. All four, however, initially were royal properties in India.

The Kohinoor was taken to Accra by the Moguls about 1300 A.D. Tamerlane had it affixed into Peacock Throne. When Nadir Shah of Persia conquered the Moguls and in 1739 plundered New Delhi, he captured the Kohinoor with the Peacock Throne, as well as the Shah and Orloff diamonds. When he was assassinated in 1747, one is his officers pried the Kohinoor from the throne and fled with it to a Himalayan refuge. There the stone was stolen from him by Sikhs. It was in the possession of the Rajah of Lahore in 1813, but it did not come to light again until the British annexed the Punjab in 1849. By that time, it had been formed into an Indian-cut rosette of 186 carats; what happened to the rest is not known. Queen Victoria, to whom the great gem was presented, had it cut again, this time to an 108.93 carat oval brilliant. In 1911, it became the central ornament in the state crown of Queen Mary, and is now on exhibit in the Tower of London among other state jewels.

The Orloff diamond, known early as ‘Moon of the Mountains’ had an even bloodier saga. After the assassination of Nadir Shah, it too was stolen. Once more by theft, it came into the possession of an Afghan who somehow had also acquired three other jewels: the Eye of Allah sapphire, a thumb-sized ruby, and an equally large emerald.

The Afghan took the jewels to a dealer in Baghdad. But he had been trailed there by three Armenian brothers names Shafras, who knew what treasure he was carrying on his person. Shortly, after he had made his sale to the dealer, the Shafras offered to buy the jewels, for twice as much. They invited both the Afghan and the Baghdad merchant to their quarters, there murdered both men, ransacked the merchant’s store until they found the jewels, and fled with them toward Constantinople.

On the way, the brothers began to quarrel. In the bitterness, the eldest, during the last camp-out before Constantinople, poisoned the other two. Then he fled to St.Petersburg, where he sold the sapphire, ruby and emerald. Somehow he secured an audience with the Count Gregory Orloff and suggested that he buy the Moon of Mountain diamond as a gift to the Empress Catherine the great. Orloff, who had fallen from the favor of his Imperial mistress, was easily persuaded.

In 1773, the empress did accept the diamond, but apparently she did not reinstate the Count into her graces. However, the gem, popularly renamed, ‘the Orloff’, was mounted atop the double eagle of the Imperial scepter.

When World War I broke out the crown jewels of the Czars were sent to Moscow and were buried. Not until 1922 did the Soviets learn of their whereabouts. Since then, the Orloff has been on display in the Kremlin Museum.

Kept nearby, in the same museum, is the 88.7 carat, bar-shaped Shah, one of the few engraved diamonds in history, which was also in the plunder that Nadir Shah took in New Delhi. The sequel of thefts and murders relating to the Shah diamond is not s well authenticated as those associated with the Orloff and the Kohinoor. Engravings on the stone indicate that in 1591 it had been the property of Nizam Shah and that by 1641 it had become the property of Shah Jehan, who later built the magnificent Taj Mahal.

After the death of Nadir Shah, the guardians of the Shah diamond were either more fortunate or more loyal than those who guarded the Kohinoor and Orloff gems. The Shah diamond reached Persia safely, and was worn as a pendant by the Persian rulers. In 1824 it belonged to the Persian Shah, Fath Ali, whose name is the third engraved on the diamond. In 1829, when the Russian Ambassador was assassinated in Tehran, Czar Nicholas I threatened reprisals. To appease him, the Persian government offered the Shah diamond. To the Czar it evidently seemed a fair trade. So the Cossacks who had been held ready did not cross the border, and the Shah diamond went to join the Imperial Russian jewels in St. Petersburg.

Similar political intrigues in Great Britain and France also involved gems. The stories make spectacular reading, more spectacular, in any case, than the frequent reports of thieves and highwaymen routinely being hanged in London or guillotined in Paris for crimes considered minor today.

When the Scots rebelled against Mary Stuart and her lover Bothwell they captured the Queen after the battle at Carberry in 1657. No sooner had Mary Stuart been incarcerated than her casket of jewels, which contained the diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls she had been given when she was Queen of France, disappeared from her possessions. A few weeks later, the Earl of Morton turned up in London and offered Mary Stuart’s jewels to Queen Elizabeth. No mean business woman, Elizabeth bargained the Earl down to 12000 crowns, and soon the Mary Stuart gems were in the Royal collection of England.

When James I, Mary Stuart’s son, succeeded Elizabeth to the throne of England, he naturally regained his mother’s jewels. However, his son, Charles I, lost many of them during the Civil War of 1641-47 to go-between and agents of Parliament. What was left of the treasure, including the Sancy and Mirror of Portugal diamonds, was smuggled to France by his queen. She pawned them to pay for supplies and troops in the war against Cromwell, as well as to underwrite the intrigues and high living of her son, the future Charles II. Cardinal Mazarin eventually redeemed the jewels and bequeathed them to his pupil, Louis XIV. These acquisitions became part of the Crown Jewels at Versailles.

When the French Revolution began in 1789, Louis XVI ordered the Crown Jewels moved to Garde Meuble. But the Jacobins, in need of cash to finance the overthrow of the Bourbons, bribed some senior officers in the Royal Army. Probably masterminded by the tribune Danton, the successful plot secured for the Jacobins a loot as rich as Nadir Shah’s when he captured the Peacock Throne half a century earlier. During the theft, those guards at the Garde Meuble who had been bribed were either stabbed or garroted. But Tavernier’s 67.13 carat blue diamond and Charles I’s Sancy, originally among the Royal Jewels, had vanished.

A week or two later, the Duke of Brunswick and the King of Prussia, under the illusion that the French King had reestablished his authority, ordered their troops withdrawn from the border of France. The troops of the French Royalists were also dispersed. Whereupon the Jacobins were left free to proceed with the extermination of the nobility and guillotining of the King and his Queen, Marie Antoinette.

Tavernier’s Blue Diamond was never seen again. Then, in 1839, a blue diamond, weighing 44.5 carats and cut somewhat lopsided, was furtively sold in London. Because the buyer was Sir Henry T Hope, the diamond has been known since as ‘the Hope Diamond’. In 1874, the gem collection of the Duke of Brunswick was sold at an auction in Switzerland, included was a marvelous blue diamond of 6.5 carats, a perfect twin in color and quality to the Hope Diamond, and large enough to have been shaped out of its missing tip. About the same time, the Sancy Diamond reappeared in the possession of a Russian prince at St. Petersburg.

In 1793, her eagerness to regain her yellow diamonds brought the Countess Du Barry, favorite of Louis XV between 1768 and 1774, to the steps of the guillotine herself. The Countess had amassed a fortune in jewels especially in the yellow diamonds she loved best. These were said to be worth millions of dollars.

When the Jacobins seized Paris and imprisoned the King and Queen, the Duc de Brissac arranged for DuBarry’s flight to England. But all her jewels were at her villa at Luciennes. On the evening of her departure, de Brissac helped DuBarry and her trusted caretaker, Zamorre, to bury her jewels under a tree in the villa gardens. As the news reached London that the King and Queen had been guillotined, DuBarry, although now safe, went into a frenzy. She insisted that she must return to France to retrieve her jewels and see that they were smuggled out of the country. Since her London friends could not dissuade her, they arranged letters of credit, as well as false identification papers and valises with secret compartments.

The Countess reached her villa safely. She located Zamorre and asked for his help to dig up the jewels. Zamorre agreed, but urged her first to get ‘a good night’s rest’. To make certain that she would rest he added a sleeping potion to her wine.

While DuBarry slept, Zammore reported her return to the Jacobin tribunal at Luciennes. The next day, with DuBarry a prisoner on her way to Paris, Zammore led the revolutionaries to the spot where her jewel caskets had been buried. Thus DuBarry’s yellow diamonds, too, went to finance the Revolution and, indirectly, helped to launch the career of a serious young Corsican lieutenant named Bonaparte who was to become the great Napolean.

Gem thieving remained an ‘occupational disease’ of revolutionaries and military men in Europe, South America, and most of Asia into the middle of the nineteenth century. However, non-political thieves were hardly inactive then and now.

One of the most notorious of the new breed was Adam Worth, native of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Worth launched his nefarious career by enlisting, deserting and reenlisting, in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Each time he collected the $1000 bounty offered to anyone who enlisted ‘for the duration’. Between 1865 and 1870, Worth advanced from pickpocket to bank and post office robber. Growing prosperous, he acquired a steam yacht, a chorus girl, and moved his base of operation to London.

One of his most audacious coups was the theft of $700,000 worth of rough diamonds from a post office safe in Capetown. Another was the midnight theft at Gainsborough portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire from a poorly guarded art gallery on London’s Bond Street.

Then thirty years of successful robberies came to an end for Worth as he was caught ransacking a registered mail car in Liege, Belgium. However, the Gainsborough painting was not returned to its owners until 1911 when, ill and almost destitute, Worth made a deal with Pinkerton detectives. In exchange for ‘enough to provide room and board for his old age.’ He took the painting from its hiding place in Brooklyn and handed it over to detectives from Scotland Yard and the Pinkerton agency.

The exploits of Worth were, undoubtedly, in the spirit of ‘private enterprise’. The enormous social and economic changes in Europe and America had brought vast fortunes to thousands of families in ‘the trades’. Whether in New York, London, Paris, millionaires paraded wives and mistresses in diamond necklaces, ruby rings and emerald brooches. Robbers and thieves on both sides of the Atlantic soon learned that most of the jewels owned by these nouveau riche were stored in bedroom wall safes, or simply were kept in morocco jewel cases on the ladies dressing tables.

It was during these decades that the world learned of the discoveries of vast diamond lodes in South Africa, opal fields in Australia and Mexico, and the development of the cultured pearl industry in Japan. These riches poured into an insatiable market as diamond rings and sterling silver tableware became part of every young woman’s dream and hope chest. For thieves this new reality proved to be more dazzling than any dreamed of since the grave robbers had their heyday in Egypt and in Ur. And since a fortune in gems can be carried off in one or two coat pockets, the opportunities for quick profits by clever and nimble robbers became commonplace.

Locks can be picked, safes can be blown open. At the worst stolen goods, if not disposed of to a ‘fence’ can be pawned. What helped thieves in those days, and what still aids them today, is owner carelessness, such as was responsible in part for the successful burglaries in the Oppenheimer case and the Chantilly Treasure Tower.

Carelessness continues to the jewel thief’s best ally. The theft in 1964 of the 536 carat Star of India sapphire and of the spectacular gems from the American Museum of Natural History in New York was made possible less through any supreme cleverness on part of the robber band than by an alarm system that had not been turned on in the Museum ‘in a long time’.

In an age in which jewels can be transported by air 5000 miles overnight, such thefts will only multiply unless security, like charity, begins at home.

Robert West Howard
Mineral Digest Volume 4, 1972