Gunmen Hit Hotel Lobby Jewel Shop in $250,000 Heist

Four bold bandits, armed with Uzi-style guns, robbed an exclusive jewelry store in the luxurious Beverly Wilshire Hotel shortly before 11 a.m. Thursday, escaping with an estimated quarter-million dollars worth of gold and diamond jewelry.

The gunmen fired two shots, one into a mirrored wall in the hotel lobby opposite Schwartz Jewelers, and another at a witness who ran after them. No one was injured, except for one of the robbers, who apparently cut himself on broken glass.

Beverly Hills police spokesman Lt. Bill Hunt said that four men in their 30s, neatly but casually dressed, made up the bandit team. They escaped in a white Cadillac Eldorado, identified through its license number as stolen earlier in Los Angeles.

“It’s obviously a brazen thing, in a hotel, on a major boulevard,” Hunt said. “It’s fortunate no one got hurt.”

According to victims and the police, the robbery was carried out in about two minutes after three of the men entered the hotel through the Wilshire Boulevard entrance, leaving a partner at the wheel of the stolen Cadillac.

One of the bandits tipped the doorman $5 and said, “We’ll only be here a couple of minutes.”

About 40 feet inside the lobby, one of the robbers posted himself outside the front door of the jewelry shop, produced a weapon resembling an Uzi submachine gun from beneath his coat, fired a shot and yelled for everyone to get down on the floor.

While about half a dozen people sitting on benches in the lobby scrambled to comply, the gunman’s two companions entered the jewelry store and pulled a similar weapon from a gym bag. They ordered manager John A. Jackels, salesman Scott Brumfield and an unidentified visitor to hit the floor and then broke two display cases with a crowbar. The bandits grabbed diamond rings, necklaces, earrings and other valuable pieces of jewelry and dropped them into the gym bag.

Then, one of them dripping blood, the men ran through the lobby to the getaway car and jumped in. As they were pulling away, one of the gunmen fired a shot through the car’s right rear window, shattering it but missing a man who had followed them from the lobby. That man was identified only as a former police officer.

The driver of the getaway car turned right on El Camino Drive next to the hotel and sped away.

The still-shaken Jackels said after the robbery that he felt the holdup team had “lost control of the situation,” because more hotel visitors were arriving in the lobby during the robbery. “They had not finished,” said the manager of the small shop, which is part of an international jewelry firm.

“I feel the main thing is that nobody got hurt,” Jackels said. “Jewelry can be replaced.”

Brumfield said he was “just fried” by the whole experience.

“It’s a different feeling. Sheer terror,” he said. “The thing I remember is glass smashing and flying around.”