$10,000 Put Up as Reward in Jewelry Store Heists

An anonymous retail company on Friday offered a $10,000 reward for information to help solve one of Southern California’s most baffling crime problems: a network of jewelry store robbery rings specializing in lightning-quick holdups of department stores and small jewelry outlets.

The rings, believed to be based in a small section of Southwest Los Angeles, operate independently of each other, maintaining informal street contact and closely following each other’s methodology, police say.

The groups are believed to be responsible for as many as 60 holdups in Southern California and several other Western states in the past year, using between 100 and 200 participants.

The rings have largely evaded detection by carefully crossing police jurisdictional lines and using different members from crime to crime, much like platooning football squads, according to detectives.

Appear Isolated

The result of this sophisticated planning is that robberies orchestrated by the same ring often appear to be isolated. That makes it difficult for investigators to determine which crimes are connected, a process crucial in arresting or prosecuting ringleaders.

The reward, which was announced in an advertisement in Friday’s editions of The Times, offers $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of “the persons responsible for the armed robberies of fine jewelry counters in several major retail department stores.”

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. William Booth declined to identify the retailer that posted the reward.

In the past, investigators have said that branches of Best Products Co. Inc. had been hit particularly hard by the rings, but security spokesmen for Best Products were not available for comment Friday.

Police Hopeful

“We have a whole lot of reason to believe that if somebody comes forward and we make one arrest, that could lead us to several,” Booth said.

Police have made scattered arrests of suspects they believe are members of the rings. For example, a Los Angeles teen-ager was caught after a Seattle holdup in October and pleaded guilty, and five suspects from Los Angeles were arrested after a Bakersfield robbery in November.

However, “what we need is to pick up somebody who’ll talk or who will lead us to one of the fences (the jewelers who purchase and buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen property),” Los Angeles Police Detective Robert Johansen said.

The hallmark of the robberies has been their speed. Usually, a trio of young men, at least one of them armed, enter a department store’s jewelry section or a small jewelry store, smash one or more cases, grab the merchandise and flee.

Shots have been fired, but in most cases, the robbers seem to have been aware that their chances of eventual apprehension are heightened if victims are wounded or killed, detectives said.

In a number of cases, the robbers have been teen-agers. Police speculate that leaders of the rings recruit young street gang members because they can pay them lower percentages of the take from the robberies.

Lt. Tim McBride, commander of Pacific Division detectives who have investigated numerous Westside robberies believed connected to the rings, said there is no evidence that the volume of robberies has been increasing. What is changing, he said, is that the criminals are becoming more adept at evading investigators.

The robbers seem to have taken advantage of police agencies’ traditional reluctance to share information with each other, suggested a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney.

In addition to the common ploy of making sure that crimes are committed in a wide variety of Los Angeles police divisions and Southern California’s myriad of other jurisdictions, the jewel robbery rings seem to “shuffle people in and out,” McBride said.

“They might send five guys out on each job, but two or three will be different ones each time,” he explained.

An example, police said, were three recent robberies of San Fernando Valley jewelry stores that involved different robbers but appeared, on second glance, to have been orchestrated by the same people.

In the first incident, on Nov. 19, three boys, described by witnesses as 12 to 15 years old, smashed a Reseda jewelry store’s cases with a sledgehammer and shot and wounded an employee. Three days later, three robbers in their late teens or early 20s hit another jewelry store in North Hollywood in similar fashion. Two weeks after that, another trio--two of them described as 14 or 15 years old--robbed a jewelry store on Sunland Boulevard in Sun Valley, firing an errant shot as they fled.

While the stores are only a few miles from each other, each is in a different Los Angeles police division and therefore was investigated by different detectives.

Johansen, who investigated the Reseda case, said police recovered automobiles believed used in the Reseda and North Hollywood crimes and found that both cars had been rented with the same counterfeit credit card.

Crime Videotaped

Johansen said a store videotape of the Sun Valley robbery showed that the robbers “were not in the store more than 60 seconds.”

Pacific Division’s McBride said that in response to the rings’ activities in West Los Angeles, several Los Angeles police divisions and other local police departments recently resumed periodic meetings of the West Area Robbery Officers Assn. to compare notes on crimes.

“Eighty percent of the people we’ve identified as participants have come from an area in Southwest (Los Angeles) that would probably encompass 10 square miles,” Detective Fred Stracky said.

“It’s obvious they know each other,” McBride added. “It’s like a guy goes to work for IBM and becomes a software specialist and forms his own company. That’s the enterprisingness of these young hoodlums. A guy splits off and forms his own group.”

Stracky said ring members he has interviewed contend that “jewelry is the closest thing to currency there is. They’ve found they can use it for anything: cars, dope, women--plus, it’s easier to go into a Broadway (store) and take it down for $100,000 than to rob a bank and have the FBI chasing you.”

Chances Slim

Added Johansen: “There are so many thousand jewelry stores that (the rings) feel the chances of them being apprehended are slim, and they’re probably right.”

In a related development Friday, a Los Angeles jeweler was sentenced to four years and four months in prison in Los Angeles Superior Court for purchasing two expensive watches that were taken in a $500,000 armed robbery of an exclusive Washington, D.C., department store.

Police said the holdup men used methods similar to the robbery rings when they stole the jewelry from a Neiman-Marcus store.

Saied Kalimi Aframian, 28, was arrested after Los Angeles police found merchandise from the September, 1984, robbery for sale in his Hill Street shop.