Armed Bandits Take $1 Million in Gold Holdup

Two armed men posing as customers entered a shop in Los Angeles’ bustling jewelry district Wednesday and escaped with nearly $1 million in gold dust, bars and jewelry chain. They left two shop owners and five employees gagged and handcuffed, police said.

The raid, regarded as one of the largest and most daring ever in the nation’s second-largest jewelry district, was engineered by two men in sport coats who apparently used briefcases to hide handguns and to make off with more than 100 pounds of loot, authorities said. Most of the payload was in 24-carat gold used to manufacture jewelry chain.

No one was injured in the robbery at the Rope Mine Jewelry Corp., a sixth-floor wholesaler and manufacturer at 610 S. Broadway.

However, the gunmen, who entered the store shortly after 8 a.m., repeatedly threatened to shoot their hostages before abandoning them--gagged and bound at the wrists and ankles--in a closed office, shaken employees said later.

“I said (to myself), ‘I’m already in my coffin,’ ” shop owner Khatchik Djigardjian recalled. “ ‘They’re going to kill me. They took everything and they’re going to kill me.’ It was the worst time of my life. I’ve never been that close to death.”

Employees managed to summon help only after one of them pulled a telephone from a desktop and dialed the 911 emergency number by working her hands behind her back. They were able to sound the company’s burglar alarm only after the suspects had fled.

The robbers “calmly walked past the security guards in the lobby,” Los Angeles police said. “We rarely get this type of robbery downtown,” said Lt. Robert Kurth. “To my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve had a robbery of this magnitude during the Christmas season.”

The theft was believed to be the largest in the jewelry district since a 1983 robbery and shoot-out in which $1.3 million in valuables was stolen. A suspect was later arrested.

In 1980, $2 million to $4 million in gems and gold jewelry was taken in a holdup similar to Wednesday’s, in which two gunmen bound, gagged and blindfolded wholesalers on the 13th floor of the Pacific Jewelry Center on Hill Street.

Earlier this year, two gunmen posing as rabbis pulled off a smaller but similar robbery, escaping with about $300,000 worth of valuables, Kurth said. No one was arrested in that case.

Kurth said investigators may have a “50-50” chance of apprehending Wednesday’s two robbers, based on fingerprints, descriptions and a videotape taken from security cameras in the building’s lobby.

Shop owner Djigardjian, 42, described one robber as a thin man over 6 feet tall with blond hair. The other was short, bald and appeared to be Asian or Middle-Eastern, he said. Both men were wearing sunglasses, he added.

Investigators late Wednesday were comparing those descriptions--and conflicting descriptions given by other store workers--with security videotapes. Those tapes, intended to show everyone who enters or leaves the building, contain “several good frames” of two men who might be the suspects, Kurth said.

But detectives were waiting for more employees to see the tapes before reaching that conclusion, he said.

“We do not have a positive ID on the videotape at this time,” Kurth said. “We have (images of) two possible suspects we are going to work on with photo enhancements and composite drawings.”

However, he added, “We can’t even get the hair color off the video. We’re running into difficulties with the suspect descriptions. We’re going to handle that all real carefully.”

Djigardjian, who described himself as the West Coast’s largest manufacturer of gold jewelry chain, operates his company much like scores of others in the jewelry district, where high-rise buildings are crowded with a polyglot of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers who do business worldwide.

The proprietor said he buys 24-carat gold, which he melts into 14-carat bars and ships to a factory in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where the chain is made. It is then shipped back to Los Angeles, where his employees polish it and prepare it for sale to retailers.

When the two men showed up at the locked door of his company office on Wednesday, Djigardjian used a video monitor to observe them standing in the hallway, he said. Seeing their coats and briefcases, he assumed them to be potential customers and pressed a button to electronically unlock the door and let them in.

The shorter man introduced the visitors as New Yorkers and asked about the merchandise. Djigardjian said he led the two men toward his own office to talk. But as he did so, the taller man approached from behind and put a gun to his neck.

“I felt on my neck a cold thing,” the Russian Armenian immigrant recalled. “When I turned to my right, I see the gun. . . . As he took my hand, he said, ‘Don’t move . . . or we’re going to blow your head off.’ ”

Although he was only a few feet from the burglar-alarm button on his wall and from a loaded .357-magnum revolver in his desk, Djigardjian said he was unable to reach either as the robbers handcuffed him and placed him face down on the floor.

Still at gunpoint, he was ordered to call his brother and the five employees out from the back work room, one at a time, and each, in turn, was also bound and placed on the floor. At that point, both robbers were brandishing guns, Djigardjian said.

The six-foot-high office safe had been opened by the store owner before the bandits entered. After handcuffing all the employees, Djigardjian said, the robbers cleaned out the safe, leaving two $100 bills and other paper currency that had been taped to the inside of the door as business mementos.

The robbers left after about 15 minutes, Djigardjian said.

One employee, Lady Martin, was able to get her hands on the phone cord and to yank it off the desk. She dialed 911 and another employee, Maria Franco, freed herself enough to talk to the police dispatcher.

Meanwhile, Djigardjian lay on the floor and kicked one wood door until it splintered and opened, enabling him to get to a burglar alarm. Police officers were almost there by the time he sounded it.

Djigardjian said there was no chance during the robbery to “make like . . . a cowboy movie” and confront the robbers. He said he does not know how much of the gold is insured, explaining that much of it belonged to his customers.

“I chose my life,” he said. “I can make that money with hard work. . . . I can start over. I’m just glad to be alive.”