String of Jewelry Store Heists Studied : Crime: Three stores in South Bay malls have been hit five times since November. Police are checking to see whether these are connected to dozens of similar robberies.

A spate of five jewelry store robberies in South Bay shopping malls, including one at Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance last weekend, has left investigators probing possible connections to dozens of similar heists ranging as far afield as Arizona.

“There has been a rash of them,” Hawthorne Sgt. Don Shrum said.

The robbers, who operate in groups of two to four, all have invaded stores, brandished handguns to intimidate employees and customers and then left with the contents of display cases. Police believe many of the robbers know each other, although they do not believe that all of the robberies have been staged by the same people.

In the most recent robbery, three thieves took $300,000 in gems and gold from Camelot Jewelers in the Del Amo mall on Superbowl Sunday. They packaged the loot in the store’s own boxes and then nonchalantly mingled with mall traffic before making their getaway.

“They were pretty brazen,” Torrance Police Sgt. Ron Traber said.

Other robbers in similar cases have also been successful: The take from four robberies in Manhattan Beach and Hawthorne during November, December and January adds up to more than $1 million. No arrests have been made.

The Del Amo robbery began at 5:30 p.m just as the store was about to close. There were no customers.

According to Traber, three men walked in and confronted Gloria Delia, 42. They took her to a back room, where they found another employee, Houik Danielian, 32.

“They told the young lady she was to go out to the floor accompanied by two suspects” and do what they ordered, Traber said. Otherwise, he said, they told her they would kill the other employee.

“They wanted her to open the display cases, which she did, and remove items of jewelry from those cases: Rings, watches, mostly the type of jewelry with stones or gold,” Traber said.

“While she was doing that, another of the suspects in the store went to . . . an office area and managed to locate a box full of loose diamonds.”

The thieves again took Delia to a back room, where she and Danielian were bound with duct tape, the police spokesman said. Then they left the store.

The store had surveillance cameras mounted, but Traber said they were not working.

Police are hoping that the distinctive appearance of one of the robbers will lead to an arrest. Traber said one suspect is a black male with one front tooth made of gold and the other one missing.

Two other stores--Bullock’s department store in the Manhattan Village mall and Zales Jewelers in the Hawthorne mall--have each been robbed twice, and a third robbery was attempted at the Bullock’s store.

Bullock’s troubles began on Nov. 8 with an attempted robbery, according to Manhattan Beach Police Sgt. Jack Zea. The two potential robbers panicked after the clerk couldn’t get the display cases open quickly. “They felt they were in there too long,” and left empty-handed, Zea said.

Police found the getaway car about a quarter-mile from the mall and discovered that it had been stolen in Phoenix, Ariz., two days earlier and subsequently used in two jewelry store robberies there.

On Nov. 24, three robbers were more successful at Bullock’s. “One pulled a handgun, had the clerk open the display cases and take out jewelry,” Zea said. “The robbery lasted about 40 seconds.”

Customers were in the store but were unharmed.

“It all happened so fast they more or less watched the thing,” Zea said.

The haul was valued “in the low six figures,” he said.

Three weeks later, on Dec. 17, four men, one of them armed, came to Bullock’s.

“Same thing,” Zea said. “They grabbed the clerk and made her open the display case.” The loss was put at $260,000.

“Bullock’s was upset because it looked like they were being targeted, but that’s not true,” Zea said. The thieves “will hit any jewelry store carrying expensive jewelry,” he said.

Television monitors at Bullock’s taped the episodes but because of poor lighting and positioning, the videos have not been useful to police trying to identify the robbers, Zea said. He added that the store has since improved its monitoring system.

Zales Jewelers’ problems began in early December. On Dec. 3, two men armed with handguns arrived.

“They took over the jewelry store at gunpoint,” Hawthorne’s Shrum said. They took between $400,000 and $500,000 in diamonds, rubies, bracelets and gold watches.

On Jan. 17, another group of robbers--three men wearing ski jackets and ski gloves, each armed with a handgun--came to Zales. This time, Shrum said, the robbers made off with $350,000 worth of jewelry.

Like Bullock’s, Zales personnel believed they were being targeted.

“We got a number (of stores) hit,” said Al Madrid, a Zales investigator working in Arizona.

Madrid said suspects from Los Angeles were recently arrested in Scottsdale, Ariz., in connection with a Zales jewelry store robbery in the second week of December. He said investigators are pursuing links between the Scottsdale robbery and the first Hawthorne robbery, as well an attempted robbery in mid-December at a Zales store in the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry.

Lou Boozell of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery and homicide bureau, who has been investigating jewelry store robberies for several years, said the South Bay thefts fit a pattern seen during 1989 in almost four dozen cases in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, other parts of California and other states.

Boozell said the typical pattern is for the planner of a robbery to recruit assistants from a loose network of criminals specializing in jewelry store holdups.