3 Gunmen Rob Jeweler at S. Coast : Crime: They escape with $450,000 in diamond jewelry in daring midday holdup of store.

In a brazen midday robbery of a South Coast Plaza jewelry store Thursday, gunmen stole $450,000 worth of diamond jewelry and escaped into the busy mall, police and the store manager said.

No one was injured in the 12:20 p.m. robbery at Black, Starr & Frost jewelers, located on the second floor of the Nordstrom’s wing of the mall. The three unmasked men escaped on foot through an exit 60 feet from the jeweler and may have met up with two other men before leaving the area, police said.

After entering the store, one of the bandits ordered three employees and two customers to lie on the floor, while another held a gun to the manager’s neck and ordered him to open a jewelry cabinet, store manager Barry Lacey said.

In a telephone interview, Lacey gave the following account of the robbery: “I was putting sterling silver jewelry into a wall cabinet when they all burst in. One put my arm behind me, stuck a gun in the side of my neck and said ‘Open the case.’ I tried to turn around and see if (the gun) was real, when he pushed me aside and said ‘open it’ again.

“I asked him ‘which one?’ because the sterling silver jewelry isn’t worth that much,” Lacey continued. “I told him I’d open any case he wanted me to. He hesitated, then pointed to a case of solitaires (jewelry with a single diamond setting) and said, ‘That one.’

“I was fumbling with the keys, to find the right one, and apparently I took too long because he pushed me out of the way and started kicking in the backs of two display cases.”

One man scooped the jewelry into a gym bag held open by a companion, he said. They emptied one case and half of a second case before the three decided to flee into the mall, Lacey said, adding that most of the take was diamond rings with solitaire settings.

Costa Mesa police are speculating that the robbers drove from the mall parking lot to nearby Larkspur Street, abandoned a stolen car, and left in another car, possibly with two other men, Lt. Tom Warnack said.

Shortly after the holdup, police received a report from a Larkspur Street resident of five suspicious-looking men getting into a blue, older model, American-made sedan. When officers arrived at the scene they found an abandoned, blue 1985 Oldsmobile traced as stolen from Inglewood, Warnack said.

Police said they have no further leads in the case.

Lacey, who said he had never been a robbery victim in his 12 years in the jewelry business, described the team as amateurish.

“They seemed very unprofessional,” he said. “When I asked them which case I should open, they had to look around to find out what they wanted. I don’t think they had cased the store.”

Lacey said the robbery lasted just under two minutes, according to the timer on a security video camera in the store. He said the camera captured images of all three men.

Lacey closed the store for five hours after the robbery to take inventory, then took his employees out to lunch “to have a drink and relax.”

The last reported jewelry store heist in South Coast Plaza was in 1988, when four heavily armed men escaped with $1 million in merchandise from Slavick’s Jewelers. Six jewelry stores have been robbed in five Orange County malls since 1988.