Beverly Hills Madam Gets Back Some of Her Stolen Jewelry : Theft: Police were skeptical at first about how the diamonds and sapphires were taken. But one man is convicted and another is at large.
The Cartier watches remain at large, as does the telltale Louis Vuitton bag. But part of the Beverly Hills Madam’s nest egg has been recovered at last, four months after its mysterious theft.
Elizabeth (Madam Alex) Adams--the onetime grand dame of high-priced prostitution in Los Angeles--said police last week returned what is left of a cache of jewels she had been banking on for her retirement.
Stolen from the mirrored Bel-Air bathroom of Adams’ close friend, Hollywood scion David Niven Jr., the missing valuables made international news last year when their theft was reported to Los Angeles police.
“There were diamond bracelets and necklaces, sapphires and diamonds and pearls, gifts to me when I had started out and the Arabs had just found their black gold,” the 60-year-old Adams fumed then.
Unlikely, said detectives, understandably skeptical of a woman who for two decades had made her living on the wrong side of the law. Nonetheless, they dutifully followed every lead, including Adams’ assertion that the person behind the theft was almost certainly an up-and-coming rival madam and former protegee.
As it turned out, said LAPD Detective Steve Bucher, the detectives and the victim were wrong.
There was, in fact, a cache, and it was, in fact, stolen--but not by Adams’ prime suspect. Rather, Bucher said, the theft was the work of two robbers who told police they had been tipped off by Adams’ disgruntled ex-handyman.
According to Bucher and Adams, one robber told police that the handyman was angry at having been fired by Adams the week before (she says she caught him stealing her $25-a-pot English rosebushes).
In police reports, Niven said that the robbers showed up at his door about 5:30 p.m. Nov. 16 and got inside by posing as parcel deliverymen. Once inside, they pulled a gun, hogtied him with duct tape and demanded: “Where’s Alex’s bag?” Terrified, Niven directed them to the guest bathroom, where she had been hiding her jewels for the past four years behind a mirror in a tan Louis Vuitton bag.
After they fled, Niven managed to free himself and telephone the police. Adams was beside herself. In the 1970s and ‘80s, she could net $100,000 a month providing call girls for millionaires and sheiks, but after her 1988 arrest for pandering, those days were gone. With less than a month left on her 18-month probation, she is no longer the high roller she once was.
Consequently, Adams was gleeful when police called last month to say they had gotten a break in the case. Two men, one of them claiming to be David Niven Jr., had reportedly used a blank check stolen with the jewels to purchase an $8,600 diamond ring from a San Fernando Valley jeweler. Suspicious, the jeweler told the men they would have to come back the next day to pick up the stone, and when they left, he called police.
When one man returned the next day to the jewelry store, Bucher was on hand to make the arrest. Daniel Mark Harrison, 23, an illegal immigrant from Canada, confessed almost immediately, Bucher said, and was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison.
The handyman, Bucher said, was arrested on charges of suspected conspiracy to commit armed robbery, but the district attorney dropped the charges for lack of evidence.
The third suspect--Douglas Ross (Swede) Bonde, 50, alias Jack Ross Shively--fled shortly after Harrison’s arrest and remains at large, Bucher said. The detective said a felony grand theft warrant has been issued for Bonde’s arrest and authorities are on the lookout for his car, a silver Datsun 280Z with vanity plates that say “SWEDEZ.”
Meanwhile, Adams says she is glad to have her nest egg, but disappointed that so little was left of it by the time the police solved the case. Of the original collection, the only items found were 10 necklaces, a few rings, several antique coins, some loose gems, pendants, earrings and a ripped jewelry bag, Bucher said. He confirmed that most of the most expensive pieces had been fenced by the time the evidence was traced back to the robbers’ apartments, and said it is unlikely that they will be found.
“All I got back was a bunch of crap,” Adams fretted from her bedside phone on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. “It was such a gorgeous collection--the Piaget with diamonds, the Piaget without diamonds, the sapphires, the Cartiers. I felt like crying.
“But the police were very sweet. They did their best. And I suppose God gives and God takes away.”
Besides, there is always the silver lining: Along with the jewels, 16 little notebooks were returned. And they, Adams says, are valuable in their own right--filled as they are with the names and numbers of her, ahem, closest friends.
