Pink Panthers Nabbed

Published: 29 May 2009

By

The gang with the catchy name has committed the most intriguing jewel heists of the past decade. They have tear-gassed jewelry store employees in Tokyo and escaped with the $31.5 million Comtesse de Vendome necklace. They have driven black Audis literally into a swanky Dubai shopping mall to commit a $3 million diamond robbery. They have brandished a .357 Magnum at employees in a London Graff store and escaped with $36.6 million of diamonds in three minutes.  

Since 2003, the Pink Panther gang has been blamed for stealing loot worth more than $130 million in 120 robberies in 20 countries. Now police in France and elsewhere are hoping that the arrest of two suspects this month may shed some light on the brazen group.

The two men, Nicola Ivanović, 36, and Zoran Kostić, 38, were arrested in Paris’s red light district less than a week after Swiss police raised the alarm about a robbery in Lausanne on May 5 that they believed was the Panthers’ doing.  

British police gave the group its nickname after they found that a suspect in the Graff robbery had foxed away a $657,000 blue diamond in a jar of his girlfriend’s face cream – a hiding spot used in one of the “Pink Panther” series of films that starred Peter Sellers. “They may have this daft name, but they are competent and dangerous,” one investigator told The Guardian.

Lausanne Heist no Exception

The Lausanne robbery of May 5 was no exception. In the late afternoon, a well-dressed man walked into the jewelry store L’Emeraude and asked about watches. When an employee opened a display case, an accomplice burst in and the two thieves absconded with 94 luxury watches. The crime took less than two minutes, reported the Swiss media, and workers in a pharmacy across the street noticed nothing.  

The bold, quick and professional approach prompted Lausanne police to raise the alarm and pass on to French police their hunch that the robbers were headed for France.

In France, investigators had information gathered from a Pink Panther suspect arrested in Monaco in October. They promptly sent surveillance teams around to the strip clubs and peep shows of Paris’s Pigalle district. The police work finally led them to the men at the two-star Hotel Utrillo, and they also found two Swiss Patek Philippe watches from the Lausanne robbery.

Those arrested are of Serbian nationality, which jibes with Interpol’s reckoning that most of the Pink Panther gang are Serbs from Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Serbia proper. There’s much that Interpol doesn’t know, though, and officials hope that the two new jailbirds will reveal more information. Police don’t know what happened to the rest of the watch haul from the Lausanne robbery. And they don’t know whether the Panthers were behind the Paris Harry Winston heist last December, in which three men in drag stole what was then appraised as $108 million in jewelry. Though the store has since marked the claim down to $32 million, insurer Lloyd’s of London continues to offer a record $1 million reward for the return of the jewels, which have not been recovered.

Police: Military, Athletic Backgrounds

Police believe that the men are from military or athletic backgrounds, and that there are about 200 members of the gang. The Panthers are thought to be made up of small, mobile units, unlike other major organized crime groups with clear hierarchical and organized structures. Police believe that members live quietly in European cities between robberies, like the Serb hospital cleaner in Switzerland who took an $80 easyJet flight to London for the Graff robbery. (He was convicted of conspiracy to rob in the UK in 2004.) And they have noted that members travel on valid passports issued to other people.

Following the Kostić and Ivanović arrests, police investigators from Belgium, France, Germany, Monaco, Montenegro and Switzerland pooled information at Interpol to help identify further members, accomplices and other crimes linked to the gang. Police believe that both men were involved in at least 10 armed jewel robberies in Europe in the past 10 years.

Interpol, which set up a special cell dedicated to the gang in 2007, hosted a conference two months ago that gathered police from 16 countries – including Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates – to share photos, fingerprints and insight in the hope that information could help crack their cases.  

“We know that their favorite targets are luxury jewelers, but we don't yet really know if they are involved in passing on stolen goods, or are involved in drug or arms trafficking or deal in counterfeit papers,” Interpol deputy director of criminal affairs and drug trafficking Emmanuel Leclaire told Reuters at the time.

Another 40-odd Pink Panthers have been jailed in the past few years throughout Europe.

-- Beth Kampschror