In three parts, an article by Xavier MacDonald on high end jeweller robberies.
The author of this article would like to convey his personal observations to security professionals, experts and senior management concerning security and safety that he has gathered whilst working for many years as the worldwide security manager in one of the most luxurious and exclusive jewellery houses in the world. He would like to exchange a few ideas and recommendations so that they can be challenged, improved or passed on to others. He has tried to view this problem from an independent position and not from the point of view of a security manager or a police officer or an underwriter. He has also chosen to view things from the ‘attackers’ perspective, how they think, what motivates them and what will make them go elsewhere. This article discusses, step by step, how one could seriously limit armed robberies worldwide that can be extremely grave for staff, have a negative media impact and result in serious financial loss.
This article focuses on anticipation and prevention instead of reacting to incidents in order to avoid or at least seriously reduce attacks in high-end jewellery and watch houses. Security is similar to a game of chess where one has to anticipate the opponent’s moves by thinking like him but always keeping one step ahead. This is done by reading who the criminals are, knowing how they operate, analysing their latest modes of operation, anticipating or foreseeing their moves and then presenting a dissuasion image to any proactive predator.
Criminals attack the jewellery stores simply because that is where the high value goods are located! These criminals are predators who are intelligent and adaptive. Anticipating where and when they will attack is possible if security professionals and other security officials are prepared to evaluate evolving crime trends both local and national but also trans-national. When they do so, they must adopt the perspective of the criminals. Based on that analysis, security professionals in high-end jewellery houses can then take steps to make their specific establishments less attractive to opportunistic predators who always take into consideration first and foremost the gain versus risk calculus associated with any potential attack. For the security professional then, presenting a dissuasive image is the primordial first step in avoiding an attack. Unattractive is best and will eventually induce predators to seek high-end gains in other segments of the markets. They too in that sense are intelligent business men.
It is mainly during the reconnaissance phase that it is possible to ward off an attack of a store. Criminals must perceive that the outside perimeter is under surveillance. This will give them pause. Once they go into the store to carry out their own ‘criminal audits’, they should sense that they are being discretely tracked by the security personnel and staff who are clearly following tight procedures. Criminals do not necessarily come in through the front doors but will also collect information from personnel to enter through the rear doors or through the neighbouring walls and ceilings.
The author believes that the thought process concerning the anticipation of armed robberies and thefts in high-end jewellery environments will also limit such robberies in other environments including embassies and nuclear plants, trades or commercial segments. This, of course, will need to be adapted to each specific culture, country and continent but the thought process behind this, anticipating and predicting attacks remain the same. By following this process one should be capable of seriously limiting incidents. If we want to outstrip the offenders instead of running after them, we must stop being short sighted by clearly identifying them. We must learn how to predict, anticipate these attacks so that offenders go elsewhere.
The responsibility for any shortcomings resulting in high-end attacks does not lie merely with the security professionals or the police. Rather, it is the whole system that needs to be re-thought and re-engineered.
II. SETTING THE SCENE – THE PREDATORS
The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 saw the revival of historic central European states, the expansion eastward of the European Union and on the commercial front the opening of new world markets. The downside has been an increase in politically destabilizing income level disparities and an increasingly mobile criminal element. From 50 states at the beginning of the 20 century to 195 today, many of the new micro-states are both institutionally weak and showcases for shadowy political policies. This has led to an upsurge in traditional western nations of new organized criminals on the scene from the Balkans, countries from former USSR, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Turkey, Nigeria China, etc., along with an increased potential for politically motivated terrorism. Security professionals in all the trades today need to grasp these fundamental changes in the security environment. They must have a broader picture of the criminal world – mafias, cartels, drugs, prostitution and counterfeiting because crime and criminals are today as often as not internationally connected, especially when unloading goods and laundering money.
The highly organized and generally disciplined cross border criminal element is not however the only threat facing security managers. Purely local criminals of a new order have also moved onto the scene. Post-colonial era immigration and massive urban housing estates have generated young ethnic criminals eager to share in the life style benefits of the luxury markets. For some time, the French police largely ignored the housing estate North African criminal elements in pursuit of more traditional organized “native” criminals. In addition, since the emergent North African criminals had no serious criminal records, they could “carry on their business in peace”.1
Older traditional criminals are now being “doubled” by these newcomers. Furthermore, they grasp the concept of global supply and demand routes and markets. A common method of operation is the ad hoc task force to carry out one attack and then separate. One or two robbers will meet up with two other robbers and join forces to hit a jewellery store, share the loot and then separate. They do not spend their whole careers together as the traditional criminals used to.
Differing European penal laws have also encouraged armed robbers to launch attacks in countries with lower prison sentences. One underwriter’s recent assessment – “You take, for example, Sweden and Norway. If you commit a cash armed robbery in Sweden you’ll get two to three years. If you commit the same robbery in Norway you get ten or fifteen. Therefore, if it’s a simple boat crossing which is going to last an hour and a half, I know what I would do. It thus becomes very challenging if you have an open gateway into Europe”.2 “With the borders coming down, organized crime groups that before operated only on a national level, are able to operate much more internationally”.3 In the last few years, if cross border police co-operation has improved, there is still a vast window of opportunity open to organized international gangs targeting high-end luxury products.
Until the mid-1990s, banks and post offices were the main targets for the newcomers because of the cash and goods which the robbers could steal and the relative ease in carrying out the attack. When the banks, however, improved their security measures by installing double “mantrap” doors and limiting cash in the branches, the criminals turned to cash-in transit vans and jewellery houses. They are now also attacking cash dispensers with explosives (+73% in France in 2012). In future, aside from the ever profitable but highly disorganized local level drug trade, it is possible that they will move on to easier and more profitable sources of income to include people smuggling, counterfeiting of retail goods and medicine, contraband cigarettes and protected animal species. Other fields of opportunity include high-jacking lorries with valuable goods and robbing chemical laboratories, technological sites and museums. Robbing gemmologists, auction houses, casinos or sub-contractor workshops for example is far easier and more profitable today than attacking a high-end jewellery store, though given the value on site the threat remains a constant.
So, between the East European disciplined pro and the up and coming ethnic armed robber, what type of person are we dealing with here? Roger Matthews writes that there are in fact three categories of robbers – “the amateurs, the intermediates and then the professional and persistent ones.”4 What we can suppose then is that “the main difference between persistent robbers and the other groups is in the level of planning, selection of targets, the use of firearms and the deployment of violence”.5 The author believes that some of these ‘professional and persistent robbers’ sometimes prefer to stay in one segment of criminality (banks, cash-in-transit vans, jewellery stores, etc.,) rather than the other fields of drugs and arms trafficking, prostitution and so on in order to remain more discreet and low key. The author calls this the “specialist” category where their experience in only one or two segments make them experts in these fields and that their success rate is very high. This, however, does not mean that certain robbers will not attack a jewellery store in order to start up their own businesses in one of the other criminal segments.
Furthermore and most critically for many professional and experienced robbers “robbery is more of a job and a way of life” and “…involves contempt for conventional lifestyles”. Xavier Raufer, a criminologist, believes that it is not poverty that makes people steal or rob as was the case for Charles Dickens’ Fagin but in today’s world rather the abundance of goods and wealth on media display versus the increasing divergence in average income levels.
From a robber’s perspective, carrying out a robbery is quite straightforward and “simply involves selecting an appropriate target, walking into the premises, threatening the cashier with a real or implied weapon, demanding the money, putting the money in a bag and walking out”.6 This may seem quite simple, even though attacking a high-end jewellery store for example is more complex and needs a great deal of planning and expertise. Still, it must be understood that when robbers wave their weapons at people this is certainly the worst moment in which to irritate them in any way. The robber’s adrenaline is pumping at high speed through their veins and their testosterone levels are overflowing. As one robber explained concerning his victims “They’re doing as they are told, you’re in full control. It’s just brilliant. You’re just there. You’re a man. You’re like God”.7 Many robbers do not necessarily want to use their weapons against their victims but use them as a deterrent or as a means to escape. This would not be the case of course if they were up against the police since neither party would hesitate to shoot if their lives were at risk or for the robber his liberty at stake. Admittedly, “the advantage of carrying a real firearm, it was felt, was that victim resistance would be minimal and no one would get hurt”.8According to Roger Matthews around half the robbers thought it was “stupid or irrational” for personnel “to have a go at them”9 since it was not their money or goods. This is especially true for jewellery houses which are all insured and will recover the cost price of the stolen goods. It is perhaps significant that when resistance does occur, it is often at the low end of the robbery world where the potential victim is a simple store owner with limited if any insurance coverage and has often already been robbed several times.
Quite understandably then robbers carry firearms to instil immediate fear and submissiveness. They want the sales personnel, guards and clients to co-operate. “When you carry out an armed robbery, even if you don’t harm anyone or even if you don’t kill anyone, you spread fear”.10 They want people to know straightaway that they mean business since time is their greatest enemy. One way the robbers achieve this is by “engaging in apparently gratuitous or irrational violence on the onset of the robbery”.11 Redoine Faïd, a former high-end robber, went on by saying that “you have to condition them into thinking your way. You have to use really violent language to make them understand that you are not there for a laugh”.12 The robber can, to a certain extent, be compared to an actor who goes on stage every night and must convince the public in the first few seconds that he is another person.
What the author has also noticed during interviews with various former criminals and through research is that they were all, at different levels, affected by adrenaline because “it’s just like when you do coke, you get a rush out of it”.13 As the controversial armed robber Redoine Faïd wanted to stop since he had put enough money aside but was then “caught up in an infernal spiral”14 getting adrenaline rushes from his robberies. For him, adrenaline had thus become a form of addiction and was needed again and again since he “had become dependent”.
In addition to the adrenaline rush, many robbers also take drugs and/or consume alcohol to help them “do their job.” The stress level is extremely high with the ever present fear of being caught or killed. Those who sniff cocaine or take other illicit substances for attacks are generally daily consumers. They become a danger to their own system and also to their victims. Since a large percentage of robbers are however under the influence of drugs or alcohol during a robbery, it is vain to hope that expensive security equipment alone would deter these criminals. They may become extremely violent if personnel do not co-operate immediately or if for whatever reason they feel that their limited attack time line is running out.
Personal fear is rarely discussed by criminals because it is often taboo. Redoine told the author that before and during an attack he and his team always experienced fear. With experience and minute preparation the level of fear lowered over time but during the actual attack “you are winded; your heart beat is at 200. Nobody talks, time has literally stopped. Your face is rigid and white. Your blood has stopped flowing. Your teeth are clenched. You do not think of anything except your mission. You’re a robot. … Anyhow, you do not hear anything. It’s as if there was no more sound on earth. Only silence. Your silence; you’re on another planet”.15
In short, adrenaline, drugs, fear and weapons make for a lethal cocktail. This is certainly not the time to mess around with the robbers. In the high-end luxury trade, store personnel and guards should know that they have to co-operate with the robbers. It is rare for anyone to press the silent alarm button no matter how much training is given. Their lives and the lives of their customers are at stake. No jewel or watch is worth a single drop of blood.
Alain Bauer and Xavier Raufer, two French criminologists, believe that “in the face of such threats, ordinary security measures (police, justice, security officers, CCTV, etc.) are very often derisory”.16 If one admits that ordinary security measures are often derisory then what are the security professionals to do to deter the criminals from attacking?
The answer lies elsewhere – predicting potential events and instituting the preventive measures enhancing one’s dissuasive image, thereby prompting a robber to assess the success probability of an attack as less than optimal. In short, you must play on the robber’s psyche and his desire to win! Remember, he too has a lot at stake. Wherever on the gamut from impulsive amateur to hardened professional, the robber must succeed. Failure means at best a long jail term or at worst death in a shootout with police. Like any predator, his preference then will be to attack the weakest member of the herd that yet offers sufficient “take” to make the risk versus gain calculus attractive. Survival for a high-end jeweller thus lies in staying abreast of the ever evolving threat in order to anticipate attack and then taking the appropriate steps to become and remain “unattractive.” Staying abreast is accepting to take one’s blinkers off to avoid collective blindness.
III.STAYING ABREAST OF THE EVOLVING THREAT
Security for high end goods is first and foremost imagining what could happen and then taking steps to avoid it happening. A robbery is not fate. By foreseeing attacks, one is given a means to counter or to prevent them. It is far wiser to foresee and deflect an attack than to respond to it when it arrives on your doorstep. One retired security official, for many years associated with the US embassy in Paris, remarked. “It is a cruel thing to say but one of the hard realities of the counter-terrorist game is that you always want the daily routine of your diplomats and the evolving security posture of your protected embassy sites to present an image sufficiently dissuasive to delist you as a potential target and to reorient the threat in the direction of someone else. The threat is always there. It is always going to be there. You will be looked at. The trick is to avoid making the final cut when the looker turns to target selection. For your part, you always need to be working on that – avoiding the cut.”13 The same logic applies to the threat posed by high-end jewellery robbers.
Foreseeing or predicting attacks means putting oneself in the shoes of the criminal. One must learn to think like them. Think as an attacker instead of a defender. Security managers must know what they are up against; who the criminals are, where they come from, and their current and evolving modes of operation. Only then can they put in place the correct protective measures. Security managers in high-end jewellery houses have thus to declare war and to be proactive rather than waiting for the criminal to walk into a site waving a weapon around. The author uses the word “war” advisedly. Many criminals today have adopted military-like tactics. They wear flak-jackets, carry automatic weapons with war ammunition, use grenades, rocket launchers and high explosives as necessary. Security personnel are often unarmed defenders (especially in Europe) with only their procedures, equipment and intelligence as a defence. In such a threat environment, the only real edge is to be proactive. One must always be thinking one step ahead of the criminal. One must push one’s reasoning to the furthest limits possible and never take for granted the received wisdom of what other people may be saying or doing. Detecting a danger consists of looking beyond the horizon, of leaving what is known in order to furrow into the unknown.
Similar to a doctor auscultating a patient before writing out a prescription, one has to clearly identify the dangers in order to predict or foresee them. By seeing clearly and over the horizon, it is then possible to anticipate the criminal’s moves. When a jewellery house is robbed, procedures are improved, hardware and electronic technology are upgraded or added and training is carried out in order to avoid the same attack but also to reassure management and personnel.
If the role of security professionals is limited to protection only against past attacks, they might as well just count on luck. Robbers are not necessarily stupid. Many are smart. They will not always use the same modus operandi. They are adaptive predators. So what does one do if robbers start changing their modes of operation? Security professionals have to be capable of identifying tomorrow’s attacks today and finding immediate solutions to counter them. They should question themselves regularly concerning what is going on not just at the protected site but also what developments are occurring outside of the stores, out on the streets and within the wider national and international crime world. They then must ask themselves what their security posture is in the face of such developments, and put in place whatever new protective measures and procedures are warranted. If not, they risk being caught up in the complacency trap that often affects house staff and local guards.
Herewith, an example from the low end of the criminal attack spectrum. On 6 October 2013 in Paris a high-end watch establishment located next to place Vendôme was attacked by a 15 strong gang. They ran-off with 20 watches worth 1.2M€/£1M. A 24 year old Rumanian and a 17 year old Moldavian were arrested shortly afterwards. Later so were 3 other Eastern Europeans. Police in France reported that they “had never before seen such an attack.” Notwithstanding that assertion, similar attacks of luxury stores with this mode of operation had previously taken place in Germany, Belgium and England.
People need to be reassured that they work in a protected and safe environment and security gives oneself the impression or the feeling of being safe should aggressive behaviour or events occur. We may even try to convince ourselves that systems always work and worst of all fool others into believing they will work. We are reassured by routine, having cameras, a guard in place instead of questioning ourselves of what is going on outside to anticipate an event. If security is then based on impressions or feelings, one can admit that it is subjective which means that different people, including the security managers, imagine different things at any given time and for different security risks. People can make bad decisions simply because they are based on subjective or perceived risks instead of objective ones and that they react to emotions instead of taking a step back and being rational. Many non-security professionals do not have the global security picture and will often create incidents whilst believing that they are doing the correct thing to avoid them. Protecting people is paramount but often people do not realise the dangers that exist or that can take place and can put themselves or the company at risk.
So why undergo an attack in the first place instead of taking simple immediate preventive actions to at least reduce the risks of an attack instead of counting on fate or chance? Security is never one hundred per cent foolproof because there is always a chance factor involved. Good luck certainly does exist in everyday life and we all use this word from time to time especially when playing the national lottery. However, by counting on it every day, one puts oneself in a solely defensive posture which will inevitably one day or another turn into bad luck. The more the security manager puts in place pro-active robber/thief oriented protective measures which anticipate a potential gang’s modus operandi, to include the reconnaissance phase, the less he will need to count on luck.
How then does one foresee what is unexpected or unpredictable? Luckily, man is foreseeable which makes him predictable simply because he follows patterns and is often repetitive. Robberies are not done at random and are rarely one-off events in blue chip jewellery houses. They are first and foremost based on calculated risks and offenders quite understandably do not want to be caught, killed or wounded. The selection of targets is performed in a rational way and analysed by the criminals in a methodological and thorough manner to detect all the weaknesses. They will thus choose the weakest store of the pack before they attack because success is capital.
The main question one could then ask oneself concerning robberies is “Why does an attack take place here and not there and how does one minimize the risks?” rather than “When are we going to be attacked and what do we then do?” By thinking this way, the author believes that the scales of success will tilt in the security manager’s favour and the chances of success are significantly increased. If one simply sits and waits for an attack it most certainly will happen. If on the other hand one expects the unexpected then one cannot be completely surprised when the unexpected occurs.
Security managers must never be content that all is working well. They must keep in mind that robbers are always watching for new criminal opportunities. Many armed robbers are opportunists. They will switch from one field to another on the lookout for an easy and profitable heist. They will go where the money or the goods are and follow them around. The security manager therefore must foresee the criminal’s next move and then block the opening. The criminal will otherwise always take the lead. Unfortunately, man’s natural inertia makes him most at ease with what has happened in the past, sometimes with what is occurring in the present but rarely with what may occur in the future. The criminal, however, is by nature always looking to the “next score.”
It is worth repeating, robbery is not fate. It is man who controls the risk environment, who in effect creates the opportunity which the criminal exploits. It is up to the security manager to identify such risks and then take steps to make exploitation more difficult for the offender. Robbers, adaptive predators that they are, will detect vulnerabilities. They can on occasion even create them by bribing or suborning personnel for information or for purposes of neutralising hardware and electronic security. In short, if the criminal is always looking for the weakest link, so must the security professional. He must “out criminal” the criminal. On 9 September 2013, again next to place Vendôme, ram-raiders ploughed their vehicle into an upmarket jewellery boutique at 4 a.m. and made off with €2M worth of loot. Question – why were the goods left on display in the window instead of being put in the safe for the night? If one left a 10€ note on the pavement in front of the store, how long would it take for somebody to pick it up? So why leave 1M€ worth of timepieces on display in a window all night? Perhaps display is a valid marketing ploy. It is nonetheless stupid because it assumes criminals are stupid. They are not. They are the most opportunistic of predators. And yet, on 17 March 2014 a similar attack in the same area occurred because once again goods were left overnight in the display windows!
“Losses happen but some are more preventable than others”18 if one is prepared to predict events by opening one’s mind by listening, reading and analysing what is currently going on outside the stores and not only in them. Robbers do not just walk off the street and rob a store. They have to analyse the different stores and find the weakest one. There are numerous indicators, even minor ones, that warn us that problems lie ahead but we often do not take a step back to identify them hoping not to be affected. One must take the time to predict where they come from and how they operate by reading the local, national and international papers and specialised web sites to find out the new modes of operation, techniques and trends that are taking place today and what could certainly happen tomorrow in any establishment. By reading in the tabloids, Jérôme Pierrat who is a journalist specialised in criminology believes it is possible to anticipate fifty per cent of all attacks. He believes that if one person or one gang has a new idea of attacking a site, fifteen other people or gangs will just follow the same mode of operation simply because they will read about it in the papers or see it on television. Roger Matthews who is a professor in criminology adds that “Offenders are greatly influenced by the media who can perform a sensitising role that instructs or encourages those already predisposed to crime and violence to express these tendencies”.19 The media probably have an effect on criminals and “… often depict the robbers as dangerous psychopaths or as cold calculating criminals”.20 This is often the case for petty criminals who use unnecessary violence but not certain high-end robbers who carry out robberies with innovative and unexpected modes of operation as was the case of the two Harry Winston armed robberies in Paris in 2007 (20M€/16.5M£) and 2008 (85M€/70M£), the two Graff heists in London 2007 (7.4M€/6.1M£) and 2009 (40M€/32M£) as well as the Leviev robbery in Cannes in 2013 (100M€/82M£). These upmarket robberies will get prime of place because of the high market value of the robbery and possibly because this kind of robbery in highly protected places verges on the technical feat. In that perspective, these robberies can easily be portrayed as a kind of “specialised craft reserved to professionals which has nothing to do with the vulgar smash-and-grab job”.21 The use of battery powered window cutting tools, explosives, criminals on scooters, ram rod attacks, etc., are all foreseeable if one is prepared to read about them, accept that there is a possibility of such an attack and take immediate action. By reading this information in the tabloids, security reviews and bulletins or following specialised seminars it is then possible to predict which methods will be used next and take the necessary steps to protect oneself. Put another way, anticipate attack and take the necessary steps to be less attractive in the risk versus gain assessment that the criminal automatically performs when he looks at you from a criminal perspective. Have you assessed your status, anticipated potential attack and taken steps to present a dissuasive image. Or are you the weak member of the herd waiting unwittingly to be culled?
