How Diamond Heists Actually Work | How Crime Works | Insider

My name is Bryan Sobolewski. I am a former

diamond

thief and stole $2.3 million worth of gold and jewelry throughout New England. And that's how

crime

work

s. I would compare the jewelry business to the drug business in terms of how shady it is. You will never get the

diamond

they tell you is there. You're probably buying junk most of the time. The profit margin ranges between 500% and 800% when you walk into a store to try to buy a diamond. I was 20 when this started, 25 when I was arrested. So it was a five-year period. Then, there was my father, who was the mastermind.

My brother, he was the muscle. Normally I was the driver. Normally I was the lookout. We had an internal guy. Bill was a friend of my dad. So he would basically tell us who was a good person to pursue. If we went to a store, it would tell us where the safe is, what time the safe was opened, what time the guy would be there. He himself was a traveling salesman. That's how he knew everyone. We used Bill to place an order if it was a store, just so we knew that product would be in the store and we would have a certain quantity we could get from the store.

The landscape at that time was that there were many family-owned jewelry stores. You didn't have many chains. There was Kay Jewelers, there were a couple of big chains, but most were independent. And they had street vendors with their products in their cars, and they would travel to these stores and try to sell them to them. We tried to hit anyone who had claimed fake insurance or fake thefts before. We never go after anyone clean. And that's very hard to find in the jewelry business. You'd be surprised how many of these guys report false thefts and keep the insurance money.

Finding a job is infuriating, but it's super, super, super important. It's about recognizing traffic. At what time a patrol could pass by. All of this influenced the time of day we would do a job. Generally during the day. We didn't mind the crowds. Sometimes crowds can help you. People are interested in what is happening there. So for Seabrook, for Woody's job, the question was basically: What time does he come to

work

? Where does he park his car? The Raynham robbery, my brother and I went to a Papa Gino's right next door, got a piece and then went back to the car and ate it.

Everyone at Papa Gino's remembered us. Each person. That's one of the things about the casing. You have to notice, but you can't notice that you notice. So the cars we used were never ours. We would return at night, take the car. We would pull into a shopping center parking lot. I would take away someone's license plate. We would put it in the car. We would use the car. My dad would bring it the next night. He would just leave it on the lot. You could never prepare for all eventualities. There would be no scenario that we could practice and go through that would not eventually present some problem that we would have to overcome.

I would come in as a customer to be as normal as possible, but I didn't like it either. It was stressful to have a duffel bag with rope and bolt cutters in case we had to cut a lock we didn't have a key for. My dad would come in with his girlfriend. She sounds very sexist, but we needed to have a woman. Most of the street vendors we were looking for were men. So it wasn't necessarily about how many bodies we needed. It was more about what genre it was. One of the things we had to do was make sure we could get into the safe.

We knew that the insurance company's protocol for you to have loose diamonds and be able to sell them and insure them is that every time you go to that safe to take out a diamond, that safe will be locked again. But my dad did it in such a way that he kept sending the guy back and forth to the safe and eventually the guy would just leave the safe open. And most people did not follow the protocol to the letter. So once we knew the safe was open, we would dismantle the store. 90 seconds passed at the beginning of the robbery.

So when my dad and his girlfriend come in and start talking, that's not the 90 seconds. It's been 90 seconds since Kev comes in and the guy is subdued. That's when we got to the clock. When those 90 seconds are up, I don't know what you'll have in your pockets, but we have to go. There were times when we left a case behind. We don't take everything. The 90 second rule came from bank robbers. They tell you that you can't spend 90 seconds on a bench. Because if you go through the vault, more than 90 seconds will pass and you will be dead.

It was all based on Kev. It could subdue a victim. It was handcuffs or duct tape or sometimes just being on top of them with a gun. Then my brother would jump on the case, grab them and put them down. He says, "Keep your mouth shut. We'll be out of here in a couple seconds. No one's going to get hurt." My dad went after the safe. I went after the cases. We once came across a safe that, when we opened it, didn't have what we thought was inside, and my dad just wasn't convinced. And he started playing with the bottom of the safe, and he pressed it and he jumped out, and everything was inside.

The bottom was hollowed out. So, he would always have a ball peen hammer. And those cases are not easy to break because they all have a layer of plastic in the middle. So when you hit it, there's just a hole. You have to keep breaking and eventually push down all this piece of broken glass, and then it makes it very difficult to access the items. That's why in some of these cases, even in the jewelry store windows, there were people in the '80s who broke and grabbed the windows. My dad had rules. We try not to hurt anyone.

In the scenario where we were going to a store that wasn't ours and looking to rob a street vendor, we would set it up so that when they pulled out the guns, they would only point them at the victim. So we deliberately didn't target the store owner so that the victim would say, "Hey, is he involved in this?" And that's exactly what happened. There was a plan that my father had that he wanted to come up with: we would go in and knock down as many stores as we could in the Jewelers Building in Boston. There is a real five or six story building full of jewelry stores.

And it was something we squashed because the guy at the front desk was a police officer. We never had to deal with security guards because at the time there weren't many jewelry stores that required the presence of an armed guard. The only one was the double doors. And we didn't even go in. And you'll notice that in most street-level jewelry stores there is one lobby and you can't keep both doors open at the same time. You would have to go through one, take several steps before reaching the next. And that's because they can close that lobby.

And at that point, we say, no. Most of these stores tell you to enter. Now I can't enter a jewelry store without being told. They don't use a high-tech security system during the day because there is foot traffic. And those things, you know, are you talking about laser beams that shoot out once you pass them? Well, you can't wear that during the day. Now there are cases of alarm, but again, you have to consider who responds to the alarm. When was the last time you did something with a car alarm? If during the day, during work hours, an alarm goes off, I think for a couple of minutes, most people will think it's a fluke and wait for it to go off.

Most people's first instinct is not to call the police when they hear that. So now you have a live armed guard in a store. I think "Pink Panther" style jewelry store robberies disappeared when security systems didn't have to be connected to your phone. So once a silent alarm is triggered, it can contact a satellite. The satellite calls the police. You can't stop that unless you find a way to cut the electricity to that entire structure. And yet they have backup systems. So, yes, if the power goes out, that security system will still work. If we took off in the stolen car, we'd run into the Bronco, throw everything back, and I'd go home.

That's when I had the opportunity to start reviewing the material. We had to keep things at home. So we would have between $500,000 and a million dollars worth of retail jewelry. At wholesale, it's probably a hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff. My dad separated it into, here are the necklaces, here are the bracelets, here are the rings, here are the uncut gems, here are the cut gems, here are the set gems. From there, we simply put them in packages that we could sell in jewelry stores. High-end stuff is super, super, super hard to sell. You know, little trinkets, little chains.

My dad made more money with these little glass jars with little beads inside. If he shines, people will buy him. So for us, no, there wasn't a level of preference in terms of what you were taking. But if I have five boxes in front of me and one is full of diamonds and one is full of gold chain, I'm going to go for that. The gold chain is much easier and faster to sell than a diamond ring. You don't want to deal with uncut produce, because then you'll have to find a place to cut it. And that is not easy to do.

I would rather sell you a set stone than a loose stone because it is more made and you can charge more for it. You are charging for gold. So when you go in and buy a diamond, now you're paying for the diamond, you're paying for the weight of the gold. Bill was our main dumping ground for many things. He was the other person. He was a jeweler in Nashua. And this was a guy who understood that the margin is where you make money, and if you buy stolen things, you can score big. So if you buy it for $0.50 on the dollar, you can already charge what you normally would, charge a little more, and really clean up.

We buy a lot of our stolen stuff in bulk. Therefore, getting rid of bulk jewelry is very difficult to do. Because as soon as you have it in your hands, you are an accomplice. So there is a lot to say. So you have to understand that after a robbery, every pawn shop is, you know, the police say, "If you see any of this, call us." So we couldn't just go to a pawn shop and say, here, buy all this stuff. We do it little by little. So it's great to have a pocket full of diamonds, but if you have nowhere to throw them or fence them... and fence is what we call the sale of stolen goods.

If you get caught buying fenced stuff, you'll be screwed. And that's how most people get trapped in these situations. The jewelry party is where you simply invite a group; It's like a Tupperware party with jewelry. So, come and see our product. We would put everything on the table, display it, and people would just look at it. And it is effective. It's a cash business. Many diamonds have laser-engraved serial numbers. You can buy fake documentation for these things. So at that time, it was rare for anything to be recorded. The technology wasn't there and the technology was expensive.

So now there are certifying bodies that will give you a certificate that says this is the diamond you're buying, and this is how it's graded, and this is blah, blah, blah. But you can pay for them. One of the ways we used to tell was by scraping glass. You could go to a jewelry store or pawn shop and they will take a small pen and hit it with a little electric current to see if it is a real diamond. You're pretty much fine buying gold, but you need to make sure it's sealed. So if you have a piece of gold that, you know, they say it's 18 karat gold but it doesn't have a stamp that says "18 karat," it probably isn't.

Gold will not be magnetized. That could be one way. I used to try, I would take some of the stolen jewelry and try to sell it as drugs, and they used to dip it in lye because they say lye reacts with the other metal that's in the gold. That is not true. It does not work. I'm not going to a store to buy jewelry right now. Because you are paying an exorbitant profit margin and you don't know it. You don't know if it's real. Some people are probably looking at their hand right now wondering if what they're holding is worth anything or not, but.

Diamonds are not rare. A flawless diamond is rare, but sapphires and emeralds are much rarer, if that's a word, because you don't find them flawless very often, and you don't find them treated or enhanced in some artificial way. Most of the insurance scams I observed were hearing secondhand what the person reported as stolen from their store. Every job we did, Bill was able to go and talk to that person afterwards without knowing that Bill was the one who helped rob it, we heard him say it was robbed, and it was always double. At least double. These guys are taking this problem and turning it into an opportunity.

And that's why you're paying so much for insurance, because these guys, the insurance companies, are pretty screwed. If you're really good at it, you'll know how many cops there are in that town, which is why we never did a job in Nashua, New Hampshire. Nashua, New Hampshire, had one of the best police forces of the time. I grew up in Boston with organized

crime

. I wasn't involved in this, but we all knew that the Angiulos ran the state, ran the entirewaste management, all construction. An entire section of Boston was dedicated to strip clubs and drug trafficking.

And the moment you left the combat zone and did something like that, an Angiulo or someone from that team or a police officer would beat you up for it. That was the place where you did it. And it worked very well. Bulger enters and everything is completely disorganized. There was no way we would have robbed 22 stores while the Angiulos were in power. Either they would have come to us and asked for a share or they would have said that these stores are protected and cannot be attacked. When you think, how can a father involve his children in something like this?

My dad lived a childhood very different from ours. He grew up in Chelsea, right next to Heller's Bar. Heller's Bar was a mafia bar. Right behind Heller's was a huge dirt parking lot where my dad would often walk out of his house and see a tractor-trailer pulled out of the East Boston docks, where the mob picked up most of their stuff. They would park it in the back of Heller's and sell everything there. And my dad saw this. So my dad followed all the rules. He went to university. He was a respectable member of society, unless there was something on the ground that he was not bound by and that he could endure.

And I think that was the mentality of most people in Massachusetts at that time. Pay your taxes, keep the man away from you, but if you see an opportunity to have a drink, take it. Initially, my father gave this guy his life savings to invest in importing diamonds into the country. This guy decided to take that money from my dad and then tell him that he never received the delivery. And my dad was in a bad place. He was in a very bad place. He finally asked if we would help him. He finally sat down and said, "Here's the deal.

You guys are going to have to get out of college. You're going to have to work full time. I don't have the money to pay for any of that." Or we could get this guy's money and set him up." And that's exactly what we did. And the beginning of 22 more robberies began. It all started as "we have to save dad." And then my dad started introducing us all the robberies like we're helping people. We're going after this guy, he's dirty, and this guy scammed people, and if we stop him, he won't scam anyone. After five, you start. to say, hey, you know, we're not superheroes and we're not here to save the world.

What are we doing? And that's when things started to get very serious: my brother and I were very worried about how far this would go. The real victims are those people whose dignity, their right to freedom, their right to move through the world without anyone tying them to a chair and their families. It doesn't stop with them. loved that person and had to find out what happened to them. I was arrested on December 26, 1996. There was enough distinction in us to separate us from anyone who did it. There weren't many crews. There weren't many people doing jobs.

I went to rehab and stopped committing robberies, and my brother and father continued. They did two more and then they did one after prison. But I stopped because I had gotten sober and went back to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor. My brother has already been arrested. My father has already been arrested. They were both awaiting trial and I knew they would come for me. To me, prison looked a lot like a criminal university. A lot of inmates would walk in there and say, "Okay, what did you do? How did they get you? Okay." And they leave knowing how to get their way.

So prison is an education in terms of if you want to keep doing what you're doing, that's the place to go and talk to the people who were caught and figure out how to do it right. I think the hardest part of my prison sentence was not the time in prison. It's the stigma. I couldn't get them to hire me. Regret sucks, man. It really is. It's not easy to live with. In the end it was my decision. And I, you know, I could say I was 13 and not capable of making those decisions, but I was 20.

My father and my brother passed away on February 11 of last year. My brother and I had a very difficult life and complicated relationship. We very rarely got along. And when we came together, it was in situations like this. So through our drug abuse, we bonded. Through thefts, we came together. In prison we united. But every time we were out and needed something substantial to solidify that bond, it was never there. The book I wrote was called "Family Jewels" and it was my attempt to use it as a tool to talk to kids, to talk to people, maybe use how crazy this story is to scare you.

I work as a personal trainer now. I created my own certification. I wrote my own book that lists the programming for this type of exercise. And it's now approved by three or four personal training certifying bodies. I do the podcast, I do "Family Jewels Podcast." The podcast allowed me to go into greater detail. It allowed me to break down each robbery individually. It brought my dad and me together.