The Panthers have choreographed some spectacular jobs: In 2007, a group of men drove two cars through windows and into the forecourt of a mall in Dubai, racing out to rob a jewellery store of $3.4 million worth of jewels; in 2004, two men and two women raided a jewellery store in Tokyo, escaping with $30 million in jewels, in what was the biggest grossing robbery in Japan’s history; in 2003, two men stole £37 million in jewels from a diamond store in London. Only a fraction of those jewels have been recovered but police did find a 2.32 carat blue diamond ring hidden in a jar of face cream belonging to the girlfriend of one of the thieves, echoing a scene from the first Pink Panther movie starring Peter Sellers.
Many Panthers were blooded during the Balkan wars in the 1990s, taking advantage of the ample opportunities for crime during the violent chaos in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Along the way, they learned how to work in decisive, daring teams, and to cast aside their national and ethnic differences in search of a universal goal — getting rich quick. While the Panthers pose none of the threat to European stability that the wars of the 1990s did, their anarchic, transnational crime wave is an unpleasant hangover of the wars and wildly at odds with the rules-based modern society represented by the EU, an organisation that all of the former Yugoslav republics one day hope to join. (Slovenia has already made it into the club.)
Montenegro, the smallest of the former Yugoslav republics, is home to a large number of Panthers, according to Interpol. It’s a shockingly beautiful country, but as the economy transitions from state-run socialism to free-market capitalism, average Montenegrins still have to struggle with a per capita gross domestic product just slightly more than that of Lebanon and Botswana. Unless you happen to be in on the influx of foreign investment in the luxury tourism industry, it can be tough to make a good living in Montenegro.
Meeting those who have been tempted to make their money in international crime rather than through hard graft at home took GlobalPost reporters many weeks to arrange. They are cautious men who choose when and where they want to meet — usually at night, usually in a café or restaurant they know and usually at the last minute. Three of the criminals were interviewed in Montenegro, one in Vienna — all on condition that their identities be protected and their names changed. One of the four has since been arrested by police in a western European country and is now in custody there.
Yugoslav criminals were operating in western Europe even before the country fell apart in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until the Kosovo war ended in 1999 — and, with it, the highly profitable smuggling business that accompanies most wars — that the men who had bonded over the years of fighting began to look in earnest outside the region for a new revenue stream.
Over the years, police officers around Europe and in other parts of the world realised they were increasingly dealing with jewel thieves from the former Yugoslavia, many with connections to each other, and in 2007, Interpol set up a multi-national team devoted to catching them. The cops at headquarters in Lyon, France, named it Project Pink Panther.
The truth, however, is that the existence of a coherent Pink Panther gang is almost as fanciful as anything Inspector Clouseau ever nosed around in. Interpol officials and the criminals themselves agree that the so-called gang is a loose conglomeration of separate gangs, many of whom know each other, and some of whose members are interchangeable.
“There are several groups,” said Nikola, the pseudonym of the driver who took part in the heist in Rome in 2001. “In a group, there are five or six. More than six is too much. If there’s more, the share is smaller. There must be mutual confidence in each other.”
Most jobs start with a piece of gathered intelligence, the criminals explained. This can be as sophisticated as an insider passing on information about a jewellery store’s security system, or as primitive as a thief noticing that a particular store has, say, a major display case near the front door and sits on a street that allows for a fast getaway. A gang will often include a woman, who will accompany one of the male gang members into a store on a reconnaissance mission.
One criminal, a Croat, who says he is now in legitimate business, recalled working with a team of Montenegrin and Serb criminals he met in Lausanne.
“I speak French and I was able to visit various watch shops and jewellery stores, ask questions, observe and recognise the weak points of the security personnel without raising any suspicion,” said the man, who was interviewed in Vienna earlier this year. “I had a girlfriend from a wealthy Viennese family and she was a perfect cover without knowing it. Sometimes, I was given money to buy her pretty expensive things like earrings or necklaces. After a month or so, those guys would storm the targets and disappear.”
Often the heists are very primitive.
“Any good robbery should take up to 20 seconds,” said Zoran, a Serbian career criminal. “In case we are dealing with sophisticated security and a strong police presence, we always set up decoys or activate alarms somewhere nearby to divert attention.” Zoran said he has pulled off several robberies in the Netherlands. “The first thing I do when I arrive in Holland is I get a good car, preferably a BMW 5 Series, with a hook on the rear. The hook is important because it helps when I drive in reverse into a jewellery shop.” The powerful car “is needed to speed away and not be caught by police. But a few times they had reinforced glass, so when I hit the display window, I bounced back. That was unpleasant.”
Zoran has a second method. “Another way is to have someone else wait in the car and two of us walk in a shop in fancy clothes and I carry a briefcase,” he said.
Durovic, the head of Montenegro’s Interpol bureau, believes that many Europeans are unprepared for the war-nurtured nerve of the Panthers, the gumption required for smashing and grabbing during the daytime and in the heart of swanky commercial districts in cities like Monte Carlo, Geneva and Paris. “They cannot recognise that those people have the courage to commit (these crimes) and they are not ready for that,” he said.
No matter how the robberies are conducted, with a hammer or a helicopter, there’s a level of efficiency and sophistication in the handling of the stolen goods that has police bemused. “We don’t know how they do that because I would say probably many Pink Panther members have been arrested at least one time in their life but very rarely are stolen goods recovered,” said Emmanuel Leclaire, Interpol’s assistant director of the Drug and Criminal Organisations Directorate at headquarters in Lyon. “We don’t know what are the processes to receive these jewels and watches.”
Part of the answer sits on the muscular right wrist of Rocco, a criminal who was a friend of Arkan, the late Serbian gangster and war criminal, in the form of a glinting gold Rolex. Rocco explained that the watch, worth $33,000, was a gift from one of the Panthers in appreciation for his great work, which during an interview in the otherwise empty upstairs section in a bar in Podgorica, he explained is to “arrange purchases of the final product.”
Stolen watches go on the black market but jewels are taken from their moldings and reset, or cut to look different. “The goods are reshaped, laundered and sold into regular channels,” he said, meaning legitimate jewellery companies. The buyers pay between 18 per cent and 25 per cent of retail value, he said. Marbella in Spain, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Belgian city of Antwerp are popular desinations for stolen jewels, according to Rocco and Zoran.Like their crimes, the Panthers can be both crude and sophisticated. Rocco has the classic look of the mid-90s paramilitary: shaved head, multiple tattoos and a matching deep voice. But he’s also well-versed in European politics and Montenegrin history and has travelled extensively, including to the diamond mines of Sierra Leone. Nikola, the driver from the Italian job, is smoother still. He speaks fluent English and Czech, Slovak and Polish also — and some Italian, Spanish and French. The men often pick up languages during their spells in foreign prisons but they are also diligent students, realising that language is a crucial tool for gathering information about a target in a foreign country and escaping safely after the robbery.
Among those recently caught was former Cetinje resident Zoran Kostic, a prominent Pink Panther who was arrested in Paris in June in relation to the robbery of a jewellery store in Lausanne, Switzerland in May. Kostic, 38, escaped from prison in Montenegro a decade ago (after shooting dead one of Pajovic’s friends) and is suspected of committing many robberies in various countries. But when GlobalPost visited his family’s home in Cetinje, there was no sign that any of Kostic’s wealth had benefited his loved ones.
Interpol’s success in arresting Kostic and numerous other Panthers has some of the criminals worried, even though both they and the police know that no thief stays in prison forever and that once the criminals make it to their home countries in the former Yugoslavia they cannot, according to each country’s constitution, be extradited.Two of the men interviewed said they felt the police were nevertheless winning this latest Balkan war. Part of the problem, according to Nikola, is the unwanted glamour and mythological status the Pink Panther moniker has given to these criminals.
“When they give you a name you’re in big trouble,” he said, as he finished up a dinner of fresh sea bass at the seaside restaurant and lit a cigarette, “because every single small policeman is trying to catch you. We lost a lot of guys because of that name. Some of our co-workers got drunk in casinos and were bragging about it, thinking they are something. It’s better to be nothing. The best criminals are those who stay out of prison.”
Former Yugoslav criminals saw their opportunity and are now the world’s most feared diamond thieves. Interpol has dubbed them the Pink Panthers. In a GlobalPost exclusive report, four of the thieves reveal how they plan their robberies, how they dispose of the stolen diamonds — and who is winning the battle between them and police departments from Marbella to Dubai
Post a Comment