Jewel-heist suspects could be from GTA
Canada-wide warrant issued for couple seen on video
Police are closing in on a pair of sticky-fingered diamond thieves suspected in a series of robberies across Canada — and the trail has reportedly led them to the Toronto area.
The names of the suspects have not been released but their smug, smiling images are clear as day thanks to surveillance camera footage of one robbery on Oct. 7 at a jewelry store in Saint John, N.B.
He is a 70-year-old man with a white beard and quick hands. She is a 44-year-old woman who keeps a stash of phoney diamonds in her pocket while appearing to scroll distractedly through her iPhone.
Officially, the couple is suspected in two robberies this month — in Saint John and Charlottetown, P.E.I. — in which real diamonds worth about $30,000 were surreptitiously switched for worthless cubic zirconium imitations.
They are the object of a Canadawide arrest warrant issued Wednesday by the Saint John police force.
Unofficially, the haul could total more than $100,000, said Wayne Smith, owner of Saint John’s W. Smith & Co. Fine Jewellers, whose store was the target of a $10,000 theft.
“These people have robbed from one end of the country to the other . . . I know of one store that got hit for $70,000 and they don’t really want to talk about it. This is how crooks get away,” Smith said Wednesday.
“I know another store got hit for $21,000 in Vancouver. There was somebody in Windsor. Once this all comes together, I said I’d be more than willing to fly to Toronto and help go through the stones that they find to help distribute them back to their rightful owners.”
A spokesperson for Toronto Police would not comment on Smith’s assertion that the couple is from the Toronto area, saying any such admission might undermine attempts to arrest the suspects.
But it would be hard to imagine that the wanted individuals do not already know they are being sought. Their faces and their alleged crimes have been flashed across the news for days.
On surveillance-camera video that was released to the public by Smith, the couple can be seen looking at necklaces, earrings and other jewelry before being presented with the loose cut diamonds. While the sales representative walks away to grab a mirror for the couple, the man switches the real diamond for a fake that he has received from the pocket of his female accomplice. With the switch done, he stuffs the gem into his back pocket.
Smith said the couple gave the impression they were passengers on a cruise ship that had docked in the city the day of the robbery because they kept asking for prices to be con- verted into U.S. currency.
But he said that the police investigation ultimately proved that was a lie because all cruise ships take pictures of their passengers when they board the vessel and when they get off. Smith added that the authorities were able to determine that the couple was travelling in a car.
“With Mr. Smith and his cameras, I think they met their match,” John Lamont, crime director with Jewellers Vigilance Canada, an industry association, said this week.
Smith said he decided to release the footage to the public because he was confident he had earned enough goodwill through community involvement to crowd-source the search for the culprits.
But releasing the video also had the unintended consequence of prompting sheepish jewellers to come forward and admit that they, too, had been victims of what is known as a diamond-switching scheme.
The Charlottetown diamond theft came to light only when the store’s owner heard about the theft in New Brunswick and realized his store had also been targeted by a similarlooking couple, said Charlottetown Police deputy chief Gary McGuigan.
On Tuesday, Charlottetown police issued a photograph from surveillance footage that shows an older man and middle-aged woman.
“We believe they may be responsible for (thefts in) Ontario, P.E.I., New Brunswick and possibly Nova Scotia,” said Lamont, who handles the distribution of crime advisories and acts as a go-between with police for Jewellers Vigilance Canada.
While jewel theft is still a rare occurrence, jewellers are often reluctant to admit they’ve been robbed.
“They’re not sure that the police can do anything,” Lamont said. “But in fact we have this network set up and we work very closely with the police. So it’s a situation where we’re trying to get jewellers to realize how important it is to identify these incidents because when we have the information, then we can alert other jewellers.”