“We're talking about guys who are greedy. If these crimes were connected, as he suspected, there were ringleaders calling the shots. Another: He didn't want to catch only the men who entered the stores. This was just one of the challenges Stearman faced. Masks and gloves obscure the robbers' identities, so unless they leave DNA behind, there are often few leads to follow. It's rare for one to last longer than two minutes, and most are over in half that. These robberies were a form of street terror. “I don't want my family at a mall where this stuff is going on,” he told me. What inspired Stearman to take on the case, more than the robbers' seeming fondness for Chevys, was imagining the suffering of those who witnessed the crimes. “I always feel like I'm right behind the criminals and if I stop, they get further ahead.” “I obsess over these cases,” Stearman told me. attorney who worked on the watch-heist case, described Stearman as relentless. His casual look, however, belied a furious work ethic. When I first sat down with him, he wore his preferred uniform: an untucked T-shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors.
Time bandit apparel plus#
That was a plus for a guy who shuns neckties except for when he has to go to court.
“There wasn't a lot of uptightness,” he said. Above all else, they seemed to put a premium on competence. The special agents-the ATF has just over 2,600, one-fifth that of the FBI-weren't flashy or self-important. Stearman had been with the ATF for 10 years, ever since he graduated from college. Their getaway car: a stolen Chevy Impala. He also read about a December 2015 robbery in which three masked men had used hammers and axes to smash cases in a Ben Bridge Jeweler in Riverside County. He saw a story about the watches strewn on the 405 freeway and another, about the Century City heist. Were late-model Chevys a signature?Ĭurious, Stearman searched for similar robberies on Google. Stearman knew repeat offenders could be almost ritualistic, mimicking past offenses: passing the bank teller the same note, say, or always wearing the same shirt or hat. The heists also seemed meticulously planned, right down to repeated use of stolen Chevys as getaway cars. Most robberies are investigated by local law enforcement and prosecuted in state court, but these seemed organized, which could mean conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery-a federal crime. Stearman had wrapped up his gun-store investigation and was ready for another major case. About a mile from the mall, police found an abandoned black Chevy Impala containing evidence related to the crime. They smashed a glass case, grabbed 133 Rolex watches worth more than $2 million, and fled. Two weeks later, five men in hooded sweatshirts and masks entered a watch boutique in South Coast Plaza, an Orange County mall. Arce said a prayer as splinters of glass flew everywhere. Now the store's assistant manager, Daniel Arce, was lying facedown next to that same case as the robbers attacked it with hammers. Employees noticed his outlandish outfit-a checked blazer and long denim shorts-and the way he used his phone to film the case that held the priciest watches. Just four days earlier, a man built like one of the robbers had visited Gearys, posing as a customer.
“Hurry up!” the man shouted to his partner. “Get on the ground!” he yelled, and the guard and three other Gearys employees dropped to the floor. The first intruder, a short, stocky man carrying a rifle, burst in and his gun went off, shattering a glass case.
Dupre is a solid six feet three inches, but as he rushed to lock the front door, the men were already pushing their way in. “They're coming, they're coming!” yelled Damian Dupre, a security guard at a Gearys luxury-watch boutique, when he saw the men running toward the store. By the time they had reached the top, they'd pulled on ski masks and they were sprinting. On a quiet Monday around noon, two men dressed in black stepped onto an ascending escalator in the underground parking lot of an open-air mall in Century City in Los Angeles.
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