By Kelly Crow, The New York Times
For a moment, just before he slipped out of his Ford Taurus to buy a morning paper in Los Angeles, Sam wondered whether to bring along the bulky backpack he had stowed in his trunk. He decided against it.
Sam, an uncomplicated man with broad shoulders and a Chinese accent, traveled the country for a jewelry manufacturer in downtown Los Angeles. On this day, May 1, he was making sales calls with his jewelry line, 365 pieces worth about $500,000, which he had stuffed into the canvas backpack. He never carried a briefcase. Too conspicuous.
Minutes after he went to get his paper, standing before the cashier, he heard glass break. He ran out the door toward his car, and stopped and stared. The upholstery in his back seat was mangled. His trunk was empty. When the police arrived later, he was still shaking. He knew that jewels left unattended were never protected by insurance. He knew his career was over.
What he did not know was that, according to the police, word of his jewels was being sent across the country to the operator of a tiny jewelry store in Jackson Heights, Queens. She was Catalina Palacios, a petite 36-year-old from Ecuador with bright dark eyes and thick brown hair. Soon after, Ms. Palacios booked two seats on a Jet Blue flight leaving New York for Long Beach, Calif., on May 5. As always, she planned to take along her traveling companion, a shy, stocky 27-year-old Colombian named John Sergio Salguero.
Neither packed anything except jewelry scales. This journey, like so many others they had taken in the last year, was intended to be a one-day affair.
Sam, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not know these jewelers. But the police in Queens and Los Angeles did. For months, detectives had suspected the couple were working a fence, a black-market operation to buy stolen goods and resell them later as legitimate. With $500,000 in jewelry lost in Los Angeles, the police in New York wondered if the two would turn up in that city. On May 5, they did, at Long Beach Airport. They hailed a cab. Plainclothes police officers followed.
Time will tell what happened that day. Ms. Palacios, speaking through her lawyer, Marlena Gerdts, protests her innocence; Mr. Salguero’s former and current lawyers, Eliel Chemerinski and Edward Lopez, respectively, did not return calls for comment.
But what is clear is that New York City, the nation’s principal jewelry hub, is also a center for the theft and fencing of stolen gems. Just since last fall, at least seven salesmen in the city were attacked and stripped of their precious goods.
“Bank jobs might get you a couple thousand dollars,’' said John Kennedy, a spokesman for the Jewelry Security Alliance, a trade group. “But hitting a jewelry salesperson can bag you a million.’'
Last year, jewelry salesmen nationwide reported having been robbed of $48 million in gold and gems. Most of these salesmen work alone, carrying fortunes with them from jewelry factories to boutiques to trade shows. At the end of a workday, they often take their goods home. Because armed escorts are costly, they make easy marks.
New York’s role in the legitimate gem industry is obvious. The diamond district on 47th Street is swarming with shops, and a swath of Queens, including Long Island City, Sunnyside and Jamaica, is home to more than 130 jewelry manufacturers.
Less evident is that the city also shelters the largest concentration of jewel thieves, according to city police and the F.B.I. Part of an organized group of about 2,000, most of them illegal immigrants from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, these people work in bands of 10 to 20. While they travel regularly to cities around the country - Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Atlanta - to avoid capture, police believe that nearly all of them come home to Queens, particularly Jackson Heights. New York is an easy city in which to disappear.
In the 1960’s, these thieves slashed tires and pulled “distraction’’ jobs to snare jewels. But in the past decade, their methods have grown more violent. In most of the recent gem robberies in the city, the salesmen were accosted at gunpoint. The thieves funneled their spoils through a local fence, the police say, and usually used the money to build mansions in their home countries.
Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and Atlanta have full-time law-enforcement task forces focused on this gang, but New York, with apparently the biggest problem, does not. Detective Walter Burnes, a police spokesman, said the city does not need such a task force because cases are divided up between the department’s gang unit, detective bureau and the major case squad. “These units are more than capable of handling any gang situations like this,’' he said.
In large part, the gang’s local movements are tracked by two low-profile detectives, one working in a small cubicle in the Port Authority’s police outpost at Kennedy Airport, the other out of a subterranean police station alongside the F train in Briarwood, Queens. These men, Detective Curtis J. King of the Port Authority police and Sgt. Scott F. Guginsky of the city police, began working together three years ago on jewelry crime. Both say they believe they have uncovered a fence in Catalina Palacios.
Ms. Gerdts, her lawyer, disagrees. She said Ms. Palacios has a license to buy secondhand jewelry, has worked in the business for 10 years, routinely travels around the country on jewelry business and runs a legitimate jewelry store called Tru Kinny at 90-13 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights.
“At the end of the day, we’ll be able to protect her and get her acquitted,’' Ms. Gerdts said. “The police can say this is a major coup, but when you get down to it, there’s not much evidence there.”
The police tell a different story.
A Mysterious Name
At Kennedy Airport, crimes usually revolve around luggage - stealing it, hiding things in it. In the 28 years that Detective King has worked at the airport’s northern tip, he has met many luggage thieves.
Small-time thieves desperately shed clues about one another in hopes of legal leniency. Detective King, a stocky 51-year-old with ice-blue eyes, encourages this. He takes notes, and when he has enough time and extra manpower, he checks out the stories.
About two years ago, Detective King noticed that a new name - Tru Kinny - had begun filtering through the mutterings of thieves. Who was Tru Kinny? He had no idea, but he heard that this Kinny person liked to buy jewelry plucked from stolen luggage. Soon, he was corrected. Tru Kinny was a store in Jackson Heights, and the person in charge went by the name Catalina.
Detective King called Sergeant Guginsky, a 37-year-old who spikes his brown hair with gel and is built like a quarterback.
“Ever heard of a place called Tru Kinny?” Detective King asked.
“Sure,” Sergeant Guginsky said. “Almost all the guys we arrest have Catalina’s business card in their wallets.”
Then, last fall, Detective King got a call from the F.B.I. The bureau said the authorities in Brussels had intercepted a package stuffed with jewelry, most of which had been stolen throughout Europe over the previous summer. The package was addressed to a Catalina Palacios.
After Detective King and Sergeant Guginsky met to talk strategy, they decided that more proof was needed. So, Sergeant Guginsky began driving by Ms. Palacios’s store, located on a sleepy shopping strip, and taking surveillance photographs. With its dark blue awning and pink neon piping on the front window, the store looked like countless other local shops, but it kept odd hours, sometimes closing at 2:30 p.m. and other times staying open until 11:30 p.m.
More jewel thieves turned up with Tru Kinny cards. Sergeant Guginsky tried to reach Ms. Palacios at her apartment in Rego Park, Queens, but no one ever answered the phone or the door.
Meanwhile, a rash of jewelry robberies was making Queens seem like the Wild West. On Sept. 9, for example, a salesman for Devidoll Designs was pulling out of a parking lot in Astoria when men rushed his car, smashed the windows and stole $250,000 in jewels at gunpoint, according to the police. On Oct. 10, three Spanish-speaking men approached a car on a street in Astoria and tapped on the windows with gun butts. The salesman inside gave up his goods.
On Nov. 20, two salesmen for KBS Jewelry in Manhattan were driving in Brooklyn when a tire went flat. One man went for help, but as he returned, he saw four Hispanic men hauling away two bags containing $500,000 in jewelry. The second salesman had been told to stay in the car.
Sergeant Guginsky could not be sure that any of these jewels were sent to Tru Kinny. But they were undoubtedly being fenced somewhere. What he and Detective King searched for was a connection.
Clues in the Air?
A possible breakthrough came on March 6, when some men pulled a knife on a salesman carrying $700,000 in jewels in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb. Five days later, police caught the men driving around Los Angeles in a rental car with Missouri plates.
At Kennedy Airport, Detective King was sitting at his desk when his phone rang. It was Detective Joe Williamson of the Los Angeles police. He and his partner, Detective Mike Woodings, were superstars in the jewelry industry for their ability to catch South American jewel thieves.
“Hey, you ever heard of a Catalina?” Detective Williamson asked. “We just scrolled through a couple of cellphones from an arrest here, and both have a New York number and Catalina on speed dial.”
Detective King called Sergeant Guginsky and asked, “Could it possibly be Catalina Palacios?’'
“Sounds like it,” Sergeant Guginsky said.
Detective King started calling the airlines to check out Ms. Palacios’s recent travel habits. Airline records showed that she had flown into Kansas City on March 7, the day after the robbery. The Los Angeles detectives called her cellphone company, which registered calls made on her cellphone within Overland Park.
Detectives King and Williamson began checking other flights made by Ms. Palacios since October, more than 20. They discovered that in several cases the flight dates and destinations corresponded closely to recent robberies of jewelry salesmen. A robbery was reported in Seattle on Nov. 6; she flew to Seattle on Nov. 9. Courier robberies were reported in San Francisco and Los Angeles on Jan. 14 and Jan. 15, respectively. On Jan. 16, she flew into Oakland, Calif., and out of Long Beach the next day. On April 24, $500,000 was stolen in Tempe, Ariz. On April 25, Mr. Salguero flew into Long Beach and flew back a few hours later.
“We’ve got a pattern here,” Detective King told Sergeant Guginsky.
But in late April, the men decided they needed more information. The timing of the flights could be coincidental.
Through the Keyhole
Then came Sam.
News of the salesman’s $500,000 loss in Los Angeles spread throughout the jewelry industry and especially interested Detective King and Sergeant Guginsky. The theft took place on May 1, and they surmised that the jewelry would be fenced within the week.
When Detective King saw that Ms. Palacios and Mr. Salguero had booked flights to Long Beach for May 5, he notified the detectives in Los Angeles. He wanted to fly out himself, but he decided to stay in New York in case the couple made it back with the jewels. Instead, he and Sergeant Guginsky prepared to get a search warrant for Tru Kinny if an arrest was made.
In Los Angeles, Detective Williamson and a few police officers followed the couple to the Downtown Marriott, near the city’s largest cluster of jewelry stores, where they were joined by Detective Woodings.
Ms. Palacios and Mr. Salguero checked into the hotel before lunch. They did not leave their room until 3:30 p.m. By that time, someone had visited them, and at least eight officers had taken over the room across the hall. When the pair left, Detective Williamson watched them carry a box into the L.A. Jewelry Mart on nearby Hill Street. He saw them approach a Brink’s shipping store and mail the box. He followed them to a steakhouse around the corner.
After they ate, they ambled back to their hotel room. The police watched through the keyhole, ready to move. Minutes after 8 p.m., they walked out, straight into the tall form of Detective Woodings.
“We’re conducting an investigation, and we would like to talk to you,” he said calmly. Detective Williamson, standing nearby, thought the pair looked stunned. The two were placed in separate hotel rooms and interviewed by police officers.
Detective Woodings said Ms. Palacios told him she had come to Los Angeles to buy some silver from a store. (Ms. Gerdts said her client said jewelry, not silver.) But upon her arrival, Ms. Palacios said, she realized the store was closed.
“Did you have an appointment?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Did you call the store ahead of time or call after you realized it was closed?” he asked.
“No.”
In the next room, Mr. Salguero said little.
“I’m a jeweler,” he told Detective Williamson. “I shipped some jewelry. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
The box the couple had taken to the jewelry mart was confiscated by the police in transit. Inside, Detective Williamson found three plastic bags the size of grapefruits. One was packed with 14-carat jewelry, another with 18-carat items, and a third with platinum pieces and a $19,000 diamond-and-sapphire bracelet. In all, there were about 330 pieces, with five beige washcloths from the Marriott wedged in as stuffing. The box was addressed to Tru Kinny.
Detectives said they later confirmed that the jewelry was from Sam’s backpack.
After booking the pair, Detective Williamson called an excited Detective King back in Queens. Detective King then called Sergeant Guginsky, who stationed several police officers outside the closed front door of Tru Kinny. No one would go in or out.
The two then secured a search warrant and spent the following day, May 7, rummaging around the tiny store. But they found little other than an empty safe and several dusty display cases. A handful of pieces inside turned out to be stolen, including a 1985 Big East basketball ring from St. John’s University. Sergeant Guginsky tracked down the owner; he had kept the ring at his mother’s house, which had been burglarized months before.
Sergeant Guginsky was disappointed at the slim findings, but Detective King was more cheerful. He believes that the aggressive chase for anything stolen is always worth it. “If we can make it unbearably hard for a thief to sell his goods here,’' he said, “maybe he’ll find another line of work.”
The charge against each of the two jewelers was a single count of receiving stolen property. Neither has a criminal record. At a hearing May 23, a judge ruled that there was enough evidence to allow a trial. At a hearing last Tuesday, a defense motion to dismiss the case was denied.
“We don’t have a lot of information yet because the case is just beginning,’' Ms. Gerdts, the lawyer for Ms. Palacios, said. “But the only truth so far is that my client is being charged with only one count of receiving stolen property.”
That property is back with its owners, the jewelry manufacturer in Los Angeles. Sam, the victimized salesman, is back making sales calls, but with only 60 pieces.
The day of the arrest, Sam was at home, wondering how he would hang onto his job with so many jewels missing. He felt overwhelmed, violated. His mind whirred with criminal scenarios. Where had his jewels gone? He did not need many guesses.
Suddenly, his boss called from the police station. He had miracle news.
“I was praying,” Sam told him. “If those bags had hit New York, they would have been gone in a minute.”