In May of 2003, the flagship store of luxury jewelry retailer graph in London was serving an eccentrically dressed customer named Nebojsa Denic though his suit and umbrella may not have appeared unusual. His awkward pompadour wig stood out as he examined a 12 carat ring valued at $450,000. The ring was apparently not quite what Denic was looking for. Remarking that it was too glamorous. Then asking, “Do you have a smaller one?”
Before a more subtle piece could be offered. Denic whipped out a chrome-plated .357 Magnum and told everyone to get on the floor at the same time, a Montenegrin man in his late twenties named Predrag Vujosevic entered the store and used a hammer to smash open display cases and remove 47 pieces of diamond jewelry.
Now with 23 million pounds of jewelry, the two men fled the scene. Simon Stearman, a security guard gave chase and managed to subdue Denic by sitting on him. Stearman reportedly removed Denic’s wig and began berating him for it. Telling the thief how dumb he looked.
Police discovered fake passports
Within days, Scotland Yard identified another accomplice in charge of the burglars’ travel arrangements. One Milan Jovetic. Detectives obtained a warrant to search the apartment where Jovetic was staying with his girlfriend Anna Stankovic. The search turned up to fake Italian passports with no names or photos and a particular jar of face cream. In the cream was a blue diamond ring worth upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars. The press referred to the robbers as the Pink Panthers. A similar hiding spot was used in the 1975 comedy, The Return of the Pink Panther.
While the blue ring had been found more than 22 million pounds of jewelry were still missing along with Vujosevic. Scotland yard detective Steve Alexander tracked phone records to an apartment in Paris thought to be Vujosevic’s home. But Vujosevic was gone. While in Paris, Alexander met up with a special police unit called the Brigade for the Repression of Banditry to compare notes.
It turned out the graph robbery in London wasn’t the first time Vujosevic was suspected of robbing a jewelry store. In fact, it wasn’t even the first graph store he’d targeted. Vujosevic was wanted for robbing a graph store in Amsterdam. It Castiglione in Paris as well as jewelers in Frankfurt, Geneva and Barcelona.
Police caught one member of the Pink Panther crew members
In 2005, Vujosevic was caught trying to cross into France from Italy via car. When Alexander traveled to Paris to question Vujosevic however, he refused to talk about the London robbery. According to his mother Vujosevic was sentenced to nine years in prison, but the missing diamonds were nowhere to be found.
While the London graph heist was the crime that gave the Pink Panthers, their name, it was far from the only one. And in no way, encompassed the full roster of the group. According to Jeweler Magazine, as of 2019, they’d stolen nearly $1 billion worth of goods across 35 countries.
In 2001, a group robbed a jewelry store in the coastal town of Biarritz France. Speaking to their thoroughness for planning jobs to deter any possible witnesses prior to the heist, the men painted a bench outside the store. So no one would happen to sit there with a front row seat of the heist. In 2002, a group stole the Millennium necklace worth $1 million from the Nevada casino in Las Vegas.
Another jewel thief crew made off with $14 million of jewels
In 2003, another group of Panthers made off with $14 million of Jewels from Chaupar in Paris. Then in March, 2004, two Serbian men in wigs stole the Comtesse de Vendome necklace necklace. It featured a 125 carat diamond from a store in Tokyo. In Saint Tropez in 2005, a group of Panthers in wigs and flower print shirts robbed a jewelry store and escaped via a waiting speed boat. Also in 2005, a group in Amsterdam dressed as airport workers transferred 75 million euros of jewelry to a waiting plane. In 2007, the Pink Panthers robbed the Harry Winston boutique in Paris with guns. The next year they robbed the same store dressed as women. Combined the two thefts resulted in 76 million pounds of lost jewelry.
Indeed, it seems the Panthers have no qualms whatsoever about targeting a store, they’ve already robbed. In 2009, they stole 43 pieces worth 40 million pounds from the same graph store in London that they hit in 2003. The heist that gave them their name.
While jewelry has been a specialty of the Pink Panthers, it is not the only luxury item they’ve targeted. In 2008, the group pulled off the largest art heist in European history. Stealing a Monet, a Van Gogh, a Gauguin and a Saison. In total, valued at over 145 million from a gallery in Zurich with so many big money heist to choose from. Some theorize the collective’s most infamous robbery took place in 2016. Stealing an estimated $5.6 million worth of jewelry in Paris from one Kimberly Kardashians, including her 20 carat diamond engagement ring from Kanye West.
Frankly, despite their long list of crimes of which we’ve only discussed a few, not much is known about the group; who their leaders are, where they take the jewels, how they’ve organized, even how many people are in the group are all unknown. Even the name, the Pink Panthers is a moniker given to them by the media, not the group itself. Whenever a crime is committed. If it sounds like someone fitting a description of a Pink Panther, it’s chocked up to the P.P. Posse, a name Ryan coined for the group just now.
Panther jewel thieves group possibly made up of 20-30 thieves
Well, there’s no shortage of detectives and police agencies working to track them down. As we’ve mentioned, there’s not much confirmed information about the group. One Belgian detective Andre Notredame believes the Panther operation is made up of 20 to 30 experienced thieves along with dozens of facilitators in cities, throughout Europe, providing logistical assistance, such as obtaining hotel rooms, cars and weapons.
It does seem to be that the group employs the same strategy in many cases, one they used at 152 different jewelry stores between 2002 and 2010. One well-dressed man enters the store, propping open the security door. Other associates follow through the propped door and using hammers and pickaxes break open display cases and stuff the jewelry into backpacks. They then leave in an older model, often stolen car.
When that strategy won’t do, the Panthers will occasionally use a tactic known as Vol au Belier. Which is basically smashing a storefront window for easy entry and exit of the store. In 2007 and you can find full footage of this elsewhere on YouTube, and the Panthers drove to Audis through the doors of the Wafi mall in Dubai, and then into the doors of the grafts store. Three masked men ran into the store, grabbed 3.4 million in jewelry and escaped in the getaway cars. While their strategies are brazen in what jewel heists aren’t they are not flawless. In the Dubai graph heist, DNA evidence left in the Audis, connecting the robbers to a previous job in Lichtenstein as well as a cell number used to rent those Audi’s led to police identifying eight Panthers.
In October of 2008, one of those men Bosnian Dusko Poznan drove a rented Audi into Monaco with the Serbian man Borko Ilincic. The two men parked and headed towards a Sierra belly store. A store that had already been robbed by the Panthers in 2007, as they were crossing the street, a car suddenly hit Poznan. Poznan and Ilincic reluctantly went to the hospital where Monaco police arrived and arrested the men.
Police still don’t have much info on Pink Panthers
While many Panthers have been arrested. The pressure to give up information has not resulted in any knowledge surrounding any sort of higher organization of the group because of this it’s rumored that the Panthers are actually a loose group of Serbians, Montenegrins, Bosnians and other former Yugoslavians orders for targets may filter down from some unknown higher level. But many Panthers do not appear to know one another. And there may not be an actual leader.
For a group that most considered to be loose knit, however, there still seems to be quite a bit of comradery amongst members, including daring attempts to break one another out of jail. In 2003, a Serbian named Dragan Mikic. One of the Panthers who in 2001 painted the bench outside the jewelry store he was robbing to deter witnesses was arrested the day after stealing from a jewelry store in Courchevel, France.
In jail, local prosecutor, jewel bear, Lafayette noticed how unintimidated Mikic seemed to be saying, “these guys don’t care about being put into jail. They know they are going to escape”. Later that year, Mikic made his first attempt breaking away from guards after a hearing and running across a highway. Mikic was shot in the leg and sent to a more secure prison in view of French, sir, son, that prison, however, apparently turned out to be not secure enough. One day an associate was able to task wire cutters and a ladder over the prison walls so Mikic could escape while another man fired AK rounds at the guards for cover. Mikic was never recaptured.
Then in July, 2013, another Panther, Milan Poparic was serving a six-year sentence in Switzerland for a jewel heist in 2009. A van rammed opened the gate of the prison mashing between the gate and the inside yard under a hail of AK 47 fire. Poparic along with another prisoner used a ladder provided by their accomplices to get over the prison fence. The prisoners and the two men in the van set the van on fire and got in a secondary vehicle and took off at high-speed. Poparic was the third Panther to escape Swiss prison in three months. The other two escaped while Bois-Mermet prison near Lausanne in May, after an accomplice threw a sack over the prison wall containing escape equipment and a gun.
Theories
It seems there must be something more than a loose affiliation keeping the Panthers together.
Theories around what links the group center largely on a shared a geographic and cultural history. The countries of former Yugoslavia, especially Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The group with an Interpol that focuses on the Pink Panthers is specifically charged with pursuing jewels thieves from the former Yugoslavia. For a little context, criminal gangs, rose to dominance in Serbia during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. During this time, many in the region developed an animosity towards the European Union. They were viewed as failing to halt the bloodshed and corruption that was ravaging the region while also denying immigration requests from Belkin citizens.
Essentially, the former Yugoslavians felt like none of the wealthy Western Europeans cared about their plight as a result. It’s possible to look at the heist through the lens of angry former Yugoslavians who steal from Western Europe and theoretically bring the money back East.
In a 2010 article appearing in the New Yorker about the Panthers. Writer David Samuels met with a Serbian man who went by Eugene who claimed to have knowledge of Panther operations. According to Eugene, “they hate everybody. They hate Germany, the Vatican, the USA, their own governments. They’re junkies who hate. You get a call from a guy. You meet 10 other guys and you get paid. Some are cousins. Some are good friends. All of them will be in prison in five or 10 years”.
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