Why no one can stop the Pink Panther jewel thieves
By Harry Mount From The Daily Mail, UK
As brutal as they’re cunning, they’re the gang of 200 ex-soldiers who’ve struck across the world
Lone raider stole £88m of jewels from Carlton Cannes Hotel on Sunday
French hotel was setting for 1955 Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch A Thief
Chief suspects in the robbery are a gang known as the Pink Panthers
The novelist Somerset Maugham called the French Riviera a sunny place for shady people. On Sunday, one particularly shady customer dropped into Cannes — and swiftly high-tailed it out again £88million the richer.
In a staggeringly brazen heist, the lone raider marched into the Carlton Cannes Hotel, the most glamorous hotel in the city.
There, cool as ice, his face concealed by a motorcycle helmet, he threatened hotel staff with an automatic pistol before swiping a pile of diamonds and other gems from an exhibition in the lobby being held by Leviev Diamonds, one of the world’s top jewellers.
Right under the noses of hotel security guards, the masked crook shovelled the jewels into a briefcase and then calmly strolled off down the Croisette — the seafront promenade where film stars, models and billionaires go to see and be seen.
In recent years, the Croisette has also become a favoured haunt for the world’s most audacious diamond thieves.
In May, during the annual Cannes Film Festival, £1million of jewellery was taken from the safe in the hotel room of an 
American jeweller working for Chopard, one of Switzerland’s most famous diamond merchants.
Only days later, a £1.6million necklace was lifted by a crook at a film industry party just down the coast at the even more exclusive resort of Cap d’Antibes.
The Carlton Cannes Hotel itself — the epicentre of Riviera glamour ever since it was built in 1911 — has proved a particularly irresistible target.
In August 1994, three machine gun-toting crooks stormed into the hotel’s jewellery shop and cleared its shelves of £39million worth of gems.
They have never been caught.
But the raid this weekend was more outrageous still. First estimates put the value of the stolen jewellery at £35million. Now, following a detailed inventory of the missing jewels, the French police believe they may be worth as much as £88million.
The robbery could have come straight out of a Hollywood heist movie — and, indeed, in an intriguing case of life imitating art, the Carlton Cannes was the setting for the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock movie To Catch A Thief.
Cary Grant plays a suave, retired cat burglar suspected of stealing diamonds belonging to the millionaire mother of his gorgeous love interest, Grace Kelly.
But that’s not the only Hollywood twist, for the chief suspects in the robbery are a gang known as the Pink Panthers, taking their nickname from the first Inspector Clouseau film about an international thief intent on stealing the world’s largest diamond — the eponymous Pink Panther. In the past, the gang — who have struck all over the world — have made provocative, teasing references to the film.
After a 2002 raid on Graff’s, a Mayfair jeweller, one gang member, Milan Jovetic from Montenegro, hid a £500,000 blue diamond ring in his girlfriend’s jar of face cream — a ploy used in the Pink Panther comedy.
But there was nothing funny about the attack. During the raid, Jovetic’s accomplice brandished a loaded Magnum .357 revolver, and the gang stole £23million worth of jewellery — only £3million of which has been recovered.
In May 2005, Graff’s was attacked a second time — again, it is thought, by the Pink Panthers. This time, £1million of gems were taken.
Only last Thursday (25), one of the Pink Panther ringleaders, a 34-year-old Bosnian, Milan Poparic, broke out of a Swiss prison. He had been serving a six-year sentence for another diamond robbery in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 2009.
During last week’s jailbreak, a group of his accomplices battered their way into Orbe prison by driving a van, pedal to the floor, through the front gate.
They then kept prison guards at bay with a hail of automatic gunfire from their AK-47 assault rifles, as Poparic and another man — a Swiss kidnapper called Adrian Albrecht — scaled the prison walls and jumped into a waiting van, which sped off.
As if this wasn’t embarrassing enough for the Swiss authorities, Albrecht had escaped from the same jail before, in 1992. And only in May this year, a third member of the Pink Panther gang escaped from the Bois-Mermet prison in the Swiss town of Lausanne.
The suspicion is that Poparic, reunited with his old partners in crime, then co-ordinated Sunday’s raid in Cannes.
He had plenty of partners to choose from. For the Pink Panthers are a loose affiliation of up to 200 thieves, many of them ex-soldiers from the former Yugoslavia, hardened by the Balkan wars.
The group is thought to have been involved with burglaries worth more than £380million across 120 jewellery shops in more than 20 countries, from the U.S. to Switzerland, and Dubai to Spain.
Police suspect the Pink Panthers of everything from drug-trafficking to murder — but what the gang especially like is old-fashioned jewel theft.
The techniques used in their raids are straightforward: not much more than a classic smash-and-grab.
But they like to spice up their crimes with a dash of movie heist daring.
In one raid in Biarritz, on the western coast of France, they gave a public bench near their target jewellery shop a fresh coat of paint to stop any passers-by sitting there and becoming accidental witnesses.
In 2007, during a raid on a shop in Ginza, a high-end shopping district in Tokyo, suspected members of the gang stole a £1.5million diamond tiara.
After spraying three saleswomen with tear gas — temporarily blinding but not otherwise harming them — they helped themselves to a tiara, necklaces and other gems.
Security footage showed the gang members calmly walking into the store dressed in slim-fitting suits and crisply ironed white shirts. One even carried an umbrella. They were in and out of the shop in just 36 seconds and made their getaway on bicycles, weaving in and out of the heavy traffic.
They used another novel mode of getaway transport in 2005 in St Tropez, where the gang raided a jewellery store before making their escape in a speedboat. They wore masks over their faces and garish, floral-print Hawaiian shirts.
When they attacked a branch of the jewellers Graff’s — a favourite target — in Dubai in 2008, they smashed their way into the glazed front of the shop in two limousines, before making off with jewellery worth £8million.
And like any Hollywood criminals, the Panthers like their disguises.
In 2008, they dressed up as women for an attack on jeweller’s Harry Winston in Paris. They wore blonde wigs, sunglasses and fashionable scarves — but carried concealed hand grenades and .357 Magnum guns. They left with emeralds, rubies and diamonds worth nearly £70 million.
For a 2009 raid on Graff’s in Bond Street, it is thought they used the latest in prosthetic make-up. This time they got away with £40million of jewels.
But it would be utterly wrong to romanticise the Pink Panthers, who are known for their ruthless pursuit of wealth, carrying out raids armed with Kalashnikovs.
In 2005, a shop assistant at a jeweller’s in Vienna was shot in the face during a robbery attributed to the Pink Panthers.
Rarely are the jewels recovered. Necklaces, tiaras and bracelets are broken up, their gold or platinum settings melted down, and individual gems sold in plain sight on the international diamond market.
Arresting the perpetrators has proved easier than tracking down the stolen jewels.
And the burglaries continue despite the arrests.
In 2007, three gang members were convicted of taking part in Japan’s biggest ever jewel robbery, when £15million in merchandise was stolen, including the Comtesse de Vendome necklace of 116 diamonds, with its centrepiece 125-carat diamond.
Three more Panthers were convicted in 2008 for robberies across France. Others have been arrested in Cyprus, Monaco, Rome and Athens, where three Serbs were spotted in March 2012 casing a jewellery shop, disguised with wigs. One of them has already escaped from Athens prison.
But the organisation is seemingly unstoppable. Cut off one head of this hydra-like gang and another two or three grow in its place.
For anxious jewellers, keeping an eye on their diamond necklaces, the terrifying truth is that there are so many Pink Panthers, and they are so adept at breaking out of jail, that even a whole pack of Inspector Clouseaus — however accidentally brilliant — could never hope to round them all up.
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