Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

So we had nothing to do but sit and wait it out. There was a holiday weekend coming up, with Monday the holiday. Most jewelry houses stayed open for business all day Saturday, but even so, figuring a six p.m. closing, that left sixty-three hours for them, until nine a.m. Tuesday morning. And they could be anywhere at all in the United States. We sent out a general alarm bulletin to all members of the jewelers’ associations because that’s all we could do, but we knew most of them wouldn’t even be seen until Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning we didn’t have long to wait though. The call came through at 9:15. It was almost unbelievable. They’d taken one of the biggest firms right here in New York, and oh, brother, how they had taken it. Normally this house kept in the neighborhood of a half million dollars worth of stones in their vault, but a few weeks before they had received a consignment of uncut diamonds from the African mines worth at least a million. The underwriters decided to keep the stuff there until it was cut, for maximum safety, because this house had one of the most modern, burglar-proof, security vaults in the city. Or at least it was until then.

The robbery was a masterpiece, no question about that. The jewelry firm occupied an entire five story stone and brick building on Fifth Avenue. They went in through the brick wall of the adjoining building in the sidestreet on the second floor level. This was more of Leon Schell’s planning. The second floor of the adjoining building was rented out a year before to a rug importing firm, a perfect cover for them. Over weeks and months they had removed the double row of bricks in that building and a single row of bricks in the abutting jewelry building for an almost doorsized opening. The work on their side was concealed from accidental discovery by keeping a bank of metal clothing lockers against that wall. When they were ready to break in all they had to do was wait for a heavy truck to pass by and shove what was left of the wall in on the jewelry house side.

That let them in to a small office on the second floor of the jewelry building. The gaping hole in the wall couldn’t be seen from the street, but to prevent anyone in the building across the street from noticing it they pasted a blue cloth over the opening — the same shade light blue as the walls. And every bit of dirt and debris was cleaned up; we found it all in trash barrels in the adjoining building.

The rest of the second floor, all of the first floor, and the part of the first basement where the vault was located, were protected by burglar-proof, invisible infra-red light beams. Each light source was focused on a light sensitive relay across the room — any interruption of the invisible light would turn in an alarm. The only trouble was that the guy who designed this setup never had basic training in any of the services where he had to crawl on his belly with his back end down to keep under a curtain of live machine gun fire. The light beams were installed in doubles, one at waist height, the other at knee height. I suppose the idea of the doubles was that if one set failed the store still had the protection of the other. But all you had to do to avoid the alarm system was crawl around on the floor under it, which is just what these guys did.

In the first basement, across from the vault, was the electronic marvel that made a burglary impossible. A television camera kept its unblinking eye focused on the vault door; any living thing that entered its range would show up on the viewing screen in the control room of the detective agency that provided security for the jewelry house. This closed-circuit television setup was really great, it did away with the necessity of having watchmen on the premises, and would work for you for as many hours as you wanted at a single stretch. A couple of dozen banks, brokerages houses, and jewelers in the city had them installed. I’d seen the rows of viewing screens in the control room, each screen identified with the name and location of the camera installation. If anything showed on the screen all you had to do was call Police Headquarters and the cops would have the building surrounded in minutes. An extra bonus was that you could punch a key to take a tape record of what was going on.