The FBI released the below
report:
For the high-end jewelry
sellers on the popular online classifieds site Craigslist, it must have seemed
like their ship had come in: A prospective buyer in California offered not only
their asking price but would fly them into town and have a limo waiting.
“The individual would think
they were going to the jewelry store to meet with the actual buyer,” said
Special Agent Darin Heideman, who works out of the Oakland Resident Agency of
the FBI’s San Francisco Division, “when in fact, a co-conspirator would take
them to a predetermined location, assault them, and then basically rob them of
all their items.”
The crew of robbers, based in
the San Francisco Bay Area, is estimated to have stolen more than $500,000 in
jewelry from victims who traveled from more than six states between November
2012 and December 2013. Five men were charged in 2014 in connection with the
violent robberies during which, among other items, a $90,000 Cartier watch, a
$14,000 Rolex watch, and a $19,000 engagement ring were stolen. The last member
of the crew to be sentenced, Michael Anthony Martin, 42, of Tracy, California,
was handed a term last December of 30 years in prison.
The case illustrates how the
FBI and police work together on cases that may at first appear to be local or
isolated, but on closer investigation can span multiple jurisdictions. In this
case, a Bay Area detective’s efforts to solve a “snatch-and-grab” robbery at a
Fremont, California coffee shop ultimately led him to more than 20 similar
robberies of victims from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida. Fremont Police
Department Det. Michael Gebhardt’s legwork also uncovered the scheme’s
mastermind: a prison inmate who personally called Craigslist targets—purporting
to be a successful record producer—and assigned his co-conspirators to carry
out the plans.
“It’s definitely a tale of
something that started small and just mushroomed into this massive
investigation,” said Gebhardt.
It all started in 2012 with
the brazen robbery of a Bay Area man who was selling his watch. The seller and
the purported buyer, both local, arranged to meet in Fremont in a public
place—a coffee shop. “As they are talking, the potential buyer just grabs the
Rolex and takes off running,” Gebhardt said.
“It’s definitely a tale of
something that started small and just mushroomed into this massive
investigation.”
Video surveillance and the
so-called buyer’s cell phone number turned up an identity that police were able
to link to two more robberies in Bay Area cities. In each case, the victims
were selling Rolex watches and the prospective buyers grabbed the goods and
ran. “The M.O. [modus operandi] is the same,” Gebhardt recalled thinking. “He’s
targeting people on Craigslist for Rolexes.”
Two months later, the
detective received word that police in Oakland were investigating five similar
robberies, including one they witnessed firsthand during a separate
investigation. Oakland police officers arrested three men, who it turned out
were associates of the watch thief Gebhardt was investigating for the 2012
coffee shop heist. With some digging, Gebhardt learned his subject was taking
directions from his father, an inmate at the California Men’s Colony state
prison. The father was using a number of relatives, including his son and a
cousin in Texas, to lure prospective Craigslist sellers with flights and limos
and then have co-conspirators rob them once they were captive.
For the sellers, it might
have seemed a safe bet when prospective buyers offered plane tickets and limos.
“That’s exactly what they want,” said FBI Special Agent Paul Healy, who also
worked the case out of Oakland. “They’re being told everything’s being taken
care of.”
Heideman said it was a relatively
small investment for the robbers. “You have to think—what does a plane ticket
cost? Probably $400 to $500. A limo is going to cost a couple hundred bucks,”
he said. “If you're traveling with a $30,000 diamond, that’s just a drop in the
bucket to what they are going to steal. They were able to build these personas
and build trust where there should not have been trust.”
Gebhardt learned of a
Wisconsin woman who flew to St. Louis to sell the $19,000 diamond ring she had
listed on Craigslist but ended up getting robbed instead. When Gebhardt saw a
picture of the suspect, he recognized it was the same guy he’d been trying to
run down—the son of the prison inmate. Still other cases—from Florida, Oregon,
and Colorado—started to point back to the same prime suspects and associates.
“So we needed one big agency
to basically be able to charge this thing,” Gebhardt said. The detective called
the FBI, and agents from the Oakland Resident Agency helped set up a sting.
They posted an ad on Craigslist hoping to attract the attention of the robbery
crew’s leader in prison. And it worked.
“He calls me from prison and
we set up a deal to sell my Rolex to him,” Gebhart said. “I would be flying in
from Texas to the Oakland airport. He would have a driver pick me up.”
As that plan was coming to
fruition, the FBI discovered that another Craigslist seller from Los Angeles
was to arrive—with his Rolex—in Oakland on the same day.
“Obviously we couldn't let
him get robbed, but we also didn’t want to tip him off because we didn't want
him to call the guy that was going to rob him,” said Heideman. So the
investigators posed as Craigslist buyers, contacted the seller in L.A., and
outbid the robbery crew. They met him in a bank parking lot in Oakland. “We
basically pulled him aside and said, ‘Here’s what you were about to walk
into,’” Gebhardt said. “He was obviously relieved.”
“They were able to build
these personas and build trust where there should not have been trust.”
Special Agent Darin Heideman,
FBI Oakland Resident Agency
Meanwhile, on the same day of
the sting in Oakland—December 16, 2013—two other simultaneous operations took
down the robbery crew’s mastermind in prison and arrested his son, who was in
hiding in Alabama.
The arrests led to federal
indictments in 2014 against five defendants who have since received sentences
ranging from 41 months to 30 years. The father, who cooperated with
investigators, was given an addition seven years in prison for his role.
Looking back, the robbery
crew was so prolific and violent they had no choice but to expand beyond their
local area, agents said. Even limo drivers stopped working with them. “They
would literally wear out a jurisdiction,” said Healy. “So they would go 40
miles away—or 400 miles away—to another town to do it.”
Tips for Staying Safe
The Craigslist website offers
tips on personal safety when meeting someone for the first time. The site
states, “With billions of human interactions, the incidence of violent crime
related to craigslist is extremely low.”
Among the personal safety
tips:
Insist on a public meeting
place like a cafe, bank, or shopping center.
Do not meet in a secluded
place or invite strangers into your home.
Be especially careful
buying/selling high-value items.
Tell a friend or family
member where you're going.
Take your cell phone along if
you have one.
Consider having a friend
accompany you.
Trust your instincts.
Meanwhile, some jurisdictions
have moved to create “Safe Lots” for exchanging items from online classifieds.
Det. Gebhardt says his department suggests on social media that if people are
going to meet, they should meet in their local police department’s parking lot.
“If somebody says, ‘I don't
want to meet there,’ then that’s probably a red flag about the person you’re
meeting,” he said.
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