GREAT JEWEL ROBBERIES.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1921, Page 10

GREAT JEWEL ROBBERIES.

PROFESSIONAL THIEVES’ BIG HARVEST Fashions and. customs in crime change as in everything else, in accordance with changing conditions and circumstances. The old-fashioned bank burglar has gone out of business because the vaults of the modern big banks are too skilfully guarded. The old-time big jewellery store robberies have practically ceased because the valuables are too carefully protected to afford opportunity for wholesale thefts.

The epidemic of bond robberies in the financial sections which startled the country last winter have been pretty well ended because brokers, banks and the bonding insurance companies have learned a lesson and are safeguarding securities more carefully (says a writer in the New York American). At the present moment American thieves have centred their attention on the jewel of wealthy and fashionable American women, because this is found to be the easiest field of operations. For the last months there has been a more or less important jewellery robbery almost every night in some fashionable section of the country, and very few of the burglars have been caught. Everybody remembers the Caruso robbery of nearly half a million dollars’ worth of jewels early last June. This case was given wide publicity in the newspapers, but of the multitude of other jewel robberies here and there throughout the country very few details reached the ears of the newspapers. Why have professional thieves turned their attention industriously to women’s jewels? The reasons are not (hard to seek. In the first place / the jewellery possession of wealthy American women run into countless millions. Where is there a multi-millionaire American’s wife Who has not from a hundred thousand to a million dollars’ worth or more of jewels? It has been estimated that within the walls of one public building, the Metropolitan Opera House, on many an occasion there are jewels to the value of ten millions in the hair, the ears, around the throats, on the fingers and on the clothes of the women present.

Indeed, at some social functions or fancy dress occasions, one individual woman of social prominence, sometimes wears not only all her own wealth of jewels but loads down her headdress and costume with many added jewels, borrowed for the occasion from wealthy friends. If a wealthy man owns securities running into the hundreds of thousands he does not keep them in his house or on his person or in his office. They are securely locked up in the vaults of a bank or safe deposit company. But if his wife owns a two hundred thousand dollar necklace or matched pearls and another half million dollar’s worth of miscellaneous rings brooches and jewels, they cannot be given the security of a safe reposit vault if the owner is to wear them and get any satisfaction out of them. Here lies the secret of the repeated and successful raids upon the private jewel collections of fashionable and wealthy women. It is easy for a thief to make a list of millionaires’ wives who own valuable jewellery. The next step is to watch the movements of the owner of the gems. Sooner or later the opportunity will come for the thief to find the jewels removed from their customary hiding place or place of partial security. Sophia Lyons, the most expert American jewel thief known to the police, in a burst of confidence told how she and her confederates had sometimes spent an entire year watching a woman before the opportunity offered. One enormous haul of jewellery was made from an American woman’s bedroom ii) a hotel at Monte Carlo after they had watched her New York residence, her country house at Newport, and followed her on social visits to Chicago and Washington, had crossed the ocean with her on the steamship, had taken rooms in the same hotel in London and in Paris and in Nice, and finally caught her off her guard one night after her return from the Monte Carlo Casino to her hotel apartments. It was a long investment, Sophia Lyons explained, of time, patience and money, but it paid handsomely when the thieves at last got into their hands a million dollars’ worth of jewels. Even bolder and more cruelly crude were the operations of two Chicago jewel thieves who watched the departing guests from a whist party in the early mornipg hours. As six women guests at the whist party were leaving in an automobile two robbers pistols in hand, jumped on the running boards. One held his revolver at the chaffeur’s head while it was still within sight of the bright lights of the residence and ordered the driver to go to the entrance of a near-by park. Here the thieves stripped the ladies of their jewels and escaped through the shrubbery.

In the home of Mrs George McFadden, jun.. near Philadelphia, thieves in the night made their way to a box containing jewellery' to the value of £50,000. This included a string of pearls worth £40,000 and was one of the finest owned in the United States. No trace of this has been found and by now probably the rope, consisting of 165 pearls, has been taken apart and each pearl put in another setting.

At the home of Mrs. William Sackett Duell, of Meadowbrook, Pa., a function of note was held. Soon after the last guest had departed Mrs. Duell retired to her room, and to her amazement and dismay saw that her jewel box had been ransacked and rare family'jewels worth over £5OOO abstracted. Her distress was the more acute because she was forced to the realisation that she had actually been graciously entertaining the thief that evening—that, perhaps, she had even been reckoning the thief on her list of cherished friends. Toward early summer £15,000 worth of jewels were stolen from the home of Mrs. Hamilton Fish, the weill-known social leader. This robbery has always been shrouded in mystery, as neither the family nor the police would admit anything. But the robbery was reported, just the same and a servant suspected. And so it has gone. These are but some of the more important jewel robberies that have had police, detectives and the surety companies by the ears for the past year not in New York alone, but all over the country.