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When armed robbers swooped down on gem salesmen on San Francisco streets last month, making off with $650,000 of gold and gems in two separate daylight robberies, Howard Cohn recognized a too-familiar pattern.
Cohn, a third-generation jeweler and president of Golden Gate Gems, suspects that the robberies were the work of the same gang of professional jewel thieves who last year stripped his salesman of $1 million during a selling trip to Sherman Oaks.
Jewelry industry insiders like Cohn - and, increasingly, federal officials - believe the recent string of eight violelnt Bay Area holdups and 62 others nationwide is the work of a sophisticated South American theft syndicate made up of former police and soldiers. Last year, they hauled in $61.5 million from traveling jewelry salesmen. Victims have been beaten or pistol-whipped, and in Chicago police have arrested three members of the gang blamed for gunning down a jeweler in that city.
Easy targets
Gem salesmen are easy targets because they tend to travel alone, carrying gems worth millions in easily identifiable sample cases. And the Bay Area is a hotbed for such crimes because it is one of the country's primary gem markets, centered around the Jewelry Mart in San Francisco.
Los Angeles Police Detective Mike Woodings, head of an organized theft unit focused on the gang and one of the top authorities in the country, believes that San Francisco and Los Angeles are home to nearly 600 of the thieves.
Woodings, who often consults with San Francisco police on local jewel thefts, also...