How Harry Winston Got Robbed

December 8, 2008 –In a method that can only be described as daring and a little theatrical, a number of armed thieves robbed a Harry Winston store at the heart of Paris, taking with them over 108 million dollars in loose diamonds, diamond rings and other precious jewelry. How did they do it? They did it in drag. Harry Winston is one of the leading retail companies in the diamond and jewelry industry, worn by famous socialites, celebrities and royalties all over the world.

In a scene that one might imagine taking place only in a movie, the armed men walked in wearing wigs and dresses and proceeded to rob the store of diamond rings, necklaces and basically everything valuable. Why would they dress in drag first? Well, if we do a little guesswork with the help of a little bit of heist fiction we might think of two apparent reasons why a robber would want to dress in drag: disguise and surprise.

The disguise theory can be associated with the desire of the diamond robbers to make their escape smoothly. After all, when the people at the store call for help, they’ll be saying that men robbed them, letting them escape because of the disguise. The drag outfits might also help conceal the identity of the robbers from security cameras and other pieces of security equipment. There’s also another thing about wearing something as outrageous as a drag outfit: theatricality. The ridiculousness of the drag outfit tends to draw people’s attention. A panicked person such as one being robbed would attempt to remember very detail he or she can about the criminals. However, the outfits would naturally draw a person’s attention, causing that person to remember the outfit instead of the criminal’s face.

The surprise theory has something more to do with the initiation of the robbery instead of the getaway. By dressing in drag, the robbers are able to establish the element of surprise. How? Well, being a jewelry store, Harry Winston would have found a group of women entering their premises to look at diamond rings and such to be nothing extraordinary. If a group of men approached the store, the staff would have been on alert even before the robbers entered the premises.

These two hypotheses show you that robbing Harry Winston of its loose diamonds and jewelry such as diamond engagement rings was no amateur and impulsive job. Rather, it was obviously carefully planned and executed. The fact that the perpetrators have been working on the heist for a long time is even more evident in the amount of information they seemed to have –they called the staff by name and even knew where every bit of jewelry was located.To pull off a crime involving as much jewelry and money as this definitely took years to plan.

To add insult to a hundred-million-dollar injury, the same store was robbed a little over a year ago, when robbers made off with about 25 million dollars worth of loose diamonds and jewelry. Coincidence? You decide.Much speculation has arisen concerning the possibility of an inside job, and further investigations into the theory are already underway. Store employees have not been exempted as suspects or accomplices to the crime.

So how was Harry Winston robbed of its precious diamond rings and loose diamonds? Apparently, they did it with a lot of careful planning, a bunch of cheap wigs plus some tacky dresses. Although the robbers did have high-powered guns, it turns out that not a single shot was fired and it appears as though no one was seriously injured.