Jewelry store burglarized

Thieves hit a Downtown jewelry store early Friday and took an estimated $150,000 in jewelry while skipping over fake diamonds and silver pieces during a well-organized raid, police said.

The earliest estimates had been that the thieves stole $1 million in jewelry from the second-floor Grafner Brothers jewelers in the 800 block of Liberty Avenue. Authorities later scaled that back.

Police said thieves disabled the top-of-the-line alarm system within four seconds. The security panel and multiple motion detectors were ripped from walls, said J.P. Donahoe, a repairman for Vector Security, which monitors the store's alarm system.

The steel doors on four safes were peeled back with sledgehammers and electric-powered grinding tools, investigators said. The tools were left beside the empty safes. Police said that is not uncommon for professionals, who do not want to be seen with tools after a robbery.

Such robbery teams usually include four people -- a lookout, someone to disable the alarm system, the "muscle-man" to break into safes and a driver, who might or might not go inside the store, police said.

The four safes contained the store's display jewelry, police said. Two other safes in the 5,000-square-foot store appeared to be untouched.

Doors from Liberty Avenue to the four-story building were secure and the store's glass front entrance is covered during off hours by a metal gate. Police suspect the thieves might have entered the building through the roof or a fire escape door.

The jewelry store was closed yesterday. Police said the owner was conducting an inventory. A man who answered the door at the store said Grafner Brothers owner David Lloyd wouldn't comment.

Police said a cleaning crew had finished in the store about midnight Thursday. The alarm company responded to an alarm about 3:37 a.m. Friday, but city police had not determined whether anyone from the alarm company went inside the store. Lisa Laboda, a Vector Security training manager, said she could not discuss any client's account.

Employees of Pegasus, a nightclub in the same building, noticed their phones had gone out at about 2:50 a.m., police said. Detectives said the thieves cut phone wires in the building, perhaps to disconnect the burglar alarm, although Grafner Brothers was receiving telephone calls yesterday.

The club's employees did not notice anything else or hear an alarm, said David Morrow, the club's owner.

"If the alarms go off, it shakes the building," he said, adding that the sound is easily heard over loud music.

Six to eight detectives moved in and out of the building yesterday morning, and uniformed officers blocked entrances. Canine units were called to the scene, but were not used, police said.

A police technician gathered evidence around a first-floor closet with a deadbolt lock that had been pried open. Inside, wires to a fire alarm system had been cut, though it could not be determined by looking whether the wires also hooked into the security system.

"It sounds like a very sophisticated job," said former police Cmdr. Ron Freeman, who retired in 2001 after more than 37 years and had led the city's major crimes division for two decades. "They have to be organized and bright, and they did some research. They were determined to plan it out and must have even thought about how to dispose of the jewelry. ... This is not something you do on a spur of the moment."

Major crimes Cmdr. Maurita Bryant didn't return calls.

Regina Bekman, owner of Yuriy's jeweler on the first-floor of the same building, said her smaller store was untouched.

Nevertheless, she said, a jewelry heist so close "of course" made her nervous.