Brink’s heist saga: How do you fence stolen gems worth millions? Inside the jewelry black market
Brink’s heist saga: How do you fence stolen gems worth millions? Inside the jewelry black market
The robbery at Brink’s — the last-ditch effort by jeweler James R. Brink Jr. to hold on to an estimated $2.6 billion worth of gems — isn’t an ordinary case.
The case involves diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other jewels, with some estimated to be worth five years’ worth of wages for anyone on the average American wage of $23,000.
The jewelers’ world, including federal agents, accountants, jewelers’ brokers and private detectives, has taken up the case with gusto, with the jewelry on the move from Arizona to New York this week, from Long Island to New Jersey, from the Carolinas to Florida.
A month earlier, on April 15, four jewelers with Brink’s — including two of its founders — were indicted by a grand jury in federal court in Manhattan for trying to stop two of the robbers from escaping by going on the lam.
But on April 28, after four weeks of travel by federal agents, two of the robbers — Richard R. Kukors, 57, and his driver, Richard L. Fusco, 45 — turned themselves in, ending a manhunt that had involved more than 5,000 law enforcement officers in five states.
The case has also caught the eye of several jewelers, whose names have appeared in the indictment.
One, William T. Everson of New York, has become a target because of a long-standing dispute with Robert M. Sommers, a partner at the Jewelers of the South, who has filed a suit against Everson in a New York court.
The case of an East Coast family of jewelers with the same name as this one is in the federal court in Manhattan.
An unidentified jeweler told The Post that the dispute was over a trademark lawsuit filed by Sommers, the father of a jeweler and a former employee at Everson’s firm.
The father and son did not return phone messages left at Sommers’ law office in New
