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The Crime that Rocked the Capital

Gone in 90 seconds – not a Hollywood blockbuster but how a chillingly executed heist from a jewellery store in the heart of Scotland’s capital could be described. In that astonishingly short period of time, armed raiders succeeded in snatching more than £730,000 worth of jewellery and making their escape. They evaded capture by motorbike through Edinburgh’s crowded city centre whilst shop- and office-workers thronged the streets at the end of another day’s work.

For the staff at the flagship branch of Rox, the national chain of boutique jewellers, it was a harrowing experience as they came face to face with robbers whose determination matched their aggression. Those involved required counselling in the aftermath as they came to terms with the experience they had been put through.

A crisp winter’s evening provided the backdrop to a piece of high drama on 15 January 2013. The post-Christmas sales were in full swing but, for the shadowy figures who approached Rox that night, the discounts were of little consequence. The clock was showing 17:13 when the doors of the shop burst open. A hooded figure led the charge, brandishing a revolver as he ran through the shop towards the stunned staff. Dressed in dark clothing and gloves, he made a beeline for the counter at the rear of the store where two members of the Rox team were stationed, aiming the handgun at their faces in a terrifying attack on innocent employees.

Sales manager Ho Suet So and sales assistant Samera Afzal were those unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle. After being barked at with the instruction not to move, terrified Samera had the barrel of the gun thrust into her side as she was dragged across the shop to an area containing a number of particularly intricate pieces – including a £100,000 diamond collar, which appeared to be a specific target. As the gunman took control, his accomplice wasted no time in setting about his duties. Using a small axe, he systematically worked his way up the length of the showroom. First the cabinet glass was smashed and then the contents were hurriedly stuffed into a rucksack before the routine was repeated at the next cabinet. Distinctively, the axeman was left-handed. In just a minute and a half, the bag was brimming with high-value goods and the raiders were ready to make their exit, fleeing into the darkness of the night and leaving the staff cowering in the ransacked shop.

Whether the pair knew it or not, the store’s manager, Katy Lawrence, had heard the drama unfold from her office and, although it was out of view, had immediately pressed a panic alarm connected to police headquarters. It was little defence against a criminal outfit clearly drilled for speed. They could have stayed for longer and ensured every last item was cleared from the cabinets but they didn’t, presumably because they were conscious that an alarm was likely to be triggered. They wasted little time in simply exiting the building and getting a valuable head start on the police as they raced towards the scene. It may have lasted just 90 seconds but the incident will be a lifelong nightmare for the three women who suffered dreadful intimidation from violent armed robbers.

The event has been replayed thousands of times since it happened. The whole episode was captured by CCTV cameras trained on the shop and, unusually, the footage was made available for public consumption in the months that followed.

The headlines screamed out details of what was billed at the time as a £1-million heist. It flew in the face of the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity – for Rox, it was not the type of story the marketeers had in mind when they had prepared for the launch of the glitzy and glamorous Edinburgh store just a few months before the raid. The sleek store is located in the restored Assembly Rooms building on George Street, a stout presence in Edinburgh’s prestigious New Town. More than two centuries old, the distinctive building has been a cultural beacon for generations in the city, playing host to such luminaries as Dickens and Thackeray down through the years.

In 2012, an 18-month refurbishment programme was completed, restoring the A-listed building to its former glory. Funded by the City of Edinburgh Council with contributions from several partners in the heritage and arts fields, the sensitive restoration included the provision of retail space within the complex and Rox was among the businesses to seize the opportunity to buy into a slice of the capital’s history as was beauty brand Kiehls.

On 23 October 2012, the Glasgow-headquartered jeweller, which already had outlets on the west coast and in Aberdeen, unveiled its new Assembly Rooms base at a lavish launch party. Having invested in the region of £1 million in the outlet, the firm’s managing director, Kyron Keogh, promised to provide the ‘ultimate luxury shopping experience for diamond lovers and luxury watch connoisseurs’. What he could not have anticipated was the interest his new pride and joy would attract from a far less savoury section of the population – the type who came wielding an axe and revolver rather than an array of credit cards.

The terror on the night of the robbery was a far cry from the high spirits on the evening of the store’s launch. More than 300 guests attended the event, with chart icon Labrinth providing the star quality and a host of well-known names from the Edinburgh scene attracted by the glitz and glamour of the occasion. With canapés provided by Jamie’s Italian, a neighbour of Rox, and cocktails by Sloane’s Gin, it was a party that went with a swing. The 2,500-sq.-ft shop, complete with what the company described as a ‘Thrill Room’ equipped with a champagne bar, represented an exciting addition to the thriving luxury goods sector in Edinburgh. Recession? What recession?

The design of the flagship Edinburgh store, by the firm Graven Images, has proved to be a winning formula and has been recreated during the firm’s rapid expansion in recent years. Graven had provided the team behind the five-star Blythswood Square hotel in Glasgow and Hotel Missoni in Edinburgh and were bringing that boutique hotel feel to the world of retail through its work with Rox.

The build-up to Christmas 2013 brought a £1-million investment by the jewellery company’s bosses as they moved into England for the first time. First came the opening of a store in Leeds and then an impressive outlet in Newcastle. It was the biggest store in the growing Rox chain and featured an in-house Gucci shop to set it apart from its competitors. The success in Scotland’s capital had helped drive forward that recent English move. Initially employing a dozen staff, the Edinburgh boutique store opened in time to meet the anticipated Christmas rush. With a glittering array of diamond jewellery and bespoke pieces alongside watches by globally renowned brands such as Raymond Weil and Hublot, it was designed to be a destination rather than simply a shop.

A few years earlier Multrees Walk had been established just a short stroll from the Assembly Rooms – a shopping zone which became home to Harvey Nichols and Louis Vuitton amongst other famous names as the New Town went from strength to strength. The influx of top-end retailers did not go unnoticed amongst the criminal fraternity with several high-profile incidents in the years prior to the Rox raid. Fashion store G-Star Raw had £17,000 of stock stolen when thieves knocked over a bollard with a car before ram-raiding the shop and making their exit. Similarly, jewellery outlet Links of London had already been hit and, this time, a motorbike was the chosen getaway vehicle, after the windows of the store had been smashed with a sledgehammer. Iconic bag designer Mulberry was the subject of two ram raids within the space of just four months as its Edinburgh store was relieved of more than £40,000 of stock. In both of those incidents, a car had been reversed through the store window to provide swift and easy access to the displays. And both times the perpetrators made an unhindered departure from the scene leaving Mulberry to pick up the pieces – just as their counterparts at Rox were left to do more than four years later.

There had been calls to improve security at Multrees Walk but that proved a challenge on a practical level. As a public right of way, the prospect of erecting gates to block pedestrian access was considered unworkable and finding bollards able to withstand determined thieves was proving difficult. On those occasions, the hauls were less valuable than the Rox tally but they provided the warning signs for others in the same sphere to heed. Indeed, just a few months before Rox was hit, there was an incident at a neighbouring jewellers in which £27,000 of goods were taken. On that occasion the Lime Blue store, also on George Street, had been targeted by a lone raider who, at first, asked to view a selection of diamond rings – before swiping them and making his escape on foot. The difference was that the value of the Rox thefts ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds, not tens of thousands. The raiders escaped with quality as well as quantity, with a number of particularly valuable items among the treasure trove netted by the duo.

As well as the £100,000 diamond collar, they made off with engagement rings, necklaces and a collection of watches which included a distinctive £11,000 Hublot model. All in all, 77 items were taken, including 43 rings, 24 watches, 3 pairs of earrings, 3 necklaces and 4 bracelets. To date, none of those pieces has ever been recovered and the conclusion made by police was that the haul had been stolen to order rather than taken speculatively – as was observed at the time, the goods weren’t the type that could be hawked around a car boot sale.

Attempting to trace the missing stock was a priority in the days following the raid but retracing the steps of the robbers was even higher on the agenda. What was known was that the pair sped away from the George Street shop on a motorbike which had been parked nearby. It was not a quiet getaway, with the duo shouting and swearing at pedestrians to ‘get back’ as they made their way to the black Honda 650 bike before pulling on distinctive helmets – one white, one red – and roaring off into the distance.

The use of bikes in jewellery heists had become almost commonplace in the UK in the years leading up to the Rox raid, with their nimbleness viewed as the ideal antidote to increasing city centre congestion. Just a few months prior to the Edinburgh robbery, shoppers at a London shopping centre were stunned when a gang of six armed robbers stormed the indoor mall aboard three powerful motorbikes. They smashed their way into a jewellery store and made off with Cartier, Rolex and other big-brand items before speeding out of the Brent Cross venue and through the traffic. The value of their haul was estimated to be in the region of £2 million, demonstrating, once again, the high-stakes game those involved were dealing in.

In Edinburgh, police were able to track the route taken during the getaway after the motorbike was found abandoned in a car park on Northumberland Street a short time after the incident. It lay just a few blocks north of George Street and the Rox store but far enough away to give the escaping duo breathing space. The key was left in the ignition, a sign of the haste in which it had been dumped, and a trail of evidence was discovered in the vicinity. The crash helmets, an axe used to smash the display cabinets and gloves believed to have been worn during the robbery had been dropped in the area.

As officers studied CCTV footage and interviewed witnesses, the shop remained closed for a day after the robbery to allow a thorough investigation by scenes of crime specialists. Police also stepped up patrols in the area, as much to reassure the public and traders in the area that they were serious about tracking down the offenders. A public appeal for information was made and photographs of some of the key pieces of jewellery were issued. Initial estimates suggested £1 million of stock had been lost but, as the thorough process of sifting through the debris left behind was completed, that was revised downwards to arrive at the accurate figure of £730,000.

Snippets of information began to be filtered out by the investigating team in an attempt to garner further evidence from the public. For example, it was revealed early in the probe that eyewitnesses reported one of the assailants spoke with an English accent whilst the other was said to have a local twang. It was also revealed that it was believed, after abandoning the getaway bike, the pair had continued on their path away from the scene by taxi. Police put out an urgent appeal to Edinburgh’s cab drivers to report to them with any information they might have had on the movements of the two suspects.

It was a fast-moving investigation and the same could be said for the response from Rox. In addition to making £10,000 worth of repairs, within a week the firm had spent £50,000 on a new security system for the Edinburgh store, including installing a ‘smoke cloud’ system. When activated, the equipment is designed to release a thick fog to disorientate and deter would-be thieves. In the immediate aftermath of the Rox raid, one British company, SmokeCloak, unveiled an evolution of the system when it launched what was believed to be the world’s first DNA fog fluid. The purpose of using the fluid in the cloud systems was to tag perpetrators with a unique DNA code, providing definitive forensic evidence which would be able to place them at the scene of the crime if they came into contact with the mist. The theory was that fog was a deterrent whilst the DNA was a tool for identification and prosecution – so combining both made perfect sense.

In addition to the cloud system at Rox, a permanent security guard was recruited and a new ‘lock-door’ policy introduced as management took a serious approach to the protection of their staff and stock. Publicity surrounding the new measures helped spread the word that the firm meant business in its battle to beat the crooks.

Just ten days after the raid had taken place, Lothian and Borders police arrested two men, both in their twenties. Days later, a third joined them in custody and, almost two months later, the operation continued with a fourth arrest, with a swift and decisive investigation. Two of those arrested during the investigation were eventually tried and jailed for their involvement. The other two walked free before the case reached court.

It was at the High Court in Glasgow that Elliot Jorgensen, 25, and Anthony Boyd, 26, entered guilty pleas in relation to the armed raid. Prosecutor Andrew Brown QC told the court that the robbery was ‘carefully planned’ and ‘efficiently executed’. He said Jorgensen, from Salford, was involved in the raid itself with an unknown accomplice, while Boyd, an engineer from Manchester, had a central role in the ‘organisation’ of the robbery.

Jorgensen was the man who brandished the revolver, leaving staff ‘frozen with fear’ according to the prosecution. It was also Jorgensen who unwittingly provided police with the evidence which led them to close the case – his DNA was discovered on one of the recovered gloves. That was a crucial mistake made by the pair – the perpetrator’s DNA profile was held on the police database due to an earlier arrest. Having been chillingly professional up to the point of their getaway, they had begun to panic in the aftermath, detectives suggested as they faced a succession of potential witnesses on the packed Edinburgh streets. They also attempted to counter a swift response from police who were quickly scrambled to the area of the robbery.

As the investigation gathered pace, officers also uncovered CCTV footage of Jorgensen being handed a large sum of cash by three men at the San Carlo restaurant in Manchester prior to his arrest. Boyd and Jorgensen each admitted a charge of assault and robbery and it emerged the latter had previously been jailed for robbery in 2007.

Detective Inspector Bobby Deas, who led the investigation, was pleased to see the two suspects brought before the court. He said: ‘This was a terrifying ordeal for the staff at Rox to endure and resulted in a large quantity of valuable jewellery being stolen from the store. Officers launched a robust investigation to trace the men involved and, with the assistance and co-operation of our colleagues at Greater Manchester Police, we were able to ensure that both men were brought to justice.’

He admitted errors had been made by the pair: ‘It was a very professional job. The value of the jewellery stolen alone shows that it was professional. We can only assume that leaving behind the item of clothing was a mistake. Obviously they would not plan to leave behind any forensic evidence. It may have been due to the response from the public, as there was quite a number of people outside the store when they came out, and the police response which saw officers on the scene very quickly. Matters may have been forced on them and they made a crucial error.’

Jorgensen was jailed for 12 years while Boyd was sentenced to 10 years. In mitigation, the court was told that Jorgensen – described as ‘a highly intelligent individual’ – had been ‘visibly shocked’ on hearing what he had put the staff members through. Meanwhile, Boyd’s QC claimed gangsters had preyed on his client to become involved due to his Edinburgh connections. But Lord Matthews told Jorgensen and Boyd that those who ‘gamble in such high stakes’ should be prepared to face tough consequences. Prosecutors also issued a confiscation order totalling £1.5 million but received just £1 from each of the offenders at that stage because neither had significant assets.

In a statement, the Crown Prosecution Services said the two accused had acted along with others as yet unknown. The CPS said Jorgensen was primarily involved as one of the two men who actually committed the robbery whilst Boyd, who has a connection with Edinburgh, was involved in planning and facilitating the robbery.

Michelle Macleod, Procurator Fiscal for the High Court in the East of Scotland, said: ‘The robbery of Rox jewellers was an audacious plan to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of jewellery in broad daylight on one of Edinburgh’s busiest streets. Thankfully nobody was physically injured in the robbery but being threatened with a gun and axe was a terrifying ordeal for those working in the shop and no doubt has had a lasting effect on those who witnessed the robbery. Despite their best efforts to evade capture and thanks to the thorough investigative work of police and prosecutors, two of those responsible have today been brought to justice.’

Justice may well have been done but, for the staff and owners of Rox, there was still significant unfinished business. Samera Afzal had been left unfit to return to work after the trauma of the incident and the stolen stock remained unrecovered.

DI Deas said after the sentences were passed: ‘The case isn’t closed. We’re satisfied with this result in court but inquiries continue to recover the missing property. We’re still appealing to anyone who may have information on its whereabouts to come forward.

‘Our message to anyone who believes Edinburgh may be a soft target for these kind of offences has been clearly shown that this is not the case. That’s not a challenge, just a statement that the full resources of Police Scotland will be brought to bear against them.’

Within days of the raid, police in Scotland had launched a nationwide dragnet, enlisting the help of forces the length and breadth of Britain. They pieced together a picture of what had taken place in the planning stages, believing reconnaissance had been carried out well in advance in Edinburgh. They also discovered that Boyd had made arrangements for the getaway motorbike, stolen in England, to be transported from Manchester to Edinburgh in readiness. He had it dropped off on the same Edinburgh street on which his mother lived.

DI Deas said: ‘It was a very challenging inquiry and we were helped by witnesses, including staff at the shop, who provided vital evidence for this case. The staff at Rox were left extremely distressed by this incident, which was horrendous for them, but they acted professionally throughout and were able to provide us with detailed information. We received excellent support and help from other police forces, particularly Greater Manchester Police, from the outset. Edinburgh is still a relatively safe city. Events of this gravity are very rare.’

And that was not an empty statement from Deas. Prior to the Rox raid, the biggest robbery in the capital was over 15 years earlier and then the cash haul was £150,000 – few and far between but enough to send shockwaves through the jewel in Scotland’s crown.

The Rox heist was by far the biggest of its type but it marked the beginning of a spate of incidents in the capital in the months which followed – albeit with limited success for those behind the subsequent raids. The Beaverbrooks store at Fort Kinnaird was broken into after thieves gained entry through the roof – with a far more dramatic aerial assault following shortly after. Macintyres of Edinburgh, located on Frederick Street in the heart of the city, was targeted on by a gang with a plan likened to a scene from Mission Impossible. Equipped with specialist harnesses and ropes, they planned to drop in through a glass-domed section of the roof after cutting a hole to gain access. Their audacious attempt was foiled by security staff and they fled empty-handed, leaving behind some of the gear they had brought with them for the ‘mission’. A jeweller’s shop on the same street, Laing’s, had three Rolex watches worth £50,000 stolen during the same incredible period.

Police took the opportunity to warn Edinburgh’s jewellers of the risks associated with one of the high street’s most glamorous trades. With security tightened and vigilance heightened, perhaps Scotland will not see their like again.