Two men traveling around New Zealand on Mexican passports are believed to have made two daring day-light robberies that netted around $770,000 worth of jewellery and gem stones from several jewellery salesmen.

From The New Zealand Herald online:

Two men accused of being part of an international robbery group which netted $770,000 worth of jewellery were remanded in custody when they appeared in Auckland District Court this morning.

Cesar Orlando Romero, 43, a native of Colombia, and Javier Espinosa Agreda, 26, whose country was not listed on charge sheets, appeared in Auckland District Court today via audio-visual link from Auckland Remand Prison.

Both face charges of being part of an organised criminal group conspiring to commit aggravated robbery. Romero is also charged with possession of a fake United States passport.

Their lawyer, Paul Tomlinson, did not make a bail application and they were remanded in custody until June 24.

Three women – Maria Teresa Martinez, 47, and two Colombian women who have yet to be named – are also scheduled to appear today.

Two other alleged members of the group, Juan Leal Casillas and Jose Roberto Jimenez Perez, are still at large.

Their victims were dealers from Australia and Asia here to buy and sell jewellery.

The wanted men are travelling on Mexican passports and were last seen in Christchurch on May 27. They may be travelling in a grey Mitsubishi rental car.

Detectives believe most of the jewellery has been recovered, but are still assessing exactly what went missing and what they have since found.

Police were alerted to the gang after Sydney-based dealer John Wertheim was robbed of $110,000 worth of jewellery in Parnell in daylight on May 2.

The thieves allegedly struck again on May 17.

Again it was in a public place, outside the Rydges Hotel in Federal St in the central city, where two salesmen lost $660,000 worth of jewellery.

All the salesmen were believed to be in the city visiting potential buyers.

Mr Wertheim couldn’t be contacted last night but a spokeswoman for his employer, J S Landau Diamonds, said the company “wanted to be very careful what is published about the robbery”.

Detective Inspector Scott Beard told the Herald the thieves shouldn’t expect New Zealand to be soft on crime.

“New Zealand shouldn’t be seen as an easy touch by overseas criminals. Police work closely with Customs and Immigration and in this particular case, the joint effort got results.”

Mr Beard warned the alleged thieves that they would most likely find it hard to hide here.

“New Zealand is such a small country [that] generally, with public assistance, [police] find people they’re looking for – which doesn’t necessarily happen in bigger jurisdictions.”

The hospitality industry and Customs have been put on alert for Casillas and Perez.

He said the dealers were not hurt during the robberies. “Probably the biggest injury was losing their property.”

Mr Beard said the arrested people and Casillas and Perez were likely to be part of a syndicate with links to South America.

The victims had been deliberately targeted but he could not discuss details now that some of the accused were before the courts.

More than 1000 items were stolen but only a few pieces had still to be recovered, Mr Beard said.

“You can imagine there are a lot of items and we just need to go through and check them off inventories, but at this stage it would appear we have recovered a lot of it.”

Three of those arrested are Colombian nationals travelling on United States passports. The nationalities of the other two are not known but they arrived in New Zealand in April using Mexican passports.

As Gold Buyers in New Zealand we see some interesting jewellery items, however we are yet to have a solid gold iPad come through! We’d be happy if that did happen because we love the iPad and couldn’t think of anything better than wrapping it in 2.5 kilos pure gold (24ct).

Here’s the full article:

Dubbed the iPad2 Gold History Edition, this bespoke beauty by designer Stuart Hughes looks set to hold the record for the most expensive tablet device on the market for a long time yet.

Let’s break down what you’ll get for a cool £5 million. First, the 24ct gold back, with the Apple logo drenched in 53 individually set ‘I’F’ Flawless white diamonds totalling 12.5cts.

Second, the front frame, overlain with exotic Canadian Ammolite, one of the world’s oldest gemstones and carbon-dated at 75 million years old. Like truffle over pasta, the frame is further jazzed up by mixing shavings of the thighbone of a T-rex into the already ancient mineral. Still not impressed? The home button’s encrusted with a single, 8.5ct Flawless diamond, set in platinum and surrounded by a supporting cast of 12 flawless diamonds. Only two of these superluxe gadgets have been made, so join the queue!

The Federal Police from the International Airport of Mexico City recently arrested a Mr Martin Thomas (U.S. Citizen), 58 years who had 150 gold coins in his possession. The gold has a total weight of approx 4.6 kilos.

According to the news report the gold coins were found in his baggage as he awaited a flight to Panama from the Mexico City airport, officials said. One container held 50 gold coins with the legend ‘Suid Afrika-South Africa’ on them and two others had 100 coins inside that said ‘United States of America’.

Although Mr Thomas provided a receipt that he had with him for the purchase of 50 of the gold coins worth $1,171 each, the gold was still confiscated by the prosecutors, the secretariat said. It is not clear what the charges are against him or even if it’s legal to confiscate gold coins in this manner.

Normally when passing through immigration one is required to declare ‘currency in their possession to X $ value’ and it would have been the legal face value on the coins – so $50USD/oz of gold. It seems bizarre to risk all that value  if he was legitimately importing/trading gold, so the theory is that either he was smuggling gold or the officials are corrupt and will keep the gold for themselves.

Either way, moving this much gold through Mexico – NOT SMART!

The recent 83rd Academy Awards saw some beautiful dresses and actresses walk the Red Carpet! The Oscars are famous for the glamour, fashion and style. James Franco was brilliant in drag (silky pink dress) with Anne Hathaway sporting a smart black tuxedo. Kirk Douglas was hilarious and charming during his appearance…  Natalie Portman was touching in her speech and full credit to “The King’s Speech” for their well deserved win of Best Picture.

Here’s Gold Smart choices for Best Dresses on the Red Carpet:

The New Zealand Gold Buying industry is relatively tame with ‘pawn shops’ content to rip-off customers with low rates and unethical loan-sharking to vulnerable people. They’ve been known to call confuse ‘pawn shops’ with ‘prawn shops’, bad advertising and tacky shops – which is nothing when we heard about Toronto’s Cash for Gold companies…

According to a news item on Toronto Life, two competitive gold buying companies set up across the road from one another and that’s when the problems started. One of the gold buying shops apparently hired a hit-man to ‘take-out’ his rival across the road!

“Around noon on July 16, a large, Iranian-born man named Saeed Hosseini purportedly walked into Easy Cash for Gold, a storefront near Bathurst and Glencairn, and asked to speak in private with the owner, Jack Berkovits. Berkovits, a grizzled 58-year-old who also owns a chain of jewellery stores called Omni Jewelcrafters, took Hosseini to a nearby kosher restaurant called King David Pizza. They ordered coffee and sat. After much prevarication, Hosseini, a tae kwon do specialist and former mixed martial arts competitor, finally admitted that he had no gold to sell. Instead, he claimed he was there because of Maria Konstan, an employee of a competitor named Harold Gerstel, a man better known by his public moniker Harold the Jewellery Buyer.”

“According to Hosseini, Konstan had asked him to kill Berkovits. Having said this, Hosseini quickly assured Berkovits that he wasn’t going to do it; he just thought Berkovits should know that Konstan not only wanted him dead, but was willing to pay someone to do it.”

“Berkovits immediately contacted 13 Division at Eglinton and the Allen Expressway and gave a statement to two police investigators. Berkovits’s claims were later bolstered by Hosseini himself, who gave investigators the same story he’d given Berkovits. Konstan was arrested on July 22 and charged with five criminal offences, the most serious of which was counselling to commit murder.”

“The case was reported by a swarm of journalists and was revealed to be as convoluted as it was ludicrous. In one televised news interview, Hosseini, while hidden in shadow like a participant in a witness protection program, claimed that he’d worked for Gerstel for years, primarily as a collector of debts. Konstan, he alleged, had offered him $50,000 to take care of Berkovits; she had been so angry at the time that he could see the veins stand out on her forehead. The report then cut to an unnamed Gerstel relative, who insisted that Hosseini was never an employee and had been paid only on one occasion to keep an eye on the competition across the street. Not to be outdone, Harold Gerstel complained to one of the papers that the allegations were false: “All I can say is it’s a total frame-up,” he was reported as saying. No one, meanwhile, could explain what would motivate Konstan, an elderly, low-level employee of Gerstel’s, to hire a hit man.”

“The most interesting fact came from the police, who, either by accident or design, released a curious detail to the press: the tensions between the owners of Harold the Jewellery Buyer and Omni Jewelcrafters began in May 2009, when Jack Berkovits hung a “Cash for Gold” sign outside his store.”

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Despite the drama, I imagine most gold buying business in Toronto continue on as if nothing much has happened. I guess when you are dealing with people that are comfortable charging 1,000% interest on loans then the next step is not so hard to make. Our advice is to steer clear of companies that make loud noises and proclamations about quick cash from seedy shops. Your intuition will guide you and hopefully help you avoid a very costly mistake when selling gold.

The World's Largest Gold Bar - 250KG

Here’s some interesting facts about Gold…

• Chemical symbol is Au from the Latin word ‘aurum’ which means “shining dawn”
• A carat was originally a unit of mass based on the carob seed used by ancient merchants
• Gold was discovered in Ancient times and used by the ancient South Americans, Asians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese
• A total of 165,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, as of 2009. This is roughly equivalent to 5.3 billion troy ounces or, in terms of volume, about 8,500 cubic meters
• The largest gold nugget ever found weighed 195 pounds
• It is mentioned in the Bible
• The purity of gold is measured in Carats
• The Carat is still used for the weight of gem stones where 1 carat = 200mg
• Pure gold is 24 carats
• Oceans are the greatest single reservoir of gold at Earth’s surface, containing approximately eight times the total quantity of gold mined to date. However, the current cost of extracting it is more than the gold is worth. • About 10 billion tons of gold are estimated to be held in suspension in the oceans of the world
• The oldest gold jewelery used by man is dated to 3500 BC
• Pure gold is expensive and not very practical to wear owing to its extra softness. Therefore, it is mixed with other metals mainly copper and silver. Compared with other metals, gold is much softer
• Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all metals; a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of 1 square meter, or an ounce into 300 square feet
• It can even be hammered so very thin that the light of the sun can shine through it
• The melting point of gold is 1064.18 °C

If you are considering selling gold jewellery, gold bullion, gold coins or any form of gold talk with New Zealand’s Gold Buyers – Gold Smart today.