On guard: Gold fever spurs thefts

LOS ANGELES - Gus Rodriguez looks more like a soldier than a jewelry-store security guard: He has a Beretta handgun strapped to his bulletproof vest, shades wrapped around his shaved head, and pepper spray bulging from a breast pocket.

"I am not afraid," the former Ecuadoran military man says, patting his pistol. "They call me Rambo."

After a summer of brazen attacks on gold stores, parts of downtown Los Angeles look more like a militarized zone than a commercial corridor.

The gold fever that has driven prices to an all-time high is also fueling a crime rampage in the precious metal. Police nationwide are seeing an uptick in robberies and burglaries related to gold prices, which peaked at $1,891 an ounce last month, up more than $600 from a year earlier. Gold closed Tuesday at $1,873 an ounce in New York futures trading.

The FBI doesn't keep numbers for gold thefts, but local police departments have anecdotal evidence of a spike. Necklaces have been snatched from dozens of women in daylight attacks, and burglars are targeting gold in homes. Robbers in New Jersey even cleared out the Sterling Hill Mining Museum's irreplaceable collection of gold nuggets - samples valued at $400,000 collected from mines across the globe.

"It's really bad," said the owner of Abel's Jewelry, one of scores of gold stores lining Broadway, a grubby street through the heart of downtown Los Angeles. "You work all your life trying to have something for the family, and they want to take it all in one day."

His store was robbed twice this year, most recently about two months ago when three men smashed his glass display cases with hammers and made off with about $10,000 of gold.

The beauty of gold, from a criminal standpoint, is that it's easy to fence. Rings and necklaces can be melted down - destroying the evidence - and sold. Precious items such as diamonds are harder to alter and easier to trace.

There were at least six Los Angeles gold-store robberies in June and July. On Aug. 22, four men with hammers were arrested outside a jewelry store, Los Angeles Police Lt. Paul Vernon said.

"Certainly the surging gold prices motivated these people to want to do these smash-and-grabs," Vernon said. "They are not trading what they steal at the market value of gold. Even if they get half that, they are making a pretty penny."

In Oakland, police say dozens of women have had gold necklaces yanked from their necks on the street. More than 100 similar thefts have been reported in Los Angeles, a rash of robberies is taking place in St. Paul, Minn., and police in Phoenix say muggers chatted up high school girls then ripped their gold necklaces from them.

"We've never seen this," said Oakland Police Sgt. Holly Joshi.