It was a jewelry heist days in the making — one allegedly planned by thieves who had worked their way up to a major score after honing their covert craft in the parking lots and truck stops of San Bernardino County.
When they broke into a Brink’s big rig at a remote Grapevine truck stop in the dead of night three years ago, the men may have gotten more than they bargained for: a haul that could be worth up to $100 million.
That would make the theft of 24 bags containing jewelry, gems, watches and other precious items on July 11, 2022, among the biggest heists of all time.
All of this according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles against seven co-conspirators who allegedly carried out the theft at the Flying J Travel Center in Lebec, Calif. The men were each charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit theft from interstate and foreign shipment and theft from interstate and foreign shipment. Some face additional charges.
In all, 14 jewelers whose merchandise Brink’s was transporting to Pasadena were victimized that day. Several suffered grave financial losses, and some left the trade altogether. The merchants, many of whom are based in L.A., have been locked in a years-long legal battle with Brink’s over the value of their pilfered goods.
Some of the stolen jewelry was recovered after search warrants were executed Tuesday.
Two of the defendants arrested are expected to appear in federal court on Tuesday. Another is an inmate at an Arizona prison, according to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, which described the crime as “the largest jewelry heist in U.S. history.” Ranging in age from 31 to 60, the men are all L.A.-area residents, hailing from neighborhoods including Boyle Heights, Westlake and Rampart Village.
The co-conspirators, some of whom use aliases, are Carlos Victor Mestanza Cercado, Jazael Padilla Resto, Pablo Raul Lugo Larroig, Victor Hugo Valencia Solorzano, Jorge Enrique Alban, Jeson Nelon Presilla Flores and Eduardo Macias Ibarra.
Some of the defendants have also been charged with smaller heists throughout San Bernardino County.
If convicted, Mestanza, Padilla, Lugo, Valencia, and Alban would face up to 20 years in federal prison for each robbery charge. All the defendants would face up to five years for the theft conspiracy charge and 10 years for each theft charge.
Their planning of the Brinks heist allegedly began at the International Gem and Jewelry Show in San Mateo, where, starting on July 8, 2022, jewelers displayed their baubles in booths under the glare of fluorescent light. Prosecutors allege that Padilla spent days casing out the show.
On July 10, Mestanza, Lugo and Alban allegedly scouted the Brink’s semitruck, which was loaded with 73 bags containing the jewelers’ wares, according to the indictment. When the big-rig departed the San Mateo County Event Center that night, it touched off a complex choreography that culminated at an Interstate 5 truck stop about 70 miles north of Los Angeles.
This account is drawn from the indictment and previous reporting by The Times, which has extensively covered the crime, widely known as the Brink’s heist.
The semitruck’s departure from the event center around 8:25 p.m. triggered a series of phone calls among some of the defendants, the indictment said. Through the night, several of them allegedly followed the southbound Brink’s truck, which was piloted by one driver while another dozed in the vehicle’s sleeping compartment. It traveled on the I-5 for about 300 miles, pausing at a rest area in Buttonwillow before pulling into the Lebec truck stop at 2:05 a.m. on July 11.
When driver Tandy Motley left the semitruck to get a meal inside the Flying J, the thieves made their move.
They’d have 27 minutes to pull off the heist.
An evidence photograph provided by the FBI shows a sampling of jewelry taken in the Brink’s heist in July 2022.
(FBI)
Choreography of a crime
It was a little after 2 a.m. when the thieves allegedly breached the big rig’s trailer, bypassing its defenses without alerting the sleeping guard. Then, they stole 24 bags of jewelry.
Afterward, according to the indictment, the men headed for East Hollywood. The defendants may not have grasped how large their score was. In the days after the heist, several of the co-conspirators deactivated their mobile phone numbers, according to the indictment.
The court filing does not say how the defendants gained access to the trailer; it also does not note the presence of any weapons, such as guns or knives.
But previous reporting by The Times detailed the aftermath of the episode.
At 2:32 a.m., Motley, the Brink’s driver who was dining at the Flying J, returned to his vehicle and noticed its rear lock had been cut away. A little before 4 a.m., two L.A. County sheriff’s deputies responded to a “vehicle burglary call for service” at the truck stop, whose parking lot was filled with 18-wheelers.
“I’m pretty sure we were followed from the show where we got loaded,” Motley told the deputies, according to their body-camera footage, which The Times obtained in 2023.
Within days of the theft, the scale of the crime came into view. It quickly drew comparisons to infamous heists from across the decades, among them 1983’s Brink’s-Mat gold bullion job near Heathrow Airport, 2003’s Antwerp diamond theft, and 2015’s Hatton Garden burglary, in which thieves tunneled into a vault in London’s jewelry district.
“There are days that you forget about this whole thing because we moved on — kind of, sort of,” Jean Malki, one of the victims, told The Times a few weeks before the indictment was unsealed. “But there are other days wishing you could do this and that, but there’s nothing you can do, because you lost everything.”
A quirky corner of the trade
The heist has captivated L.A.’s jewelry industry, whose epicenter is St. Vincent Court, a bricked alley in downtown where jewelers congregate to trade gossip between sips of espresso.
Malki said that, whenever he visits, he is besieged by colleagues with questions.
“Every single time, I get somebody asking me, ‘So, Jean, whatever happened with your jewelry?’” said Malki. “And the answer always was, ‘We don’t know anything.’”
The affected jewelers occupy a humble corner of the field, selling at trade shows across the country. It’s a lifestyle that breeds camaraderie among the merchants, whose businesses are also, in many cases, enmeshed.
A man walks through St. Vincent Court in downtown L.A. in 2013.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
They often obtain merchandise from each other without paying for it up front, which allows the jewelers to take on expensive items without shelling out for them until they have sold. That complicated things for some of the victims, because they didn’t actually own certain items they lost in the heist. One of the jewelers, Kenny Lee, previously told The Times that the cost of his stolen goods was at least $12 million.
Attorney Jerry Kroll, who represents the victimized jewelry companies, called the situation “a tragedy on multiple levels.”
“Some of my clients left the jewelry trade. Others are trying to find a way to hang in,” said Kroll, who spoke with The Times in May. Many of his clients are elderly. “None of them are doing well. …For my clients, waiting is challenging.”
Malki, co-owner of Forty-Seventh & Fifth Inc., previously said his company lost as much as 650 pieces of jewelry and other items in the heist. He continues to sell at shows and said business is slow.
But Malki said he is buoyed by “loyal customers — thank God for that.”
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Video of a conversation between Brink’s drivers and sheriff’s deputies provides a new look at the initial response to a July 2022 crime that victimized 14 jewelers.
Years of legal skirmishing
The fallout from the heist has been ugly.
Within weeks of the crime, Richmond, Va.-based Brink’s sued the affected merchants, who then filed their own complaint against the company. Central to the legal wrangling is a dispute over the dollar value of the thieves’ haul.
The Brink’s lawsuit, filed in New York in August 2022, has sought to limit any payout to the jewelers to $8.7 million — a figure that, according to the company, reflects the value declared by the merchants on shipping manifests. But, two weeks later, the jewelers sued Brink’s and other parties in L.A. Superior Court, alleging the stolen items could be worth more than 10 times that amount.
The case filed by Brink’s in federal court in New York is further along.
The company has asked the court to declare that its responsibilities to the jewelers are governed by their contracts. The lawsuit includes language from a Brink’s contract that indicates the company will pay clients for items lost during shipping — in this case up to their total declared value of $8.7 million.
The company alleged in the suit that the figure was drawn from manifests signed by its jeweler customers ahead of the tractor-trailer’s departure from San Mateo. The jewelers “substantially under-declared the value of their shipments” when they consented to having their wares transported by the company to the L.A. area for a trade show in Pasadena, according to the suit. (Some jewelers have said it is common practice to assign lower values than fair-market costs to reduce shipping fees.)
“Brink’s believes that each Defendant seeks to recover more from Brink’s than is permitted under the Contract,” said the company in its complaint, which also asked the court to consider finding that it is not liable for the losses of defendants who did not accurately describe the value of their items.
The jewelers’ L.A. lawsuit, meanwhile, alleged breach of contract and negligence, among other claims. It alleged that agreements signed by the jewelers contained contract text rendered in “microscopic print” that was too small to read and thus “cannot be binding.”
It also alleged that the 18-wheeler drivers’ conduct was “grossly negligent,” and it claimed that “lax security” by Brink’s allowed “jewelry and gemstones to be stolen right out from under the noses” of the workers.
Alleged thieves’ other heists
In the months leading up to the Brink’s heist, several of the co-conspirators allegedly pulled off a series of thefts in San Bernardino County, the indictment said. In some cases, the crimes relied on tactics similar to those later used at the Flying J truck stop. Yet the Southern California scores were a modest prelude to the job in Lebec.
The men would allegedly travel to truck stops and other locations, including some far away, “to identify and rob, steal, unlawfully take, and unlawfully carry away” a variety of merchandise.
According to the indictment, the defendants used multiple vehicles to follow trucks carrying shipments of electronics and other items until they reached stopping points. Then, the indictment said, the alleged thieves would rob or burgle the vehicles.
Some of the defendants would allegedly act as lookouts around businesses that truck drivers were patronizing, and others would break into the “seemingly unattended” vehicles and pilfer their contents — “including by force and threat of force in the victims’ presence.”
The men charged in the indictment would then return to L.A. County with the merchandise to divide up and fence for profit.
On March 2, 2022 — a little more than four months before the Brink’s episode — prosecutors alleged that Mestanza, Lugo, Valencia and others used multiple vehicles, including Padilla’s, to follow a truck carrying Samsung electronics from Ontario.
When the vehicle stopped at a store in Ontario, Mestanza, Lugo and Valencia and others allegedly distracted the driver inside the shop while some in the group stole the electronics, which were later valued at about $241,000.
Less than two weeks later, Lugo, Mestanza, Padilla, Valencia, Alban and others allegedly used similar tactics to follow and rob a box truck carrying Apple AirTags. When the driver stopped for food in Fontana, some of the men are alleged to have stolen merchandise later valued at roughly $57,000.
When the driver caught the thieves, according to the indictment, one who wielded a small knife allegedly yelled, “Don’t move, or I will fuck f— you up!”
Sometimes, the alleged thieves weren’t successful. On May 25, 2022, Mestanza, Padilla, Lugo, Valencia, Alban and others allegedly drove to a truck stop in Fontana to steal from a vehicle there. The men used a crowbar to break in, the indictment said, but fled before making off with anything.
Still, that same day, Mestanza, Padilla, Lugo, Valencia, Alban and others found another target in Fontana, allegedly stealing Samsung electronics valued at a little more than $14,000.
They took the merchandise from a parked semitruck — the same sort of vehicle they allegedly broke into in Lebec six weeks later.
