This was the great coup of two luxury watch hunters in Barcelona

The sequence is brief and fast, almost imperceptible to those who do not have a trained eye. Two young people walk along the central Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona on a holiday Friday, December 8, at half past five in the afternoon. They are chatting, with their faces uncovered. One rides a scooter, without getting on it, and the other accompanies him. They seem like two more tourists, or two neighbors, in the hornet's nest of visitors that the city receives.

But in reality, the two young people are not walking through Barcelona, ​​they are tracking it. Between sentences, they scan everyone they come across. Its apparent parsimony contains a cautious approach. Until at the exclusive Cartier boutique, in the luxury rectangle of Barcelona, ​​they discover what they are looking for: a watch. Richard Mille RM 35-03 with a white strap and blue case, on the wrist of an unsuspecting Taiwanese tourist.

The talk between the two young people ends. His lizard body tenses. Hidden in the crowd, they turn around and head in the footsteps of Richard Mille. The victim, who is walking with two other men, is unaware that they are following him. The two luxury watch hunters separate. One stands with the scooter in a corner, and the other stands right behind the group of three, with his eyes fixed on the clock. He has a jewel worth half a million euros within his reach.

The robbery is carried out in seconds. The three friends are preparing to cross a pedestrian crossing. The young man approaches, with adrenaline bursting his veins, and collides with the Taiwanese. A chance encounter that actually involves a very studied blow to unlock the watch's lock. Its owner notices. He raises his hands, his wrist bare. Shouts. The boy runs at a gallop already with the Richard Mille in his possession. His partner is waiting for him on the scooter, which he reaches with one jump, and they both disappear at 50 kilometers per hour through Barcelona's Eixample. In their pocket they carry one of the most expensive watches ever stolen in Barcelona.

The next scene is in the Raval neighborhood: the reverse of the luxury of Paseo de Gràcia. Eight days have passed since the robbery. The furas —agents of the mossos plainclothes patrolling the streets—recognize the two kids. Their faces have been spread internally to all the agents in the city: they are the two young people, aged 23 and 21, who landed a Richard Mille of 500,000 euros without much effort. They go together again, they carry the same scooter with red wiring, and one of them wears the same necklace from the day of the robbery. The police arrest them, without any major problems. One has a police record for a violent robbery and theft; the other is clean. There is no trace of the jewel.

“When a watch is stolen, you either recover it immediately or you never recover it,” explains Mossos d'Esquadra sergeant Ramón Torner, head of the Titani group, specialized in the investigation of luxury thefts. His office, in the police station in the Sant Martí district of the city of Barcelona, ​​is an open space shared by 10 agents, two corporals and him, who leads the team. Since May, they have investigated the theft of 600 luxury watches. “There is no longer seasonality,” he explains, about this type of coup, which is carried out mostly by young people, versed in the matter, who almost never act alone. “They rehearse how to make the insurance yield,” says the sergeant.

Torner's team – which was created last summer – patrols the street, but, above all, it carries out meticulous analysis work to find criminals in the images captured by the hundreds of devices that monitor a city like Barcelona. and his victims. To find the two Richard Mille thieves, the agents have tracked all the cameras they have found in their path: from stores, from ATMs, from public security… In an interval of “half an hour before and half an hour after” the heist. After hours of viewing, with images from five different cameras, they have managed to reconstruct and deliver the sequence of the robbery to the court. In the images, they explain, you can clearly see what happened.

Researchers are reluctant to estimate the value of a watch to consider it luxury: “Anyone from a well-known brand, that gives a certain status, of high value.” This category also includes cases in which thieves unknowingly take a counterfeit. “Let the criminal himself think that it is a luxury watch,” summarizes Torner. On occasions, imitations have been found for up to 3,000 euros, which have required the collaboration of specialist jewelers who have needed to disassemble the watch to check its authenticity. Another condition is that it is a robbery with violence. “That is the biggest difficulty,” says Torner. Demonstrate in court that the push, the studied pull, with scratches for the victim, is a violent robbery.

Unlike other units, there is no top 10 thieves in the Titani group. Some faces are familiar, but others, like the Richard Mille kids, are new. “Some come, do the season, and leave,” says the sergeant. Others are repeat offenders, stealing a cell phone, a bag, or a watch, depending on the opportunity. There are also more professional ones, linked to organized crime, who can land in Barcelona, ​​carry out the coup and leave. But they all share a common characteristic: “They all know how to output the clock. “Everyone has a receiver.” And they estimate that they can pay between 30 and 50 percent of the value of the watch to the thieves, before placing it on the Asian market.

When the Mossos arrested the thieves of the Richard Mille, its owner had already left Barcelona. The police informed him of the arrest. And the watch? he asked. The agents are convinced that even if they had not obtained a court order to search t
heir house – “they do not say where they live, they invent it, or provide addresses of lawyers for notifications” – they would not have found the jewel either. And the receivers, who investigate more specialized units, live in the shadows, without a background, and many of them dedicated exclusively to watches. The two young people were released after being placed at the disposal of the judge awaiting trial.

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