Brazen Diamond District Robbery Could Be A "Scare Job"

Investigators are still looking for the two men suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of watches from a store in the Diamond District earlier this week, in a heist so spectacular you can't help but think they may actually deserve the loot. We don't often get a good heist! Now, though, the NYPD's floating around a few ideas as to how these two men managed to pull off the burglary, with prevailing theories including that the thugs were sent to the shop by a rival jeweler, and that it may have been an inside job.

According to the Post, a Russian jeweler rival of the robbed Watch Standard Jewelry store at 23 West 47th Street has admitted to sending the two suspects over to intimidate the competition, though not to steal the goods. "They wanted to show they had muscle," a law enforcement source told the tabloid. "They have a beef over money and jewelry, and the Russian [whom the victim and his partners] are beefing with sends these two guys over there to scare them."

Then again, cops were reportedly turned onto this rival heist theory by Watch Standard Jewelry owner Danny Mikhaylov, who apparently has a lengthy arrest record and history of claiming to be a victim of heists. Police aren't ruling out that this was an inside job, noting that the heist occurred in daylight in a heavily secured area, and that the watch store was located on the eighth floor of the building. "The store was not on the ground floor, so there has to be some reason why they went there,” one police source told the Daily News. “Someone knew the fact they had stuff there.” CBS 2 reports that one shop employee even had a criminal record, and was suffering from financial woes.

Meanwhile, cops say that Mikhaylov's initial estimate that the thieves took $2 million worth of jewelry and watches was incorrect—in reality, the burglars made off with $500,000 in watches and about $6K in cash. And authorities have unearthed surveillance footage showing the suspects both before and after allegedly committing the crime—one suspect is in a suit, wearing a Kangol cap, while the other is wearing a red baseball cap: