Amit Sharma, owner of Nirvana International, should have been waiting on holiday shoppers in his recently opened Tribeca jewelry boutique. Instead, on Monday, he was watching crime scene detectives comb over every surface of his store for fingerprints, fibers and any other possible trace evidence.
Sometime between his 8 p.m. closing time on Saturday and when he arrived to open at 11 Sunday morning, thieves apparently lowered themselves into the small office in the rear of Sharma’s store at 246 West Broadway, cut open his safe and removed what the jeweler estimates is at least half-a-million dollars in diamonds and gold jewelry.
Having opened his small store in June, Sharma said he was just beginning to develop relationships with local residents and that business was good. Now, at the height of the holiday shopping season, he suddenly find himself without a single ring or necklace to sell.
“I cannot even think right now,” Sharma said, a quiver in his voice. “They’ve almost put me out of business.”
Conservatively, Sharma estimates his losses to be as much as $500,000, but he has yet to complete a list of his inventory. After immigrating to New York from India in 1997, Sharma, 38, set himself up as a wholesaler in the Diamond District on West 47 Street. He said the burglary was the first time anyone had tried to steal from him.
“I’ve been in the business for 13 years, and there’s never been anything like this,” he said. A day after the robbery, Sharma said he was furious that the expensive ADT alarm system he had installed to protect the store and its contents had evidently failed.
“I’ve got motion sensors and everything in my store, in the office, and not once did it go off,” he said. “Even now it hasn’t gone off. What am I paying all this money for if it doesn’t work?”
Detectives at the shop Monday afternoon did not offer comment. William Fegan, an architect who represents the building’s owners TriBeach Holdings, said he believes his fourth-floor office window was the thieves’ point of entry into the building.
“We found the window broken in Sunday morning,” Fegan said, adding that it appeared that the thieves had climbed onto his office’s terrace from next door at 1 North Moore Street where a 10-story apartment building is under construction.
“It looks like they went down the stairs to the second floor, picked the lock on that office and then cut a hole in the floor,” Fegan said. He said the thieves put glue into the locks on the shop’s front door to prevent anyone from interrupting the heist. A rope ladder could still be seen Monday afternoon hanging in the rear of the store.
“It’s pretty apparent what happened here,” Fegan said.
Zachary Vella, one of the developers of the condo building under construction next to Sharma’s store, said that his building does have an alarm system but only for the interior. The outer scaffolding, where the thieves may have made their way onto the neighboring building, is unprotected.
Sharma said it was too early to tell if he will be able to reopen his shop. For now, he said he’d wait to see if the police investigation produces a suspect, and exactly how much of his losses his insurance will cover. Beyond that, he said, he could only imagine what might happen to his prized collection, including a solid gold and enamel Indian bangle that he had just bought for his infant son."
"What’s really devastating is that they took all of these things and they probably don’t even know what they are.”