The Rise and Fall of an All-Star Crew of Jewel Thieves

In march 2019, the retired police detective Mike Crowley met me in the lobby of a hotel near the Miami Dolphins’ stadium. Crowley, a 71-year-old Vietnam vet, was wearing shorts, a white undershirt, and a camouflage baseball hat that said marine in block caps. Over the course of three hours, he sipped a single rum and Coke.

Four years earlier, Crowley said, he’d noticed a pattern in a string of jewelry-store robberies happening all over Florida: The same means of entry had been used every time. As he spoke, I eyed a large stack of paperwork teetering on the table in front of us, including thick folders labeled drill team in black marker.

At first, Crowley had had multiple suspects for these crimes. He walked me through a laundry list of itinerant safecrackers who had passed through Florida in recent years, pulling off heists in various cities throughout the state. Florida, seen through Crowley’s eyes, is a migratory stopover for the most elite burglars and safe teams. If you rob banks because they’re where the money is, you rob Florida because it’s where the jewels are. The retirees are covered in them, the newlyweds fawn over them in palatial beachside shops, and the tourists haul them home to remember the romance of a special trip.

The police reports Crowley showed me made the burglars sound like ghosts. At one crime scene, detectives found a single footprint left behind in the drywall dust. At another, investigators were reduced to watching hours of traffic-cam footage, trying to decipher the robbers’ movements based solely on headlights reflecting off the back of nearby buildings. In a frustrating near-miss, a baker came to work at 4 a.m.—while a burglary was under way—and parked his car close to where the perpetrators had stationed their own vehicles. Unfortunately, he saw and heard nothing. In some cases, the target store’s air conditioning would be cranked up, which police later surmised was the thieves’ way of avoiding leaving DNA behind in their sweat. One store was so cold when the owner showed up the next morning that the windows had fogged up like a winter holiday display.

Across their six-year run, what appeared to be the same crew committed a virtually identical crime over and over again, Crowley explained. They targeted jewelry stores in strip malls, usually on the edges of small towns whose local police had not yet experienced this kind of sophisticated burglary. The crew struck in the middle of the night, sidestepping stores’ advanced alarm systems with an electronic jamming device. The crew also picked targets that shared a wall with a business that had no real reason to install an alarm of its own. It might be a travel agency, where customers rarely, if ever, paid cash, or a nail salon; an empty storefront was also ideal. They would break into the neighboring business, and then cut entirely new doors through the walls and step through to the jewelry stores. The crew earned Crowley’s nickname—the “Drill Team”—by cracking supposedly impenetrable safes in record time, often drilling just one precise hole. They seemed to have an intimate knowledge of every make and model on the market.

A savvy burglar knows that opportunities for crime are often designed directly into the built environment; architecture itself can be a source of vulnerability. A business protected by even the most advanced alarm system can still be betrayed by something as simple as a repetitive floor plan shared with neighboring storefronts, Crowley explained. Casing one place means casing the other. This Florida group also found that the bathrooms of adjacent stores are often placed back-to-back to take advantage of shared plumbing and that, for reasons of privacy, each bathroom would be free of cameras and other alarms. The use of cheap, insecure building materials to separate one shop from its neighbor—just some two-by-fours and drywall—meant that getting from one business into the next was trivial. All the crew really needed was a handsaw in order to safely emerge in the bathroom of a neighboring jewelry store within minutes.

The group’s expertise was so out of proportion to that of the police departments in the small towns and suburbs where they operated that local law enforcement seemed helpless in the face of their planning and coordination. Crowley showed me a list of known break-ins, including dates, addresses, and local detectives assigned to each case. The group, he pointed out, was hitting businesses in different police jurisdictions nearly every time, guessing—correctly—that law-enforcement organizations around Florida were not in regular contact. News of a break-in in one town was by no means guaranteed to reach detectives just a few miles away.

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Although he was a decade into retirement at the time, Crowley, who calls himself a “victim-oriented investigator,” sensed an opportunity to do some good. He wanted to see the scenes in person, so he began driving hundreds of miles to meet with storeowners as soon as he learned of a new heist. No one had hired him to do this, he emphasized to me. It was all on his own dime.

For active-duty detectives at these crime scenes, however, Crowley was an unwelcome presence. His most consistent experience with police departments throughout the state, Crowley told me, was having his phone calls unreturned, his emails unanswered. “Except for two detectives in two cities, they didn’t want anything to do with an old guy and they didn’t want to talk to me,” Crowley complained. One of the police departments I reached out to actually warned me against speaking to Crowley at all, claiming that, because he was no longer on active duty, he had been feeding me inaccurate information. “I felt like Rodney Dangerfield,” Crowley joked.

He eventually settled on a suspect, thanks in part to a friendly tip. Bobby Talsky, 58, is the president of International Safe & Vault Services, an organization based in Ocala, Florida, not far from where Crowley himself lives. Talsky’s interest in this crew had been piqued by those ultra-precise drill holes, placed in exactly the right spot to pop specific high-security safes. Talsky has an encyclopedic knowledge of the American safe industry, and told me he could list everyone in the United States capable of that kind of drilling.

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What troubled Talsky was that these heists appeared to be an inside job, not by jewelry-store employees but by someone in the safe industry. Based on the precision of the drill holes, both Talsky and Crowley also began to suspect that they had seen this thief before. More than a decade earlier, a Florida safe technician had been indicted for a series of interstate break-ins, and he had been out of prison since 2003.

Could the same notorious safecracker be active again?

From 1996 to 1999, a series of nearly identical burglaries took place all over the American Southeast. The crimes were lucrative, with a total haul of $10 million to $15 million, as estimated by law-enforcement officials who described the case. Jewelry stores—and a handful of grocery stores, heavy with customer cash—from Alabama to Georgia and throughout the Carolinas were being hit in the middle of the night. What united them all was the precise drill-work of the crew’s safe expert; the fact that the burglars were cutting through the walls of neighboring businesses, such as nail salons or empty storefronts, to enter; and the ease with which the perpetrators seemed to bypass advanced security systems.

There was something peculiar, however, about the way these burglars seemed to be traveling to and getting away from the crime scenes, a missing detail that might help investigators explain how the crew was able to cover such a huge territory.

William Anthony Granims—Tony—lives near Tampa, Florida, where he is a licensed pilot and former private investigator. In the 1980s, Granims ran his own pawnshop in the remote Florida town of LaBelle and had connections throughout the secondhand-goods industry, which he has maintained in the years since. Granims learned to fly as a teenager, soaring over the Everglades with friends and daredeviling under city bridges before returning home for dinner. He was also an early “phone phreak,” using DIY home electronics to manipulate and explore the national telephone system, and he began experimenting with hacking, including jamming electronic systems, from the first days of personal computing.

All of these affiliations were superb false fronts for Granims, who later became one of the most skilled criminals in Florida history. If Granims was ever pulled over with a car full of suspicious electronic gear, he could simply show his PI license and claim to be working a case. If he had a trash bag full of jewelry in the trunk, he could just say it was from an estate sale at a buddy’s pawnshop.

If burglary was an Olympic event, the team flying from jewelry store to jewelry store aboard Granims’s airplane would surely win the gold. This original squad’s star players also included Mark Collins, a retired Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy who spent 16 years on the force before going rogue. Collins had firsthand knowledge of police investigative procedures, his own private-investigator license, and a long list of contacts inside Florida law enforcement in case things went belly-up. (At his initial bail hearing, Collins would receive character-witness statements from several Florida law-enforcement officials, testifying to his moral rectitude. He was still found guilty at the subsequent trial.)

Rounding out the crew’s core group of experts was Michael Ornelas. Ornelas had been working as a professional safe technician and locksmith for years when these heists began in the mid-’90s. By all accounts, he was one of the best in Florida, if not the United States; Ornelas could drill, pick, and manipulate his way into any box on the market. Today, he has become something of a cautionary tale, a man whose name I first heard spoken in professional safecracking circles with a tone of quiet embarrassment. Ornelas had crossed the industry’s ultimate red line: He’d used his skills to rip off the very people who had turned to him for help.

I reached out to Granims, who was surprisingly willing to chat. It quickly became clear, however, that trying to understand the early years of Granims’s criminal career would mean parsing an endless series of allegations laid atop rumors that dissolved into myths. I stumbled on a series of comments left under seemingly random usernames on two blogs, alleging that Granims had been a CIA-trained pilot flying covert missions during the Iran-Contra affair. When I asked him about this, Granims was noncommittal, instead making elliptical references to piloting jobs he claimed to have taken at the time for the DEA, some involving harrowing nighttime landings on remote roads in the Everglades, with nothing but the headlights of a waiting pickup truck to guide him. As with everything Granims told me, these tales were difficult to fact-check.

Granims says he was 18 when he first met Ornelas. When the two young men learned of each other’s nascent interests—Ornelas studying locks, Granims mastering electronics—they became instant friends, collaborating on and off in the years to come. In the 1990s, Granims and Ornelas even ventured into the movie business together, helping to produce a low-budget horror film titled Creep. (Two of the most notorious jewel thieves of the past three decades thus have pages on IMDb.) Was that a way for Granims and Ornelas to launder heist money? I asked. Granims laughed; Ornelas just loved movies, he said, and the two of them were having fun.

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According to federal indictments, the crew’s airplane heists began in 1996, but Granims admitted to me that he had pulled off smaller, unrelated heists well back into the ’80s. Indeed, he was not shy about discussing the appeal of breaking and entering. “When you stand in front of a building and you know you can have that thing inside it in an hour and a half, it’s very tempting,” Granims told me. “There’s nothing—and I mean nothing—that’s not breakable. It’s just a matter of: What’s it worth to break? It’s like with any other business. Is the work worth the payment?”

I asked Granims to describe the crew’s flights for me. He and the other men, he said, would take off from an airport in South Florida. They would fly during both night and day, often chasing clear weather; no one wanted to wait out a southern thunderstorm in a plane filled with stolen jewelry. Granims also avoided filing a flight path in advance with the FAA by relying on visual flight rules, a more flexible means of air travel under which pilots are permitted to improvise routes without contacting air traffic control. Granims could choose their destinations on a whim, often landing at small, quiet airports on the edges of major cities. There are thousands of jewelry stores in the United States; pick an airfield at random, and you will be close to one.

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