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German Court Convicts Five Men for Green Vault Jewel Heist

The eastern German city of Dresden woke up on a cold, stormy morning in November 2019.

Overnight, robbers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in royal jewelery collections from the city’s historic green vaults, the castle’s cellars that are now part of a museum.

the robbers left The vault floor was covered with shards of broken glass and covered in powder for forensic investigators to smell.

Five men from the same notorious Berlin criminal family were found guilty and convicted for their roles in the robbery and getaway on Tuesday in a high-security Dresden courtroom. The prison sentences for Ravie Lemmo, Wissam Renmo, Bashir Renmo and a pair of twins were tried under juvenile guidelines because they were only 20 years old at the time of the robbery and their names were not made public under German privacy regulations. sentenced to four to two years in prison. From 4 months to 6 years and 3 months. A sixth defendant was acquitted due to an alibi.

The men are part of a family known to German tabloids as the “Renmo clan”, whose members have been charged with welfare fraud, extortion and robbery.

During the 15-month trial, the six defendants at times appeared to be crew members of “Ocean’s Eleven” and at other times “Mr. Ocean’s Eleven.” beans. But the defendants weren’t the only ones who appeared incompetent at times.

Despite a colorful criminal history, the men were free to plan and carry out the greatest robberies. Most disturbingly, two of the men on trial had previously been convicted of stealing an enormous gold coin worth $4 million from a museum in Berlin. When the crew carried out the Green Vault robbery, they were in court for the crime, but not in custody.

But for all its flaws, the epic trial that ended Tuesday showed how a small group of overzealous perpetrators managed to break into one of Germany’s safest museums and take home the country’s biggest score. He revealed an extraordinary story of how he managed to escape. Postwar history.

set up

Almost a week before the robbery, one of the men broke into the city’s power supply room at the foot of Dresden’s Augustus Bridge. Police conducted an investigation but found no reason to be alarmed.

Around the same time, the robbers cut clean triangles out of the old metal grate that covered the corner window of the Green Vault’s treasure room. They chose a window that was not visible to nearby surveillance cameras, cut a section of thick wrought iron about 1.5 feet from the grille, and glued it back in place.

The tools used by the thieves, the pneumatic Jaws of Life used by rescue teams to rescue people trapped in car crashes, are not available on the open market. Three months ago, Wissam Renmo broke into a specialized tool factory and stole a device.

the police arrested him he appeared before a judge on a robbery charge Only two days after the Dresden robbery. When the court sentenced Renmo to two-and-a-half years in prison for the theft, the court had no idea how the tool was used. A higher court subsequently commuted his sentence.

robbery

Shortly before 5 a.m. on the last Monday of November 2019, a homemade incendiary bomb exploded in front of an electrical service room by the Augustus bridge. A crude device, a cooking pot filled with a diesel-gasoline mixture, destroyed a nearby streetlight.

Two hundred yards away, two men entered the green vault through a pre-drilled hole in the grate and began violently slashing down the cases in which the jewels were displayed with hammers. Police later testified that the attackers hit the vial 56 times in just a few minutes.

Two private security guards watched the robbery unfold on an undisclosed video feed, but could only call the police, as strict rules forbid unarmed men from confronting the robbery. . (The guards were initially suspected of having some involvement in the robbery, but were quickly proven innocent.)

Rabier Remo, one of the two men in the green vault that morning, later testified that he was amazed at the strength of the nylon string that held the jewel to its case. According to him, this was the biggest obstacle the thieves faced.

They brought back 21 sumptuous works from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that once belonged to local ruler Augustus the Strong and his son Augustus III. The items they collected included ceremonial swords, brooches, pendants, hats, necklaces, buttons, and two diamond-encrusted epaulettes. The jewelry contained a total of 4,300 diamonds and other precious stones.

After loading the loot into a stolen numbered Audi station wagon, the group drove to a parking lot in a residential area a few miles away. So they dove into the Mercedes and set the Audi on fire. The fire spread to more than 60 cars in the garage, causing more than €500,000 in damage and endangering the life of a woman who was inside the garage at the time.

A second getaway car went up in flames a month later.

investigation and trial

It took months for a police task force dubbed “Epaulettes” to find any solid leads, but officers burned DNA found at the crime scene and two getaway cars. Linking the Renmo family together, clues begin to emerge. Another significant development came when police located and interrogated the man who had sold a large number of his SIM cards for the phones used during the robbery.

About a year after the break-in, nearly 1,700 police officers raided apartments, garages, cafes and several cars in a Berlin raid, arresting three crew members. Others were arrested within months thereafter.

Their trial had dragged on for almost a year, until Ravie Remo (who uses a different spelling of his family’s surname) recanted his earlier testimony, claiming he was actually in the vault during the robbery. said in His confession was part of an arrangement the defense negotiated with the court. It was to return the jewelry in exchange for the maximum prison sentence and confess to the crime. Three others also admitted to their involvement in the crime. One of them was able to prove that he was in the emergency room on the night of the robbery, but the other insisted he was not involved in the robbery until the end.

However, the deal came with strange terms. Defendants agreed to confess to their crimes but reserved the right not to convict accomplices police had not yet arrested. They were also given time to work with their lawyers to prepare answers to the prosecutor’s questions.

The men at trial admitted to the museum robbery but refused to acknowledge key aspects of the crime, such as planning or initiative, instead blaming unknown accomplices.

But the plea bargain had significant advantages. Most of the booty was returned. However, some key pieces of the collection are still missing (important diamonds, elaborate brooches, epaulettes, etc.), and others are damaged or oxidized.

In addition to a prison sentence, the state is seeking about €89 million in damages for the loss of treasure and damage to the museum.

family

Members of the Renmo family originally came to West Berlin from Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.

They are just one of a dozen family crime syndicates in Germany. But thanks to German tabloids and television shows, Lemmoth enjoys an extraordinary degree of fame. Even if they were not the most successful, violent or prolific organized crime syndicate in the country, until this trial they were perceived as largely intractable.

Mahmoud Jarabha, an academic who studies crime families like the Remmoths, said these networks were known for their loyalty and unwillingness to deal with authorities, which made the Green Vault plea bargain very difficult. said to have made it shocking to But he added that it is very difficult for outsiders to know much about the real power structures within these families because of the norm of silence.

But due to plea bargaining provisions, the truth about who organized, coordinated and planned the robbery may never be revealed.

But for Haraba, one thing was clear: “More people from the family would have been involved.”

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