Bryan Sobolewski was a diamond thief and committed a string of armed robberies and break-ins around New England in the early '90s.
Sobolewski speaks with Insider about the reconnaissance and casing aspects of jewel theft and how he would approach stores. He recounts how his family broke into safes, smashed cabinets, and stole from traveling salesmen. He talks about scams within the diamond industry and how he believes gem stores are complicit. He covers the scarcity and value of diamonds and uncut gems, and he describes how thieves value sets and engravings.
Since leaving prison, Sobolewski gained a bachelor's degree in psychology. He has spoken in schools and substance-abuse-counseling groups. He now is a personal trainer and lives in Texas. He is the author of "Family Jewels," and in 2021, he started "Family Jewels Podcast," which details his life story.
Sobolewski speaks with Insider about the reconnaissance and casing aspects of jewel theft and how he would approach stores. He recounts how his family broke into safes, smashed cabinets, and stole from traveling salesmen. He talks about scams within the diamond industry and how he believes gem stores are complicit. He covers the scarcity and value of diamonds and uncut gems, and he describes how thieves value sets and engravings.
Since leaving prison, Sobolewski gained a bachelor's degree in psychology. He has spoken in schools and substance-abuse-counseling groups. He now is a personal trainer and lives in Texas. He is the author of "Family Jewels," and in 2021, he started "Family Jewels Podcast," which details his life story.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 My name is Brian Sobolewski.
00:01 I'm a former diamond thief,
00:03 and I stole $2.3 million worth of gold and jewelry
00:06 throughout New England.
00:07 And this is how crime works.
00:09 I would compare the jewelry business to the drug business
00:15 in terms of how shady it is.
00:17 You're never getting the diamond they tell you is there.
00:20 You're probably buying junk most of the time.
00:23 The markup is somewhere between 5% to 800%
00:28 when you walk into a store to try to buy a diamond.
00:30 I was 20 when this started, 25 when I was arrested.
00:40 So it was a five-year span.
00:42 So you had my dad, who was the mastermind,
00:44 my brother, he was the muscle.
00:46 I was usually the driver.
00:48 I was usually the lookout.
00:50 We had an inside guy.
00:51 Bill was a friend of my dad's.
00:52 So he would basically feed us
00:54 who was a good person to go after.
00:55 If we were going into a store,
00:56 he would tell us where the safe is,
00:58 what time the safe opened up,
01:00 what time the guy would be there.
01:01 He himself was a traveling salesman.
01:03 That's how he knew everybody.
01:05 We used Bill to place an order if it was a store,
01:07 just so we knew that that product would be in the store
01:11 and we'd have a certain amount
01:12 that we'd be able to get from the store.
01:14 The landscape at the time was
01:16 you had a lot of mom and pop jewelry stores.
01:19 You didn't have a whole lot of chains.
01:20 There was K-Jewelers.
01:21 There were a couple of major chains,
01:23 but most of them were independent
01:25 and they had traveling salesmen
01:27 with their product line in their car
01:29 and they would travel to these stores
01:30 and try to sell to them.
01:31 We tried to hit anybody that had claimed false insurance
01:35 or false robberies prior.
01:36 We never went after anybody clean.
01:39 And that's very hard to find in the jewelry business.
01:42 You'd be surprised how many of these guys
01:43 are reporting fake robberies
01:45 and taking the insurance money.
01:47 Casing a job is, it's maddening,
01:55 but it's super, super, super important.
01:57 It's about recognizing traffic.
01:59 What time a patrol car might go by.
02:01 All of this stuff fed into what time of day
02:04 we would do a job, usually during the day.
02:07 We didn't mind crowds.
02:09 Crowds could sometimes help you.
02:11 People being interested in what's going on there.
02:15 So for Seabrook, for the Woody job,
02:19 it was basically what time does he come to work?
02:21 Where does he pull his car up?
02:23 The Raynham robbery, my brother and I
02:25 went into a Puppegino's right next door,
02:27 grabbed a slice, and then went back in the car and ate it.
02:29 And everyone from Puppegino's remembered us.
02:32 Every single person.
02:33 So that's one of the things about casing.
02:35 You gotta notice, but you can't be noticed, noticing.
02:39 So the cars that we use were never ours.
02:41 We would go back at night, take the car.
02:44 We'd go into a mall parking lot.
02:45 I would unscrew somebody's license plate.
02:46 We would put that on the car.
02:48 We would use the car.
02:49 My dad would bring it back the next night.
02:52 He would just leave it back on the lot.
02:53 You could never prepare for every eventuality.
02:57 There would be no scenario
02:59 that we could practice and go through
03:01 that wouldn't eventually present some issue
03:03 that we would have to overcome.
03:05 [drill whirring]
03:08 I would go in as a customer
03:12 based on being as average as possible,
03:15 but I didn't like it either.
03:16 It was nerve-wracking.
03:17 Having a duffel bag with rope, bolt cutters,
03:20 just in case we had to cut a lock
03:22 that we didn't have a key for.
03:23 My dad would go in with his girlfriend.
03:26 It sounds so sexist, but we needed to have a female.
03:29 Most of the traveling salesmen
03:31 that we were going after were males.
03:33 So it wasn't necessarily about how many bodies we needed.
03:35 It was more about what gender it was.
03:38 One of the things that we had to do
03:39 was make sure that we could get into the safe.
03:43 We knew that if the insurance company protocol
03:46 for you having loose diamonds
03:48 and being able to sell them and have them insure them
03:51 is that every single time you go to that safe
03:52 to bring a diamond out, that safe gets relocked.
03:56 But my dad did it in a way
03:57 that he kept sending the guy back and forth from the safe
04:01 that eventually the guy would just leave the safe open.
04:03 And most people didn't follow the protocol to the letter.
04:06 So once we knew the safe was open,
04:07 that's when we would take down the store.
04:09 It was 90 seconds at the beginning of the robbery.
04:13 So when my dad and his girlfriend go in there,
04:15 so I thought that's not the 90 seconds.
04:17 It's 90 seconds from when Kev comes in
04:19 and the guy's subdued.
04:20 That's when we hit the clock.
04:21 When that 90 seconds is done,
04:22 I don't know what you have in your pockets,
04:24 but we gotta go.
04:25 So there were times we left a case behind.
04:27 We didn't take everything.
04:28 The 90 second rule came from bank robbers.
04:32 They tell you that you cannot spend 90 seconds in a bank
04:35 because if you go for the vault,
04:37 it's gonna be more than 90 seconds and you're dead.
04:40 Everything was based on Kev.
04:41 He could subdue a victim.
04:43 It was either cuffs or duct tape
04:45 or sometimes just standing over him with the gun.
04:47 So my brother would jump over the case,
04:49 grab him and put him down.
04:50 Say, "Just keep your mouth shut.
04:51 "We'll be out of here in a couple seconds.
04:53 "Nobody's gonna get hurt."
04:55 My dad went after the safe, I went after the cases.
04:57 One time we encountered a safe that when we opened,
05:01 it didn't have what we thought was in it.
05:03 And my dad just wasn't convinced
05:05 and he started fooling around with the bottom of the safe
05:07 and he pressed it and it popped up
05:08 and everything was inside.
05:10 The bottom was hollowed out.
05:12 So I'd always have a ball peen hammer
05:15 and those cases are not easy to break
05:18 'cause they all have a layer of plastic in the middle
05:20 so when you hit it, just a hole.
05:22 You have to keep smashing and eventually push down
05:25 this whole piece of cracked glass
05:27 and then it makes the items very difficult to get to.
05:30 So that's why some of these cases,
05:31 even the jewelry store windows,
05:33 they were peopled in the '80s
05:34 that would smash and grab through the window.
05:36 My dad had rules.
05:37 We tried not to hurt anybody.
05:40 In the scenario that we were going into a store
05:42 that wasn't ours and we were looking
05:44 to rob a traveling salesman,
05:47 we would stage it so that when the guns were pulled out,
05:50 they were only pointed at the victim.
05:52 So we purposely didn't point them at the store owner
05:56 so that the victim would say,
05:57 "Hey, is he in on it?"
05:59 And that's exactly what happened.
06:00 There was a plan that my dad had
06:09 and wanted to hatch that we would go in
06:11 and actually take down as many stores as we could
06:13 in the Jewelers building in Boston.
06:14 There was an actual building with five or six floors
06:17 full of Jewelers.
06:18 It was something that we squashed
06:21 because the front desk guy was a police officer.
06:24 We never had to deal with any security guards
06:26 because at the time, there weren't many jewelry stores
06:28 that required an armed guard be there.
06:31 The only one was the double doors and we didn't even go in.
06:33 And you'll notice that about most street-level
06:36 jewelry stores is there's a foyer
06:38 and you cannot hold both doors open together
06:41 at the same time.
06:42 You'd have to go through one,
06:43 take a number of steps before you get to the next one.
06:46 And that's because they can lock that foyer.
06:48 And at that point, we're like,
06:49 "Nope, most of these stores buzz you in."
06:53 I can't get into a jewelry store now
06:55 without being buzzed in.
06:56 They don't use a high-tech security system during the day
06:59 because you have foot traffic.
07:00 And that stuff, you know, are you talking about
07:02 laser beams that are tripped once you go past them?
07:04 Well, you can't use that during the day.
07:06 There are alarmed cases now.
07:08 But again, you have to consider
07:10 who's responding to the alarm.
07:12 When's the last time you did anything about a car alarm?
07:15 If during the day, during business hours,
07:18 an alarm is going off,
07:19 I think for a good couple of minutes,
07:21 most people are gonna think it's a fluke
07:22 and wait for it to shut off.
07:23 Most people's first instinct
07:25 isn't to call the police when they hear that.
07:27 So now you have a live armed guard in a store now.
07:30 I think the Pink Panther breaking
07:32 and entering style jewelry store robbery
07:35 went away when security systems
07:37 didn't have to be connected to your phone.
07:39 So once a silent alarm, once it's tripped,
07:42 it can contact the satellite,
07:43 the satellite calls the cops,
07:45 you can't stop that unless you find a way
07:47 to cut the electricity to that entire structure.
07:50 And even then they have backup systems.
07:52 So yes, if the power does go out,
07:53 that security system's still gonna work.
07:55 If we left in the stolen car,
08:02 we would meet the Bronco,
08:03 we would throw everything in the back,
08:05 and I would go home.
08:06 That's when I had the opportunity
08:07 to start going through this stuff.
08:08 We had to keep the stuff in the house.
08:10 So we would have 500 to a million dollars
08:14 worth of jewelry, retail, wholesale,
08:16 that's probably about 100 grand worth of stuff.
08:18 My dad would separate it into,
08:21 here are the necklaces, here are the bracelets,
08:23 here are the rings, here are the uncut gems,
08:25 here are the cut gems, here are the set gems.
08:27 From there it's just putting them into packages
08:31 that we could sell to jewelry stores.
08:34 High end stuff is super, super, super hard to sell.
08:37 You know, little trinkets, little chains.
08:39 My dad made more money off these little glass jars
08:43 with little beads inside.
08:45 If it sparkles, people will buy it.
08:47 So for us, no, there wasn't a level of preference
08:51 in terms of what you were grabbing.
08:52 But if I got five cases in front of me
08:55 and one's full of diamonds and one's full of gold chain,
08:58 I'm going for that.
08:59 The gold chain is way easier to sell quicker
09:01 than a diamond ring is.
09:03 You don't wanna deal with uncut.
09:04 'Cause then you gotta go find a place to cut 'em.
09:06 And that's not easy to do.
09:07 I would rather sell you a set stone than a loose stone
09:11 because more of it's done and you can charge more for it.
09:13 You're charging for the gold.
09:15 So when you go in and you buy a diamond,
09:16 now you're paying for the diamond,
09:17 you're paying for whatever the gold is in weight.
09:19 Bill was our main dump site for a lot of the stuff.
09:22 [beep]
09:23 Was the other person.
09:25 He was a jeweler in Nashua.
09:26 And this was a guy that understood
09:28 that the markup is where you make your money.
09:30 And if you buy stolen stuff, you can mark the hell out of it.
09:34 So if you buy it at 50 cents on the dollar,
09:36 you can already just charge what you normally would.
09:39 Charge a little bit more and really, really clean up.
09:42 [beep]
09:43 Bought a lot of our stolen stuff in bulk.
09:45 So getting rid of jewelry in bulk, very difficult to do.
09:50 'Cause as soon as you have your hands on it,
09:51 you're an accomplice.
09:53 So there's a lot to it.
09:55 So you gotta understand, after a robbery,
09:56 every single pawn shop is, you know,
09:59 the cops say, if you see any of this stuff, you call us.
10:02 So we couldn't just go to a pawn shop and say,
10:04 "Here, buy all this stuff."
10:06 We put it through piecemeal.
10:07 So it's great to have a pocket full of diamonds,
10:11 but if you don't have any way to dump it or fence it,
10:14 and fencing is what we call the selling of stolen goods.
10:18 Get caught buying fenced stuff and you're screwed.
10:22 And that's how most people get caught in these situations.
10:25 Jewelry party is where you just invite a bunch,
10:27 it's like a Tupperware party with jewelry.
10:29 So come in and look at our product.
10:31 We would lay everything out on the table, display it,
10:34 and people would just look at it and it's cash.
10:37 It's just a cash business.
10:38 [drilling]
10:40 A lot of diamonds are laser inscribed with serial numbers.
10:47 You can buy fake paperwork for this stuff.
10:49 So at the time, it was rare that anything was engraved.
10:52 The technology wasn't there,
10:53 and the technology was expensive.
10:55 So you have now certifying bodies out there
10:59 that will give you a certificate that says,
11:02 "This is the diamond you're buying,
11:03 "and this is how it's graded, and this is blah, blah, blah."
11:05 But you can pay for those.
11:07 One of the ways we used to tell was scraping glass.
11:09 You might go into a jewelry store or a pawn shop
11:11 and they'll take a little pen and they'll hit it
11:13 with a little electrical current
11:14 to tell if it's a real diamond.
11:16 You're pretty much okay buying any gold,
11:18 but you gotta make sure it's stamped.
11:20 So if you have a piece of gold that's,
11:22 they say is 18 karat gold,
11:23 but there's no stamp that says 18K, it probably isn't.
11:26 Gold will not magnetize.
11:29 That might be a way.
11:30 I used to try to, I'd take some of the stolen jewelry
11:33 and try to sell it for drugs,
11:34 and they used to dip it in bleach
11:36 'cause they say bleach reacts to the other metal
11:38 that's in the gold.
11:39 That's not true.
11:40 It doesn't work.
11:41 I'm not going to a store and buy jewelry right now
11:43 'cause you're paying an exorbitant markup,
11:46 and you don't know.
11:48 You don't know if it's real.
11:49 Some people probably looking at their hand right now
11:50 wondering whether or not what they have in their hand
11:53 is worth anything, but diamonds are not rare.
11:56 A flawless diamond is rare,
11:58 but sapphires and emeralds are way rarer,
12:02 if that's even a word,
12:03 because you just don't find them flawless very often,
12:07 and you don't find them treated or enhanced
12:10 in some way artificially.
12:12 Most of the insurance scams that I observed
12:15 were hearing secondhand what the person reported
12:18 was stolen from their store.
12:19 Every job that we did that Bill was able to go
12:22 and talk to that person afterwards
12:24 without knowing that Bill was the one that helped rob him,
12:27 we heard what he said was stolen,
12:29 and it was always double, at least double.
12:32 These guys are taking this problem
12:35 and turning it into an opportunity,
12:36 and that's why you're paying so much for insurance
12:39 is 'cause these guys,
12:40 insurance companies are getting screwed pretty bad.
12:43 [machine whirring]
12:46 If you're really, really good at it,
12:51 you will have knowledge of how many police are in that city,
12:55 which is why we never pulled a job in Nashua, New Hampshire.
12:58 Nashua, New Hampshire had one of the best police forces
13:00 at the time.
13:02 I grew up in Boston with organized crime.
13:04 I wasn't in it, but we all knew the Angulos ran the state,
13:07 ran all of the waste management, all the construction.
13:11 An entire section of Boston was devoted
13:14 to strip clubs, drug dealing,
13:16 and the second you stepped out of the combat zone
13:19 and did any of that stuff, either an Angulo
13:22 or somebody from that crew or a cop would thump you for it.
13:25 That was the place you did it, and it ran really well.
13:28 Bulger comes in and it just became completely disorganized.
13:31 No way we would have robbed 22 stores
13:34 while the Angulos were in power.
13:36 They would have either come to us and asked
13:37 for a piece of it, or they would have said,
13:39 these stores are protected and you can't hit 'em.
13:42 [machine whirring]
13:44 When you think to yourself,
13:49 how does a father get his sons involved
13:51 in something like this?
13:52 My dad lived a very different childhood than we did.
13:54 He grew up in Chelsea, right next to Heller's Bar.
13:58 Heller's Bar was a mob bar.
14:01 Right behind Heller's was a huge dirt parking lot
14:03 where frequently my dad would leave his house
14:05 and see a tractor trailer pulled from East Boston docks,
14:09 which where the mob picked up most of their stuff.
14:11 They would park it in the back of Heller's,
14:13 and that's where they would sell everything.
14:14 And my dad saw this.
14:16 So my dad followed every rule.
14:18 He went to college.
14:19 He was an upstanding member of society
14:21 unless there was something on the ground
14:23 that wasn't tied down that he could take.
14:26 And that was the mentality, I think,
14:27 of most people in Massachusetts at the time.
14:29 Pay your taxes, keep the man off your back,
14:32 but if you see an opportunity to take a little something,
14:35 grab it.
14:35 My father initially gave this guy his life savings
14:39 to invest in importing diamonds into the country.
14:42 This guy decided to take that money from my dad
14:44 and then tell him that he never got the delivery.
14:47 And my dad was in a bad place.
14:49 He was in a very bad place.
14:50 He finally asked if we would help him.
14:52 He finally just sat down and said, "Here's the deal.
14:54 "You guys are gonna have to come out of college.
14:55 "You're gonna have to work full-time.
14:56 "I don't have any money to pay for any of that stuff.
14:59 "Or we could go get the money back from this guy
15:03 "and set him up."
15:03 And that's exactly what we did.
15:05 And it started the beginning of 22 other robberies.
15:09 It started as we gotta save dad.
15:11 And then my dad started presenting all the robberies to us
15:14 as we're helping people.
15:16 We're going after this guy.
15:17 He's dirty, and this guy ripped people off.
15:20 And if we stop him, he won't rip anybody.
15:22 It was like a Robin Hood kind of thing.
15:24 After five, you start saying, "Hey, we're not superheroes.
15:28 "And we're not here to save the world.
15:30 "What are we doing?"
15:31 And that's when things started to get very...
15:33 My brother and I were very worried
15:36 at how much further this was gonna go.
15:39 The real victims are anybody that we stole their dignity,
15:44 their right to freedom, their right to move about the world
15:47 without somebody tying them to a chair, and their families.
15:50 It doesn't stop with them.
15:51 It stops with anybody that loved that person
15:55 and had to hear about what happened to them.
15:57 (tool buzzing)
15:59 I was arrested on December 26th of 1996.
16:08 There was enough distinctiveness about us
16:12 to separate us from anybody else doing it.
16:15 There weren't a whole lot of crews.
16:16 There weren't a lot of multiple people doing jobs.
16:19 I went to rehab, and I stopped doing robberies.
16:21 My brother and father continued.
16:22 They did two more, and then they did one after prison.
16:25 But I stopped because I had sobered up,
16:26 and I went back to school
16:27 to become a drug and alcohol counselor.
16:29 My brother was always arrested.
16:30 My father was already arrested.
16:31 They were both sitting, awaiting trial.
16:34 And I knew they were coming for me.
16:36 To me, prison was a lot like criminal university.
16:41 So many inmates would go in there and be like,
16:43 "Okay, what did you do?
16:44 "How did you get caught?
16:45 "Okay," and they leave with knowledge
16:47 of how to get away with it.
16:49 So prison, it can be an education in terms of,
16:52 if you wanna keep doing what you're doing,
16:54 that's the place to go and talk to the people
16:55 that got caught and figure out how to do it right.
16:58 I think the hardest part of my prison sentence
17:01 wasn't the jail time.
17:02 It's the stigma.
17:06 I couldn't get hired.
17:08 Regret sucks, man.
17:09 It really does.
17:10 It's not easy to live with.
17:12 It was ultimately my decision.
17:14 And I could say that I was 13 years old
17:16 and wasn't capable of making those decisions,
17:18 but I was 20.
17:19 My father and brother passed away February 11th last year.
17:23 My brother and I had a very difficult
17:26 and complicated relationship.
17:27 We very rarely got along.
17:29 And when we bonded, it was in situations like this.
17:32 So through our drug abuse, we bonded.
17:34 Through the robberies, we bonded.
17:35 In prison, we bonded.
17:36 But whenever we were outside and needed something substantial
17:40 to solidify that bond, it was never there.
17:42 (machine whirring)
17:45 The book I wrote is called "Family Jewels."
17:51 And it was my attempt to use the book as a tool
17:54 to talk to kids, to talk to people,
17:56 to maybe use how crazy this story is
18:00 to kind of scare you straight.
18:02 I work as a personal trainer now.
18:04 I created my own certification.
18:07 I wrote my own book that lists the programming
18:10 for this type of exercise.
18:12 And it is now approved by four certifying bodies
18:16 for personal training.
18:17 I do the podcast.
18:18 I do "Family Jewels" podcast.
18:19 Podcast allowed me to go into greater detail.
18:22 It allowed me to break down each robbery individually.
18:25 It brought me and my dad together.