It’s the early hours of the morning of October 3rd, 2016. In a quiet Parisian suburb police chief
Christian Sainte is fast asleep next to his wife. Since he investigated the Paris massacre the year
before, he’s had trouble getting a full night’s sleep, but on this night, he’s blissfully swaddled
in soft sheets, having sweet, sweet dreams. Not for long.
At approximately 3 am he’s awoken from his slumber by the sound of his phone ringing.
The noise stirs his wife out of sleep, too, her mind immediately finding the words,
“Not again.” The person on the other end of the line is the night officer calling from HQ.
There’s been a “vol à main armée” – an armed robbery. It’s happened at a very swanky place,
too, a rarified joint where Hollywood movie stars rub shoulders with oil barons.
What he doesn’t know at that moment is he’s being informed about the robbery of one of the
world’s biggest TV reality stars, a woman whose backside has had more TV time than global warming.
Sainte has no idea this case will become known in France as, “L’Affaire Kardashian”,
a “cause celebre” that will turn out to sound like something from a crime novel.
Nonetheless, when he hears her name, he doesn’t even know who she is. Rubbing his eyes,
with one leg in his pants and a cup of coffee steaming next to his laptop, he types into a
Google search box the words, “Kim Kardashian.” After a bit of reading, he thinks, “Whaou!...
This woman has a lot of ‘likes’ on Facebook.” He’s soon surrounded by Paparazzi, to the extent
that at times he feels he’s the last crop in the middle of a swarm of locusts. Sure,
he’s been in the spotlight before. He investigated that terrible massacre; he’s worked on a number
of very high-profile crimes, but nothing he’s done can prepare him for a Kardashian.
For him of course, it’s work, it’s what he does, but for the rest of the world,
it is entertainment. It’s arguably the most real thing that’s ever happened to the reality star,
so what’s ironic, is many of her fans don’t believe it happened. For the conspiracy theorists
that hide in every corner of the Internet, it is a staged event, something we’ll come back to soon.
Ok, so let’s go back to start. Maybe some of you have no idea what we’re
talking about. Perhaps even a few of you have remained sane enough not to get caught up in the
world of Kim Kardashian and her famous family. We’re not going to do some kind of bio here,
so all you need to know is that Kim Kardashian is an incredibly wealthy American TV reality star who
cut her teeth doing things in front of people who liked how she looked. Yep, she got famous by being
famous, for being a socialite, for being rich, for showing off her allegedly enhanced body parts,
and finally, for marrying a rap star turned man that once wanted to be President, Kanye West.
That relationship took a turn for the worse, and not long before we started writing this show,
Kardashian filed for divorce. Both her and West have been in Time’s, “100 Most Influential
People.” She was in there before the robbery when she was already making buckets of money from
influencing people. Her net worth as of June 2020 was said to be $900 million. When she was with
West, and she was at the time of the heist, the two of them had an astronomical amount of cash.
With that in mind, Kardashian wasn’t and isn’t averse to shelling out a few dollars on jewelry.
Ok, so she went to France for “Paris Fashion Week” and we expect a bit of a holiday. She did once
say, “Holidays are the best”, although perhaps her 2016 jaunt to Paris wasn’t the best time of her
life. In fact, her ordeal sounds terrifying. She was staying at a luxury residence on
Paris's Rue Tronchet, apparently, the hotel-slash-apartment doesn’t stand out.
That’s why it’s sometimes called, “No Address Hotel.” You can only stay there if your name is
on the guest list, if you know what we mean. You either have to be very wealthy, or very famous.
She liked the $16,000-plus a night suite a lot and had stayed there before with Mr. West. At the time
of the heist, he wasn’t there. He was doing a gig at an Arts Festival in New York. Quite suddenly he
just stopped playing and told the many fans, “I'm sorry, family emergency. I have to stop the show.”
Not long before that, at around 2.30 am in Paris, five guys had entered the No Address Hotel. They
shouldn’t have even been allowed into the place, but because they were all wearing police uniforms
the concierge opened the door. That was a mistake. The gang handcuffed him and at gunpoint
demanded he take them to Kardashian’s room. She was sleeping at the time, naked except for
a bathrobe, when she thought she heard footsteps outside her door. She shouted out, “Who’s there”,
to which there was no answer. It was then, at 2.56 am, that she called her bodyguard.
The next thing she knew two men appeared in front of her, and with them was a tied-up concierge.
Both men were hooded, although only one of them had a ski mask on.
Both guys were dressed mostly in black and both of them had police written on their tops.
Frightened out of her wits she watched in horror as the guy with the ski mask approached her.
In English, but in a foreign accent, he demanded she hand over her diamond engagement ring.
That ring was reportedly worth $4 million. You can understand why she might not have wanted
to give it up, and at first, she told the man she didn’t know where it was. Her memory soon improved
when the guy held a gun to her head. He then started looking around for the rest of the stash.
Here we will interrupt the story and tell you something about France’s so-called,
“home-jackers.” You see, robbing banks these days isn’t easy at all.
There’s just so much security. In France, like in other countries, a new way to steal a ton
of cash is by robbing the rich in their homes. Celebrities are sometimes the targets, especially
ones whose lives you can follow online. You know what they own, sometimes where they’re staying,
and often what valuables they like to travel with. The day before she was robbed, Kardashian
had posted a selfie on Instagram wearing an incredibly large and expensive diamond ring.
She also posed with diamonds decorating her mouth. This crafty gang in France had been staking
out Kim Kardashian on social media. According to the French cops,
these gangs are smart and will wait in prey for the people they’ve been watching online.
In one case in France, a gang tied up the members of a rich family and put each member in a separate
room. The gang then threatened each family member and asked where the valuables were kept.
One of them is always bound to tell, especially when someone could get seriously hurt. Usually,
the gangs don’t want to resort to violence, but they will if necessary.
With this particular family, they’d followed them on the socialite pages of Vogue magazine.
After the robbery, the gang even had the audacity to call the father of the family
and ask for the appraisal documents for the stolen jewels. Apparently,
the gang was finding it hard to sell them without those documents. It was a case of, tell us what we
want to know, or we’ll find you and hurt you. Ok, you get the picture. You know what kind
of people we are talking about here. Now back to Kim in a bathrobe with a gun pointed at her head.
The guy in the ski mask said in no uncertain terms, tell me where the jewels are. He took her
out to the landing, where she thought about making a run for it, and then realized she’d probably get
shot when the elevator door didn’t open in time. He took her to the bedroom where he pushed her
forcefully onto the bed and tied her hands with plastic cables and tape.
When she screamed he covered her mouth with the same tape. The guy then picked her up, took her
to the bathroom, and dumped her in the bathtub. It wasn’t hard to find what they were looking for.
The bounty included what was in a jewelry box, what was lying around, and what was in her purse.
According to Kardashian’s statement to the police, the haul included:
“Two Cartier diamond bracelets, a Jacob necklace in gold inlaid with diamonds,
earrings with diamonds by Loraine Schwarz, and others by Yanina. Three gold necklaces
by Jacob, little bracelets, jewels, rings. A necklace by Loraine Schwarz with diamonds,
another little necklace with six diamonds underneath. Another diamond necklace with
the name of my son Saint on it. A Jacob diamond cross. Two rings in yellow gold.”
Yep, she obviously didn’t travel light. We’re surprised she didn’t add to that statement,
“the kitchen sink…the diamond-studded kitchen sink.” All in all, around 10 million dollars’
worth of jewelry was taken from her. They also took her smartphones and some cash.
In the bathtub, she didn’t really know what was going on. She did fear for her life, though,
thinking the guys might come back in. When she was sure they’d gone, she started to rip
the tape off her. That, she said, wasn’t hard at all. She guessed the guys weren’t too experienced
at home-invasions. She even said they argued like kids all the time while doing the robbery.
According to reports, the gang’s getaway vehicles were bicycles. We guess they didn’t think they’d
be involved in a high-speed chase through Paris. It was actually quite clever because
bicycles are easy to get rid of and hard to trace, and the gang knew CCTV was watching
them. They’re not very good carriers of bags, though. During the escape, one guy dropped a
diamond and platinum cross on the sidewalk. Three days later, some people’s world was
turned upside down when they heard that the next installment of “Keeping up with
the Kardashians” was going to be placed on hold indefinitely. Fans were already
feeling the first shivers of cold turkey when the robbery became a sensation in the media.
But get this, some people thought there hadn’t been a robbery at all.
Some folks thought she was behind it all. You see, some things just didn’t add up for
some people. They asked the question of why she was carrying so much jewelry with her.
Ok, so a diamond ring and maybe a necklace or two is reasonable, but why was she in
France with a veritable pirate’s treasure chest? Well, she was at the time incredibly wealthy and
not one to shy away from the cameras. Perhaps she always carried that many valuables with her. After
all, listen to what a member of the Saudi Royal family said after being asked about the heist.
“There’s no question in my mind that this will play heavily on the mind of shoppers and
travelers from the Gulf when it comes to visiting Paris. Lots wear their jewelry very openly here.”
Maybe her traveling treasure wasn’t all that strange.
Then others asked, why was she not bruised after her ordeal, especially around her wrists, and if
her smartphone had been stolen, why was she using one in a photo after she’d spoken to the police?
They knew this because they’d seen a video clip. Some people wondered if she had not staged the
entire thing to make a giant insurance claim? That kind of talk on the internet didn’t sit
well with her. She said that not only had she been the victim of a violent robbery, but she was now
being victimized back home in the US. Let’s remember this is a woman who at gunpoint had
screamed the words, “Don’t kill me, I have babies, don’t kill me, please, I have babies! I’m a mom!”
She soon filed lawsuits against several media outlets and put a gag order on that video.
She later dropped the lawsuits, which inspired conspiracy theorists once again to
air their knee-jerk reactions online. Ok, they said, maybe she didn’t do it for the
insurance money, but maybe she just wanted even more publicity than she already has.
Really? She’d risk becoming a criminal in France to get more attention when she
arguably has more attention than the sun? The whole thing being staged just didn’t add up.
Then, some suspects were apprehended by police along with the alleged ringleader,
one Aomar Ait Khedache, ala, “Omar the Elder”. This 60-something man was made out to be some
kind of criminal mastermind, although his lawyer said he is “very far from the fantasized image
of a great bandit that he is portrayed.” Another guy was arrested after his DNA was
found at the site. He later admitted that he’d been part of the robbery and had even
tried to sell her ring. He added that this proved difficult, given that the ring was so well-known.
It aint easy to fence the crown jewels, that’s for sure, but it can be done.
11 suspects were apprehended in total, most of them aged 44 to 72. The five men that entered
the building that day have since been dubbed the “grandpa robbers” because they were aged 60 to 72.
As we write this, the trial has yet to take place, although one man named Yunice Abbas
isn’t denying anything. He’s since written a book called, “I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian.”
This 67-year-old is the guy that dropped the diamond-encrusted cross on the sidewalk when
he was making his slow getaway on a bicycle. He later wrote, “It went fast – maybe five,
six, seven minutes – from entry to exit, because everything went smoothly. Nobody interfered, the
victim handed over the jewels without resistance.” He’s hoping he’ll be given a light sentence given
his honesty and the fact he has an ailing heart. As for the missing jewelry, well, the Kardashian
bling is still out there somewhere. It’s very likely everything was taken apart and those
parts were sold separately. They could well be sitting in jewelry stores in Antwerp as we speak,
one day becoming part of some other rich person’s jewelry collection. As one expert said about the
stolen diamonds, “They will be on the fingers of Americans within six months to a year.”...
And they won’t ever know they once made eight million people on Instagram green with envy.
That concierge, he was racked with guilt after what happened. So much
so that he wrote a letter to Kardashian. It went: “Dear Kim. When you feel the cold steel of a gun
at your neck, it’s the moment when remaining calm can mean the difference between life and death,
both our lives. I hope you are feeling better.” She didn’t reply.
Now you need to watch, “Insane Way Bank Robbers Executed Perfect Bank Heist (Stole $20 Million).”
Or, have a look at, “Airplane Heist - Thief Who Hijacked A Plane and Stole A Million Dollars.”