An Ex-Pink Panther on His Old Crew Blamed for Robbing Kim Kardashian
Expert thieves took $9 million in jewels and left on bicycles. A veteran safe cracker says it sounds like his old friends and shares how they might have done it.
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast
A gang of armed robbers tied Kim Kardashian up, held her at gunpoint and stole $9 million in jewelry from her at the Hotel de Pourtales in Paris, France. Kardashian was attending Paris Fashion Week and her accommodations were not really a hotel, but a residence of 8 apartments reserved for multi-millionaires. The five-man robbery team quickly overpowered the concierge and specifically asked him to point out Kardashian’s apartment. The robbers found her alone in the apartment at around 3 a.m.
Speculation has run rampant in the media concerning the bold and daring heist. With France on lockdown due to the terror recent terror attacks, not many robbers would even brave such a move. In the eyes of the media only the infamous Pink Panthers, a Serbian robbery collective, would be worthy of such a heist. The coordinated, precise, and non-violent strike fits the Pink Panther’s modus operandi. It appears that the gentleman robbers with the Mission Impossible playbook have struck again, adding to their mythology and infamy in the criminal underworld.
I asked former Pink Panther and safe cracker extraordinaire, Palve “Punch” Stanimirovic, what he thought about the Kardashian heist. Punch used to plan robberies for the YACS, which stands for Yugoslavians, Albanians, Croations, and Serbians. They were the the Pink Panther’s predecessors. Stanimirovic’s father, Vojislav, pulled off the Vizcaya Heist, robbing Miami’s Vizcaya museum of $250,000 in antique silver in 1971 and set the trend for Eastern European burglary crews.
