Insult to Injury

On August 6^th 2012, the jewelry store that I work at was robbed by three of the dumbest individuals that it has been my displeasure to encounter. I alluded to this event in my January 25th post and have recently been asked about it on several occasions. The robbers made off with over $50,000.00 in cash and inventory. Included in the inventory was a selection of vintage watches, as well as several modern watches. Among the stolen were many Bulova’s, Elgin’s, Gruen’s and Hamilton’s, mostly somewhat common watches but in good condition. Then there were a few Rolex including a 1917 ladies sterling silver one. Then there were a few not as common watches like a Girard-Perregaux Gyrodate, although, not a high end watch it was a somewhat unique piece.

 

I have to give credit where credit is due; the Cicero Police Department did an exceptional job. Within days of the crime, they had identified and captured the first of the thieves and several days later they captured a second one. Now for the sickening part of this little tale, when they caught the second criminal mastermind, he, of course, became very cooperative. The police started showing him photographs, the first of which was yours truly who he identified as “the gentleman we robbed”.   Again, credit to the police, I couldn’t identify the robbers, so they did a reverse lineup. They showed photos of some of the watches that were stolen, which the thief readily identified. When the police asked him what they had done with the watches, he responded, “Oh that junk.  We threw in a garbage truck with all of those jars of glass”. It seemed all they wanted was gold and cash but, as you can guess, the jars of “glass” were about 30 carats of diamonds ranging from about half pointers to half carats, plus a few larger stones and among the watches was a Rolex Day Date (and I thought they wanted gold). From what I understand, these guys robbed several other places.  It kind of makes me wonder what other “junk” they sent off to the dump. Of course, the cherry on the cake here is the third robber stiffed his accomplices on most of the cash and fled to New York where he was caught robbing a bank.

 

Included in this post is a small sampling of the pieces lost to a level of stupidity that can only be called criminal.

Book Review: A Movement in Time with Breitling and Rolex; An Unauthorized History

A Movement in Time with Breitling and Rolex, An Unauthorized History, written by Mark A. Cooper, is 150 pages broken down into five parts and then a glossary of watch terms. The first part is “The History of Rolex”. The second part is “How to Identify Fake and Replica Rolex”. Next is “The History of Breitling Watches” followed by “How to Identify Fake and Replica Breitling”. Then the final part is titled “The World’s Other Quality Watches and History”. This last section covers Ball, Cartier, IWC, Longines, Omega, Patek Philippe and Zenith.

           

I did not intend to review this book yet, but it has earned its worth this week. A good repeat customer came in with several watches, one of which was a Breitling Avenger that just didn’t feel right. The long story short, some of the information in this book proved my suspicions correct - the watch was a fake.

That being said, it is not a very well written book.  By that I mean writing style and mechanics, not the content. There are misspellings and grammar mistakes all over the place. The sections just seem to run into each other and his thoughts seem to wander in a few places. It is a self-published print on demand type of book and I do not believe the author used an editor. Another major problem with this book is the images are not clear, actually they look like photocopies. All and all, the presentation of this book is of poor quality. Being that the book is exactly 150 pages I can’t help but wonder if that was a price point magic number and the author crammed a little for that reason.

The information provided in this book is useful and, although most of it is available from other sources, he tries to amalgamate the information. I also found the glossary somewhat lacking and skimpy, although I already have several watch and clock dictionaries, so it was not a major problem for me. I believe that if the author chose to update some his material, obtain better images, and hire a professional editor, he should republish it. Then it would be a convenient reference guide for both Rolex and Breitling. As it stands now, it’s a little rough around the edges.