The Los Angeles Police Department responded to three separate alarms at GardaWorld’s Sylmar cash storage facility on the day thieves stole up to $30 million from its safe in the city’s largest heist. ‘history of the city.
Despite officers being on the scene in the early hours of Easter Sunday – including around the time the sophisticated burglary allegedly took place – the criminals remained unnoticed, according to three law enforcement officials close to the investigating the incident.
During at least one of the patrol car interventions, GardaWorld was alerted, officials said, but the Montreal-based security services company did not record the intrusion.
The Times previously reported that GardaWorld only became aware of the crime after the safe was opened the next day, April 1. Only then, officials said, were LAPD investigators informed that a significant amount of cash had been seized.
The sequence of events, partly disclosed in an LAPD call log obtained by the Times, raises questions about security maintained by GardaWorld at the Roxford Street property, which is used to process and store cash liquid for the company’s customers in the Los Angeles area. The timeline also reveals details of the complex crime, which is believed to have been carried out by a team that entered the one-story building via its roof.
Jeffrey Zwirn, a longtime security consultant, said the heist’s success appeared to be the result of a “systemic failure.”
“The physical and electronic security appears to have been deficient which was not verified by the alarm company, and/or by the security command center and/or by the security director designated to ensure that the system was more than adequate in light of its characteristics. high risk environment.
GardaWorld did not respond to requests for comment.
According to the police log, the LAPD responded to 13 alarm calls at the building in the year before the robbery, and all were determined to be false alarms. One of them notably occurred shortly before 11:30 p.m. on March 30, the day before the robbery. A patrol car arrived at the warehouse a few minutes later and ruled it a false alarm.
Another alarm sounded in the building at 4:36 a.m. on Easter, according to the newspaper. A few hours later, the newspaper said, a police car was dispatched to the property, a supervisor was notified and a report was taken. The log does not say what police found. However, a resident of the nearby Tahitian Mobile Home Park previously told the Times that FBI agents visited her the day after the burglary and asked if she “saw or heard anything suspicious around 4 a.m.” at Easter. (The woman said she was sleeping at the time and she wasn’t.)
At 7:22 a.m., another alarm sounded at the GardaWorld warehouse and a police car responded approximately 45 minutes later; the LAPD log shows it was considered a “valid alarm.” Finally, an alarm sounded at 3:51 p.m. and a police car arrived around 4:00 p.m. in response. This was considered a false alarm, according to the newspaper, the details of which were first reported by TMZ.
False alarms triggered before the heist could be the result of criminals testing the building’s security apparatus, according to Aria Kozak, general manager of Los Angeles-based security services company Elite Interactive Solutions.
“In this particular case, the false alarms might just be a small window into criminal activity,” he said. “They are very knowledgeable and intelligent and they will look for the soft spot or weakness.”
Law enforcement has remained extremely tight-lipped about the investigation into the incident. LAPD Capt. Kelly Muniz declined to discuss the timeline of the crime, explaining that the investigation was being led by the FBI. An FBI spokeswoman said she could not reveal when the agency responded to the heist and declined to provide details about the investigation.
The burglarized GardaWorld facility, surrounded by active railroad tracks and a mobile home park on two sides, is located in a rundown Sylmar neighborhood where residents said street crime is a scourge. And neighbors said strange things happened in the neighborhood over the weekend.
A park resident reported hearing a strange mechanical noise coming from GardaWorld property over the Easter weekend. His house has a view of part of the warehouse where the thieves also broke into the side of the building. A KABC-TV News video broadcast April 3 showed a large cut in the side of the structure covered by a piece of plywood. And the owner of a nearby convenience store said his Wi-Fi network was down for much of Easter and cellphone calls were also down. It’s unclear if this is related to the heist, but Wi-Fi jammers have become a common tool of thieving gangs because they disable many security cameras.
Given the amount of money stored at the Roxford Street facility, such abnormal activity should have been detected by GardaWorld or an alarm service provider, according to security industry experts.
Security consultant Jim McGuffey, who previously held management positions at Brink’s and Loomis, called the heist a “very professional job.” Still, he said, “there’s no way this should have happened.”
“A well-protected facility that houses that kind of money… normally in these facilities they have two separate alarm systems, they have sensors throughout the facility, cameras inside and out outside,” he said. “No matter how you enter the building, a sensor detects this activity and sends an alert. That’s why it was such a shock.
Zwirn added that such a property would typically include an alarm system that would be triggered by the presence of wireless signal jamming.
“Even if these perpetrators were sophisticated…based on what we know, this should have been a detectable event,” he said. “The question is why no one reacted to what should have been a detectable event.”
California Daily Newspapers
