Kim Kardashian's ordeal: The daring jewel heist that rocked the fashion world
US media personality Kim Kardashian at the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party on February 10, 2020. She was robbed in Paris in 2016.
What you need to know:
- A gang tracked Kim Kardashian online, executing France’s largest heist by robbing her in her Paris penthouse suite.
- Yunice Abbas, mechanic turned criminal, led a €9 million jewellery heist targeting Kim Kardashian in Paris.
By 2016, Kimberly “Kim” Kardashian had become a fashion entrepreneur, accumulating endorsement contracts with illustrious American brands: Sears, Midori, ShoeDazzle, Carl's Jr, Sketchers and Charmin. She launched successful Apps and enterprises, including Kimoji, SKIMS and several fragrance brands, while building her reality television reputation.
In October 2016, she travelled to France to honour an invitation to the Paris Fashion Week with her sister, Kourtney. Unbeknownst to Kim, a criminal gang had been tracking her movements in the social media for weeks to pounce on her. One gangster was Yunice Abbas, a 55-year-old mechanic of Algerian ancestry with a career spanning five decades. In 1978, after 13 years of employment, Yunice opened a car accessory workshop next to the Les Arcades shopping centre in a noisy business section of Paris named Le Grand.
He fixed counterfeit number plates on stolen vehicles and became an associate of hardened criminals. Yunice grew up in the secluded town of Le Raincy, and spent a third of his life incarcerated on the French island of Saint-Martin-de-Ré and Villepinte for felony offences.
In the summer of 2016, his accomplice, La Pince, nicknamed The Claw, met Yunice in the backroom of a Paris café and informed him he had intel that Kim would be arriving in Paris in the autumn.
Yunice and his gang of five started surveilling Sky Penthouse, the luxurious facility that would house Kim. It was part of Hôtel de Pourtalès and within spitting distance of the busy Place de la Madeleine parish. It bordered high-end boutiques, departmental stores and the pyramid-shaped Louvre Museum that housed the famous Mona Lisa painting.
The Louvre Museum crowd created a perfect foot traffic for the thieves to blend in as they walked. Cars were forbidden from entering the courtyard of Sky Penthouse, but anyone could walk or ride a bicycle into the building, an essential detail coherent to Yunice's scheme.
The doors weren’t reinforced. The building wasn’t secure; there weren’t any panic buttons and all the cameras were malfunctioning. Yunice and his gang knew the scheme had to be executed with precision timing. On October 3, 2016, the night of the robbery, Kim was in her Sky Penthouse suite alone, while her entire entourage, including her sister, Kourtney, adventured into the city for a night excursion accompanied by Kim’s bodyguard, Pascal Duvier.
Yunice assembled his equipment, which included a crowbar, gloves, zip ties, duct tape, ski masks and a handful of burner phones. One member of the crew forgot his plastic zip tie. Yunice, therefore, handed him the extra one he had, before loading their tools in his backpack.
Four gang members trekked, while Yunice, who wore a purple vest reflector, rode a bicycle. When they arrived at the entrance, they subdued the gatekeeper and led him to Kim's suite, before forcing him to be their interpreter. They found Kim asleep in her nightgown and forced her onto the floor, before zip-tying her hands and ankles while threatening to shoot her in the back.
The gang confiscated jewellery worth €9 million (about Sh1.3 billion), including a 20 carat, €4 million engagement ring Kim's fiancé, Kanye West, had bought her, and loaded them into Yunice's backpack. It was the simplest burglary they'd orchestrated and the largest heist in France’s history.
Yunice endured an uncomfortable ride back on his punctured bicycle and abandoned it by a metro train entrance. He extracted his reflective vest, stashed it into the backpack and flagged down a Citroën C4 taxi. A few kilometres later, he alighted at Gare de l’Est, handed the driver €10, then walked up Boulevard de Magenta to Gare du Nord railway parking lot, where he parked his cloned-plate car, before driving off, much to his relief.
He had destroyed his work phone earlier, but an unidentified phone started ringing incessantly in the backpack, which was on the backseat. The caller ID read Tracy Chapman, the iconic country musician. One of Yunice's accomplices had stashed Kim's phone with the jewellery. Yunice drove to the newly built Bondy Bridge over the Canal de l’Ourcq, and threw the phone into the water.
The cover of Yunice Abbas' memoir, Ja'i Śequestré Kim Kardashian (I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian).
In his memoir, Ja'i Śequestré Kim Kardashian (I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian), Yunice talks about their vile scheme, revealing that two months elapsed before they met to discuss the sharing of the loot in mid-December. The gang met on the terrace of a Paris café. They were joined by five other individuals Yunice hadn't seen before. Unknown to them, the zip tie Yunice had handed his accomplice, used to fasten Kim's ankles, contained fragments of his DNA.
Because Yunice's DNA had been on the French police database given his past crimes, the authorities matched the zip tie with him and started an undercover investigation. They teamed up with the FBI and located a surveillance video of Yunice riding his bicycle with his loaded backpack. The investigation agents spent weeks corroborating forensic evidence and phone records while tracking and trailing the other suspects.
A few weeks later, the footage of the gang's café meeting was broadcast on French television networks. They were all arrested in a sting operation.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
