The robbers, an Armenian named Cosmo Betrossian and his girlfriend, a Russian masseuse and occasional prostitute named Ilya Roskova, had entered the store just before closing, wearing stocking masks. Now Sammy Tanampai sat on the floor in the back room, his wrists duct-taped behind his back, weeping because he believed they would kill him whether or not they got what they wanted.
Sammy forced his eyes from roaming to his son’s cartoon-plastered lunch box on a table by the back door. He’d placed the diamonds in little display trays and velvet bags and stacked them inside the lunch box next to a partially consumed container of rice, eggs, and crab meat.
Sammy Tanampai thought they might be after the watches, but they didn’t touch any of them. The male robber, who had very thick black eyebrows grown together, raised up the stocking mask to light a cigarette. Sammy could see small broken teeth, a gold incisor, and pale gums.
He walked to where Sammy was sitting on the floor, pulled Sammy’s face up by jerking back a handful of hair, and said in heavily accented English, “Where do you hide diamonds?”
Sammy was so stunned he didn’t respond until the large blond woman with the sulky mouth, garishly red under the stocking mask, walked over, bent down, and said in less accented English, “Tell us and we will not kill you.”
He started to weep then and felt urine soak his crotch, and the man pointed the muzzle of a.25 caliber Raven pistol at his face. Sammy thought, What a cheap-looking gun they are about to shoot me with.
Then his gaze involuntarily moved toward his child’s lunch box and the man followed Sammy’s gaze and said, “The box!”
Sammy wept openly when the big blond woman opened the lunch box containing more than a hundred and eighty thousand wholesale dollars’ worth of loose diamonds, rings, and ear studs and said, “Got it!”
The man then ripped off a strip of duct tape and wrapped it around Sammy’s mouth.
How did they know? Sammy thought, preparing to die. Who knew about the diamonds?
The woman waited by the front door and the man removed a heavy object from the pocket of his coat. When Sammy saw it he cried more, but the duct tape kept him quiet. It was a hand grenade.
The woman came back in, and for the first time Sammy noticed their latex gloves. Sammy wondered why he hadn’t noticed before, and then he was confused and terrified because the man, holding the spoon handle of the grenade, placed it between Sammy’s knees while the woman wrapped tape around his ankles. The grenade spoon dug into the flesh of his thighs above the knees and he stared at it.
When the robbers were finished, the woman said, “You better got strong legs. If you relax too much your legs, you shall lose the handle. And then you die.”
And with that, the man, holding Sammy’s knees in place, pulled the pin and dropped it on the floor beside him.
Now Sammy did wail, the muffled sound very audible even with his mouth taped shut.
“Shut up!” the man commanded. “Keep the knees tight or you be dead man. If the handle flies away, you be dead man.”
The woman said, “We shall call police in ten minutes and they come to help you. Keep the knees together, honey. My mother always tell me that but I do not listen.”
They left then but didn’t call the police. A Mexican dishwasher named Pepe Ramirez did. He was on his way to his job in Thai Town, driving past the boss’s jewelry store, and was surprised to see light coming from the main part of the store. It should have been closed. The boss always closed before now so he could get to both his restaurants while they were preparing for the dinner crowd. Why was the boss’s store still open? he wondered.
The dishwasher parked his car and entered the jewelry store through the unlocked front door. He spoke very little English and no Thai at all, so all he could think to call out was “Meester? Meester?”
When he got no answer, he walked cautiously toward the back room and stopped when he heard what sounded like a dog’s whimper. He listened and thought, No, it’s a cat. He didn’t like this, not at all. Then he heard banging, a loud muffled series of thumps. He ran from the store and called 911 on his brand-new cell phone, the first he’d ever owned.
Because of his almost unintelligible English and because he hung up while the operator was trying to transfer the call to a Spanish speaker, his message had been misunderstood. Other undocumented migrants had told him that the city police were not la migra and would not call Immigration unless he committed a major crime, but he was uncomfortable around anyone with a uniform and badge and thought he should not be there when they came.
It came out over the air as an “unknown trouble” call, the kind that makes cops nervous. There was enough known trouble in police work. Usually such a call would draw more than one patrol unit as backup. Mag Takara and Benny Brewster got the call, and Fausto Gamboa and Budgie Polk were the first backup to arrive, followed by Nate Weiss and Wesley Drubb.
When Mag entered the store, she drew her pistol and following her flashlight beam walked cautiously into the back room with Benny Brewster right behind her. What she saw made her let out a gasp.
Sammy Tanampai had hopelessly banged his head against the plasterboard wall, trying to get the attention of the dishwasher. His legs were going numb and the tears were streaming down his face as he tried to think about his children, tried to stay strong. Tried to keep his knees together!
When Mag took two steps toward the jeweler, Benny Brewster shined his light on the grenade and yelled, “WAIT!”
Mag froze and Fausto and Budgie, who had just entered by the front door, also froze.
Then Mag saw it clearly and yelled, “GRENADE! CLEAR!” And nobody knew what was going on or what the hell to do except instinctively to draw their guns and crouch.
Fausto did not clear out. Nor did the others. He shouldered past Benny, plunged into the back room, and saw Mag standing ten feet from the taped and hysterical Sammy Tanampai. And Fausto saw the grenade.
Sammy’s face was bloody where he’d snagged the tape free on a nail head, and he tried to say something with a crumpled wad of tape stuck to the corner of his mouth. He gagged and said, “I can’t… I can’t…”
Fausto said to Mag, “GET OUT!”
But the littlest cop ignored him and tiptoed across the room as though motion would set it off. And she reached carefully for it.
Fausto leaped forward after Sammy unleashed the most despairing terrifying wail that Mag had ever heard in her life when his thigh muscles just surrendered. Mag’s fingers were inches from the grenade when it dropped to the floor beneath her and the spoon flew across the room.
“CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!” Fausto yelled to all the cops in the store, but Mag picked up the grenade first and lobbed it into the far corner behind a file cabinet.
Instantly, Fausto grabbed Mag Takara by the back of her Sam Browne and Sammy Tanampai by his shirt collar and lifted them both off the floor, lunging backward until they were out of the little room and into the main store, where all six cops and one shopkeeper pressed to the floor and waited in terror for the explosion.
Which didn’t come. The hand grenade was a dummy.
No fewer than thirty-five LAPD employees were to converge on that store and the streets around it that night: detectives, criminalists, explosives experts, patrol supervisors, even the patrol captain. Witnesses were interviewed, lights were set up, and the area for two blocks in all directions was searched by cops with flashlights.
They found nothing of evidentiary value, and a detective from the robbery team who had been called in from home interviewed Sammy Tanampai in the ER at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. The victim told the detective that the male robber had briefly smoked a cigarette but none had been found by detectives at the scene.