Articles and News

New York, NY—The Jewelers’ Security Alliance (JSA) presented its sixth annual Industry Service Award to retailer Georgie Gleim of Gleim the Jeweler, Palo Alto, CA, during its annual luncheon January 8.

Gleim and her manager, Rick Velayo, initiated an early jewelers’ crime prevention network. After receiving crime information from other jewelers in the area, they send it out to stores all over northern California. The network, a project of the Northern California AGS Guild, wasn’t easy in the early days, Gleim said, because when it started communication was limited to fax—or in the case of some stores who didn’t even have fax machines—by phone and snail mail. Email has made it much easier, she said.

The Northern California network has since served as the model to establish jewelers’ crime prevention networks nationwide.

Also at the event, JSA’s 13^th annual James B. White Law Enforcement Award was presented to Enrique Cervantes, a special agent of the FBI in San Antonio, TX and Robert Ramos Jr., special Federal officer and detective with the San Antonio Police Department. Both men are assigned to the San Antonio Safe Streets Task Force and were instrumental in recovering $800,000 (so far) in watches and jewelry stolen from Lee Michaels Jewelers there.

It’s rare to recover that much stolen merchandise, said JSA president John Kennedy, but Cervantes and Ramos worked with everyone from pawnbrokers to relatives of the thieves, following a trail from San Antonio as far as Oklahoma City. They’re still working on the case.

Separately, at the Jewelers Vigilance Committee’s annual luncheon January 7, Dale C. Kelly, assistant division chief, Data Collection Foreign Trade Division of the U.S. Census Bureau, was the recipient of JVC’s annual Stanley Schechter Award.

Cecilia Gardner, CEO of the JVC, explained the importance of Kelly’s job in tracking exports. “Why the Census Bureau? Because they count things,” she quipped.

But she grew serious when explaining that monitoring trade flow is important to ensuring adherence to the Kimberley Process. For example, if the United States suddenly triples its exports of diamonds in a year—when it has no diamond mines apart from a tiny one in Arkansas—that’s a clear signal something unsavory is going on. Kelly and her team are part of the global effort to analyze—and challenge when necessary—trade flow numbers from 74 nations.