 is to stand out from the crowd. For the watch dealers of London’s Hatton Garden, paranoia is the default setting. They endeavour to stay anonymised wherever they can, although to walk along the inlets of this infamous jewellery district, the modern breed are easy to pick out if you know what to look for. They clean out the coffee shops in the morning, hit the local PureGym by midday, then pass through Leather Lane market for a protein-heavy lunch before returning to their desks to day-trade like city boys in their imperious eighties pomp. With the rocketing popularity of pre-owned Rolexes, some have made millions in the past few years; others will make millions across the next few weeks. You’ll see Jacob Cohën jeans, Dior T-shirts, Prada pumps and silver tennis necklaces. You won’t see many watches. “It’s not worth it,” confides one dealer, who, true to form, requested anonymity.

Hatton Garden could not be more central in the capital, or more respectable, Victorian and orderly. Linger a little too long, however, and you’ll spot the hidden cameras, the undercover heavies on cafe terraces, the matte-black Range Rover Evoques parked at key intersections – less 

. “We pay for that private security,” the dealer tells me, “so even if you try and get us with machine guns, there’s little chance of you getting out of here.” They have good reason to be prepared; this corner of the city might be one of the most palpably dangerous places in the British Isles.

From the lurid stories that circulate among sellers and buyers alike, the so-called ‘Rolex ripper’ crime wave has 

all across the world particularly fearful of London – the scale, speed and sophistication of watch theft in the capital is fast becoming a point of international infamy. “People are being mugged in the heart of London,” Devin Narang, an Indian entrepreneur told David Lammy in February, 2024, using a meeting with the current foreign secretary to press the issue, “all CEOs in India have had an experience [with it].” Such a reputation can knock a government’s agenda off course, if left unchecked. Inward investment is that much harder to attract when a Mayfair meeting leads to a mugging.

The spectre of violent theft isn’t limited to visitors, either. One of Britain’s richest men, Ineos chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe, remarked to 

in August about his newfound reluctance to wear a timepiece in the capital. “I can’t wear a watch in London,” he told the paper, “and I just need to be a bit wary, a bit careful.” Ratcliffe had been particularly shocked by footage of a violent mugging taken from the CCTV cameras of the Ineos headquarters just off Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge. “A man died in a pool of blood because somebody tried to take his Rolex and he resisted. About a year ago we had three guys in hoodies, with machetes, outside the office, opposite Harrods.”	

Chris Marinello, the CEO and founder of Art Recovery International, has long sensed this growing anxiety. “It’s happening everywhere. You can’t go out to eat in Mayfair. You can’t wear a watch at a sporting event. People are beginning to talk.” Heading up one of the world’s most prominent asset recovery firms, Marinello is, more often than not, the man that victims turn to when their Rolex has been stolen. “I have the unfortunate circumstance of being on the front line, and I’m not kidding when I say that every morning, I am at my desk at 5am and I have to read horrible stories of pain.”

Robberies, of course, vary in technique and severity, all around the three-step principle of ‘alert, action, distraction’ – the thief is informed, the theft is performed, the victim’s response is thwarted. But, as Marinello explains, the plots to snatch fine timepieces are getting more intricate. “There are even spies working for hotels and restaurants that are tipping off criminals,” he says. One such victim of this routine was the boxer Amir Khan, who was intercepted and robbed at gunpoint after a spotter in a Knightsbridge restaurant tipped off thieves to his whereabouts. Speaking in court, Khan remarked, “I’m a sportsman, I’m a fighter... but this was totally different; very, very scary.” To prize fighters and power brokers alike, watch theft has never been harder to face down. But for a new generation of Rolex thieves, clued up on the craft and plugged into a global marketplace, the good life has never been easier to reach.

.” M, as he’s anonymously dubbed in the BBC’s 

, rocks back against his cab seat with a twinge of excitement. “Look at these little Asian boys,” he says, watching a pair of men arrive at Sexy Fish restaurant in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square. M is on spotting duty tonight, keeping an eye out for a couple of his young trainees – new recruits to his gang, no older than 12 or 13. “I’ll be here waiting in case they need me, just a phone call away.”

Journalist and broadcaster Tir Dhondy embedded herself within M’s watch-snatching gang for the documentary, observing first-hand how the group operated. “He had younger kids who were on bikes and mopeds,” Dhondy recalls, “stealing the watches for him. Meanwhile, on a more sophisticated level, he had female spotters going into nightclubs and seeking out prey. They were reporting to him, and then he would have his network of kids run up on them, and steal their watch from outside the restaurant, bar, club, wherever they were.”

There’s something of a ‘food chain’ among Rolex rippers, she notes. “You have your well-thought-out, more intelligent criminals, and then your smash-and-grab chancers, who do it without thought or plan. And with the crime becoming popular, there’s copycat crimes from younger criminals seeing how it’s done.” It’s these younger thieves at ground level causing particular issue, believes Dhondy. “There were two that we interviewed,” she recalls, “who seemed quite ruthless and actually potentially quite violent.”	

M, as Dhondy recounted, distinguished himself as a person who was removed from being a common watch thief, describing himself instead as a “middle man”, but was still at pains to underscore his ruthlessness. “He’d say things about how he didn’t feel guilty, how if there’s £100k on someone’s wrists, that’s his to take,” says Dhondy, “and at moments, it seemed like he really meant it.” Beyond all else, Dhondy recalls dealing with someone who was truly committed to succeeding in the world of watch theft. “He trained to make sure he knew which watches were worth his time. He’d watch people like a hawk, and every time a little bit of sparkle came into his eye, he was so distracted. For him, it was like an addiction.”

In watch collectors, clever thieves have found their ideal targets: men – pretty much always men – of a certain age and a probable wage bracket, of good taste and limited hand-to-hand combat experience, who have often never thought to hide their watches in public or on social media. It is, however, often these victims that fight the hardest for retribution, as Chris Marinello observes. “The people with the rarest Rolexes, they’re the type who’ve already searched for decades for that certain watch. They’re the ones who say, ‘Look, I don’t want any insurance money – I want my watch back.’”

Collectors also suffer, as Marinello notes, from another unfortunate side effect to the crime. “It’s a rich person’s problem,” he says. “The police aren’t going to do anything.” Marinello puts this down to two factors, one more generous and the other less so. “Unfortunately, the police forces in London are completely overwhelmed,” he tells me. “We have international terrorism, we had a pandemic, we’ve got wars raging in several parts of the world now — the last thing that police care about are stolen watches.” More than this, however, Marinello complains that the Metropolitan Police often fail to take the crime seriously, despite the dizzying sums involved. “Most police officers will never own a Rolex. They’re always so surprised, [they say] ‘Oh, I can’t believe this watch costs so much money! £200,000, amazing!’”

A stolen watch can be out of the country in hours, and once it is, Marinello says, “[the Met] close their investigation.” Being too lucrative to prevent, and too slippery to prosecute, the Metropolitan Police have started encouraging some victims of watch theft to drop their charges before a theft case reaches trial. “[They said] he’ll only receive a few hours’ community service,” one victim told BBC News last July. With such a high chance of profit, and low chance of prosecution, Rolex thefts have only become more violent and brazen in the past year. For the young watch sellers of Hatton Garden, one horror story hits home hardest.

247 Kettles is your archetypal London watch dealership. Tucked away in a mixed-use office block directly opposite Richmond tube station, a distance out from the city’s main trading spots in the leafy south-west of the capital, they sell predominantly through Instagram, doing so most often by appointment, usually to fellow dealers looking to trade stock. On 25 May 2024, two men – Junior Kunu, 29, and an older, still-at-large accomplice – entered the shop to find store manager Oliver White minding the premises. The group chat about watches as White takes out a tray for the pair to inspect; as White sits down at his desk, the older accomplice secures him tightly in a headlock, while Kunu loads his backpack with £2.8m worth of watches. That evening, so his family remarks, White returned home to Surrey, “traumatised and unable to speak,” before vanishing into the night. He was found by police officers in the woodlands of nearby Shepperton the following day, having taken his own life. His family attribute White’s decision to the impact of the robbery.

Even with clear CCTV footage, as the 247 Kettles case had, it proves uniquely difficult to retrieve stolen watches once they’ve diffused into the international marketplace. “You can hear the frustration in my voice,” Marinello tells me. “Every day I hear another one: [like] a dealer takes 30 Rolexes to the Munich watch fair and has them stolen, the thieves are in Romania, the sales platform is in Switzerland and his local police officer is in Essex.

“Watches move so fast from one hand to the next,” notes Katya Hills, managing director of The Watch Register, the world’s largest lost and stolen timepiece database. “You could have, say, 10 or 20 owners for it within the space of a year.” The Watch Register operates on the front line of timepiece theft. It is predominantly its database that the modern trade relies on for checking the status of the stolen watches. As such, its service has a unique read on the shifting trends and tastes of the second-hand watch market, as it has ballooned exponentially in the past decade. “The secondary market for watches, globally, is now a third of the total luxury watch market,” Hills notes, “and it’s growing rapidly. In the next 20 years or so, it’s expected to exceed the total sales of primary market luxury watches.”

It’s this precipitous market growth that Hills points to as the main driver for theft. “There’s restricted supply and high demand. Some watches can go for three to five times their price on the pre-owned market, and thieves know that.” This illuminates perhaps the greatest challenge about combatting Rolex theft – that the watches can increase in value in a more discerning dealer’s hands, even if that dealer is a thief. The connoisseurship driving most watch collectors is now finding its way over to the criminal side, Hills remarks. “I think thieves are primarily driven by money, but it’s interesting how they’ve become experts themselves.

For decades, the secondary watch market remained fairly static, looking destined to be another relic of a bygone age. “When the iPhone first came out,” Chris Marinello remembers, “everybody sounded the death knell for fine timepieces.” But the watch industry’s response laid the groundwork for the current boom we’re experiencing today. It began noticing that the modern watch enthusiast seeks novelty over consistency, and so it was in this vein that Rolex released a sweep of quirky new designs to the marketplace. Indeed, there’s something pleasingly infantile about the new Rolex sets: there are ones nicknamed after cartoon characters (the Hulk, the Batman), ones named after Muppets (the Kermit, the Cookie Monster), even ones named for soft drinks (the Pepsi, the Root Beer). It’s approachable, even quite easy, to become a Rolex expert these days, and with the emergence of watch-seller TikTok channels and Instagram pages, the brand’s reputation as the industry leader has been renewed with a younger and more status-obsessed generation.

As a result, Rolex dominates the leaderboards for watch sales and watch thefts alike. “Of the top 20 watch models selling in the UK for more than £5,000, guess how many are Rolexes?” Hills asks, then answers, “All 20. Rolexes account for a third of our whole database, and two thirds of our recoveries. It’s the most coveted by buyers, and the most desired by thieves.” Such is the sting in the tail with Rolex’s resurgence, and with its continuing popularity among luxury watches in general, Marinello can only summarise thus: “Wherever there’s wealth, there are rare timepieces.”

So what is the best practice for Marinello’s firm if a client approaches them saying their watch, or an entire collection, has been taken? “Generally speaking,” advises Marinello, “the first thing I say is ‘I’m sorry this happened to you. Were you insured?’ And unfortunately, almost 90 per cent of the people that contact me have no insurance.” Marinello then directs his clients toward the largest bulwark against the stolen watch trade that the secondary market has: the lost and stolen timepiece databases, such as The Watch Register, alongside the registers and catalogues compiled internally by manufacturers such as Rolex and Richemont.	

When a client runs a timepiece check on The Watch Register, Katya Hills describes, “We get back to them and say, ‘This is clear from our database’, or alternatively, if it’s stolen, we immediately phone the dealer, and say, ‘This has to be secured, you can’t return this watch to the seller.’” In theory, this system is designed to prevent stolen watches from being traded in the legitimate grey market, where they could change hands for clean money. Still, Chris Marinello has his doubts, to put it mildly, about the efficacy of this deterrent. “You’ll hear a lot of bullshit from them, but you can’t rely on The Watch Register alone,” he says. “It’s conflicted, the company will represent you and the auction house selling your stolen watch.”

The Watch Register is in direct competition with Marinello and his Art Recovery International group. Until 2013, Marinello was general counsel at the register’s parent company, The Art Loss Register; both make their trade in recovering the stolen watches that re-emerge on the grey market. Both firms process dozens of cases a day; in the case of The Watch Register, it charges a five per cent fee if your watch is discovered after being flagged on its system, and 20 per cent if you task them with retrieving it for you. “We’ve identified almost 100,000 pieces in the last year as lost or stolen. And on average, we recover about six to seven watches a day.” On the day we spoke, Hills had reached nine, nearing a personal best. “We’re very, very busy on the recoveries front.”

Business may boom for Hills and Marinello respectively, but their success is inevitably tied to the endurance of the crime’s allure – its unique properties that make it such a valuable endeavour for those bold and reckless enough to attempt it. This cycle can only get less popular when Rolexes do – and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon. “We don’t want to stop the growth of the pre-owned market,” says Hills. “That can’t be controlled, but we can make it harder for thieves to sell watches.” For Hills, that would come through manufacturers such as Rolex sharing their stolen watch data with the wider industry. For Marinello, the current attitudes toward the victims of theft are insufficient.

“It’s to protect the industry. It’s the trade, so that they can say they’re doing something about stolen watches,” he com- plains. “They’re making sure dealers don’t sell stolen watches. But that doesn’t mean they’re helping victims get back their own stolen watches.” Marinello has implored Rolex to meet with him directly in an attempt to resolve the issue. “I have been extremely vocal about this: Rolex is not doing enough. Nobody has to pay me. And if the watch manufacturers don’t start doing something, they’re going to find that it will eventually affect their bottom line.”

Beyond all else, Marinello cautions, “Be vigilant. You think that the watch on your wrist is protected – it’s not.”

This article was taken from the winter 2024 issue of Gentleman's Journal. Read more about the issue 

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