‘Grandpa robbers’ held Kim Kardashian at gunpoint – but didn’t know who she was

The morning after the heist, burglar Yunice Abbas (62) went home to catch up on some sleep.

When he woke up, his wife was glued to the TV. The headline news of the day was that American reality TV star Kim Kardashian (then 35) had been tied up and robbed at gunpoint in a luxury Paris apartment.

All her jewellery – worth about US$10 million (about N$186 million), including the engagement ring her then-husband and rapper Kanye West gave her, which alone was worth US$4 million (about N$74 million) – had been taken.

Abbas’ wife glared at him. “This has you written all over it,” she grumbled.

She was right. Abbas had dabbled in crime his whole life, from petty offences to bank heists.

The Kardashian robbery, he later wrote in a memoir, was going to be his last job before retirement.

But a series of blunders meant the heist was doomed from the start, and in early 2017, Abbas and several of his alleged accomplices were arrested.

Ten of them will now be appearing in court in Paris.

Out of those, five are accused of taking part in the heist, and six are accused of being accessories to the crime.

Most of them were born in the 1950s, leading French media to dub them the ‘grandpa robbers’.

Abbas and Aomar Khedache (68) have confessed; the others have not.

One has since died, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he is suffering from advanced dementia.

By the time the trial starts, almost nine years would have gone by since the heist

On the night between 2 and 3 October 2016, Abbas and four accomplices allegedly staked out Kardashian’s discreet suite in Hotel de Pourtalès, in the glitzy Madeleine neighbourhood in Paris.

They were dressed as policemen and wielded a gun.

They threatened and handcuffed Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian PhD student who regularly took up shifts as a night receptionist, and marched him up to Kardashian’s room.

She was resting on her bed when she heard stomping up the stairs.

“I knew someone was there to get me,” she recalled in an interview with United States (US) interviewer David Letterman years later.

“You just feel it.”

Kardashian dialled 911 but the number, of course, didn’t work outside of the US.

As she was calling her then-security guard Pascal Duvier the men burst in, pushed her onto the bed and started shouting.

“They kept on saying: the ring, the ring! And I was so startled that it didn’t compute for a minute,” she told Letterman.

The language barrier meant Ouatiki had to act as an interpreter.

They found the ring and stuffed it in a bag along with several other jewels, as well as €1000 (approximately N$21 113.30) in cash.

One of the men grabbed her and pulled her towards him.

Because she was wearing a robe with nothing underneath, she thought he was going to assault her, Kardashian later told Letterman.

But instead the man bound her with zip ties and duct tape, and left her in the bathroom.

Then, he and the rest of the burglars fled on bikes and on foot. Kardashian freed herself of her restraints, and shortly after her security guard turned up.

Traumatised, Kardashian gave a statement to French police in the early hours of the morning and flew back to the US by dawn.

It wasn’t until later that day that Abbas understood who their victim was.

“There were breaking news alerts saying Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint – that’s how important it was,” says LA-based entertainment journalist KJ Matthews.

“When the heist happened we were so surprised. How could burglars have gotten so close to her?” Matthews says.

But serious errors were made on the burglars’ side.

“They didn’t take into account the progress made by police techniques, which can now find micro traces of DNA anywhere,” says Patricia Tourancheau, a crime reporter and the author of ‘Kim and the Grandpa Robbers’.

And there was a huge number of CCTV cameras all round the city.

COMEDY OF ERRORS

Other details of this story suggest that the thieves’ planning was rather haphazard. When fleeing the scene on a bike, Abbas fell, dropping a bag of jewels.

The next day, a passer-by found a diamond-encrusted necklace and wore it all day at the office before watching the news and realising where it had come from.

The police arrested Abbas and several other people in January 2017.

The question that remains is, however, just how the gang got wind of Kardashian’s schedule.

Court documents seen by the BBC show that both Khedache and Abbas stated that all the information they needed was posted online by Kardashian herself.

The documents indicate police believe Gary Madar, whose brother Michael’s firm had provided transportation and taxis to the Kardashians for years, was an accessory to the heist and that he had fed information to the gang about Kardashian’s whereabouts.

Madar was arrested in January 2017. His lawyer, Arthur Vercken, has told the BBC “no proof [of Madar’s involvement] was ever found”. – BBC