NYC diamond dealer arrested in truck hijacking

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NYC diamond dealer arrested in truck hijacking

By Michelle Graff

December 08, 2008

Editor's note: This story was updated on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008.

New York--Federal authorities have arrested 12 men, including a New York diamond dealer, and charged them with conspiracy in the December 2007 hijacking of a delivery truck in Manhattan believed to contain several million dollars worth of diamonds, the U.S. Attorney's office has announced.

Brian Greenwald, identified as the president of Doppelt and Greenwald Diamonds, along with 11 other defendants, were taken into custody the evening of Dec. 4 after telephone wiretaps revealed that the group was in the midst of planning another hijacking for that evening, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, which was issued on Friday.

The men, named in court papers as Greenwald, Hector Rivera, Roni Amrussi, Roman Zadiriyev, Arkadiy Israilov, Hector Mathews, Mario Torres, Jose Amezquita-Castillo (aka "Quique"), Jose Torres-Rivera, Eduardo Cartagena-Delgado, Carlos Quiles and Luis Ramirez-Mirabel, face a litany of charges including Hobbs Act robbery (robbery that involves interstate or foreign commerce) and attempted Hobbs Act robbery.

If convicted, the men face sentences ranging from 20 years to life in prison, according to the release.

The hijacking took place on Dec. 20, 2007, when two men displaying police badges and firearms approached a FedEx truck near 11th Avenue and West 47th St. in Manhattan and removed the driver, who was handcuffed and kidnapped at gunpoint, the release said. The defendants drove the truck to a loading dock in Brooklyn, N.Y., but were unable to unload the contents and subsequently abandoned the truck, which was found later with all of its contents intact. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office declined to say why the men were unable to access the truck's contents, or who the contents belonged to in either the 2007 hijacking or the one allegedly being planned for Dec. 4.

Authorities held the driver in the 2007 case for more than four hours before being released.

In a court filing that reads like a script for The Sopranos, an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents recent months of recorded conversations about the planning of the second hijacking, citing the tapes as evidence that led up to the arrests.

In addition, FBI agents observed two of the defendants, Rivera and Amrussi, scoping out a warehouse on Long Island as a possible spot to offload the contents of the hijacked truck. Citing conversations that Rivera had with a witness who was secretly working with the FBI, court papers describe the former as someone who works for people "who employ him to collect debts, including debts involving diamonds," and say that he was also known at one point as "Greenwald's enforcer and was used for fear and intimidation," according to court documents.

In addition, the release states that intercepted cell phone communications among the suspects, including Greenwald, show that Rivera, Amrussi and Mathews were in charge of recruiting people for the job, and that Mathews eventually found three people in Puerto Rico who agreed to act as armed gunmen during the robbery.

In a statement to National Jeweler on Tuesday, Greenwald's attorney Murray Richman said, "We maintain that our client is not guilty."

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