THIS is the shocking moment sneaky jewel thieves distract a driver at a petrol station and steal £2 million from his car boot.
An organised crime group targeted the jewellery salesman as he was travelling from Sussex to Kent last year.
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A gang of thieves targeted a jewellery salesman and started following him in Brighton
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After puncturing the man’s tyre he stops at a petrol station where one of the thieves lies waiting
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They distract the man just before another of the gang steals from his boot
Three of the group have now been jailed after they followed the man to a petrol station in Wrotham, Kent, before puncturing one of his tyres in January 2024.
The victim had been working in Brighton selling jewellery to several businesses and was carrying precious items worth around £2.25 million.
The CCTV footage shows the moment the thieves start following the salesman.
He was tracked by Edgar Ardila-Ruiz, Monica Diaz and Edward Florez-Ortiz and closely tailed his vehicle back to Kent.
When the man stopped at a petrol station in Wrotham, Florez-Ortiz punctured one of his tyres.
The man drove away but was forced to turn back and headed to an air pressure machine after noticing his tyre was flat.
While at the machine, the footage shows Monica Diaz distract the salesman by attempting to engage him in conversation.
Meanwhile, Ardila-Ruiz can be seen at the rear of the car snatching a bag of jewellery from the boot.
The CCTV footage recovered from the garage showed the suspects fleeing in a silver Toyota Corolla.
All three thieves were part of a gang responsible for other offences across the country including areas in London and parts of Essex and Hertfordshire.
Shock moment shoplifters load bag with bottles of booze at Waitrose as helpless security guard stands next to them
Ruiz and Diaz were later arrested on February 11 after attempting to steal from another travelling salesman near Bolton, Lancashire.
The victim had alerted police after he noticed a black BMW was following him.
Local officers ran checks showing Ruiz was wanted for the theft in Wrotham while Diaz was also recognised from the petrol station CCTV.
They both pleaded guilty at Maidstone Crown Court after they were charged with conspiracy to steal, and theft from a motor vehicle.
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While distracted one of the gang steals jewellery worth £2.25 million from the boot of the car
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The boot of the car can be seen opened as the thief flees
Ruiz and Diaz, both of no fixed address, were sentenced to three years and six months in prison.
Florez-Ortiz, from Islington, London, was identified as a third suspect and separately convicted at Chelmsford Magistrates Court after pleading guilty to theft and criminal damage.
He was jailed for six years and will undergo future extradition proceedings after he was sentenced to three years for another jewellery theft in Belgium in 2021.
All three will also now be the subject of a financial investigation under the Proceeds of Crime Act to claw back any criminal gains they may have made.
Detective Constable Leo Graham said: “Our investigation uncovered a wealth of evidence showing how all three offenders initially followed the victim on foot, before tailing his car.
“They waited patiently for the perfect opportunity to prey upon him and a later examination of his car led to the recovery of a metal item which had been inserted into the tyre by Florez-Ortiz.
“Ardila-Ruiz and Diaz were thankfully caught just weeks later, after following another salesman hundreds of miles away from Kent.
“These sentences are welcome, as it is clear they were part of a bigger network of organised criminality targeting victims throughout the country.”
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Edgar Ardila-Ruiz, Monica Diaz and Edward Florez-Ortiz were all jailed following the heistCredit: Kent Police
As a major storm rushed toward Florida last October, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time faced a different kind of threat. Police had shown up in force to a rental property she owned as a result of a prank call, in a potentially dangerous attack known as “swatting.”
Back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton had sparked a torrent of online conspiracies, with FEMA officials facing harassment and death threats, according to hundreds of pages of agency emails and other documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. The records shed new light on how disaster-related misinformation affects the government’s emergency response, sucks up internal resources, and puts staff at risk.
Deanne Criswell, who ran FEMA under President Joe Biden, learned about the swatting situation as she was about to brief TV viewers on Milton, one of the most powerful storms on record to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. “It was a very unsettling feeling,” she said in a recent interview, thinking back on how she juggled her concern for her renters along with preparing Floridians for the storm.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, November 20, 2024.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Many of the attacks outlined in the documents have not previously been reported, including the doxxing of at least seven senior FEMA staffers. In those incidents sensitive personal information, such as home addresses, was published online for the purpose of harassment. The records also reveal challenges the agency faced as it tried to control the situation.
The incidents followed an online wave of disinformation suggesting FEMA was mishandling the response to the hurricanes that pummeled Florida and North Carolina in the lead up to the presidential election. Among the debunked claims swirling at the time were reports that agency workers had seized property from survivors and confiscated donations.
The offensive diverted agency time and resources to set the record straight and protect personnel. “It made my staff nervous,” said Criswell. “It made people in the community nervous. They didn’t know who to believe. They didn’t know who to trust.”The threat of misinformation continues to loom over the agency at a time when President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have made steep cuts to its staffing and funding, including pulling back on some of the resources FEMA used last fall to combat threats. In the aftermath of deadly Texas floods in July, for example, conspiracy theories online blamed cloud seeding.
“The profit-driven platform model, where sensational falsehoods outperform factual updates in emergencies, ensures this problem persists across political cycles and it can put lives at risk,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
A FEMA spokesperson said in an email the agency “uses internal DHS resources to identify and mitigate any personal threats to employees.”
A trail of disinformation
Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina, Sept. 30, 2024.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the middle of the night on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing historic flooding far inland and killing at least 250 people. Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit. Flood waters swept away small towns and cut off others, while Asheville lost water for more than a month. Almost immediately, FEMA staff had to confront false rumors circulating online, including that it had stopped accepting housing assistance applications from survivors and didn’t have enough funds to help them.
FEMA officials and experts attribute the quick spread of disinformation to historic government mistrust in the area, as well as social media platforms ratcheting back moderation. High-profile figures including X owner Elon Musk and Trump, then in the late stages of his bid to retake the White House, repeated some of the false claims. Trump, for example, said multiple times during his campaign rallies FEMA was directing disaster funds to immigrants.
For example, the agency shared a screenshot taken from a TruthSocial post from Oct. 5 that stated: “Deanne Criswell needs to be executed for crimes against humanity and treason!” An Oct. 6 post on Gab, a social media site favored by the far right, called for the “Mussolini treatment” of various officials. “The only question: Is there enough rope?” read one of the responses.
Jacyln Rothenberg, the agency’s spokesperson at the time, was among the most heavily targeted, leading Homeland Security to loan Customs and Border Protection agents to provide security at her home. “Because the doxxing was so severe and my safety was at risk, I had to stop tweeting,” she said. “I had to stop doing interviews. I had to stop putting myself on the record.”
FEMA staff also found what it called “far-right” users posting possible personal information for numerous officials, including Criswell, Coen and Rothenberg, internal documents show.
Attacks on FEMA Offline
As a second powerful hurricane — Milton — developed off the coast of Florida, the attacks on staffers’ started migrating from the internet to their homes. After Criswell’s rental property was swatted, among other “serious threats,” then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed off on a government vehicle and extra security to protect the embattled FEMA chief.
Then it happened to someone else. “My deputy Jenna Peters’ home was swatted,” Coen told FEMA’s security team in an email on Oct. 11. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.
The most high-profile incident involved a man allegedly “hunting” FEMA staff in North Carolina’s disaster zone. On Criswell’s orders, she said in an email to other top Biden officials: “All FEMA staff and contractors working to interact with survivors and conducting housing inspections, as well as search and rescue teams stood down following the initial reports.”
Elena Gonzalez, 37, looks at their burned-out home after Hurricane Milton’s landfall on October 14, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure.
After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
Supporters of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attend a boat parade near a house damaged in Hurricane Milton, Siesta Key, Florida, October 26, 2024.
(Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
And don’t get me started on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s inane move that could make it harder for pregnant women to get COVID-19 shots, thus depriving their infants of protection against the virus when they are vulnerable and not yet eligible for vaccination.
Good heavens, I needed a distraction. Happily, it arrived in the form of an unexpected video.
You may have seen it: Last Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, got tongues wagging when she did something that seemed entirely out of character for the painfully elegant first lady. She was caught on camera squishing her hands right into his handsome face. It looked like an act of hostility. I was intrigued.
I know, I know. It’s hardly world-shattering news. But who doesn’t perk up a bit when the scrim of perfection that shields the private lives of high-profile, perfectly turned-out couples is torn, even for one brief moment?
Who can forget the sight of First Lady Melania Trump swatting away her husband’s hand during a 2017 visit to Tel Aviv? Or the way her smile faded during his first inauguration the moment he looked away from her, inspiring the #FreeMelania hashtag?
For all the drama and rumor that swirled around the Clintons’ marriage, I can’t think of any public moment when they did not appear civil with one another, even after his disastrous relationship with a White House intern.
And the Obamas? Is there any other intensely scrutinized political couple who seem so downright normal? Not that anyone ever really knows what’s going on in anyone else’s marriage.
Which brings us back to the Macrons.
His plane was on the tarmac in Hanoi, where he was kicking off a tour to strengthen ties with countries in Southeast Asia. As the plane door opened, the couple were caught unawares. A startled-looking Macron backed up as disembodied hands smushed his face. He instantly collected himself, and his wife appeared at his side. As they began to descend the staircase, he offered her his arm, which she did not take.
Part of the chaos stemmed from the government first claiming that the clip was not real but was possibly a deep fake created by AI and exploited by Russia to make Macron seem weak. After the Associated Press authenticated the video, the French government changed its tune, describing the moment as merely a playful interaction between the couple.
Unsurprisingly, given their back story, the Macrons have been the subject of intense fascination for years.
They met in 1993 at a Catholic high school in northern France when he was 15. She, nearly 40 at the time, and a married mother of three, was his drama teacher. His parents were so concerned about the impropriety of their relationship that they sent him away to Paris for his senior year.
In 2006, she divorced her husband, and married Macron the following year. He was 29. She was 54.
“Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that,” Macron told Elle France in 2017. “If I did not make that choice, I would have missed out on my life.”
Unfortunately, Le Slapgate threatened to overshadow the Macrons’ trip.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he told reporters, complaining that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
A few days later, though, he was making light of the incident. Or at least trying to.
On Tuesday in Jakarta, Indonesia, as his plane door opened, another disembodied hand appeared, this time waving before Macron stepped into the camera frame smiling before he walked down the stairs arm in arm with his wife. Ha ha.
For a brief moment, the squabbling of one of the world’s most interesting couples gave us a much needed break from the actual geo-planetary catastrophe unfolding around us. For that, the Macrons have my gratitude. Merci, you crazy lovebirds.
