Diamonds have fingerprints, there’s always a pattern …
Summary: A jewel heist during an awards show puts Don’s team in the media spotlight.
Original air date: February 5, 2010 (USA)
Written by: Gary Rieck
Directed by: Ralph Hemecker
Opening numbers:
16: Victims
6: Robbers
24: Million dollars
22: Million witnesses
Family Concepts: (character development)
- Larry has been squatting in Charlie’s garage
- Larry has been living in the Mojave Desert (he never got to any of his destinations)
- Amita reads Us Weekly
- Larry has a coherent theory for the future of the cosmos, he is back to work out the kinks and test his conclusions.
Episode Quotes:
- Colby: Rule of thumb is if something reminds me of my 10th grade geometry class, then we can probably use it to solve the case.
- Nikki: What goes better with the Glock, rubies or emeralds?
Elizabeth Hopkins: Rubies! Emeralds for hand grenades, opals for switchblades. - David: I grew up in the South Bronx and I was the kid stealing the candy.
- Nikki [to David]: Where’s your girlfriend? Not Colby, the other one, the girl.
- Colby: OK fine, I’ll be an actor.
David: Really?
Colby: Yeah, I got the shoulders for it. - Larry: I’ve spent me entire life looking into the past. So, I turned my inner eye 180 degrees to look to the future.
Episode Synopsis:
Don is at Charlie’s house, hoping to watch a hockey game only to discover Amita is watching the 6th Annual Cinema and Television Viewers’ Select Awards. During an acceptance speech, the theater for the awards show starts to fill with smoke and the venue is evacuated. In the rush of people trying to get outside, a group of enterprising thieves manages to steal expensive jewelry from sixteen celebrities. Colby and Nikki start interviewing stars who had items stolen while David meets Elizabeth Hopkins, a representative from Lloyd’s of London, attending the awards show to keep an eye on the items her company insures.
Colby and Nikki are sent to talk to the director of the awards show to get the film footage of the event. Oliver shows them the footage and explains the smoke is too distorting to really make out much of anything. They take his footage for analysis and also add in all of the footage taken by various news outlets present. David and Elizabeth talk to Hans Stollbach, the owner of a high-end jewelry store where most of the stolen items were from. David suspects Hans was in on the robbery in order to get the insurance pay out. Hans explains the jewels were severely undervalued and he wouldn’t really get much from the insurance claim.
Looking over the footage and other director’s notes for the show, Charlie is able to work out there were six people who committed the crimes and where the thieves had to be sitting order to maximize their chances for theft. The seats he points out where all supposed to be for celebrities, but Oliver points out the need for seat fillers, people paid a small fee to fill seats when celebrities are not present to make the theater look full. Nikki goes to talk to Paula Watson who arranged the seat fillers for the event. She states all of her seat fillers are college students with dreams of being famous, they aren’t the type to commit robbery on such a scale.
David and Nikki run checks on the names Paula gave them and discover six aliases on the list. Nikki goes back to Paula who explains Geno Morelli, one of the cameramen, gave her the six names and said they were friends who wanted to be at the show. David, Colby and Nikki go to Morelli’s apartment only to find the cameraman dead. Before they do a proper search, someone starts shooting and they chase Jose Duran. Duran chooses to jump to his death. When the FBI searches the apartment later, there are no jewels. However Morelli did have a connection with Raul Hernandez and known thief to Elizabeth Hopkins.
Using facial recognition and crown flux dynamics, Amita and Charlie are able to identify the other members of the robbery crew at the theater. A check on the other names shows three of them worked at a sweatshop together. David leads a bust at the sweatshop and they find the whole crew, including Raul Hernandez, and the stolen jewels. The only problem is the jewels they find are all fakes.
All of the recovered jewels came from Hans Stollbach’s store. Hans admits he gave the celebrities glass instead of the real thing as he’s had problems getting items back. He didn’t want word to get out that he was offering fake jewels instead of real ones, and filed the insurance claim. Raul Hernandez tells Nikki Morelli was killed because Hernandez thought Morelli had switched the stones. Charlie works out that the remaining stolen jewels were the ones Jose Duran stole and he is able to recreate Duran’s escape route from the theater. Duran took a much longer route to leave and David works out Duran handed the jewels off to someone in the crowd so he wouldn’t be caught. Actually what happened was a double hand off, Duran to Morelli and Morelli to someone in the audience who hid the jewels in a compartment under one of the seats. The FBI catches Regina Landers, one of the celebrities who states she had been robbed, in the theater taking the jewels from the compartment. She states Geno was an old friend and she needed the money from the insurance claim.