In this case, the cross-dressers did not make it to the private sales rooms. Midway up the stairs, they pulled out weapons, including a hand grenade. “Nobody move or I smoke you all!” one of them yelled, waving a .357 Magnum around. They stormed into the manager’s office, ordering everyone to lie on the ground, facedown. Several captives were marshaled to help deactivate alarms and open display cases. Throughout, they called employees by their names, even stating home addresses—a scare tactic intended to dissuade them from revealing details of the holdup to officials.

The robbers had other intel. They knew that a 31-carat diamond solitaire ring had been delivered the day before, and they knew where it was: hidden in a secret compartment at the bottom of the main safe. La grosse pierre, as the ring became known in the press, was alone worth $8 million.

The hoods stuffed the loot into their rolling suitcase. Threatening to detonate the grenade if anyone followed them, they took off with 297 bijous and 104 watches. There are no price tags on any Harry Winston jewels, but the heist was soon revealed to be the costliest in the history of France. And it took only 20 minutes to execute.

If the Panthers were behind the second Harry Winston robbery, it qualified as their biggest, most spectacular coup yet. Either way, the perpetrators made one key blunder: They spoke. Employees testified that the men had Slavic accents—which, alongside the theatricality of their getups, again suggested Panther involvement. “Of course there is a hypothesis that it is the Pink Panthers,” confirmed Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, to media in the aftermath. “But we cannot at this stage say absolutely that it is them.”

In the original The Pink Panther (1963), one character is an insurance underwriter from Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s also covered the real-life jewels at both Winston robberies. Their loss adjuster affiliate in Paris is John Shaw, a detail-oriented Scot with a genial, bemused demeanor.

The second robbery was so big that Lloyd’s offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the merchandise. Shaw did not advertise it in bourgeois dailies like Le Monde or Le Figaro, but rather in Le Parisien, a popular paper in the banlieues. “Le Parisien gets left at zinc bars in the projects,” Shaw says. “That’s where robbers have come from in the past. Until the Pinks came along, it was often someone from there.”

Because the Pinks were the other targets, he also placed ads in Montenegro and Serbia. His firm received a flurry of replies. “We got the usual mediums, psychics, witch doctors, Ouija board people, you know: Is there anybody out there? types,” Shaw says. “Most of it needed to be filtered out.”

But then a credible-sounding informant contacted him from Romania. The caller claimed that the Harry Winston thieves had set up shop in a hotel suite in Bucharest, where they were selling the jewels. French police were skeptical: Who would buy tens of millions of dollars worth of gems in Romania? On the other hand: Bucharest isn’t too far from the Panthers’ native soil. “Apparently the guys in the hotel were blowing off about being the biggest jewel robbers on the planet,” Shaw says. “They were saying they’d done Winston.”

“HE ASSURED ME THAT IT WOULD BE AN EASY HIT, WITHOUT VIOLENCE, THAT THE JEWELRY WOULD BE REIMBURSED BY THE INSURANCE COMPANY.”

French investigators secured warrants and busted a group selling stolen jewels in the appointed hotel room. Unfortunately, they weren’t Harry Winston jewels. They’d been taken from another store in Normandy on the same day. “The whole thing was a bit of a palaver,” Shaw admits. “It led to arrests—but no reward.”

Detectives weren’t discouraged, however. In addition to their witnesses’ accounts of Slavic accents, they’d found fingerprints on a Max & Enjoy Paris handbag accidentally left at the scene of the second robbery. Better still, the video surveillance tapes hadn’t disappeared this time around. Investigators reviewing the footage were struck by the behavior of one in-house security agent, Mouloud Djennad. During the second robbery, he had moved about freely and could have easily alerted authorities. Djennad hadn’t been present for the first burglary—but he had locked up the previous evening.