LOS ANGELES — Gus Rodri guez looks more like a soldier than a jewelry store security guard, with a Beretta handgun strapped to his bulletproof vest, shades wrapped around his shaved head and pepper spray bulging from a breast pocket.
“I am not afraid,” the former Ecuadorean military man says, patting his pistol. “They call me Rambo.”
After a summer of brazen attacks on gold stores, parts of downtown Los Angeles now look more like a militarized zone than a commercial corridor. Police nationwide are seeing an uptick in robberies and burglaries related to gold prices, which peaked at $1,891 an ounce last month, up more than $600 from a year earlier.
The FBI doesn’t keep numbers for gold thefts, but local police departments have plenty of anecdotal evidence of a spike. Dozens of women have had their necklaces snatched in daylight attacks, burglars are targeting gold in homes, and robbers in New Jersey even cleared out a mining museum’s irreplaceable collection of nuggets.
“Certainly the surging gold prices motivated these people to want to do these smash-and-grabs,” Los Angeles police Lt. Paul Vernon said. “They are not trading what they steal at the market value of gold. Even if they get it half that, they are making a pretty penny.”
In addition to Los Angeles, a rash of robberies is taking place in St. Paul, Minn, and police in Phoenix say muggers chatted up high school girls, then ripped their gold necklaces from them.
