Jeweler charged with selling diamonds reported stolen

Birmingham, Ala.--A former jewelry store owner in Alabama faces money laundering charges for pawning a 3-carat diamond that was among a cache of jewels he said were taken during a robbery and collected $2.6 million in insurance for, federal officials said. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama, 64-year-old Joseph Harold Gandy, a former owner and the operator of the Denman-Crosby jewelry store in the upscale Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, faces one count of money laundering for pawning property worth more than $10,000 that he obtained through a criminal act. 

He also faces one charge of wire fraud, which he allegedly committed when he submitted an insurance claim on diamonds that had not been stolen, and one count of being a convicted felon (he was convicted of federal mail fraud in 1989) in possession of firearms for the 99 weapons seized at his home in Vestavia Hills, Ala. in November 2013. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Gandy has entered into a binding plea agreement with the government in which both the defendant and prosecutors stipulate that a 45-month (almost four years) prison sentence is appropriate. 

The plea agreement details how Gandy’s crime unfolded, beginning in 2004 when he was an owner and the operator of Denman-Crosby. 

In December of that year, when the store was holding a loose diamond event for Christmas and had many stones on memo from dealers in New York and elsewhere, Gandy reported that two unidentified men robbed the store at gunpoint. 

The store carried a $2.6 million insurance policy, a policy prosecutors say he had bumped up just before the alleged robbery. 

In January and March of 2005, he used interstate wire transmissions to submit insurance claims from the robbery, reporting that $2.8 million in jewels, including a blue diamond worth more than $600,000, had been stolen. The insurance company paid the maximum on the policy, $2.6 million. 

In July 2013, Gandy began sending a friend to jewelry stores in Jefferson County, Ala. to pawn the diamonds that had been reported stolen eight years earlier, and gave him a cut of the sale proceeds. 

The plea agreement lists four stones that Gandy had pawned, or attempted to have pawned, including a 3.01-carat emerald-cut diamond and a 3.45-carat cushion cut. 

As part of the plea agreement, the government recommended that Gandy be required to pay