I mean, eBay is what foiled it

Unsurprisingly, this still annoys Granims. “We never once got caught at any location, ever,” Granims told me. “I mean, eBay is what foiled it.” Nevertheless, Granims and Ornelas offered significant cooperation with the ensuing investigation and were rewarded with short prison sentences; Ornelas even agreed to wear a wire for the FBI to get Serrano to incriminate himself on tape. In the end, Collins and Serrano spent more time behind bars than Granims and Ornelas did. Both ringleaders were free by the end of 2003, their prison stays a mere blink of an eye—and expected to put their crimes behind them.

In 2015, Mike Crowley was becoming convinced that Michael Ornelas was behind the new, multiyear spree of elaborate jewelry-store heists consuming Florida. The drill-work was clearly professional, the crew’s method of entry identical to those heists in the ’90s. It had to be at least some of the same guys, Crowley thought, slicing their way through Florida strip malls, drilling open safes in a single go.

Unlike the local police departments who had shunned Crowley, leaving his calls unanswered and his temper simmering, the response to Crowley’s investigative work at the federal level was appreciative. Two FBI special agents I interviewed about the case both lauded Crowley’s tenacity, crediting him with bringing these burglaries to their attention in the first place. “He’s a bulldog,” Page said. Crowley had seen Page’s name on the crew’s federal indictment, filed back in 2002, and promptly reached out. Page told me he immediately agreed with Crowley’s assessment and put him in touch with a veteran special agent named John MacVeigh down in the bureau’s Florida office, who would soon take over the case: “Once he started telling me about this stuff, I said, ‘Mike, this sounds like my guys.’”

Now retired, MacVeigh lives in a suburb north of Miami and seems to have taken well to the life of an FBI retiree. He was inside his house, drinking water from a Star Wars glass, when I arrived there. When I commented on the size of his lawn, which surrounded us like a prairie, MacVeigh explained that mowing it takes exactly the length of Hell Freezes Over, a 1994 live album by The Eagles: 72 minutes and 36 seconds.

The initial problem with Crowley, MacVeigh told me, was not the quality of his research but the fact that these were not federal crimes. The crew was only hitting stores inside Florida, MacVeigh said. The feds couldn’t do anything unless the burglars crossed state lines, or began to sell stolen jewelry from one state in another. Despite agreeing with Crowley’s interpretation of the case, MacVeigh could only wait.

Then, by coincidence, Ornelas’s name crossed MacVeigh’s desk for another reason. Ornelas had stopped paying restitution for his role in the earlier airplane crimes in the ’90s, which meant that the State Attorney’s Office in North Carolina wanted to subpoena his financial records. MacVeigh got the call. At the time, MacVeigh was going through a divorce, and the very morning he planned to serve Ornelas with the subpoena, a meeting with his divorce attorney came up at the last minute. He couldn’t miss it. MacVeigh told me he called the local sheriff’s deputies, suggesting they reschedule. The deputies instead offered to keep an eye on Ornelas until he could stop by.

I mean, eBay is what foiled it

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