Ex-Tiffany Executive Pleads Guilty to Stealing Jewelry A former Tiffany & Company executive who the authorities said stole about $1.2 million in jewelry from the store pleaded guilty on Friday in a Manhattan courtroom. "I knew it was illegal to steal and I did so regardless," the former executive, Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, said softly as she entered the plea to a charge of interstate transportation of stolen property. I'm very sorry. Federal prosecutors have said that Ms. Lederhaas-Okun, 46, who was a vice president for product development until she left the company in February, took valuables from the company and effectively wrote them off the company's books. As part of her job duties, prosecutors have said, she had access to jewelry that she could "check out" to show, for example, to potential manufacturers for determining production costs. Ms. Lederhaas-Okun also had the authority to cancel the cost of jewelry that "had been rendered unusable in some way," like being damaged in transit, the government said. Normally such canceled inventory is returned to Tiffany and destroyed. Instead, a criminal complaint said, Ms. Lederhaas-Okun sold "some if not all" of the merchandise to a leading jewelry buyer and reseller in Manhattan. Prosecutors have declined to identify the company. "Okun gave false explanations for what happened to the missing jewelry," sometimes claiming that it had been lost or damaged, the complaint said. Among the items she checked out from Tiffany, the authorities have said, were numerous diamond bracelets in 18-karat gold, diamond drop-and-hoop earrings in platinum or gold, platinum diamond rings and platinum and diamond pendants. The government is also seeking the forfeiture of more than $2 million from Ms. Lederhaas-Okun, including Tiffany jewelry that was seized from her home in Darien, Conn., at the time of her arrest on July 2, a plea agreement shows. The judge, Paul G. Gardephe of Federal District Court, told Ms. Lederhaas-Okun that she faced a potential maximum penalty of 10 years on the stolen property count when he sentences her on Dec. 10. The plea agreement says that under nonbinding sentencing guidelines, the sentence should be roughly between three and four years. As part of the deal, the government said it would move to drop a second count, wire fraud, which carried a maximum prison term of 20 years. Ms. Lederhaas-Okun left the courtroom without commenting. A Tiffany spokeswoman declined to comment on Friday.